Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • What does any of this have to do with “pure efficiency?” The alleged efficiency of these models is only on the user side of the equation. It can do things for you in milliseconds that would take you hours to do yourself. Except it doesn’t do this reliably and you need to double check its work a lot, which often negates any efficiency gains.

    On the backend it’s tying up resources in chip making with negative knock-on effects for any other products needing chips, wasting drinking water because that’s cheaper then building circular cooling systems, cutting into any progress in switching to renewable energy sources and thus putting this planet in further peril, and it’s making people dumber overall because they feel they can outsource thinking to some juiced to spell checking algorithm.

    Efficiency where?




  • The UK government is giving Apple and Google three months to build on-device scanning infrastructure.

    Nothing has gone through parliament yet. That’s not to say that a majority of twats couldn’t be found there. But crucially I think this is not something a floundering PM can decree on his own authority. So far this threat is about as believable as any statement by the incumbent American president on Iran.






  • I think my sniping at Bavaria speaks for itself.

    They don’t need sway as much as money and lawyers, which I imagine they have. And this verdict is probably on the worst outcome end of the scale for them. I cannot imagine they will accept a ruling that calls them daft like this one does. They will try to water down liability for their model’s fantasy summaries. Whether they succeed is a different question. But they will try, so they will appeal, so this verdict isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Yet.

    All I said is that this verdict isn’t effective yet. These headlines and sadly this article buries this fact in a sentence in the last paragraph. Blink and you miss it stuff. Lemmies tend to overlook this and declare victory over Google when this was merely the first battle of the war.





  • If you are looking for a free alternative, you’re not going to like it. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a service hosting OnlyOffice for you with cloud storage, which will suffer from not having the worldwide server capacity of an American tech giant.

    I’d sooner investigate if you can deal with not editing documents much on the go and going for LibreOffice on a computer. It’s the solution I went for. If you have a service that hosts notes in the cloud for you, I found that to be enough to draft something, which I can turn into a document when necessary.

    Somebody suggested Proton. They are not a big as Google. Their services work alright. But where Google used to be “don’t be evil,” Proton’s motto seems to be “be daft.” Examples range from praise for the 47th administration in the US, selling email users out to the authorities, and most recently sponsoring questionable YouTube content. They want to be your Google replacement for everything and going with them is rapidly turning into “out of the Google frying pan, into the Proton frying pan.” Plus, they aren’t exactly cheap if you ask me.

    LibreOffice have recently announced they were going back to developing a cloud version. This situation might get better in the future.




  • The “town square” is former Xwitter marketing to give it relevance, which you could say it had until the son of South African emerald miners got involved. It was due to especially media types being fond of that platform. News broke there, hashtags trended, movements started. That’s gone now.

    Lemmy isn’t that. It’s a fediverse place to find mostly niche content for people who got fed up with reddit.


  • I’ve only been on Lemmy for a few days but …

    You’re on the fediverse. You are your own algorithm. What you see is what you chose to follow or what’s on the instance you signed up to. Either way, you ended up there by choice. If this is a thing you notice after only a few days, you are not qualified to predict the doom and gloom of Lemmy. Work on your feed first.

    You’ll find biased communities on here. You’ll find reasonable ones. But you need to go look for them. It’s just as echo-chambery here like anywhere else on the internet.



  • I think this is not a clean cut case of evil planned obsolescence. There are valid security concerns, as browsers are a common attack vector. You should get that updated, also to protect your privacy while surfing online. So for a banking site or similar, I kind of get it. (I recognize there is a possible conundrum when people can’t go bank in person because the bank no longer has branches and/or get excluded by their old hardware/economic reasons from doing it online. Should they be able to choose risking it if the bank knows about a flaw they then leave exposed? Shit’s complicated.)

    That being said I’m sure this banner of corporate concern was not primarily motivated by the security and privacy of their users.


  • A protocol is a set of rules that a group of people have agreed on to make it easier to talk to each other. I shut up when you talk and listen to what you say. I speak again when you have finished and then it’s your turn to listen. That’s a simple example of a protocol.

    IP is more rules than that but it allows computers to talk to each other without having to exchange contract information first, like people do with phone numbers.

    Let that sink in before you tackle Activity Pub.