GenderNeutralBro @ GenderNeutralBro @lemmy.sdf.org

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2 yr. ago

There will be more diversity in software and distros

I wish, but I doubt it. If we get to the point where there is a mass migration from Windows to Linux, it will almost certainly be concentrated into one or maybe two big distros. Probably Ubuntu.

Today, most proprietary software vendors only support Ubuntu and RHEL. Look at AMD. The ROCm installer supports Ubuntu 22.04, RHEL 9, and SLES. That's it. Not even modern versions of Ubuntu. And it's extremely ornery about dependencies. Python 3.8 or 3.10 required! No 3.9! No 3.11! Trying to get it to install on any modern Debian-based distro is the ninth circle of Dependency Hell.

That's somewhat awkward phrasing but I think the visual processing will also be done on-device. There are a few small multimodal models out there. Mozilla's llamafile project includes multimodal support, so you can query a language model about the contents of an image.

Even just a few months ago I would have thought this was not viable, but the newer models are game-changingly good at very small sizes. Small enough to run on any decent laptop or even a phone.

A well-implemented language model could be a huge QOL improvement. The fact that 90% of AI implementations are half-assed ChatGPT frontends does not reflect the utility of the models themselves; it only reflects the lack of vision and haste to ship of most companies.

Arc Browser has some interesting AI features, but since they're shipping everything to OpenAI for processing, it's a non-starter for me. It also means the developers' interests are not aligned with my own, since they are paying by the token for API access. Mozilla is going to run local LLMs, so everything will remain private, and limited only by my own hardware and my own configuration choices. I'm down with that.

I'd love to see Firefox auto-fetch results from web searches and summarize them for me, bypassing clickbait, filler, etc. You've probably seen AI summary bots here on Lemmy, and I find them very helpful at cutting the crap and giving me exactly what I want, which is information in text form. That's something that's harder and harder to get from web sites nowadays. Never see a recipe writer's life story again!

Tree Style Tabs, Sidebery, or similar are must-haves. I do try to clean up my tabs regularly, but I almost always have more open that can conveniently be displayed in a horizontal tab bar.

Vertical screen real estate is at a higher premium in general on desktop, anyway. No point in keeping my browser at the full width of my screen when most sites adamantly refuse to use the space anyway (case in point: Lemmy).

AI does not mean artificial brain or anything similar. It's a very broad term that's been in use for about 70 years now.

Pac Man has AI.

Gotcha. Typically lowercase b=bit and uppercase B=Byte, but it's hard to tell what people mean sometimes, especially in casual posts.

Come to think of it, I messed up the capitalization too. Should be a capital M for mega.

1mbps is awfully low for 1080. Or did you mean megabyte rather than megabit?

Like most words, "racism" has multiple definitions. If you only know one usage, then the concept of "reverse racism" doesn't make sense. Let's look at dictionary.com:

racism

noun

1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.
2. Also called in·sti·tu·tion·al rac·ism [in-sti-, too, -sh, uh, -nl , rey, -siz-, uh, m, -, tyoo, -],. a policy, system of government, etc., that is associated with or originated in such a doctrine, and that favors members of the dominant racial or ethnic group, or has a neutral effect on their life experiences, while discriminating against or harming members of other groups, ultimately serving to preserve the social status, economic advantage, or political power of the dominant group.
3. an individual action or behavior based upon or fostering such a doctrine; racial discrimination.
4. racial or ethnic prejudice or intolerance.

These are all clearly related, but they are not the same. "Reverse racism" does indeed fall under #4 ("racial or ethnic prejudice"). #4 is probably the most common definition when used colloquially to refer to an individual's actions or statements.

Definition #2 is more broadly used when discussing matters of public policy and legal issues, which is where you are likely to hear "reverse racism". The key point of institutional racism (#2) is that it is part of a power structure — there is a group in power that the policies serve to support and strengthen, and there is a group lacking power that the policies serve to oppress and weaken. "Reverse racism" in this context makes perfect sense: it's reversed to support the oppressed group instead of the powerful group.

There are a few ways this could work, but it hardly seems worth the effort if it's not phoning home.

They could have an on-device database of red flags and use on-device voice recognition against that database. But then what? Pop up a "scam likely" screen while you're already mid-call? Maybe include an option to report scams back to Google with a transcript? I guess that could be useful.

Any more more than that would be a privacy nightmare. I don't want Google's AI deciding which of my conversations are private and which get sent back to Google. Any non-zero false positive rate would simply be unacceptable.

Maybe this is the first look at a new cat and mouse game: AI to detect AI-generated voices? AI-generated voice scams are already out there in the wild and will only become more common as time goes on.

I feel you. It's not practical to buy a phone that doesn't have some aspects that I hate (like a notch or punch hole, glass back, or an absurd overabundance of cameras).

Same deal with small phones. There hasn't been a viable option in close to a decade. So yeah, I've bought some stupidly large phones. What's the alternative? A "compact" phone that's still too big to comfortably use one-handed? Not much of a choice.

Reminds me of the tiny or non-existent pockets that are so common in women's clothing. Yes, there are some options, but they are few and far between, and it's not like pocket size is the one and only priority.

Even if they were trustworthy, nothing lasts forever.

Does anyone seriously think Google Play Movies or whatever they call it is going to be around in 50 years? Audible? Spotify?

Unlikely.

I grew up with access to books that were printed before my parents were even born. I doubt your grandkids will be able to say the same. Not if you buy into DRM-infected ecosystems and vendor lock-in, anyway.

The only consolation is that pirates are always one step ahead. But I wouldn't want to count on that remaining true in 50 years either.

they need plaintext because they send you a recovery code or a support ticket

Sure, but we're talking about architectural choices. It is Proton's choice to use that system; it is not required for the goal of account recovery.

They could avoid storing the recovery email in plaintext. A hash would be sufficient if they require the user to enter their recovery email for confirmation when they really need to recover the account.

For an ostensibly privacy-oriented service, Proton makes some weird architectural choices.

Nobody tell her about daemons.

I came here with exactly this episode in mind. I think it is representative in a few ways:

1. It involves an alien of the week.
2. The alien species is culturally similar to human societies we, as viewers, are familiar with.
3. It demonstrates what the Federation is all about, including the Prime Directive, respectfully dealing with less developed civilizations, and solving problems without violence (especially when the problems are your own fault).
4. It's more or less self-contained. Whether this is "representative" is debatable, I guess. I think it's a big part of Star Trek even though there's a larger focus on season-long storylines in later series.

Much like a cat can stretch out and somehow occupy an entire queen-sized bed, Linux will happily cache your file system as long as there is available memory.

I had some CD-Rs that rotted within a few years. I was devastated, because at the time CD-Rs were hyped up as the most durable of any consumer media, and storage was expensive. I had tons of stuff that was ONLY on CD or DVD. That's how I archived everything.

There was an old site that did a comprehensive analysis and ranked different brands of CD-R and DVD-R discs into tiers. My main takeaway at the time was Verbatim or bust. There were some other brands that got discs from the same manufacturer, but not consistently so it was something of a gamble. IIRC Sony was one of the better ones, but Verbatim was the safest choice.

I can't say I've tested any of my old discs in the past 10 or maybe even 15 years. I copied my most important data into newer media, but I still have a ton of discs I should probably clone to my NAS. One of these years...

Then came M-discs, which as far as I know are still considered legit. They never really caught on, and production has either halted entirely or is at least limited. I never used them myself.

It's nutty that we haven't had a proper offline mode in like 20, maybe 25 years. This was something every browser had in the 90s. Loading from cache was the default, even. Now it's like, I'm not sure why Firefox even has a cache folder. They bend over backwards to prevent you from using it.

Before you tell me that Firefox has an offline mode, yeah, I know. It's basically useless.

I would love a way to have my browser automatically store a local, static copy of everything I view.

I remember a lot of KDE hate up until Gnome 3, which was controversial, to say the least. It mirrored old-school Mac hate, with a lot of invalid arguments parroted by people who never took time to learn it (or more to the point, to unlearn what they came from).

I've swapped between Gnome and KDE a bunch of times, and it hasn't really made a difference to me in many years. There was a time when running apps built for one on the other was a painful experience either way. Nowadays my DE choice doesn't really influence my application choices.