Obelix
@Obelix@feddit.org
- Comment on In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance 1 day ago:
I totally agree. Stuff like Microsoft recall is not great and America under Trump neither, but it is nothing compared to North Korea. That is a hellhole nobody who grew up in a free western society really can even imagine.
- Comment on Whatever happened to cheap eReaders? – Terence Eden’s Blog 1 day ago:
I guess that there are two issues: First of all, you can find someone who can slap standard Android onto a standard device. Finding someone who can work with a raw AOSP is harder and will be more expensive. Which is exactly what you want to not do when trying to build a really cheap device. And Google has started to move more and more services and security updates to their own platform. Using AOSP is a really bad idea
- Comment on Germany's Federal Cartel Office warns Amazon that its marketplace retailer price controls likely violate national and EU laws, in its preliminary assessment 1 day ago:
We’ll, that here is exactly the issue. I do a price comparison on multiple sites before buying something expensive and Amazon is in most cases the cheapest supplier. I suspect that it is due to those illegal price control mechanisms that force sellers to offer the cheapest price there.
And that is kind of a bad situation for everybody: You can post “Don’t use Amazon”, but it feels really stupid to pay more money for the same product from the same sellers on other platforms.
- Comment on public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird) 1 day ago:
I know what you are saying, but it is not so bad: First of all, most things people are doing at work is not really related to the OS underneath. So if you are responsible for creating passports, you are using the special government program for passport creation. If you are a policeman, you are using the special police software to do your policework. Yeah, you need additional training, but in the best case your usual software keeps working. Most people are not really interacting with the OS during their work day.
(and let’s be honest: Microsofts totally insane UI changes are also requiring lots of training. If you are used to just click on some specific buttons that somebody told you to click on, you’re totally lost in Microsofts crazy wonderland of ridiculous UI changes )
- Comment on Whatever happened to cheap eReaders? – Terence Eden’s Blog 1 day ago:
There is a hint of how he did this here: shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/06/12000-comments/
- Comment on Google quietly released an app that lets you download and run AI models locally 1 day ago:
Google hosting their shit on Microsofts servers and telling you to sideload and not using their own software distribution method for their own OS is kind of crazy if you think about it
- Comment on Germany Is Using AI to Erase Pro-Palestinian Speech 2 days ago:
You can read the post here: feddit.org/post/12529640
There is nothing there containing a one state solution and also german law totally doesn’t prohibit calling for it.
And BTW: You have a autocorrect error in your post: “leave” vs “live” can lead to people misunderstanding your point.
- Comment on Germany Is Using AI to Erase Pro-Palestinian Speech 2 days ago:
You really should read the original announcement of the feddit.org mods, because what you are saying is absolutely not what the rules there are.
- Comment on Germany Is Using AI to Erase Pro-Palestinian Speech 2 days ago:
Yeah, let’s insult other users based on their instance. That is really helpful, will bring peace to the middle east and make the fediverse the dominant social media network in the world.
- A fake Facebook event disguised as a math problem has been one of its top posts for 6 monthswww.engadget.com ↗Submitted 4 days ago to technology@lemmy.world | 103 comments
- Comment on Mom sues porn sites (Including Chaturbate, Jerkmate, Superporn and Hentaicity) for noncompliance with Kansas age assurance law; Teen can no longer enjoy life after mom caught him visiting Chaturbate 1 week ago:
I don’t understand how these kids get caught. They gotta be really slow or something.
I was caught 0 times as a teenager. My mom never found my porn.
Modern operating systems are different than Windows 98. You think that you’re sneeky and that nobody will find your porn folder and then your mom gets a “Popular files in your user group” mailing from “OneDrive Engagement” or a “Your browsing year wrap-up” by Microsoft Edge or a retargetting ad on the whole network because you looked at the Riley Reid fleshlight. Modern surveillance capitalism is really hard to escape.
- Comment on In 2025, Apple still makes it hard to play your own MP3s, so I wrote my own app 1 week ago:
The initial announcement is talking about “media” and I assumed that this did include music. That was my motivation to install Jellyfin and that works so great for me that I didn’t try to use Plexamp remotely
- Comment on In 2025, Apple still makes it hard to play your own MP3s, so I wrote my own app 1 week ago:
Sadly, you have to. Plex wants a subscription if you want to stream outside of your home network now
- Comment on Microsoft is putting AI actions into the Windows File Explorer 1 week ago:
Yeah, I’m using AI to create some simple python programs to do some work on my files. For example a popular music download site is giving you a “Artist - Album.zip” and Jellyfin likes it to be organized into Artist/Album and I created a simple python script that unzips everything into the correct structure. Or a simple script that searches multiple folders for the biggest files / duplicate files.
Yes, I know that I can do this with obscure bash and terminal black magic, but I’m familiar with python and it’s a great way to handle stuff. This is something that AI can do and where AI is actually helpful. Of course I could program those scripts myself, but it really is faster.
Current vision models are also awesome, esp. in combination with other technology. There is no reason that the Windows Explorer can’t find all pictures of your dog or every picture you took in London last September or every picture of a hamburger you took.
Features like that would also be awesome in a file explorer. But we are getting crap.
- Comment on Spotify caught hosting hundreds of fake podcasts that advertise selling drugs 2 weeks ago:
Please take a look into the articles. That really was something that a good moderation team should find and they really didn’t need to listen to every podcast:
The intention of many of these pages is obvious from their names. Podcasts with titles, such as “My Adderall Store” — which has a link in the episode description to a site that purportedly sells Adderall, as well as potentially addictive pain medications like Oxycodone and Vicodin, among other drugs — were listed within the first 50 suggested results, a CNN review this week found. CNN identified dozens of these fake podcasts across Spotify, advertising sales of medications ranging from Methadone to Ambien, in some cases claiming that the drugs can be purchased without a prescription, which is illegal in the United States.
- Comment on Spotify caught hosting hundreds of fake podcasts that advertise selling drugs 2 weeks ago:
It’s because we’ve seen this so many times and are really tired of this: Everybody knows that you have to moderate user generated content. If you provide a upload function for user generated content and don’t have a clear moderation policy in place and a moderation team, you will allow scammers, child porn, drug dealers and crypto scammers onto your platform. That has happened hundreds or thousands of times. And then some newspaper will do a report and they will remove some of the mentioned content without doing anything.
Spotify has smart employees. Some of them even worked at other companies who ran into the same issues. But they still decided to launch the feature like that, mostly because upper management really doesn’t want to pay the costs of functional moderation. That is how Facebook went on to be used in the genocide in Myanmar. That is how thousands of minors got abused. Moderate your shit. There is no way around and AI won’t help you
- Comment on Google's AI now listens to your English language phone conversations 2 weeks ago:
That really doesn’t make any sense at all
- Comment on A VPN Company Canceled All Lifetime Subscriptions, Claiming It Didn’t Know About Them 2 weeks ago:
Lifetime memberships are kind of a trap, for users and a company. The company gets revenue once and then never again. That is great now, but won’t pay your bills in 2027 or 2032. And the company knows that there are users who are willing to pay a huge amount of money for the service and who are using it. Of course the upper ranks will try to find a way to get money from them.
- Comment on I ditched my laptop for a pocketable mini PC and a pair of AR glasses — here’s what happened 1 month ago:
I really would like to try those glasses. They sound cool. But at $500 they are too expensive for an impulse and there is no place around where one can try those offline
- Comment on Google cuts hundreds of jobs in Android division. 1 month ago:
It’s a really cool thing, but if we are honest: That is nothing for the general population. I’m not really sure what Apple is doing with that feature, but there is no way that Grandma Smith will 3d scan things and send them to her grandchildren for 3d printing
- Comment on A Mouse, No Hands! 1 month ago:
It looks really goofy, but I like the concept. That gives your carpal tunnel hands a pause. Or it might free your hand so that you can type with two hands and still use the mouse. It also might help people who lost a hand or arm.
- Comment on Google cuts hundreds of jobs in Android division. 1 month ago:
I really do not want anything innovative in my phone TBH. Android works ok and the heavy lifting is done with apps. I really don’t want Google to move more crappy features into the OS and I really do not need stuff like those LIDAR sensors modern iPhones have. Just give me a smartphone with several years of security updates, enough speed to run my programs without issues, give me a good camera and I’m fine.
- Submitted 1 month ago to history@lemmy.world | 10 comments
- Comment on Tinker WriterDeck - Convert any laptop and most chromebooks into a writer deck. 1 month ago:
It is something to fight against the constant distraction of modern tech. It’s hard to write a novel when social media is just a click away, your friends are chatting in your group, you’re getting news alerts from everywhere and you even might fall into a wikipedia hole while researching about mongol tribes. So there really is a use case for devices who are only able to do one thing.
(it’s kind of the same with phones: Get a dedicated camera and go on a walk and you won’t be distracted be someone whatsapping you)
- Submitted 1 month ago to technology@lemmy.world | 9 comments
- Submitted 1 month ago to technology@lemmy.world | 5 comments
- Comment on WordPress maker Automattic lays off 16% of staff 1 month ago:
Yeah. I run Wordpress on my personal blog, but after this I won’t use it for future projects. A community fork without all that stupid Jetpack shit would be great
- Comment on Massive X data leak affects over 200 million users. 2 months ago:
Exactly this. We knew that everything would get shaky after he fired all those people and a data leak is the consequence
- Comment on Split Keyboards Are Superior And The Reason I’m The Writer I Am Today. 2 months ago:
<3
- Comment on Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users and employees 2 months ago:
Word and Powerpoint are not the worst - just think about all the time lost due to whatever Microsoft is doing in Teams or by random decisions like moving the start button to the middle instead of leaving it where it was since 1995, which automatically renders every corporate training video obsolete.