orclev

@orclev@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unless users take action, Android will let Gemini access third-party apps⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Looks awesome, but unfortunately seems to only be for the UK and EU. I wish the US market would get something similar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unless users take action, Android will let Gemini access third-party apps⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That is literally the only thing keeping me from installing Graphene on my phone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 finally overtakes Windows 10⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Same difference. If someone has a Windows 10 device and got rid of it, but didn’t purchase a Windows 11 device to replace it, they’re no longer a Windows user. Sure they could have had multiple Windows devices for some reason, but it’s rare for someone to own more computers than they have potential users to operate them (barring things like schools or companies that maintain a fixed pool of devices, although even they try to avoid having significant excess inventory). So yes, fewer Windows devices is to within a certain margin of error fewer Windows users.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 finally overtakes Windows 10⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, as I said, most went to mobile or tablet, so Android or iOS. Basically Windows users went to one of Android, iOS, OS X, or Linux. Some OS X users meanwhile went to iOS or Android.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 finally overtakes Windows 10⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  MS also recently shared that they lost 400 million Windows users. I bet most of them were Windows 10 users. This isn’t “people finally moved from 10 to 11”, this is “people finally got so fed up with Windows that they abandoned it for other options” (mostly mobile/tablet but also some Linux and OS X).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is that the biggest service Cloudflare provides is DDoS protection, and doing that requires that you have more bandwidth available than your attacker. Having enough bandwidth to withstand modern botnet powered DDoS attacks is ridiculously expensive (and it’s also a finite resource, there’s only so much backbone infrastructure). Basically it’s economically infeasible to have multiple companies providing the service Cloudflare does. You might be able to get away with two companies doing so, but it’s unlikely you could manage more than that without some of them starting to go bankrupt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Session Messenger⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I dove into their FAQ which explains it. I don’t agree with their logic, but the core idea seems to be that in order to run their equivalent of a TOR relay you have to stake a certain amount of their crypto, and you periodically receive some of the crypto as a reward for running the node. The theory is that the more nodes there are, the less crypto is available on the market and the more expensive it will become to acquire enough crypto to create new nodes. It’s all supposed to make it prohibitively expensive to control a significant amount of the network.

  The fatal flaw in the reasoning is the assumption that anyone will actually care enough about their crypto to drive the price up. With no central authority setting a price for the crypto the price becomes whatever anyone is willing to buy or sell it for. Their fatal assumption is that scarcity automatically generates value. It does not. A thing needs some kind of value in addition to scarcity to become valuable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re technically right but only because Taiwan (despite what China fervently wants) is a separate country from China. If you follow the official Chinese party line that they aren’t then yes you could make a modern phone entirely from parts made in “China”. It would at a minimum be more “made in China” than anything Trump is peddling as “made in USA”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s certainly part of it, but I’d use any mobile payment app, not just Googles one, but there’s basically zero competition there. Some banks apparently had their own mobile payment support briefly, but it seems like just about every single one of them has removed that feature and replaced it with a wrapper around Google Pay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is nice for Europe I guess, and I want to like the fairphone, but unfortunately it’s not viable for me.

  Besides basic phone features and the ability to run Android apps I have 3 requirements, 2 of which the fairphone fails at. I need it to be usable in the US on my phone carrier. I need to be able to use Google Pay or another mobile payment alternative (that’s accepted in most stores). Finally it needs to have at least a 48 hour battery life.

  Fairphone unfortunately doesn’t work in the US with most carriers, and the one that kills not only it but all the de-googled phones, it doesn’t support mobile payment of any kind. I’ve done a ton of research trying to find some kind of fix for that second point because I’d gladly use something like GrapheneOS if I could, but every time the answer I come to is it’s just not possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla's European car sales nosedive for fifth month as customers switch to Chinese EVs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That is not even remotely why they added a tax on EVs. The reason they added the extra tax is because they make a ton of money by taxing gas and as EVs are gaining popularity they’re starting to see their tax revenues plummet. There is a nugget of truth in that some of those tax revenues are used to pay for maintaining the roads and that EVs do still put wear and tear on the roads, but it’s not that they’re destroying roads any more than any other car does.

  If you’re seeing a drop in road quality it’s because your government isn’t paying to have the roads maintained like they have in the past, not because there are more EVs driving around.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty sure he meant intentional.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can websites verify unique (IRL) identities?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Safe and private? Nope absolutely impossible. If you don’t care about privacy at all pretty much the only way to do it is to have your government issue you a unique hardware token and require that to access the internet and it shares your unique ID with the website. It’s not 100% impossible to spoof an identity as you could borrow/steal someone elses token, but if they were secured with a pin/password or basic biometric it would become significantly harder.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So I had this joke idea of “they’ll just start showing the ads to the AIs”, but the more I thought about it the more it started to sound less like a joke. Imagine if someone figured out how to cram ads into the AI training models and it skewed the outputs. Why astroturf when you can train the AIs to astroturf for you. This is some black mirror shit and now I’ve made myself a bit depressed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Less depressing example. A country (I think it was India but my memory is hazy and I’m too lazy to go google it right now) had a problem with a certain venomous snake. They decided to offer a bounty for every snake corpse brought to them. The goal was to incentivise people to hunt snakes. What actually happened was people started breeding the snakes to turn in for the bounties. They realized the program wasn’t working and cancelled it at which point the breeders dumped their snakes into the wild making the whole situation even worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon: New Terms of Service IP clause cannot be terminated or revoked, not even by deleting content⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So CAP theorem says you can have a distributed system with at most two of Consistent, Available, or Partition tolerant. I haven’t looked too closely into the federation implementation of Mastodon but I suspect they opted for Available and Partition tolerant (as Consistent and Partition tolerant would mean the entire network goes down when one node does, while Consistent and Available would mean once any node lost contact with the network it could never again rejoin). Since consistency is not guaranteed (and provably can’t be) there is absolutely no way to guarantee that deleting something from one instance will remove it from all instances even allowing for a very generous time span.

  TL;DR: You’re not just right, you’re mathematically right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨16 Billion Apple, Facebook, Google And Other Passwords Leaked — Act Now⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Kind of both. The modern way of brute forcing is to just hash the 100,000 most common passwords, previously leaked passwords, and minor permutations of all of the above. It’s computationally and space intensive, but for a determined attacker entirely doable on modern hardware. That’s why complexity matters, because it’s not a simple iteration through every possible permutation, but a targeted search through a known password list.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨16 Billion Apple, Facebook, Google And Other Passwords Leaked — Act Now⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hashes can be brute forced, it’s just normally too expensive to do so for any reasonably complex password. If you’re using “password123” as your password even a hashed password is easily cracked (salting and peppering can help make this more difficult, although still not impossible).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3 million peers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Crypto is not anonymous, the entire concept of how it works is to be the worlds most public and distributed transaction ledger. It is more difficult to track than credit card transactions, but that’s a very big difference from being impossible to track. There have been multiple papers published at this point on how you can de-anonymize any crypto purchase.

  People really need to get over this idea that using crypto to buy things makes you anonymous.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Tests Removing Its Name From Bing Search Box⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Next time I need to explain what bikeshedding is I’m just going to point to this article.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The New York Times Just Published Some Bizarre Race Science About Asian Women⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well it’s also about supply chains. All the components are also made in China so you’d end up ordering the parts and then having to wait a month or more for them to be shipped to the US. If you want to avoid delays that means maintaining a significant stockpile of parts in the US that you may or may not ever actually use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨@chrlschn - Beware the Complexity Merchants⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  My job has a 3rd kind of complexity, non-essential complexity, which is like essential complexity in that it comes from the business domain, but isn’t actually required. It’s non-technical decisions about how our apps and services must function that introduce all our complexity and massively complicates our code bases. At one point we literally have to attempt to predict the future because they adamantly refuse to simply ask the customer what they’re planning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Open question] Why are so many open-source projects, particularly projects written in Rust, MIT licensed?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The crux of it is that it allows for commercial use without needing to distribute the source code. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on who you ask. There’s basically a continuum for open source software with GPLv3 at one end and MIT at the other.

  GPLv3 guarantees that corporations can’t play games with patents or weird DRM to hobble an open source library and tie it to their closed source product. A lot of corporations will specifically bar employees from using GPLv3 code out of fear it could force them to open source their proprietary code as well.

  At the other extreme you’ve got MIT which basically says do what you want with it. Fork it, embed it in your projects, sell copies of it if you want. Anything goes as long as you include a copy of the MIT license along with your software.

  Rust tends to get a lot of commercial usage so GPLv2 or MIT tend to be chosen over GPlv3, and between them most companies feel more comfortable with MIT.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Spotify caught hosting hundreds of fake podcasts that advertise selling drugs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s more that most people just aren’t aware of any equivalent alternatives, or in some cases like where there literally aren’t any alternatives. Look at phones, both Apple and Google suck and their mobile OSes are terrible but what’s the alternative? Sure there’s a few Linux phones out there and that’s almost an alternative but it’s not there yet. You could go with a “dumb” phone, but for most people that’s not going to work. So you pick your lesser evil and bitch about it whenever the latest round of enshitification hits.

  If you asked most people what alternatives exist for Spotify they’d probably say Pandora, and maybe Apple Music or Youtube Music and then struggle to come up with anything else. The better alternatives are suffering from a massive discovery problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says its latest models outperform doctors in medical benchmark⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Wake me up when someone besides OpenAI says they’re the best at something. When a company releases a benchmark they designed that their own tool that’s generally regarded as not very good is suddenly the best at, that’s not news, at best that’s PR, at worst propaganda. This reeks of “we investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trakt Upcoming VIP Renewal Pricing Changes – Effective May 20, 2025⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Seems to be some kind of centralized streaming service catalog. Never heard of it before now and no idea why anyone would be willing to pay $30 for it let alone $60.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what are your thoughts on Bidirectional brain-computer interfaces ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is simultaneously the most promising and most dangerous tech imaginable. There are so many amazing and wonderful things it could enable. There are so many horrifying and terrible ways it could go wrong. It has to be approached with utmost caution and incredibly well thought out regulation and standards. I’m not sure I trust any government or institution in existence in the world currently to manage it the way it needs to be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa among artists urging British Prime Minister Starmer to rethink his AI copyright plans⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolute fastest way to kill this shit? Feed the entire Disney catalog in and start producing knockoff Disney movies. Disney would kill this so fast.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨List of Alternatives to Adobe Programs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What about Krita? Not sure exactly what Adobe product it would be an alternative for though. I know a lot of what people use it for used to be done with Photoshop, but I think Photoshops core demographic is a slightly different use case. Also Inkscape as an Illustrator alternative?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Today it looks like the answer is technically none of them. The FAQ on bookshop.org claims they’re working with Kobo to add support “later this year”.