Removing copyright entirely is a bridge too far.

Just roll it back to a reasonable time limit (I dunno, 7 years?), and categorically reject all further lobbying attempts from Disney and the like.

Yes, I loved classic Trek for showing a better a future, where humans have moved beyond our greed, prejudice, and self-destructive tendencies. That was the through line in TOS and TNG, even if it wasn’t always 100% on-point and didn’t always age well (you need to view TOS in its historical context to get past the baked-in 1960s sexism, for example).

There’s a place for cautionary tales, and there’s a place for aspirational tales.

I liked Discovery well enough for what it was, but I hated its picture of a future where good humans are the exception rather than the rule.

Nowadays, I think solarpunk is where its at.

Buy a dozen and you could fit a good chunk of LibGen.

I’ve never replaced a watch (smart or otherwise) in less than 5 years.

Wat.

How’s navigation with Pebbles? If I start bike navigation in Google Maps on my phone, can I get turn-by-turn directions on the watch, and does it not suck?

According to the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, 2013, the median score for the US was “level 2”. 3.9% scored below level 1, and 4.2% were “non-starters”, unable to complete the questionnaire.

For context, here is the difference between level 2 and level 3, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_the_International_Assessment_of_Adult_Competencies#Competence_groups :

• Level 2: (226 points) can integrate two or more pieces of information based on criteria, compare and contrast or reason about information and make low-level inferences
• Level 3: (276 points) can understand and respond appropriately to dense or lengthy texts, including continuous, non-continuous, mixed, or multiple pages.

I think they reached a point where their user base was predominantly mainstream, not tech-savvy enough to know the difference.

I mean, how else can any site survive on advertising when the ads are so obnoxious and it’s so easy to block them? Either the site is great and the ads are non-intrusive enough that I’ll make an exception in uBlock, or I’m never seeing the ads in the first place.

Gemini might be good at something, but I’ll never know because it is bad at all the things I have ever used the assistant for. If it’s good at anything at all, it’s something I don’t need or want.

Looking forward to 2027 when Google Gemini is replaced by Google Assistant (not to be confused with today’s Google Assistant, totally different product).

In case anyone is unfamiliar, Aaron Swartz downloaded a bunch of academic journals from JSTOR. This wasn’t for training AI, though. Swartz was an advocate for open access to scientific knowledge. Many papers are “open access” and yet are not readily available to the public.

Much of what he downloaded was open-access, and he had legitimate access to the system via his university affiliation. The entire case was a sham. They charged him with wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer system, breaking and entering, and a host of other trumped-up charges, because he…opened an unlocked closet door and used an ethernet jack from there. The fucking Secret Service was involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosecution

The federal prosecution involved what was characterized by numerous critics (such as former Nixon White House counsel John Dean) as an “overcharging” 13-count indictment and “overzealous”, “Nixonian” prosecution for alleged computer crimes, brought by then U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz.

Nothing Swartz did is anywhere close to the abuse by OpenAI, Meta, etc., who openly admit they pirated all their shit.

Joplin is great. I have its data stored locally with encryption, and I sync across devices with Syncthing. It also has built-in support for some cloud providers like you mentioned, and since it supports local encryption, you don’t need to depend on the cloud provider’s privacy policy.

Setting it up on multiple devices was a bit complex, but the documentation is there. Follow the steps, don’t just waltz through the setup assuming it will work intuitively. I made that mistake and while it was not the end of the world, it would’ve saved me 15 minutes if I’d just RTFM.

99.999% would be fantastic.

90% is not good enough to be a primary feature that discourages inspection (like a naive chatbot).

What we have now is like…I dunno, anywhere from <1% to maybe 80% depending on your use case and definition of accuracy, I guess?

I haven’t used Samsung’s stuff specifically. Some web search engines do cite their sources, and I find that to be a nice little time-saver. With the prevalence of SEO spam, most results have like one meaningful sentence buried in 10 paragraphs of nonsense. When the AI can effectively extract that tiny morsel of information, it’s great.

Ideally, I don’t ever want to hear an AI’s opinion, and I don’t ever want information that’s baked into the model from training. I want it to process text with an awareness of complex grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. That’s what LLMs are actually good at.

Disgusting and unsurprising.

Most web admins do not care. I’ve lost count of how many sites make me jump through CAPTCHAS or outright block me in private browsing or on VPN. Most of these sites have no sensitive information, or already know exactly who I am because I am already authenticating with my username and password. It’s not something the actual site admins even think about. They click the button, say “it works on my machine!” and will happily blame any user whose client is not dead-center average.

Enter username, but first pass this CAPTCHA.

Enter password, but first pass this second CAPTCHA.

Here’s another CAPTCHA because lol why not?

Some sites even have their RSS feed behind Cloudflare. And guess what that means? It means you can’t fucking load it in a typical RSS reader. Good job!

The web is broken. JavaScript was a mistake. Return to monke gopher.

Fuck Cloudflare.

“One mistake” would be if he didn’t double-down on it, and if Proton addressed their customers’ concerns in any meaningful way. Instead, they deleted posts and are now withdrawing from the community entirely, and directing users to three of the worst corporate hell-holes on the internet.

Almost certainly, yes.

People on Mastodon are not happy about those statements, and called Proton out on it relentlessly with every post Proton made. This is Proton running away with their tail between their legs, back to platforms where they have more control and/or are already full of right-wing nutjobs.

If anyone’s looking for secure email, look at tuta.com instead. The email service is very similar in terms of UX and offers better encryption. They don’t offer the rest of Proton’s suite, but…maybe that’s a good thing? I mean, do you want to get locked into an ecosystem?

This will likely be rejected for one the same reasons that they decided they would not add any new flag emojis. Flags come and go. Bitcoin hasn’t even been around for 20 years yet, and its future is highly uncertain.

Also, considered as a currency, it would be better as a regular text character, not an emoji. Like $, €, ¥, £, etc.