This is something that the amazing Naomi Wu brought up for years before, and was ordered to stop publishing by the local government. It was about the same thing. It's sometimes misrepresented as being about Signal, but her point was: There's no point in using a secure messaging app like Signal if your keyboard (IME) leaks everything you write! So she was making the exact same point as in this article.
I really miss her content. 😢
Good to hear but it sounds like if the person hadn't gathered so much traction on HN they might still have been screwed.
The whole Anti-LGBT campaign blowing over from the US to Europe. In the Netherlands I see more and more of the same 😭
And the only reason code is even in there is because of their DRM :P
Yeah Naomi Wu was also arrested and "silcenced" last year (she's no longer allowed to publish anything even stuff not critical of the CCP). https://skepchick.org/2023/08/maker-naomi-wu-is-silenced-by-chinese-authorities-and-why-i-blame-elon-musk/
She is also feminist and lesbian and has an Uyghur girlfriend, which was blatantly published by Vice after promises not to do so, which suddenly put her on the radar 😭 It's a shame because I have big respect for her and her content.
I don't really understand why China is so against LGBTQ+, I don't think they have any religious basis for this. But I assume it has a lot to do with their demography crisis (rapidly falling birth numbers). Even though it seems counterproductive to me, them being against LGBTQ+ does not really make it disappear, I think facilitating IVF for happy LGBT couples to raise loved children would be more productive. But anyway...
It's because the extreme-right campaigns are fuelled by hate and discontent. And it helps them by chanelling it towards minority groups by blaming them for everything (obviously a majority won't work because they would alienate too much of their own userbase). So the narrative is 'the brown people' cause all the problems, the LGBT community etc etc. Hate unites people more easily than love 😢
What worries me the most is that formerly normal sane 'friends' actually buy into this BS and have become rabiate trans-haters practically overnight. 😢
Yeah this is why I pay only for services with fixed fees (or that allow me to set a hard limit). Wow, 100k would bankrupt me completely.
And do this every time the system gets a major update because it puts all the crapware right back 🫣
But this, in fact, is what actual war looks like these days: Sometimes it’s a volley of 300 missiles and drones, and sometimes it is lean, targeted, and carried out covertly. Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties.
So, like what's happening in Ukraine right now?
I mean they use drones for some deep strikes causing minor damage but most of the actual advancement is made using artillery and boots on the ground.
These calculations are a bit off IMO. They factor the total amount of mining and divide it by the number of transactions.
However, the amount of mining is not dependent on the amount of transactions.
I'm not a fan of bitcoin due to the wasteful proof of work mechanism but 'blaming' the transactions is not really fair IMO, especially because people don't really use bitcoin as a payment method anymore. It's just used by speculators now.
You underestimate how scary it is for them to do anything out or the ordinary. Most "normal people" and I include people like project managers in a tech company, really think things will blow up if they mess with any settings.
This is why the default browser setting is so valuable.
We could recover a lot more helium from natural gas production (some fields contain a lot) but right now it's vented because it doesn't have enough value for the operators. Only a few places worldwide bother recovering it during refinement.
But as it gets scarcer the price will go up. Unfortunately the already vented helium is gone forever 😔
Clearly not buying HP was a very good investment for me :)
Yeah she clarified that literally, it's not linked in the article.
https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1677480809450835969
I can't find the source of her saying it was about the IME thing but I recall reading that from a person close to her. She had just raised it before all this happened. Edit: Oh wait, that's here: https://skepchick.org/2023/08/maker-naomi-wu-is-silenced-by-chinese-authorities-and-why-i-blame-elon-musk/ (This was linked on wikipedia)
And yes she's a great person, she was often criticised for being a CCP stooge but that was BS. She was as outspoken as one can be being in China (and unfortunately, clearly a bit more than that).
Considering that Alzheimer can sometimes be staved off by practicing the brain, it makes sense.
After all, we all know what men really think with 😂
In Holland the government just said they dropped all plans to do this 🤬 The plans were basically ready to be signed off.
Of course in the last election the extreme-right won 25% of the votes so the cause is clear 😭
Wow, Trump has double standards? I would never have imagined! 😜
I never liked Duolingo anyway. It's a bit stupid, it just teaches you some basic phrases without explaining the grammar behind it. So you're not really learning anything.
And I really hate 'gamification' in general. I love computer games but not gamified learning or exercising etc. It just puts me off.
I used to love reddit. Especially because it was so diverse. So many communities living side by side generally pretty well (except the well-known toxic communities of course that we all knew to stay away from). And the everything-goes attitude, like people discussing religion on the same site as people exhibiting their sex lives :P I used to love seeing that kind of diversity (ok and the exhibitionism too, I admit 🤭, I'm just into that.). I just loved the everything-goes feeling about it.
But two things went wrong as I see it. One was that US society got more and more polarised and toxic due to Trump and most of reddit's users are from the US. Even the people who used to be pretty nice are so triggered by anything you say "wrong", they always think you're trying to pull them into an argument for the "other side". It's like they have PTSD from being constantly attacked by the other side and it causes that knee-jerk reaction on anything that doesn't fall 100% into their narrative. I got so sick and tired of that hostility especially because I was not used to it locally. That thing you mention, where you say something and someone always claims you're making it up to make a point or karma or whatever is so familiar and tiring.
And the other thing was of course that idiot spez. Trying to clean up reddit for his precious investors by removing (or locking away) anything not above the belt, killing third-party apps, etc. I still go there once in a while to gather some information but I stay away from discussions and I rotate my accounts every couple of months. So I don't give a crap about karma because I kill my accounts anyway. In fact even when I did have a long-term account I used to "shreddit" it every couple of months so karma was not something I ever cared about.
The sad thing is that this Trump toxicity has now even blown over to my country (Holland). They elected a total fascist 2 months ago and the same thing is happening there now, there are lots of people claiming they were never heard and now their hero is going to drain the swamp and kick out all the refugees and all that same old blahblah. Several of my "friends" were caught up in this BS and I've had to break off all contact with them. 😡
Even Lemmy is not free from this, I joined lemmy.ml for a while but I found it pretty toxic too. Lemmy.world looked similar. This is why I came here and it's been great so far.
Haha this is literally how we used to deal with this at CampZone, a huge LAN party, back in the mid-2000s.
At later editions they just enabled DHCP on the network, I think they didn't at first because they wanted to be independent of DHCP servers. Early editions even had a negligible internet uplink (after all, it was a LAN party). Though later ones had faster uplinks than the thousands of participants could fill.
As a "leftist" why should I cheer for an oppressive oligarchy? That makes no sense.
I think it's very sad what's happening there. And so wrong. LGBTQI people don't harm anyone.
And they are doing it again. CoPilot for Windows, CoPilot for Github, CoPilot for sales, CoPilot for Microsoft 365, Bing CoPilot. All different products with different properties.
I'd take a lower-priced plan with limited listening time. They're getting too expensive for the few hours a month I use it. If they bump it up more I will quit for sure.
The only reason I still use them is the qt-spotify third party client. None of the other services work on my OS (they all need DRM on the browser or other nastiness I don't have).
It's a shame. The GamesCom in Europe seems to be doing quite well so it's not really a matter of "conferences are dead".
I know conferences are no longer a place for big announcements. There's no more need to gather all the press in one place, they can just do it online now, at a dedicated time when they're not competing with other announcements in the industry. But as a visitor I really enjoyed going to GamesCom. Never been to the US so the E3 is not a thing for me but I'm sure this will have knock-on effects globally.
I don't think it will.
Microsoft's endgame is being the lord and master of AI. AI thrives on knowing more data about the user. What good is an assistant if it doesn't know your habits, your wishes and desires, your schedule and your attitude towards each person in your life?
This is not really a feature primarily aimed at helping the user directly (even though it's currently marketed as such), but to have the AI build up a repository of knowledge about you. Which is hopefully used locally only. For now this seems to be the case, but knowing Microsoft, once they have established themselves as the leading product they will start monetising it in every way possible.
Of course I'm very unhappy with this too. I'd like to have an AI assistant. But it has to be FOSS, and owned and operated by me. I don't trust microsoft in any way. I'm already playing around with ollama, RAG scripting etc. It won't be as good as simply signing up to OpenAI, Google or Microsoft but at least it will be mine.
They forgot to include the Nigerian prince in the story! Now nobody will believe it.
Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt's case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate.
Just no.
If you can't guarantee it's accurate then don't offer it.
I as a customer don't want to have to deal with lying chatbots and then having to figure out whether it's true or not.
Which is also what you want really, if you have everything on WiFi. High density setups with really small cells so you can reuse channels. A building with high signal attenuation helps with that.
Having said that I'd never want to work for a company like Google.
PS:
Bad radio propagation means Googlers are making do with Ethernet cables, phone hotspots.
"Making do with Ethernet cables"? For me that's still the most reliable and secure way of doing networking on computers. You're at a desk, why not have a cable there. For mobile devices, sure. At my work every docking station has a cabled connection luckily.
YESSS. I so wish this would be considered more.
There's several FOSS projects that I engage with that use discord pretty much exclusively and as such I'm locked out of the community. Like Home Assistant.
I really don't understand why they use it for FOSS projects that are all focused on privacy (home assistant for example focuses on using home automation without cloud so your data doesn't end up everywhere). And then lock you in to such a privacy-hostile service to communicate with them, when actually great alternatives are available like Matrix/Element.
The reason the stockpile was there was it being classified as a strategic resource during the time around WW1 and 2 when airships were a big thing. It's just not really something the government thinks they need to be involved in anymore. Though you could argue its use is becoming more strategic again.
But anyway I'm not defending the sale, I just believe this was the reason they wanted to sell it.
It's a double-edged sword.
Oculus' vision was to bring VR to the mainstream. They really didn't have the cash to make that happen on their own. They were using leftover parts from the mobile and tablet industry to hack together some headsets. It was a good proof of concept, but that was it.
With Meta's backing they put VR on the map. Others jumped in on it. Without them the Vive probably wouldn't have happened, nor would WMR. Then the transition to self-contained VR, the Quest but also others like the Pico, the Pimax Crystal and now the Vision pro. I know PCVR is pretty dead now but to me it was more of a transitory phase (and I still use it a lot but wirelessly now). VR was never going to be mainstream if you needed a powerful PC to do it and with all the cable mess.
I don't think these would have happened without the meta investment. I think it was good for the industry as a whole. However yeah, for consumer privacy it's not great that it was Meta that did the investment and not someone else (except Google or Amazon which would have been just as bad)
I don't really view it as a sellout and I was one of the earliest kickstarter backers. Serious money was needed to make it fly.
Of course we hate it. It will trigger a whole new phase of enshittification.
I still use reddit because for some things it's still a valuable resource that Lemmy isn't yet for lack of users. Hopefully more redditors will find lemmy as this proceeds.
Why? It's just Spanish for "free". And it's become pretty much of a standard to represent FOSS.
10 bucks is too much though for a search engine, at least for me. Especially now that I use LLMs to replace most of the usecases of web searches.
I never used Google much anyway the last few years, I use duckduckgo which isn't quite as bad as google is now. Yeah I know it's just microsoft bling with a lick of paint but they didn't enshittify as much as google. But $10 + VAT is just a lot of money in Spain.
Maybe I'll try the $5 plan though, I never come even close to 300 searches a month anyway.
Edit: SearXNG sounds much better actually, thanks!! <3
Edit2: I installed SearXNG and love it <3 Really thanks for the tips here.
This is why sideloading addons is so important. They've recently removed the bypass-paywalls-clean addon too.
On the desktop version you can easily sideload addons but on the mobile version they forbid this :(
Not news as it's 100% in line with their previous releases. I assume they are just paid by the console makers for exclusivity (though in this case not platform exclusivity but console in general).
The good thing is that the PC version usually gets the version that's graphically improved, like the next-gen version of GTA V that came for Xbone as opposed to the launch version for Xbox 360.
I'm not really excited for it anymore anyway. GTA V was a huge disappointment, as no single-player DLC was ever released. I've never been interested in the online stuff so the whole game is a distant memory for me. I also thought the story lacked the depth of previous games. The three characters felt too generic.
What I'd be really stoked for is GTA: San Andreas for Oculus Quest. It was announced by Meta 2 years ago and there has been zero info about it since so I doubt it's still coming. But if it did I'd jump on it <3
Yes especially since Google is making it harder to spot the ads among legitimate content now :(
I hadn't heard of her but reading her wikipedia page it seems she was pro-LGBTQ+ and anti white supremacy when she was governor, but unfortunately been reversed since she started to run for president. Probably to appease the hard conservatives. However much republican she is, she sounds way better than Trump tbh. Which is a low bar to reach of course.
Also whatever denomination, I think it would be good for America to have a female (and native indian) president for once. It shouldn't be a job for geriatric white guys only.
As a general rule, when trillion-dollar companies don’t like regulation, it simply means they’re admitting the rules are good for their customers.
We're not their customers. That's the root cause of this problem.
Good. I hope people will move away from it soon. I hate Discord for banning third-party clients and datamining my system for installed apps. So I've never really used it.
It does mean I'm excluded from some FOSS projects' support like Home Assistant but to hell with that :P