Yeah, does anyone else remember the menu bars that would show up and disappear depending on what you were doing? Those were awful–the ribbon method of context-specific tabs is better (IMO).

I already have to do this. My office wants everyone to use the MS authenticator app, won’t run on LineageOS. Even if it did, I wouldn’t install it, but still.

Ended up making them purchase a hardware security key for me instead.

Capitalism. Specifically, the stock market. IPOs make good companies into bad companies.

Being owned by stockholders effectively removes any amount of “human” in the company’s choices and direction. There becomes a single goal, to which everything else is sacrificed: make stock prices go up in the short term. The C-suite execs will say all sorts of other shit, but any appearance of accountability or altruism is solely geared to making more money at any cost. Any leadership with a soul will be forced to either give up trying to be “good”, or they leave.

And won’t survive things like… getting sprayed with water.

You might also enjoy a selection from Hark, a Vagrant.

People have been running GUIs on much less for decades–though if you’re trying to use something out-of-the-box, anything modern will certainly not do well. But there’s tons of RPi stuff that runs on meager specs.

I’d have expected people would use these things for similar projects as SBCs.

While I understand the author’s frustration with the developers not giving as much weight to the (non-contributing) community, the fact is that the developers get to make the final call on this, and they get to use whatever criteria they like.

And there’s no definitive answer to whether a name change would be a net positive or negative–a handful of complaints vs brand dilution is a subjective call. And for the number of users, I get the impression that it’s not as big of a deal to most people as it is to the author.

Dual boot is definitely more tricky to get going. I just set up a Windows partition again to play a game that uses Easy Anti Cheat, and it took some time to have everything working happily.

I’ve used both Linux Mint and Manjaro, and my Nvidia card has done fine in both. I switched to Mint from Windows because it was easier and faster to set up under Mint (Windows was missing a bunch of drivers and the OEM’s site didn’t have updated ones). The only configuration I had to do was select the proprietary driver (and Mint has a nice little GUI for that). If you’re on the fence, I highly recommend trying Mint.

One of the things you’re seeing these days are apps made with bloated frameworks, so they’re cross-platform and easy to develop. In theory it’s great that anyone can make an app for any device with little-to-no code required, but it results in apps with absurd load times, ad bloat, and usability problems. And that’s across the board (though FOSS seems to buck that trend a bit still).

As an example, my kid’s school uses an app called Seesaw. It’s straight-up garbage. It takes several seconds to open, the back button doesn’t work, etc. At least it’s not littered with ads, but it’s a small mercy.

The web is experiencing the same thing. 60MB of ad services being loaded with every click, ads taking up 90% of screen real estate, slow everything, etc. I use some older hardware, but even websites that are mostly text are unusable without a strict adblocker. Not just annoying to use, but completely unusable.

These big frameworks were developed for large, high-traffic sites like Facebook. In theory, they’ll work for your AI-generated blog, but they’ll suck to load if you host them with a $5/month hosting plan and load 300 ad-related things on each page.

The solution is to create native apps and websites, or at least use frameworks appropriate to the task. But that would require people to give a shit, so I don’t see that happening often outside of FOSS projects (which are often a labor of love).

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Hmm… it’s almost like if you train a model on biased data you get biased results…

I just got this one a few weeks ago. Only used it for 15 or 20 hours, but it seems good so far.

I’ve been at the front of the classroom–using tools like TurnItIn is fine for getting “red flags,” but I’d never rely on just tools to give someone a zero.

First, unless you’re in a class with a hundred people, the professor would have a general idea as to whether you’re putting in effort–are they attentive? Do they ask questions? And an informal talk with the person would likely determine how well they understand the content in the paper. Even for people who can’t articulate well, there are questions you can ask that will give you a good feel for whether they wrote it.

I’ve caught cheaters several times, it’s not that hard. Will a few slide through? Yes, but they will regardless of how many stupid AI tools you use. Give the students the benefit of the doubt and put in some effort, lazy profs.

You can get away without a database (and assuming you don’t need anything too complicated, I recommend not using one). I’ve had a good experience with GetSimple - it’s a content management system (like WordPress) but uses regular files instead of a database. Great for basic content, and still easy to set up and manage.

Self-hosting is a bit complicated if you’re not already comfortable running a Linux server. Not sure about privacy (though I’m not sure how privacy intersects a public-facing website), but there are lots of hosting providers out there. I use DreamHost and have had a great experience there.

Honestly, I think they might say the same thing without the /s.

Dang. NTP is that, isn’t it

The issue with the self-selecting layoffs is that it’s usually the best talent that leaves. Not that they care, as it won’t negatively impact this quarter’s numbers. But funny/sad to see them all confused a year later when number go down.

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Imagine this situation if a human replaced the AI.

Imagine a human who wants to write a book. They’ve read hundreds of other books already, and lots of other things besides books. Then they write a book. The final work probably contains an amalgamation of all the other things they’ve read–similar characters, themes, plot points, etc.–but it’s a unique combination, so it’s distinct from those other works. No copyright violation.

Now imagine that same human has only ever read one book. Over and over. They know only the one book. The human wants to write a new book. But they only have experience with the one they’ve read again and again. So the book they write is almost exactly the same as the one book they read. That’s a copyright violation.

Training an AI model is not a crime, any more than reading a book is a crime. You’re not making “copies” or profiting directly from that single work.