XLE

@XLE@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OnlyOffice invokes AGPLv3, says Nextcloud must restore removed logos in Euro-Office fork⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree with the FSF; I’m just a little worried Onlyoffice will seek some vindictive retaliation. I don’t know what that’ll look like, but I certainly wouldn’t have predicted this response from them either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OnlyOffice invokes AGPLv3, says Nextcloud must restore removed logos in Euro-Office fork⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s pretty funny on its face ("If you want to use a different logo, then use different code too"), but I have the feeling that this schism is just going to make open-source office projects worse in general.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘An element of exploitation’: the world of TikTok child skincare influencers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting how this flies in the face of Techdirt’s “Nothing to see here on social media!” article from just yesterday

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thousands of CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity—and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What was at the 1862 World Fair then? That pesky word you used…

  Your beliefs rest on

  1. This clearly conceived thing not being conceived
  2. An implied assertion Marx wouldn’t be aware of specific large events

  If you could prove either, I guess you’d be in the clear, but for some reason you’re insisting upon both.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How The U.S. Will Track EVERY Vehicle from Space: SAR GMTI/AMTI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Anybody got a FOIA request template set up for people to request their vehicular movement?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Africa pours $2 billion into controversial Chinese surveillance tech⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  American surveillance companies upset they didn’t get there first.

  • Flock Goes Global: How a $7.5 Billion Surveillance Company Found Its International Partner in South Africa’s Most Controversial Camera Network
  • Palantir co-founder invests $11.8m in Nigerian drone firm

  At this point Chinese companies are winning the surveillance imperialism race just because they’ve got more competent leadership.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Kids Are (Mostly) Alright: New Pew Study Deflates The Social Media Panic⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a really weird article about social media. I’m sure there’s some panic, and I definitely don’t want regulation to jump to unnecessary conclusions where there are problems, but it’s also worth noting that TechDirt’s editor-in-chief is on the board of a huge social media company.

  With that in mind, take this section:

  Separately, Pew also asked parents how much time their teens spend on these platforms — and the disconnect between what parents believe and what their kids report is massive:

  28% of teen TikTok users report spending too much time on the site, and that jumps to 44% when parents were asked about their teen’s use of the platform.

  Parents think their teens are spending too much time on TikTok at a rate nearly 60% higher than the teens themselves report. That gap is the entire moral panic, distilled to a single data point: worried adults constructing a portrait of a crisis that the people supposedly living it mostly don’t appear to recognize.

  If somebody has an addiction, like an addiction to drugs or social media, people around them may be more able or willing to point it out than the person with the addiction themselves. But for some reason, TechDirt takes this as a smoking gun of moral panic, that children are inherently the reasonable ones self-reporting correctly, while adults are unreasonable and over-involved.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay, but don’t go complaining if one of them slices through you want its way to the good timeline!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know if they deserve a third dimension if this is how they handle two

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thousands of CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity—and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And those looms inspired Chuck Babbage to build the Difference Engine, which was at the 1862 World’s Fair. Years before Marx started writing Capital.

  So again, when you say these machines are inconceivable to Marx…

  "you keep using that word."

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thousands of CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity—and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Marx could not conceive of thinking programmable machines”

  Are you sure about that?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says its flagship server was hit by a DDoS attack⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s worth noting that while people criticize Mastodon for being too centralized, the wording here is so different from when Bluesky (another supposedly decentralized service) went down.

  That’s probably because Mastodon users who aren’t on the main network can still exist without the flagship server, not so true about Bluesky

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Memory shortage set to run until 2027 as chipmakers focus on AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So regarding this shortage, have 40% of chips actually been purchased? Or are they just making consumer electronics more expensive in the meantime?

  Because last time I checked, these supposed contracts were nothing but a gentleman’s agreement and AI companies have been breaking those left and right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon won’t release Fire Sticks that support sideloading anymore⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s some inherent value of having competing companies trying make their Smart Stick an option on any TV. Amazon is more likely to sue, I don’t know, Samsung if their TVs forced you to log into a Samsung account before using the Amazon stick. The average consumer sure won’t be able to sue.

  (I don’t know how restrictive smart TVs are, though, and at this point I’m afraid to find out.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Do We Tell Ourselves Scary Stories About AI? | Quanta Magazine⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think more people would like this article if they took the time to read it. The entire thing can’t be summarized easily but this line was great

  After talking to experts, I was convinced there’s no reason to fear AIs developing a will to live, and then tricking or destroying us to avoid shutdown and take over the world. Unless, of course, we tell them to.

  And

  The chatbots, in these experiments, sound fairly normal. The humans, on the other hand, sound a little unhinged.

  So it’s all roleplaying experiments. (I swear in another article, I read AI getting told to be a better roleplayer would have a positive effect, while telling it to be a better mathematician would make it roleplay harder but work worse.) And that’s the real danger: people being dumb about the parlor trick

  There’s a lot of magical thinking about AI. But it must be said that if you let these systems loose in the real world and they have access to your bank account, even if they’re just role-playing, it could still have catastrophic effects.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft admits its recent server-side "update" broke vital Windows 11 Start menu function⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  QA is when you vibe code tests, right

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thousands of users got affected by OneDrive unstoppable spam on Windows, Android, Mac⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My solution to this is never using OneDrive, which (terrible as it is) can be installed on Windows 10/11.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon, Microsoft, and Google under investor pressure to disclose site-specific data center water and power consumption⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s more likely: investors suddenly started caring about the environment, or investors are looking for ways to stop losing money on an unprofitable venture?

  My bet is on the latter, especially with the context the article provides, and they’re just looking for a green parachute.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Social Media Addiction Verdicts Are Built On A Scientific Premise That Experts Keep Telling Us Is Wrong⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This piece needs a conflict of interest statement; the author is a social media (BlueSky) director telling us social media is unfairly maligned.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Denuvo has been broken, company promises countermeasures against new DRM bypasses — zero-day game releases become norm as security concerns mount over hypervisor-based bypass⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem with well-coded malware is it won’t execute unless it thinks it’s not being watched. And based on everything else in this article, it sounds like you’d also be opening your computer up to other parties exploiting security holes in the process.

  So a separate computer might work, but it would have to stay separate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Denuvo has been broken, company promises countermeasures against new DRM bypasses — zero-day game releases become norm as security concerns mount over hypervisor-based bypass⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nasty stuff I don’t want on my computer either. As an amateur, was really hoping the cracks would remove it, not circumvent it…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Denuvo has been broken, company promises countermeasures against new DRM bypasses — zero-day game releases become norm as security concerns mount over hypervisor-based bypass⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This crack sounds too scary to use. Impressive, but scary.

  As usual for any DRM company or publisher, Irdeto also claimed that downloading games with the bypass is a security concern, but this time around, the company has a valid point.

  Using the hypervisor bypass, even in its latest incarnation, requires users to… [install] a community-made hypervisor (HV) with Windows running on top of it. This HV fakes responses to the checks that Denuvo makes, and runs with higher permissions… than the operating system itself and has full, nearly untraceable access to hardware and software.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think they’re using sunglasses (the picture is from another article), but maybe. Unfortunately, these things also come in a regular and prescription, although I bet the rented models aren’t.

  It’s a little harder to tell whether somebody is wearing new glasses for the first time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Those glasses must only be as good as the WiFi they’re connected to, right? There must be a way to block signals to them or identify which ones are transmitting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla and Mila announce strategic research partnership to advance open source and sovereign AI capabilities | The Mozilla Blog⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is where your donations to the Mozilla Foundation end up.

  Google funds the development of Firefox, but people who click the Donate button fund this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intel and LG Display may have beaten Apple and Qualcomm with the best laptop battery life ever⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair to Dell, Apple’s high-resolution displays might have toned-down resolutions too. The Mac Neo ships with a lower default resolution than what it can fully handle, if I understand the settings right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intel and LG Display may have beaten Apple and Qualcomm with the best laptop battery life ever⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The least expensive current-gen MacBook after the Neo is $1100 (less if you buy a previous generation, which is apparently common practice); the Dell in the article is $1750.

  Apple’s other products are expensive, but this is a whole new level of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intel and LG Display may have beaten Apple and Qualcomm with the best laptop battery life ever⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  With a starting price over $1500, they’re competing with Apple prices too

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A free VPN you can trust, now built into Firefox | The Mozilla Blog⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Not sure why this is downloaded. Mullvad is an example of a company that has fought like hell to earn its reputation as a trustworthy VPN provider, which is something that every provider (especially Mozilla) should aspire to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple begins age checks in the UK with latest iOS update⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I have my doubts (see responses for similar arguments about systemd adding an age field).

  • Authoritarian governments are not appeased by corporations that bend over backwards for them, and
  • Apple is in the business of making money, not keeping people private.