All the cybersecurity in the world won't matter if a handful of manipulated idiots people shoot a bunch of unguarded and remotely located substation transformers.
Why are you all so upset? These stock buybacks don't pay for themselves, you know!
God I hate the stock market.
We keep saying that blocking ads is a security feature, and it keeps being true.
It's odd that the article makes no mention at all of his @ElonJet account on Mastodon, which was spun up after the Twitter account was banned. I don't see how it's "moving" anywhere, especially given the Threads/Instagram account just got suspended: Sweeney posted about it on his Twitter, and Engadget updated their article.
The problem with YouTube Premium is the pricing tiers are completely out of touch with what people are willing to pay and what services they're willing to pay for.
Let me compare to Discovery+. For $9 a month, loads of shows that ran on TV for decades can be streamed at 1080p (or whatever resolution they were available in), on up to four devices at the same time. They still have some original shows that they spend money to make. This service does not have ads.
Let's also compare to Nebula, which like Discovery+ also has original content funded by the platform. Every content creator there is also an invited owner of the platform, so their cost structure is a bit different, but they still have to sustain the costs of running a streaming platform while compensating the creators of said content for views. Nebula is a microscopic $5 a month per user with no ads.
YouTube is a platform with entirely user-generated content (costs YT nothing except bandwidth) that is already supported at the free tier with a gratuitous amount of ads. This service has been available completely free with ad support for nearly two decades. The lowest "premium" tier they offer is $14 a month for one person to stream ad-free, at a better 1080p bitrate, be able to download videos or watch them in the background in the official app, pay creators for every view, and have a music streaming app thrown in for good measure. The only other tier is all the same stuff in a $22 monthly family plan for six users, but they all have to be in the same "household" or you're technically breaking TOS, so in practice it's often more like $22 for three people, and heaven forbid any of you travel for work.
Two of the "premium" features should be free anyway. You can't watch a video without downloading it at least once, so the bandwidth cost is the same. If you download it and play it more than once, that actually saves YouTube bandwidth, and therefore cost. Any video that's played more than once is probably going to be played a lot more than once, so this would add up, especially if the app downloads the ad spots ahead of time. Background play doesn't cost them any bandwidth at all and is a trivial feature to implement, so it's put behind a paywall as an artificial restriction for no other reason than to annoy users for not paying. Both of these are anti-features; to charge for them is anti-consumer. They engender spite in users, making them less willing to pay for Premium and more determined to find alternatives.
Instead of trying to figure out what people are actually willing to pay for, which is the expected behavior of a market actor, Google continues to behave like a monopoly that can dictate terms to its users. This is why people refuse to pay for Premium. If they made the anti-features free, and introduced a Premium tier that is $7 a month to one user for nothing more than better bitrate streaming with no ads, people would sign up in droves. There could be a $9 tier for streaming boxes like Roku or Chromecast that offers Premium service for any account viewed from that one specific device, without having to sign up each individual account for premium, which satisfies another niche. The $14 tier could remain for those who also want music streaming (an extra $7 is still much cheaper than Spotify premium), and the $22 tier could still be a significant value proposition for actual families.
It's not that the price offered for the $14 premium plan isn't reasonable for what it offers - the issue is that what it offers doesn't match the actual needs of many people who use adblockers or third-party clients, on top of insulting users with anti-features. Until YouTube management can be made to understand this, they will continue to screech impotently about ad-blockers while driving users away and leaving potential revenue on the table.
It's almost silly to look into bird deaths and realize just how low wind power is on the list, even with its rapid growth in recent years. It was recently estimated that with the expected growth of wind power, it will be killing about 2.2 million birds a year in the US... in 2050. Meanwhile, power lines kill anywhere from 12 to 48 million a year right now, fossil-fueled power plants kill as many as 14 million a year right now, communication towers kill over 5 million, cars 60-80 million, pesticides as much as 90 million, and cats well over a billion. Every year. The numbers aren't that hard to find. Replacing all fossil-fueled power plants with wind turbines would be a net positive for bird populations, and the facts make that very clear.
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/08/22/pecking-order-energys-toll-on-birds
https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/renewables/weekly-data-how-many-birds-are-really-killed-by-wind-turbines/
It's very disappointing to see someone come to a post about a game bundle to support Palestine only to uncritically surface claims from a site with a blatant pro-Israel, pro-Zionism bias. Zionism and Judaism are not the same thing. Zionism is a sect of Judaism characterized by an extreme ethnic nationalist doctrine (with expected bedfellows). NGO Monitor repeats the utter nonsense that being Anti-Zionist or Anti-Israel is somehow anti-Semitic. It's not - the earliest anti-Zionists were Jews. The idea that being against or critical of Zionism is the same as being racist against Jews is an absurd fiction pushed by Zionist foreign policy in order to insulate Israel from all forms of criticism; sadly, it seems to be working. In any case, I'm not inclined to believe one word printed by NGO Monitor where Israel or Palestine are involved.
You can still do that by adopting kids someone else made. No sense adding to the population when some kids already don't have parents.
Friendly reminder to everyone that mobile Firefox is perfectly compatible with uBlock Origin. To not block ads on the modern web is a security risk.
It's not even about selling you something, it's about selling you, period. They sell the user's attention to advertisers, and don't much care about anything else because anything else is too hard to quantify in a spreadsheet.
These days I mostly go for paid content like Nebula, alternative platforms like Odysee or PeerTube, or even Newgrounds - remember them? It's not always possible to avoid YouTube entirely since some creators I follow only have a presence there, but transitions like this take time.
If it's got N95 filters in it, but the design is flawed in such a way that air can just flow around the filters even with ideal fitment, then the mask as a whole is not N95. Now, maybe their design wasn't flawed, we don't actually know that, but N95 is a NIOSH standard only given to products that NIOSH has received and tested to be at a certain standard; Razer neglected to submit their masks to NIOSH in order to get an official rating. Razer could have performed their own tests and listed the level of particulates it blocks at various levels, but marketing it as an N95 respirator implied NIOSH had verified it when they hadn't, which is fraud.
Remember that a dance party is a party - most people are there to have fun. I think the main thing to avoid, if you can manage it, is being so caught up inside your own head that you aren't looking at the people around you. Keep your back straight, your head high, your eyes off the floor. Basically, avoid the posture of a shrinking violet and you'll feel less like one. Even if you don't feel confident, maintaining a pose that looks confident will keep some of your fear away, and it will passively invite others to interact with you, which boosts your confidence a little more with each person you talk to.
Even if you spend the entire party standing around and watching other people dance, as long as you are actually watching the event, and mentally present for what's going on, you will gain something from the experience. Just remember that standing around and not talking to anyone is as much a choice as going up to someone and asking for a dance. Neither choice is wrong, but you have to live with what happens - or doesn't - based on what you choose.
All that said, you can do this! We believe in you!
Adding to sleepyTonia's comment, many flash games have been preserved through Flashpoint Archive, which is like an epic DRM-free Steam client for flash games (as well as other web game technologies, like the shockwave player). However, Flashpoint uses old flash player binaries that, as stated, may one day stop working as hardware and operating systems evolve. If that happens, it'll be great to have a replacement interpreter ready to go that can be compiled to run on newer tech.
I really hope he's cultivating at least one successor within the company to carry on his vision.
Since this labour is likely to be farmed out to innocent people in developing countries
You don't quite seem to understand how easy it is to train these AI models, and because of that, you're missing a critical point - with open-source technologies like Stable Diffusion, which has models that can be refined and run on a consumer-grade graphics card, the people using models to generate images and the people creating and refining those models are the same people. People who want to generate brand new pokemon sprites can train a model on all the pokemon sprites until it looks good. A few absolute galaxy-brain nerds who want to generate MIDI spectrograms from a text description and convert the output into audio... can apparently do that. And of course, people who want to generate lots of hentai or photorealistic porn can create and fine-tune a model, or multiple models, all by themselves (I won't link any of these, but hundreds are readily available, and thousands exist in total)
In other words, people who already consume CSAM are the people working on models for generating CP, and a subset of those have definitely been trying to make it work with only legal images so that the model itself can be distributed and used without breaking any laws, maybe even hiding in plain sight pretending it's not for making CP. Someone else out there with a different set of fucked-up desires has probably trained a model on gore and snuff images and then used it to create "photos" of people they hate as mutilated messes. There's sick people of all kinds all over the place, and the jury's unfortunately still out on whether this new tool actually causes harm when used in such a manner, or if it's just the newest way they can express their deviance. We don't know yet.
But this genie is already out of the bottle. Banning the use of this technology for specific, narrow use cases just isn't going to be effective without banning AI image generation entirely, and we're past the point where that's feasible. Image generation is a powerful tool that's not going away; it's on us now to figure out what we really believe about harm, health, and personal freedom, and what we want a society with this tool to look like.
Personally, I'm of a mind that if all the data going into the model is legally obtained, anything generated should be considered artistic expression. A person had a thought, then put their thoughts into a tool, which made a picture of those thoughts. No matter how repulsive those thoughts were, I think throwing people in prison for that kind of expression is thought-crime. There's public obscenity at play, of course, but only once they take the step of showing it to other people. If it's just for themselves, and nobody else sees it, who is harmed? Even if it does turn out that it harms the person generating the images (which wouldn't surprise me), that makes it a health issue, like drugs or other addictions, not something to criminalize.
Ah yes, the Kubrick Stare. A staple of the villainously deranged.
They're really gonna mention Lego Rock Raiders without a single nod to the unofficially sanctioned and free remake?
Jon Stewart, Trae Crowder, and Beau of the Fifth Column are three more excellent examples of positive male role models.
Doesn't have HDR, and doesn't have eye tracking? Those are two of its biggest selling points! What were they thinking?
That's not very nice.
If photography is art, so is AI image generation. If one can see something in the natural world they had no part in creating, and get an idea, a spark of creativity, and then choose a camera, choose the angle, choose the framing, set the configurable aspects of the camera such as shutter speed, exposure time, what type of film, what lens to put on, and produce a photograph, perhaps several, perhaps even a dozen attempts to get it just right, and the final result can be placed in a gallery alongside paintings and sculptures and Jackson Pollocks without a single modern art snob batting an eye, how then is that any different from someone with the same spark of creativity tuning a prompt for a model they've become deeply familiar with, seeking to bring the inspiration in their mind's eye into the real world where others can see and experience it too?
I'm sure you've heard it before, but it bears repeating for those who haven't - photography was not initially considered a form of art. But photographers didn't seem to care too much, and neither did the layperson, so here we are again, having the same old argument about another new art form made possible through a technology that invokes Clarke's law.
since most languages are written horizontally and i like ux to reflect this structure. such things are subjective though
You might be misunderstanding what we mean by vertical tabs - we aren't literally turning the tabs sideways and putting them on the side of the browser. We're placing the tabs, still horizontal, into a stacked, scrollable list on the side of the browser. The superiority of this display method for tabs on widescreen displays is not subjective, and here's why:
This is why Tree Style Tabs exists, though I prefer Sidebery these days, being more customizable and performant than TST. There's no way I can ever go back to top-tabs.
If businesses were required to release the full source code for any piece of software that becomes defunct as a result of, for example, shutting down the servers it connects to, imagine how quickly they'd push an update that allows it to work offline.
The fact they killed Omegle over pretty much exactly this but it's apparently fine when Snapchat does it makes me angry. The only difference is one of them has billionaire investors to please.
It's a fun coincidence to me that corpophilia is one transposition away from a literal scat fetish. They may as well be the same thing, honestly.
Democratize corporations.
his “solution” is some kind it proprietary video player that just plays Youtube videos.
It's not proprietary, it's source-available, and it plays a lot more than YouTube videos - in addition to YT, I use it to watch Nebula, Twitch, Odysee, and even Peertube on rare occasions. There are other plugins (that I don't use) for BiliBili, Rumble, Patreon, Kick, and Soundcloud, and the way its plugin system works, there's potential for many other paid subscription-based streaming services to be viewable through Grayjay. That is its real strength. If a creator uploads to a bunch of platforms, users can follow them on the platform they prefer, and get all their updates from one feed in one app, with added functionality that the official apps or sites simply might not have.
This is FUTO's way of trying to make web video platforms more competitive, by creating an app that can interface with content from all of them and has all the popular features even if the sites themselves don't. Grayjay has playlists, likes, dislikes, background playback, picture-in-picture, local history, the ability to block certain creators from the home feed, and the ability to hide individual videos from your feed. Furthermore, creators get a lot of ways they can monetize their content in Grayjay, like putting their merch store under the description of their videos, donation buttons, links to their Patreon or other subscription services, or general promotions, that would appear under all of their videos. Like... there are a lot of features here that really improve the experience with otherwise lackluster competitors. This tilts the market a tiny bit away from the established dominant players, and every new Grayjay user tilts it a little bit more.
Finally, it's worth emphasizing that this is not Louis Rossmann's personal pet project. His promotion of Grayjay, while it does align with his personal values, is paid work for a literal tech billionaire, Eron Wolf, who created and runs the FUTO organization. Neither of them need you to "take Louis Rossmann seriously." They only want you to consider if the apps the company makes suit your needs and values.
Ambri's been building towards this for a while, so there's a lot of material elsewhere on how the contents stay warm - put simply, it's well-insulated, and as the battery gets bigger, the square-cube law makes it more and more efficient in that regard as the volume of heat stored increases much faster than the surface area the heat can escape through. A cold start would be expensive in terms of energy, but Ambri's website states that a daily charge-discharge cycle provides enough waste heat to keep the critical components molten.
Just Have A Think did a piece on these batteries a couple of years ago, if you're interested to learn more.
VPN subscriptions about to explode.
Naturally, they'll try to ban VPNs next.
What you're missing is that "vertical tabs" in this context isn't talking about tabs literally turned on their side. We're talking about tabs that are still horizontal, but instead of arranging the tabs along the top of the screen, and shrinking their width when there's no room left, they're given a fixed width and arranged in a vertical list on one side of the screen. The best implementations of this (such as Sidebery, which the previous screenshot is from) also allow tabs to be nested in a collapsible tree structure.
You sound like you'd really like the tree-style tabs offered by Sidebery on Firefox, or that's built into Edge. Give it a try!
The title does need updated, but I suspect it was accurate at the time of posting 23 hours ago. The article appears to have been updated at least twice, based on the URL.
A huge part of the issue is that Congress steals our social security money on a regular basis
My understanding is the raiding of SSA funds is a myth. The Old-Age and Survivor's Insurance (OASI) trust fund simply isn't keeping up with inflation (particularly the big inflation spikes, like in the 80s, and like now) and is paying out slightly more each year than it brings in, leaving it unable to pay full benefits by around 2034 or so. But it's more than just inflation leading us to this result.
Every generation since the 70s has been getting poorer as the wealthiest siphon off more and more of the available money for themselves, leaving less getting paid into the fund by newer generations to help counter inflation. People who do make decent incomes currently also tend to stay in school longer than they did 50 years ago, and pay their way with loans rather than working some simple job, so they're waiting longer to start paying into the system to begin with. All that plus average lifespans having increased since 1939 (though more recently it started dropping) means the SSA's revenue has to either be increased by raising the social security tax, raising the cap on that tax, or both; or benefits have to be cut by increasing the retirement age or just paying out less to every beneficiary. That last one will happen automatically once it no longer has enough in the trust fund to pay the full amount, and the goal should be to avoid that. However, to my knowledge only an act of congress can increase the OASI trust fund's income, absent an unforeseen economic boom.
I think most people should be willing to accept paying a little bit more in taxes so their parents or grandparents can keep getting their fixed incomes, but it often feels like a very loud portion of Americans are totally against all taxes and dig their heels in, refusing to pay one cent more to maintain something they like that in legal reality cannot be re-appropriated to something they don't like, no matter how much we whinge about it being a ponzi scheme.
Grayjay still works? YT-DLP still works? I sleep.
Chemicals turning the frickin' frogs flies gay!
Who cares if flies have a harder time making more flies? Actually, everyone should - they're very low on the food chain, which means a lot of things that eat them, like birds, have less to eat and will also see population decline as a result. Yet another reason to cut down on ground-level ozone emissions.
They're more than fine with it, the Bits N' Bricks podcast (part of LEGO Gaming) actually had Baraklava (the Manic Miners dev) on for an episode about the history of Rock Raiders which included a section on remakes, including Manic Miners, so they outright drew attention to it. Very cool people over there at the LEGO Group.
I'd get premium if they weren't so insistent on bundling in bullshit I don't want or care about to justify the high price. I put up with enough of that from cable TV. I'll pay when there's an ad-free tier that doesn't do anything else and is a reasonable price for "the service that's free with ads, but without ads". If there was a per-device premium tier that I could throw on my Roku, and all my family members could have premium when they stream from there, I'd pay for that. I'd pay for family tier if it didn't have the dumb single-household rule which screws over truckers and those who travel for a living.
Google has options they could take to convince consumers to pay to not see ads, but there's no creativity left there, no effort to court the market or adapt the service and prices to what potential customers need and are willing to pay. And it's because they believe they are the market, and want to keep it that way.
I've found induction cooktops do just as well as gas at boiling water. The frustrating thing about them right now is the market is immature, so the good ones cost well over $1000 per burner and the cheap ones are so much worse (lousy coil sizes and poor heating precision) they aren't worth using as anything more than a camping stove for tiny little pans where you don't need precision. It's like nobody in the industry wants to make these things good enough to actually replace the old technology, they just want to price gouge for all it's worth while it's still seen as the "expensive, hard to make, premium option".
I switched to Bazzite not long after the Recall AI announcement, shrinking my Windows partition to leave it for just VR stuff which currently doesn't work well outside of Windows, at least on my system. It's pretty great! Not perfect, but the problems I have on Bazzite are similar enough in quantity and degree to problems I had on Windows that I've basically switched out one set of weird OS quirks for another. The big difference is now I don't have to think about the OS being disrespectful corporate spyware.
I think storage or storage drive is the umbrella term these days. "Hard drive" was always short for "Hard Disk Drive" (which was named in comparison to Floppy Disk Drive) but since it was the only type of drive used for non-volatile internal storage for a good 20 years or so, it became a catch-all term. These days, many people understand there's two different kinds and a lot of systems have both, so hard drive is becoming recognized to mean the spinning disks; as opposed to SSD, which is now an umbrella term incorporating 2.5" SATA, M.2 SATA, and M.2 NVMe, which are all Solid State Drives but different combinations of interfaces and form factors.
Chipzel has already gotten a mention, but I have to say her stuff is fantastic, especially Chipped of the Necrodancer and Super Hexagon.
Developer Konjak (Joakim Sandberg) did good work on the Noitu Love 2: Devolution soundtrack, which is a free download (zip file) from his website and is very chiptune. The actual link on the website's main page has an errant slash at the end that has to be deleted for the download to work. Some of the album can be found on YouTube if you want a preview.
Another banger chiptune to go for comes from Zircon and the work he did for the Demon Truck Soundtrack, especially The Devil's Mudflap. It's 16-bit Genesis goodness, and the game is pretty fun! Zircon's done stuff for several games and is generally an all-around musical badass.
Herbert Weixelbaum's Tanzmusik on the album 8-Bit Operators: The Music of Kraftwerk is a total earworm. The album is full of good chiptunes, but that one's my personal favorite.
You might also enjoy Adventure by Adventure. Very upbeat and energetic stuff.
Lastly, I have to give a shoutout to Zweihänder. All his stuff is pretty good, and much of it game-inspired.
Enjoy!
A non-steam game can be launched through Steam on either device, but Steam doesn't sync game saves for non-Steam games, hence Toribor's use of syncthing. Once a sync job is set up for each game's save folder, it'll keep them synced about as well as Steam does for native games.
When I look at Firefox in Discover, it only shows the list of permissions the flatpak will be given out of the box, with no warning of it being "potentially unsafe." This certainly does seem like the better way to handle it.
Also, the warning on the Flathub website is clickable - it expands into the full permissions list. Why it defaults to "no information except maybe dangerous" is beyond me.