hamsterkill

@hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help Mozilla Test the Thunderbird for Android Beta | Mozilla Thunderbird is an open-source, privacy-focused email app⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, first of all, K9 regularly beta tests their new versions before release already.

  Being launched under the Thunderbird brand, though, is expected to hit a much wider audience than just K9 users. And being a first impression, they want to do everything they can to make that impression a solid one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I was expecting idiotic rules screaming “bureaucratic muppets don’t know what they’re legislating on”, but instead what I’m seeing is surprisingly sane and sensible

  NIST knows what they’re doing. It’s getting organizations to adapt that’s hard. NIST has recommended against expiring passwords for like a decade already, for example, yet pretty much every IT dept still has passwords expiring at least once a year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Qualcomm Reportedly Taps Intel With An Acquisition Offer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t recall Qualcomm trying to buy ARM. That was Nvidia. (though, yes, it likely would also have been prevented if it had tried)

  But they’d probably have a better (but still slim) chance of getting a purchase of Intel through. That’d be a more horizontal acquisition than a vertical one as Qualcomm doesn’t make x86 chips so they can at least argue it wouldn’t be anti-competitive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Qualcomm Reportedly Taps Intel With An Acquisition Offer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They don’t mention what the offer is. Very easily could be a stock-based deal where Intel stockholders get a portion of the combined company. That’s how T-Mobile bought Sprint.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  GenAI = Generative AI AGI = Artificial General Intelligence

  You are talking about the latter. They were talking about the former.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nvidia is diversified in AI, though. Disregarding LLM, it’s likely that other AI methodologies will depend even more on their tech or similar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess I don’t really see why generative AI is a necessity for a search engine? It doesn’t really help me find information any faster than a Wikipedia summary, and is less reliable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In general — yes. Most of the time they do so by subjecting their eyeballs to ads. Do you think it’s a good idea to flood AI models with ads as well?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia is ditching dedicated G-Sync modules to push back against FreeSync’s ubiquity⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s unlikely one of those techs “wins” at all. It’s relatively easy to support them all from a software perspective and so gamers will just use whichever corresponds to their GPU.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨JPEG is Dying - And that's a bad thing | 2kliksphilip⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Only in Nightly and not by default (you need to enable it).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NREL Researchers Pave the Way for Carbon-Negative Concrete⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Isn’t the formula for Roman concrete unknown?

  Yes, though a lot of research has been done to figure out its not important properties. A secret of its durability was just figured out last year. news.mit.edu/…/roman-concrete-durability-lime-cas…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They forked it into Blink a long time ago now. They’ve diverged significantly since then.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Most consumers hate the idea of AI-generated customer service⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Previous way for companies to cut down on customer support costs was to make a better quality product (making support interactions rarer). That is not so much the philosophy anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft bans China-based employees from using Android devices for work, mandates switch to iPhones⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Google can’t operate Play Store in China because it closed its Chinese offices in response to China attempting to hack them (and several other corporations) back in 2010 (Operation Aurora).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft bans China-based employees from using Android devices for work, mandates switch to iPhones⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s just a writer seeking to vary their language a bit. It’s a trick to keep themselves from repeating “Microsoft” quite so many times in a short span, as too much word repetition can cause readers to “tune out”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Announcing the Ladybird Browser Initiative⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Best of luck, I guess, but seems like a doomed project to me. Forking WebKit, Gecko, or even Servo would seem much more reasonable, and even that is a huge undertaking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google employees question execs over 'decline in morale' after blowout earnings⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder if the decline in morale correlates with the decline in morals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google employees question execs over 'decline in morale' after blowout earnings⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Companies can seem very bipolar that way. Always yelling about how well they’re doing, while also cutting costs to maximize investor confidence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple must open iPadOS to sideloading within 6 months, EU says⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If a third party app store provides a tool or service to improve their app store, should apple expect to be able to use that for free? Negating any benefit that third party would get for developing such an improvement

  Sideloaded apps aren’t asking for benefits from being in Apple’s app store. They’re asking to be allowed to exist on Apple’s platform without being fined for it.

  Apple has used other platform API and tooling at no added cost the same way everyone everyone else does. iTunes and Safari used to run on Windows. Apple provides AppleTV+ apps for several platforms. And there’s a number of apps they make for Android.

  Apple already charges developers for access to their APIs and tooling. What Apple is doing with the per-install cost is trying to charge developers for access to their audience — which is not what the EU intended.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can an online library of classic video games ever be legal?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Abandonware amounts to “the rights holder no longer exists or no one knows who owns the rights anymore” or, more clearly “no one is enforcing their rights to this game anymore for whatever reason, so it’s de facto public domain.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox Partners with Qwant for a Better Web(?)⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Could mean that Qwant will be a selectable option included in Firefox. Could mean something else. The last time Qwant partnered with Mozilla, it was on a Qwant-branded version of Firefox.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox Partners with Qwant for a Better Web(?)⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  DDG also has a partnership with Firefox. It’s one of the selectable engines included in Firefox (at least in the US).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox Partners with Qwant for a Better Web(?)⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Every selectable search engine in Firefox has a partnership with it. Google just pays big bucks to be the default.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pornhub shuts down in Texas... and predictably, VPNs benefit⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  VPN use likely spiked in South Korea recently as well, since being blocked by Twitch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨is this copium or hopium or schizophrenia?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Knowing how hard something is can be a larger barrier than not knowing. But the main barrier preventing space colonies is the same thing preventing ocean colonies — “Why?”. What motivation is there to settle space? Exploration and experimentation can be done for motivation of seeing if we can, but settling needs known payoff both for the settlers and the funders.

  Asteroid mining is the only current suggested motivation for such a thing. And it’s very possible that by the time we figure out asteroid capture, we won’t need humans present for that work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Batteries (currently) are way too heavy for commercial planes. They can be used for the smaller propeller planes, but not for jets.

  I don’t know what you were expecting to see to indicate activity. Flight tests are a pretty far along milestone, given the expense of making test planes. That nothing went wrong on the test flight is even more impressive, given that the engineering of using hydrogen in planes is still ongoing (as the article mentions).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a lot of activity on the hydrogen-fueled aviation front.

  popsci.com/…/hydrogen-fuel-cell-aircraft-explaine…

  The infrastructure issues for planes are way less. You need fuel available at airports, which significantly fewer and farther between than consumers require for cars. Planes (and least of the jet variety) already use specialized fuel they keep available at airports. The phase-in is a lot easier too, since most running planes only travel between a few airports in their route — so you’d only need the hydrogen fuel available at the airports hydrogen planes are using to start.

  There’s certainly a lot of challenges to solve there too, but hydrogen remains the most promising solution for decarbonizing air travel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because batteries suck for any application where weight (ie. energy density) matters. Running long haul semis off batteries is not a super practical thing. Even with consumer cars, there are people for whom hydrogen will be a better fit.

  Basically we’ve been in a world where the happy medium of energy density and efficiency (gasoline) was used for everything. Now we likely need to split those things up into what energy density is more important for, and what energy efficiency is more important for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Browser maker love-in snubs Google-shunned JPEG XL⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  On a side note, 1 Terapixel is just crazy. A square with 1 million pixels has this number of pixels. So, about 1000 of 1080p will fit into this square vertically and about 500 horizontally. How has such eyes to see this all pixel perfectly?

  If you zoom in on it (a pretty common thing to do with pictures) enough, most people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Supreme Court rejects Epic v. Apple antitrust case⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s still a good chance of a DOJ antitrust case against Apple coming that seeks allowing alternative app stores (and Apple’s way of complying with the part of this case that went against them makes it even more likely, I think). But Epic’s case is done, yes, unless they want to challenge Apple’s compliance with the ruling.