I think that it’s absolutely fair to jump on Microsoft for this.
There is nothing wrong with this hardware. RAM and CPU clock speed plateaued a long time ago. The overwhelming majority of these systems being thrown away would run Linux flawlessly.
Microsoft has never given a damn about security before. These new security “features” do more to lock people in than they do to keep them safe.
I stopped caring several years ago.
It’s like when Disney bought Star Wars. They homogenized it to make it more palatable and ended up making it dull and unappetizing. Neither franchise has a soul anymore. Just a formulaic plot with a set of waypoints in a dull 3 act format. Sprinkle in some in-humor, pedestrian jokes, and a special effects budget that would make the Pentagon blush and you have a recipe for dull tripe.
My off the cuff thought is that it may be used to change the content on the tags. Show it a specific QR code and it updates the content.
They cynical side of wants to believe that it’s being used to gather shopping analytics and correlate it to facial data.
Ordered the iFleshlight. Looking forward to seeing the jealous looks I get at the coffee shop.
The DLC was incredible.
Mayor Burt “fucking” Reynolds.
Some of us do care.
A product directly bankrolled by Peter Thiel? A project, not concerned about blocking ads but rather making sure that it’s their ads that you see?
If you’re on iOS. Maybe the EU will bail you out and force Apple to allow other web engines.
If you’re on Android, Firefox works perfectly well and Fennec is a fine fork.
If you’re on anything else, Librewolf is fork of Firefox without all of the Pocket and other privacy hostile default settings.
Same reason I dropped Firefox for Librewolf. I just want a browser! I don’t want an integrated shopping cart. I don’t want bespoke tracking. I don’t want to be bombarded by trashy celebrity listicles.
My key caps have been falling off my work provided M1 Air. Thankfully, the keyboard is so crap I can barely tell the difference.
Ended up repurposing an old XPS 13 that I found in a supply closet as my dev box.
Wayland+Sway == Infinitely better experience
And owned by Lenovo. Who in the past loaded unremovable bloatware reinstallers into their BIOS so that fresh installs always reloaded their shit.
If you want a Linux laptop, System76 is your best bet.
I have to disagree (but won’t downvote!)
AI porn is creepy. In multiple ways!
But it’s also a natural evolution of what we’ve been doing as a species since before we were a species.
Does imagining a different partner while having sex or masturbating count? I would imagine most people would say, “no”.
How about if somebody draws a crude stick figure of somebody they met on the street? Unless you’re Randall Munroe, this is probably harmless too.
Now a highly skilled portrait artist paints a near replica of somebody he knows, but has never seen in the nude. They never mention their friend by name, but the output is lifelike and unmistakably them.
Maybe a digital artist finds a few social media pictures of a person and decided to test drive Krita and manipulates them into appearing nude.
Or, and this happened to me quite recently, you find your porn doppelganger. My spouse found mine and it ruined her alone time. And they really did look just like me! Taking that a step further, is it illegal to find somebody’s doppelganger and to dress them up so that they look more like their double?
Like you, I don’t want people like this in my life. But it feels like this is one of those slippery slopes that turns out to be an actual slippery slope.
You can’t make it illegal without some serious downstream effects.
If you did, the servers will just get hosted in an Eastern European country that is happy to lulwat at American warrants.
I don’t have any answers, just more Devil’s advocate-esque questions. If there was a way to make it illegal without any collateral damage, I’d be proudly behind you leading the charge. I just can’t imagine a situation where it wouldn’t get abused, a’la the DMCA.
I’ll be sure to take a picture of the moment with some Kodachrome film!
I would trade every half-assed Google feature update for a hosts based adblock capability.
That’s the sole reason that I root every device that I own.
And NO. A PiHole is not, repeat NOT a silver bullet. Nor is a local VPN with custom DNS.
ChatGPT: How can I help?
Marketing: Imagine Ned Flanders dipping a piece of white bread into water. Now write an equivalent piece of meaningless corporate drivel.
Just a sanity check here…
X née Twitter is suing a non-profit for trying to cancel it…on a platform that they literally own.
Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most… human.
My own anthropological pet theory.
Dunbar’s number is the concept that a person can only have so many meaningful relationships. Another way of thinking about it is that we, as a species, feel most comfortable in tribes with a certain number of people.
Which makes sense. I hated, hated the little rednecky town that I grew up in. But when I moved to a larger city, the first few weeks were spent overcoming the loneliness of not knowing everybody around me.
What massive online social media does is essentially short circuit the behavior that we developed when we began urbanizing.
Now a person can be a member of twenty tribes without ever needing to leave their homes. If we are, in fact, only capable of a finite number of close friendships then every close relationship that you have online is energy that won’t be spent on a physical one.
True story: I left Facebook in 2016. I had been miserable but didn’t even think to relate the two. About a month after I jumped ship I got adopted by a group of fellow nerds nearing midlife. We hang out at least twice per week. Pub trivia, bowling, hiking. Those interactions are so much more meaningful than anything you can get on social media. By our nature, humans crave physical company.
Social media isn’t going to “break” us. But, if nothing changes, it will further dramatically alter society.
The most livable place outside of the Earth is in the upper atmosphere of Venus. It’s way closer to the Earth. And air pirates would sail through clouds of sulfuric acid on their steampunk zeppelins.
I’m not saying that he has late stage syphilitic dementia. But if he doesn’t then I’m somehow even more confused about his recent actions.
Gotta mention Pop_OS! as a fantastic beginner distro. My 72 year old mother refuses to use anything else. It’s simple, has automated backups and disaster recovery, and installs non-free drivers for graphics cards.
I don’t personally use it since it doesn’t yet support Wayland and my gaming rig has a HiDPI screen and X11 doesn’t support fractional scaling. Or per screen scaling.
I’m legally obligated to inform you that I run Arch.
It’ll only affect 32bit systems with ancient operating systems storing dates in epoch time.
Not a small number. But nowhere remotely near what Y2K could have been.
Hopefully by the time we need to account for a 64bit rollover, I’ll be comfortably retired. But by that time, proton decay may be a more worrisome problem.