Depends on the industry. If you’re in an industry where your bottom line is sufficiently insulated from the quality of your goods or services, then you’ll be fine! Just gotta be an illegal monopoly, or form illegal trusts to gain equivalent monopoly power, or benefit from regulatory capture.

Like, say, health insurance. What could go wrong?!

Yeah, I’m not too mad about this. It’s a good idea, but without legal weight behind it, it ultimately failed. Ideally GDPR and similar regulations would provide something similar, so I can set my preference once and every site would be required to respect it. That would be much better that the current situation, which is that I am forced to navigate every asshole site’s custom cookie notice. Each one’s a little different, and some of them break certain browser configurations. It’s a UX nightmare. This is probably by design — annoy users into submission. Because nobody in their right mind would ever click “allow” if it were not the easier choice.

Basically Xperia or bust if you don’t want to compromise on any of that. See the search results here: https://m.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2022&nWidthMax=71&nRamMin=4000&chk35mm=selected&s4Gs=0&s5Gs=0&idCardslot=1

If you are willing to compromise on size and get a bigger phone, your options open up a bit with low-end phones from various brands, like the Moto G line and Samsung Galaxy A line. For some insane reason, high-end phones lack the useful features of low-end phones like card slots and headphone jacks.

Where was all this coming from? Well, I don’t know what Stern or Esquire’s source was. But I know Navarro-Cardenas’, because she had a follow-up message for critics: “Take it up with Chat GPT.”

The absolute gall of this woman to blame her own negligence and incompetence on a tool she grossly misused.

Right, not an IDE. The BB stands for “bare bones”, but it has a robust feature set as far as general text editing goes. Autocomplete is minimal so I tend to use an IDE for more complex coding tasks.

That article was even weirder and creepier than I expected. By a lot.

Also some interesting bits from a different Austrian tradition:

The Krampuses are now encouraged to only symbolically brush festival-goers, and not actually whip them.

Sorry, I misspoke. CUPS itself is not deprecated, only most of its old functionality regarding drivers.

From man cups:

CUPS printer drivers, backends, and PPD files are deprecated and will no longer be supported in a future feature release of CUPS

Not surprising. My gut reaction when I heard about renting gaming PCs was “that can’t work”, and it’s so much worse than I expected. The pricing alone should be enough to turn any informed person away. Easily more than double what would be reasonable. If you know anyone considering this, be sure to steer them away. Friends don’t let friends rent from NZXT.

I don’t. I have installed Firefox manually for many years across several distros now, albeit for different reasons. For example:

• Debian only has Firefox ESR in the Bookworm repo. I want the latest mainline version.

• Bazzite only offers it via Flatpak, which breaks functionality I need such as native messaging.

I see no problem installing it manually. It keeps itself updated and has caused me zero problems.

BBEdit.

It makes every other GUI text editor look like a joke.

macOS still uses cups. It’s deprecated but still functional. The alternative is to use AirPrint or get fucked.

I spent more money on music during the Napster days than any other time in my life. I discovered so much that I otherwise never would have been exposed to. I bought CDs, I went to concerts, I bought the T-shirts of bands I only listen to because of Napster.

Just marketing nonsense. There are three ways to present AI features:

1. A generational improvement on things that have been available for 20+ years. This is not sexy and does not make for good advertising. For example: grammar checking, natural-speech processing (Siri), automatic photo tagging/sorting.

2. A new type of usage that nobody cares about because they’ve lived without it just fine up to now.

3. Straight-up lie to people about what it can do, using just enough weasel words to keep yourself out of jail.

Which backend are you using to run it, and does that backend have an option to adjust context size?

I noticed in LM Studio, for example, that the default context size is much smaller than the maximum that the model supports. Qwen should certainly support more than 2000 tokens. I’d try setting it to 32k if you can.

I’d be surprised if it were anything else. No way in hell OpenAI is going to develop their own browser engine from scratch. Mayyyyybe they go with Gecko? Might make sense if OpenAI is trying to eat Google’s lunch long-term.

I never thought about it that way, but yeah. Spot-on.

I don’t hate it in Enterprise to be honest, because there is the context of “humanity not yet at its best”.

In theory, an “AI PC” (please imagine giant eye-rolls along with the scare quotes) has the hardware to run models locally instead of shunting stuff off to OpenAI or Anthropic for processing. So in theory, it’s more private and secure than similar functionality on a “traditional PC”.

In practice…wtf knows what Windows is doing anyway? Or what it will do with the next OS update? Same for macOS. On the Mac side, Apple keeps talking about their local AI and private cloud AI, and yet they’re still partnering with OpenAI for ChatGPT integration. I don’t want to use anything that even has the capability to send my shit to OpenAI, for the same reason I don’t like to put poison in my fridge no matter how clearly labelled it might be.

Weight & Diet Trackers

I’m not going to be detailed with this section because it was honestly the worst one to gather info on

I feel this. I use Waistline. Or I should say I would use Waistline if it wasn’t such a drag, but in reality I haven’t launched it in months. It was the closest drop-in replacement I could find for MyFitnessPal (which is proprietary and extraordinarily bloated), letting me search a database of foods either by type or barcode. But MyFitnessPal was a much smoother experience. I still recommend Waistline because AFAIK it’s the best out there, but the bar is pretty low.

Both have a problem with redundant and contradictory items in the database, because they are at least partly crowdsourced. Lots of entries have weird or meaningless units.

And you can’t tell when something is active/focused or not because every goddamn app and web site wants to use its own “design language”. Wish I had a dollar for every time I saw two options, one light-gray and one dark-gray, with no way to know whether dark or light was supposed to mean “active”.

I miss old-school Mac OS when consistency was king. But even Mac OS abandoned consistency about 25 years ago. I’d say the introduction of “brushed metal” was the beginning of the end, and IIRC that was late 90s. I am old and grumpy.

Say all you want about hallucinations, but AI will never be able to outperform humans at bullshitting, so sales and marketing is safe.