I had to look up the panopticon reference, so I thought to share with others: ‘A proposed prison of supervision, so arranged that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times without being seen by them: proposed by Jeremy Bentam.’

I like the ‘ground up’ approach they mention that doesn’t rely on insecure ‘adversaries’. I’ll check it out soon.

It’s true (and it feels a bit dusty), but it’s still meeting my needs. I hope it’ll get picked up again or perhaps another project will replace it.

I installed a custom launcher that’s close to the stock one on my Pixel 3 specifically to make it possible to remove the Google Search widget. Now I have a Firefox widget that points to DDG.

If any are interested, the launcher is Lawn Chair, and it can be installed via F-droid.

This, and it’s not a human. All these analogies trying to liken a learning algorithm to a learning human are not correct. An LLM is not a human.

This hits the nail on the head. A major component of art is that it’s an outlet of human creativity, something we find fulfilling to both produce and consume. If creativity is delegated to machines, what’s left for us humans? At some point, we’ll grow tired of Taco Bell and re-runs, and what then?

That’s an interesting thought, that could potentially create corporate day jobs for artists.

Edit: I don’t believe in this idea, but thought it interesting. It’s better for artists to exercise creativity.

I often wonder, “Can’t my web browser keep Alphabet better apprised of my personal life and interests?” Yes, it can! Finally, an ad company that ‘gets me’.

Not to worry my dear Wordpad coders: Neovim is a good alternative. One can always set wrap and the default font to Times New Roman.

I’ve was doing the same until yesterday, then I found StreetComplete. Since then, it’s so much easier to enter addresses. So much easier to add addresses while out walking than to carry a notepad or memorize numbers.

After using it since Lucid Lynx 10.04, I switched from Ubuntu to Mint last weekend. I’m lazy about distros these days, and I really didn’t want to switch, but Firefox instability was driving me nuts. The web browser must be reliable, IMO. It’s a fundamental requirement for a desktop OS, and this problem didn’t exist before snaps.

This is a positive take. No OS is perfect, but there are lots of reasons to give a Linux distro a whirl. Tech right now IMO has become disappointing, but Linux continues to be a shining beacon of fun and hope.

Did somebody say fire sale?

I’ve noticed that, too. It wasn’t always that way though. A couple of years ago, minus worked no problem.

Follow-up: The icing on the cake was a release or so ago when apt started queueing the snap package’s installation instead. Very clever, but also a confusing user experience. It took a few iterations before I understood the snap was getting installed instead of the deb.

Firefox is one of the worst snaps. It pops up an annoying notification everyday reminding you to restarted it. Then came the crashing. It got to a point where I couldn’t keep my browser running more than a few minutes at a time.

I wanted to like snaps, and I’m not overall negative on Ubuntu, but keeping the web browser functional is minimum requirement. The Firefox PPA is much more reliable.

Agreed, I sure am glad Lemmy was here to catch us. What would we have done if it hadn’t been ready and waiting?

This news hit me hard this morning. Bram’s work has directly benefited my career for decades. He was a good human being who did good things. RIP Bram

Every day this week I’ve thought, ‘Thank goodness for the EU.’ They just keep stepping up against the tech companies.

Also, it’s probably only a handful of people who are implementing this ‘enhancement.’ It’s not like a small team has any real bargaining power.