The data ☝️

I’m always surprised by how low the Flatpak share is.

I used to maintain a website for a bicycling club in my county that was great for getting people into biking, getting people out the house, making friends, and staying fit.

We had a banner ad along the top of the site for a local bicycle/bicycle repair shop that aided the club a lot and was very reasonable.

He got something out of it (publicity and a seal of approval towards the value/quality of his work), and we got something out of it (money to run the site, and a bit left over for things like puncture repair kits and the occasional celebratory drink after an arduous ride).

Nobody bats an eyelid to those ads. They are reasonable.

What we have now isn’t that. What we have now is an insecure, malware-infested privacy nightmare that ruins webpages and stresses everybody out.

Use Firefox + uBlock origin for your own sanity. Don’t let big tech make you feel guilty for not going along with their game.

Honestly, a physical password book isn’t a bad idea.

Not accessible via the internet, and in most cases if someone has physical access to your system you’re done for anyway.

The main weakness it has is from a nosey flatmate, spouse, or child in the house.

Be rude, someone is rude to you back. Boo hoo.

Trying to bait people into absolutely pointless arguments makes the community shittier.

Oh my fucking god, really?!

You’re so smart, that never occurred to me. I thought that there was only 27 countries in the world, and all of them were in one continent!

Yes, I do realise that, genius. I’m not from an EU country myself.

However, I engaged my brain cells and quickly realised that most phones that exist are sold in the EU, and therefore the OEM has to make and test these updates anyway. In virtually all cases they will then release these worldwide.

Like how the EU mandated USB-C and now it’s worldwide. The EU has quietly become the market that sets international standards over the past 20 years.

I know it seems like I’m being mean in this comment, but fuck me it’s the most Reddit comment ever. A pointless comment just begging to start a pointless argument. Nobody can be bothered with that trolling shit. Do better.

You’re getting angry about people talking about technology in a technology community, leading people to ask why you’re here if you hate technology being spoken about.

That’s obviously not equivalent to racism or xenophobia.

You’re yearning so hard to be a victim. It’s pathetic.

I don’t think the issue with phones is the smaller bezels or better displays.

That’s not what’s ruining them.

All phones that are sold in the EU now have to have 5 years of updates after the phone is no longer sold.

Basically, all phones have 6+ years of updates now.

Japan has been living in the year 2000 since the 80s.

Why jump through all these hoops, and lessen the security of your browser in the process, just to do something that is being fully stripped out soon anyway?

Just install Firefox. It’s not like you can’t import your bookmarks and such.

LLMs are an interesting tool to fuck around with, but I see things that are hilariously wrong often enough to know that they should not be used for anything serious. Shit, they probably shouldn’t be used for most things that are not serious either.

It’s a shame that by applying the same “AI” naming to a whole host of different technologies, LLMs being limited in usability - yet hyped to the moon - is hurting other more impressive advancements.

For example, speech synthesis is improving so much right now, which has been great for my sister who relies on screen reader software.

Being able to recognise speech in loud environments, or removing background noice from recordings is improving loads too.

My friend is involved in making a mod for a Fallout 4, and there was an outreach for people recording voice lines - she says that there are some recordings of dubious quality that would’ve been unusable before that can now be used without issue thanks to AI denoising algorithms. That is genuinely useful!

As is things like pattern/image analysis which appears very promising in medical analysis.

All of these get branded as “AI”. A layperson might not realise that they are completely different branches of technology, and then therefore reject useful applications of “AI” tech, because they’ve learned not to trust anything branded as AI, due to being let down by LLMs.