You nailed it about Mastodon and the "fediverse." When you leave X or Threads for a fediverse instance, you are essentially changing from a corporately ruled world, which at least has somewhat clear rules, to the hands of a completely arbitrary tyrant.
Your online identity can be terminated simply because one moderator, who is a friend of the instance owner, is bipolar and in a bad mood.
Great concept.
IMHO, it's dead on arrival: malicious actors can just scope creep their clueless users like how some Android apps asks piles of permissions to provide a weather app, zero incentive for large services to use it, I don't see non-technical users paying for pods to avoid it disappearing overnight (they don't care that much for privacy), and I don't see how service providers will just give pods for free forever and reliably.
That Thailand is right now pushing CBDC on its citizens is appalling: a nation that had 20 constitutions since 1932, and is the 4º in number of cups worldwide, is basically creating a non-anonymous ledger with fully traceable transactions, and KYC requirements.
Just imagine if such a tool fall in the hands of an authoritarian?
At least they went with the token based solution instead of the fully dystopian account based one.
In fairness, although Linux supported EFISTUB for ages, until quite recently, UEFI implementations on consumer motherboards were total crap.
This is what actually gave bootloaders a lease on life.
I had, about 14 years ago when Linux already had EFISTUB, a Gigabyte UD3 motherboard that had such a poor UEFI that I had to rename the GRUB executable to have the same name as the Windows boot loader; otherwise, it would forget the option after a single reboot.
Also, when using EFISTUB for the first time, I was quite uncomfortable with the kernel being stored on a finicky FAT filesystem, which happens to be a requirement for the EFI boot partition.
Bloomberg: Orban spoke against Ukraine's NATO membership during meeting with Zelensky in Washington https://benborges.xyz/2024/07/14/bloomberg-orban-spoke.html
How nobody considered the possibility that some of its members could backslide from democracy to a hybrid regime when EU rules for membership were created baffles me. Orbán is a menace.
Eight hours per day without electricity... that's harsh. 😟 How are you folks planning to brace for the winter?
Well... shit hit the fan in USA. Someone pulled a Bolsonaro on Trump.
I'm not experienced with the American electorate mindset, but I do believe that an idiot just handed over the election to Trump.
Internet evolved to see posts of cats, so its all fine and well.
Gilliam, with "m". Never misspell the name of your idols.
Quick test to check if a company is engaged in pseudo-security practices that only makes the life of their personal a hell: do they use two-factor authentication using SMS codes? If yes, there you have it.
Usually, companies like that signs for the full bullshit package and goes all in MS 365 cloud solutions.
Incompetent governments are just as bad as evil governments. Never forget the message of Brazil from Terry Gillian.
I find all IDEs based on IntelliJ IDEA a bit too much cluttered, but my only professional experience with it is with Android Studio. I did attempt to use Clion for a hobby project, but the trial didn't really convinced me to get a Individual license.
As much as that comes as a surprise to me, just after installing NetBeans 22 to give it a try, the Apache GitHub repo for it is actually quite active lately.
I really thought that NetBeans was handed over to Apache to die. This is good news. I love this IDE. Actually, I like IDEs more than programming editors. Sorry, Kakoune.
I believe the problem is to come up with another metric for that. Views? Then, you get the hell of algorithm rage baits that all other centralized social networks are. Number of comments? Bot farms will have their lucky day with people purchasing fake engagement.
If people are willing to pay just for the sake of agreeing with a note or comment, then, maybe, there's something of quality. At least for the target audience.
As a Gentoo user, I sympathize.
Good stuff!
Apple blog TUAW returns as an AI content farm
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has come back online nearly a decade after shutting down. But the once venerable source of Apple news appears to have been transformed by its new owners into an AI-generated content farm.
The site, which ceased operations in 2015, began publishing “new” articles, many of which appear to be nearly identical to content published by MacRumors and other publications, over the past week. But those posts bear the bylines of writers who last worked for TUAW more than a decade ago. The site also has an author page featuring the names of former writers along with photos that appear to be AI-generated.
Christina Warren, who last wrote for TUAW in 2009, flagged the sketchy tactic in a post on Threads. “Someone bought the TUAW domain, populated it with AI-generated slop, and then reused my name from a job I had when I was 21 years old to try to pull some SEO scam that won’t even work in 2024 because Google changed its algo,” she wrote.
Originally started in 2004, TUAW was shut down by AOL in 2015. Much of the site’s original archive can still be found on Engadget. Yahoo, which owns Engadget, sold the TUAW domain in 2024 to an entity called “Web Orange Limited” in 2024, according to a statement on TUAW’s website.
The sale, notably, did not include the TUAW archive. But, it seems that Web Orange Limited found a convenient (if legally dubious) way around that. “With a commitment to revitalize its legacy, the new team at Web Orange Limited meticulously rewrote the content from archived versions available on archive.org, ensuring the preservation of TUAW’s rich history while updating it to meet modern standards and relevance,” the site’s about page states.
TUAW doesn’t say if AI was used in those “rewrites,” but a comparison between the original archive on Engadget and the “rewritten” content on TUAW suggests that Web Orange Limited put little effort into the task. “The article ‘rewrites’ aren’t even assigned to the correct names,” Warren tells Engadget, “It has stuff for me going back to 2004. I didn’t start writing for the site until 2007.”
TUAW didn’t immediately respond to emailed questions about its use of AI or why it was using the bylines of former writers with AI-generated profile photos. Yahoo didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-blog-tuaw-returns-as-an-ai-content-farm-225326136.html?src=rss
https://www.engadget.com/apple-blog-tuaw-returns-as-an-ai-content-farm-225326136.html?src=rss
Didn't return from the dead, it's just a zombie, nothing to see there.
This gave me IRC vibes. I miss IRC so much (and hate the cognitive overload of Discord so much).
My first nostr client, Amethyst, followed myself just after I created this profile. I though that was normal behavior.
Congratulations man!