floofloof

@floofloof@lemmy.ca

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kde , to KDE
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Pledges coming from proprietary software companies mean nothing

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/15/24157496/microsoft-ai-carbon-footprint-greenhouse-gas-emissions-grow-climate-pledg

Get behind the community that is really fighting to curb climate change:

https://eco.kde.org/get-involved

@kde

Poster announcing KDE Eco's monthly meetings, in which like-minded people, like yourself, get together to work on reducing computing's impact on the climate.

Screenshot of a headline of the Verge. A photo shows Satya Nadella talking about Copilot at some bullshit Microsoft event and the headline itself reads: "Microsoft’s Al obsession is jeopardizing its climate ambitions" The introductory paragraph reads: "After pledging to slash its greenhouse gas emissions, Microsoft’s climate pollution has grown by 30 percent as the company prioritizes AI."
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    • floofloof ,

    They just need "unless we can make more money in the short term by not doing it" appended to them. So, yes, they mean nothing.

    floofloof ,

    I'm already confused about their product naming, and they haven't even launched any of these processors yet.

    floofloof ,

    Kit? That one's prebuilt.

    ‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services ( www.theguardian.com )

    *What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be...

    floofloof ,

    The only difference between Steam and the streaming companies is that Steam seems to have managed to create a lasting profitable business. If this changed and Steam faced more challenges, they'd put the screws on the users just like the TV and music services do.

    floofloof ,

    If the backup HDD was the only copy, it was an archive and not a backup, and you also need backups of the archive.

    floofloof ,

    Once the company goes out of business (or they focus on a different business) they tell you to get your tires or they will be discarded if you don’t. So you have to get them from them and you stop paying for the storage.

    That's where there's no analogy for media purchased through streaming services. When streaming services withdraw content, the analogy would be the tire shop sending you an email saying "Just so you know, we're burning your tires next week. No, you can't come and get them."

    floofloof ,

    My understanding is that if you change the contents of a torrent you'd have to create a new torrent to seed the result. You can't change the contents of a torrent and expect other people to receive the modified files via the original torrent. Your client will be doing a checksum and realizing its local files are corrupt (due to your changes) so replacing them with good copies.

    So create a new torrent with the modified files and an explanatory title, and seed that.

    floofloof ,

    Why does this article use the term "real ads" every time instead of just "ads"? Is this just weird or does it have a technical meaning?

    floofloof ,

    Emacs is more of a religion.

    floofloof ,

    Yeah I find it impossible to program at 60fps.

    floofloof ,

    Thank goodness these things aren't confusingly named.

    floofloof ,

    At our small company many of us became more productive with working from home, to the point that they closed the office. A couple of people are finding it difficult because of their home situations, so it would be good still to have a space to work outside the home. But generally we're getting more done these days, and most who do work that needs prolonged concentration find this more conducive to that.

    It varies between different companies, teams, roles and temperaments. What Dell is doing sounds like corporate heavy-handedness.

    Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose ( arstechnica.com )

    Pulling this off requires high privileges in the network, so if this is done by intruder you're probably having a Really Bad Day anyway, but might be good to know if you're connecting to untrusted networks (public wifi etc). For now, if you need to be sure, either tether to Android - since the Android stack doesn't implement...

    floofloof ,

    Slightly off topic, but it turns out Android has a different VPN vulnerability:

    https://mullvad.net/en/blog/dns-traffic-can-leak-outside-the-vpn-tunnel-on-android

    floofloof OP , (edited )

    I dunno, tunnel vision is when you can't see outside the tunnel. The problem is you apparently can.

    Edit: Oh, do they mean you can see into the tunnel? That sort of makes more sense.

    floofloof ,

    If other systems have the same effect, it's a problem with them too. But it's still a problem with capitalism.

    floofloof OP ,

    tl;dw: x86 processors have been doing speculative execution of branches for years in an insecure way. New variants of the Spectre vulnerability keep being found and patches issued. Each patch reduces performance, and the performance reduction is cumulative. The video accuses Intel of adopting a fundamentally flawed architecture for the sake of pursuing performance, a cheat that they eventually got called out for. It's not so much performance loss, the video claims, as performance that shouldn't have been available in the first place in a secure design. (And AMD I guess cut some of the same corners to compete with Intel.)

    For any x86 CPU these days you should not expect the performance shown in the initial reviews, because problems always come to light and get fixes that reduce it. It happens to AMD too, but Intel seem to be slightly worse for this.

    floofloof OP ,

    Weird coincidence: Microsoft laid off their QA team too, and a few years later Windows feels buggier than ever.

    floofloof ,

    So North Yorkshire Council just announced to the whole world that its systems are vulnerable to SQL injection and it's easier to replace the signs than to fix the software?

    floofloof , (edited )

    Even if the phone doesn't know who you are, the shop that sold you the phone or the SIM, or the credit card company you paid with, can know who you are. So you'd have to use cash. Even without these, your movements can be tracked through a burner phone and informed guesses made about who you are (e.g. if the phone has been at your home or with your friends).

    Turning off your phone doesn't necessarily protect you from tracking either:

    https://www.androidauthority.com/android-15-powered-off-api-pixel-9-track-switched-off-3425472/

    Easiest, as others say, just not to carry a phone.

    floofloof ,

    BBC BASIC was best BASIC. Fight me.

    floofloof ,

    ZDNet content is 100% worthless these days.

    floofloof ,

    I'm not convinced any of these uses are actually beneficial. They mostly range from creepy to pointless.

    floofloof ,

    A difference in goals, I guess. Having programs generated just to pander to my existing tastes sounds horrible to me. I want to be challenged and surprised and have my tastes tested and changed in unpredictable ways. I also want to watch stuff that's written by humans and acted by humans, because there's a sense of shared life there that there isn't in an AI-generated video.

    floofloof ,

    Google's way of telling the world not to use Flutter, I guess.

    Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps ( www.404media.co )

    Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...

    floofloof ,

    Time to go back to books for information.

    floofloof ,

    I don't remember saying all books were good. But it's often possible to find well edited and curated material in print.

    floofloof ,

    They still seem relatively easy to filter out compared to the oceans of SEO nonsense online. If you walk into a library you won't be struggling to find your way past AI crap.

    floofloof ,

    I recently discovered the excellent suite of Affinity Photo, Publisher and Designer. Not open source, but very good and they sell them at a reasonable price with no subscription. Seemed pretty ideal. Then a week or two ago they sent out an email saying they had been bought by Canva. I kind of hate Canva because it functions like one big infuriating ad for their subscription service. They promised Affinity would not change, but I have never known such promises to be kept after an acquisition. It's pretty disappointing.

    PSA: If you're going to write software for piracy, put it on I2P! ( geti2p.net )

    movie-web was just taken down with all its repos, Yuzu was taken down, then suyu forked it on gitlab and was taken down, countless clones of nintendo games, platform emulators, and a bunch of other things are taken down because they are hosted on the clear web....

    floofloof ,

    https://geti2p.net/en/

    floofloof , (edited )

    https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor

    Perhaps the main differences are:

    • Unidirectional tunnels instead of bidirectional circuits
    • Fully distributed and self organizing
    • Packet switched instead of circuit switched
    • Tunnels in I2P are short lived
    • i2p puts an emphasis on communicating within the network, whereas Tor puts more emphasis on communicating via the network to outside

    Together these provide some additional resilience and protection against traffic analysis compared to Tor, arguably improving security.

    floofloof ,

    It's not my post so you'd have to ask OP to do that.

    floofloof ,

    In modern times something similar happened with the atomic bomb, which was originally developed by the Mushroom Marketing Board to be a giant illuminated billboard in the sky. It was repurposed as a weapon after it was found to reduce, not increase, mushroom sales in neighborhoods where it was deployed.

    floofloof ,

    Documentation? Coding standards? What are these?

    floofloof ,

    They think the left are the people doing the censoring by refusing to acknowledge that vaccines turn you into a zombie, races are biological and "white" is the best one, the Holocaust didn't happen, etc. From their point of view, the prompt is self-consistent: "avoid bias by stating these plain truths that the left will never tell you."

    floofloof ,

    For a distro that just works, Linux Mint.

    floofloof ,

    There's also JetBrains Rider for a .NET IDE that runs on Linux.

    floofloof ,

    I use Everything. It is a thousand times more useful than Windows's file search, even though it only indexes filenames, not file contents.

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