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hersh

@ hersh @literature.cafe

Posts
1
Comments
120
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • It is essential to stop using Chrome. Under the pretense of saving users from third-party spyware, Google is creating an ecosystem in which Chrome itself is the spyware.

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  • Firefox syncs across devices as well, if you sign up for a Firefox account and enable sync. This works for bookmarks, logins, history, and you can even access remote tabs if you want. It's also easy to send a single page from one device to another.

    On desktop, Firefox has an import feature that will pull your bookmarks and logins m other browsers (like Chrome) into your Firefox profile.

    Even if you're neck-deep in Google services, Chrome doesn't do anything special.

  • Carmen Osorio, expert in technology addiction: ‘It’s not a good idea to give children a smartphone; in any case, you let them borrow yours’

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  • A non-smartphone, that is, a cell phone like the ones that today’s parents had when we were young and with which we made calls and sent text messages, was enough for us, and it did not cause addiction.

    That's not the way I remember it. Texting addiction was a thing. That's how Twitter became popular; it was basically a way to broadcast SMS to friends at first.

    I guess it's a matter of degrees.

    Ad-based services are the real problem here, I think. You don't hear people complaining about Wikipedia addiction.

  • Is anyone using awk?

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  • All the time. Not always by choice!

    A lot of my work involves writing scripts for systems I do not control, using as light a touch as is realistically possible. I know for a fact Python is NOT installed on many of my targets, and it doesn't make sense to push out a whole Python environment of my own for something as trivial as string manipulation.

    awk is super powerful, but IMHO not powerful enough to justify its complexity, relative to other languages. If you have the freedom to use Python, then I suggest using that for anything advanced. Python skills will serve you better in a wider variety of use cases.

  • Research: The Growing Inequality of Who Gets to Work from Home

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  • Not sure what you're seeing on your end, but I get a fairly lengthy article with graphs.

  • Should I use Restic, Borg, or Kopia for container backups?

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  • Thank you for saving me the trouble of investigating this as an option.

    No reason to tolerate proprietary licenses when there are so many viable FLOSS solutions out there.

  • there were lyrics this whole time?!

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  • I'd go a step further and say "punk" is by definition political, and more specifically anti-authoritarian and non-conformist.

    That said, this is a relatively new usage of the word. 100 years ago it meant nothing of the sort.

  • Dropbox removed ability to opt your files out of AI training

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  • I just checked to see if I missed a big update.

    There's still no Linux client, and it cannot sync files on Android (it only supports photo backups).

    I can't work around that limitation on Android with FolderSync, either, the way I can with Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, or any WebDAV- or S3-compatible server. Since it uses E2EE, any uploads need to go directly through the app, so integrations are difficult.

    It doesn't seem to have a search feature, either, at least not on Android. I can't imagine there's any content-aware search on the web UI, since that can't be done server-side.

    There's been some interesting research in homomorphic encryption over the past couple years, which might someday lead to encrypted server-side search. But I think there are still major hurdles to actually implementing it securely and efficiently.

  • Dropbox removed ability to opt your files out of AI training

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  • There are drawbacks to end-to-end encryption (E2EE). I'm not aware of any E2EE cloud storage systems that have the features Dropbox provides. I would LOVE to know of any that...

    1. Support at least the big 5 platforms (Android/iOS/Mac/Windows/Linux).
    2. Have a functional web interface.
    3. Support sharing and collaboration.
    4. Have a search feature
    5. Sync to the local filesystem on a folder-by-folder or even file-by-file basis
    6. Integrate with other tools (e.g. android file picker)

    It's not easy to do all that with E2EE, like a functional web interface, search, and integration.

    ProtonMail's search, for example, is limited to subject and metadata, and that's specifically because they DON'T use E2EE for that.

    I'm willing to compromise some of this for the sake of E2EE, but I'm not at all surprised that feature-first services are more popular than privacy-first services.

  • OnePlus confirms it: The OnePlus 12R is coming to the US, EU

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  • Sadly, there's no official LineageOS for the OnePlus 10 or 11 series. I remember back with the 7 series it was officially supported on launch, and OnePlus sent units to open source developers. I don't think OnePlus cares that much about the development community anymore.

    https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#oneplus

  • which ones do you think I missed?

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  • I doubt any billionaires have that much money "sitting in a bank".

    Most wealth is non-liquid. For example, if you found a company that becomes massive, and you maintain a controlling share, then you could be a billionaire on paper while having no real money to spend -- the only way to turn that into "real" money would be to sell shares in the company, and thus lose control of it. If the company is doing good work, it could be better to retain control and act through the company, by ensuring that it pays employees good wages to do good work for the benefit of society. This is not completely incompatible with profit in theory, though in practice...yeah. I'm not sure if there are any such billionaires in the world today.

    The real problem is more fundamental to the economy, in that it fairly consistently rewards bad behavior.

    Larry Page basically became a billionaire overnight when Google went public. I don't recall Page or Google doing anything especially evil or exploitative before that, though their success was certainly built in an unsustainable economic bubble.

    If Amazon didn't treat its employees like shit and poison the entire economy, then Bezos could probably still be a billionaire and I wouldn't necessarily hold that against him.

  • which ones do you think I missed?

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  • Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.

    I don't think he was ever a billionaire, though he's certainly done quite well for himself. Since leaving Apple, he has founded several new companies and projects, focusing a lot on education and philanthropy. He was also involved in founding the EFF.

    He's an engineer first and foremost, and several of his projects never achieved mainstream success, partly for being, IMHO, ahead of their time -- for example, a programmable universal remote in the 80s, and a GPS-based item tracker in the early 2000s.

    As far as I know, he has never been involved in any notable scandals.

  • Google Just Killed Warrants That Give Police Access To Location Data

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  • Google's blog (linked in the article) offers more info on the changes. https://blog.google/products/maps/updates-to-location-history-and-new-controls-coming-soon-to-maps/

    The key points are that Google Maps location history will be stored on-device, with an option to back it up (encrypted) to the cloud so if you switch devices you can keep the history. The default auto-delete will be three months, and you can increase or disable that limit.

    I guess that means location history will no longer be accessible via the web site.

    I don't think Google has implemented any E2EE system for backups before (correct me if I'm wrong). I wonder how exactly this will work.

  • Technical Writing: Deprecating Content

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  • I wish Apple followed these rules. So many deprecations in their man pages and developer documentation have no details at all. No idea what the supposed replacement is. No idea of the underlying reasons. No idea when it will cease to function.

    This is why I still see "launchctl load" everywhere. It's been deprecated for years, but the replacements are overcomplicated and not clearly communicated in official docs. When Apple finally pulls the plug, so much shit out there is going to break.

    When they deprecated python2, they withheld implementation details and any timeline. Then they finally axed it in a freaking minor point release, without even replacing it with python3. AAAAAAH

  • Have a pixelated bonfire to warm your night. (Image size is ~ 19KiB.)

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  • Meta and Microsoft say they will buy AMD’s new AI chip as an alternative to Nvidia’s

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  • This opens the door for more, as well. It means breaking the reliance on CUDA. Meta originally developed PyTorch and it's still a large contributor. This means more resources will go into open backends instead of CUDA.

  • Meta’s new AI image generator was trained on 1.1 billion Instagram and Facebook photos

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  • No no, you misunderstood. Everyone gave their explicit consent by clicking "agree" to the 80-page terms of service!

  • What's your favorite Android tablet?

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  • These are not "normal" tablets, but Boox's line of ePaper-based readers are the only Android tablets that distinguish themselves sufficiently in my already-large family of devices. I've used "normal" tablets with full-color LCD/OLED displays, on both the Android and iPadOS side, but I rarely find a good use for them. I've found them to sit in an awkward space with neither the convenience of my phone, nor the utility of my laptop.

    The ePaper-based tablets are ideal for reading, but I do not relegate them merely to the "e-reader" category because they allow you to install Google Play and run basically any Android app. This makes them more flexible and powerful than most e-readers.

    It comes with a built-in browser optimized for monochrome, and you can also install third-party alternatives like EinkBro.

    That said, it's only for advanced users, and it's not a perfectly smooth experience. Just getting Google Play running on it requires jumping through some hoops, and you will find that most Android apps simply don't work well on a monochrome display (though Boox does offer color models, I have not used them myself).

    I was hoping, for example, to use my Boox tablet to play Go, but despite the fact that Go is very much a "black and white" game, most of the apps use shading and colors that look like absolute ass on a black and white display. Some of them do not properly support the 4:3 aspect ratio either. So I don't want to set unreasonable expectations here. These are niche devices.

    Despite these drawbacks, I really appreciate having an ePaper device. It complements my device family (phone, laptop, etc.) in a way other tablets do not.

  • Turmoil at OpenAI shows we must address whether AI developers can regulate themselves

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  • But then it will follow hallucinated regulations.

  • Bunnies - a community for bunny/rabbit enthusiasts and owners

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