orclev
@orclev@lemmy.world
- Comment on A Toronto company is deliberately spreading hyperpartisan lies on Facebook. It owns a page called "Canada Proud" and has bought more than $250,000 in ads targeting voters 15 hours ago:
Ah, so homegrown scum. I kind of lump them under the mega corporation header though as the goal for them is to eliminate regulations and oversight so they can pillage to their hearts content. Really trying to speed run that late stage capitalism dystopia.
- Comment on A Toronto company is deliberately spreading hyperpartisan lies on Facebook. It owns a page called "Canada Proud" and has bought more than $250,000 in ads targeting voters 15 hours ago:
Going to be real interesting to see where that money is coming from. My bet is some combination of the worst of the US political “thinktanks” like the federalist society, Russian assets, and mega corporations like Amazon.
- Comment on An Alarming Number of Gen Z Ai Users Think It's Conscious 2 days ago:
Is it still passing the Turing test if you don’t think either one is human?
- Comment on TLS Certificate Lifetimes Will Officially Reduce to 47 Days 1 week ago:
Get ready for a bunch more 1 and 2 day outages because someone forgot/missed the deadline to renew some crusty server somewhere. This is such massive overkill for most servers. End users should start getting used to that expired certificate warning in their browser of choice and the process to tell it to continue to the site anyway.
- Comment on Opinion | I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America. 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, the article is right, but for all the wrong reasons. China is taking the lead globally less because of anything it’s doing but more because of what everyone else is. In many ways the US was doomed from the moment one of our two political parties decided its future was best served by appealing to the ignorant and uneducated.
The GOP has spent decades attacking our education system and painting experts and the educated as the enemy all because they had the temerity to say the emperor had no clothes and point out the many ways in which conservative dogma fails. China got incredibly lucky to have just the right economy and connections in the 80s to become everybody’s outsourced manufacturing hub and has further benefited by the US attacking its own educational and research institutions.
China hasn’t so much sprinted past the US as they have maintained their steady pace while the US shot itself in the head because the right hand wanted to be the one in charge of everything.
Trump and the MAGA idiots are just the natural progression of the policies the GOP embraced starting all the way back with Nixon and his southern strategy and accelerated by Reagan and his economic policies.
It turns out it’s hard to be a leader in a technological society when you put the dumbest people you can find in charge of things.
- Comment on Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users and employees 4 weeks ago:
Teams meetings aren’t really that much worse than Zoom, it’s mostly minor gripes, although there are quite a few of those. The Teams chat client on the other hand is an absolute garbage fire that’s significantly worse than Slack, Discord, or pretty much anything up to and arguably including IRC.
An organization , “team”, channel, and chat are confusing as hell, that breakdown does not in any way align with the way communication works in a large organization. Why is there so little configuration available for notification settings? Why can’t I completely silence or ignore a “team”, channel, or chat? Why do I not receive notifications half the time for the things I actually want to be notified about? Why aren’t there threads or at least a sensible and easy to follow “reply to” option? Why can’t anyone seem to agree on the correct way to organize things? Half our groups are creating gigantic “teams” that include half the company, while the other half are creating shared channels nobody knows about. Both options suck.
- Comment on I'm an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don't speak for me - ratfactor 4 weeks ago:
They killed me with an IPO. How weird is that?
- Comment on I'm an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don't speak for me - ratfactor 4 weeks ago:
Can’t stop the signal.
- Comment on E-waste or Linux? Charities face tough choices as Windows 10 support ends 5 weeks ago:
Microsoft’s requirements for Windows 11 include a 1GHz or faster CPU with at least two cores, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage,
All of this is no problem and essentially any computer manufactured in the last couple decades can meet these requirements. They’re effectively irrelevant for this discussion.
Secure Boot capability, and TPM 2.0 compatibility.
This is the problem right here. Pretty much every last computer you hear about that isn’t compatible it’s one or both of these, almost always the TPM 2.0 module.
That of course is if the reason you aren’t “upgrading” is because the hardware isn’t supported. For a great many of us our hardware is supported, we just don’t want all the bullshit anti-features Microsoft has crammed into Windows 11. Windows 10 was already bad enough with it’s constant telemetry spyware, that annoying Cortana garbage shoehorned in anywhere they could manage, the absolute atrocity that they turned the start menu search function into, and the annoying teams and OneDrive integrations that randomly reinstalled and. re-enabled themselves after updates.
Then MS went and had to cram in even more spyware by way of their horrible copilot garbage. All for what? What are we getting with 11 that’s better than 10? What feature justifies that upgrade? Nothing, that’s the answer. There’s no reason at all that 11 needed to be made.
- Comment on E-waste or Linux? Charities face tough choices as Windows 10 support ends 5 weeks ago:
In other words it was the sales department doing what they always do, pulling complete bullshit out of their ass and then expecting the engineering team to deliver it.
- Comment on In Response to Amazon preventing to download books you bought: Some DRM free bookstores and publishers 1 month ago:
In some cases very, but in others not so much. Some of them have Patreon accounts or other ways to accept payment, but in many cases you’ll be doing good just to find a working email address for them. Ideally though I’d prefer to just pay for the books outright rather than trying to do some kind of grey area thing where I’d pirate the book and then donate the cost to them (if for no other reason than it causes tax headaches for everyone involved).
- Comment on In Response to Amazon preventing to download books you bought: Some DRM free bookstores and publishers 1 month ago:
No you can’t. They changed the firmware so eBook downloads now go into a partition that’s not accessible when mounting the kindle over USB.
- Comment on In Response to Amazon preventing to download books you bought: Some DRM free bookstores and publishers 1 month ago:
Plus I actually want to support the authors. My issue is with Amazon not the authors, so I want to pay for the books I’m reading so they can keep making more of them. If I could buy the books directly from the authors in some cases I would, and in all cases if it was available from the Kobo store I’d be willing to buy it there. Unfortunately that damn exclusivity clause on Kindle Unlimited means my options for them are Amazon, Amazon, or Amazon (or roll the dice on piracy and not support the author, not to mention even when it is the book in question the quality is often poor).
- Comment on In Response to Amazon preventing to download books you bought: Some DRM free bookstores and publishers 1 month ago:
Sort of? Kindle Unlimited itself is digital only, but the exclusivity clause only applies to ebooks I think, so in theory you could purchase a physical copy elsewhere.
I’ve pretty much entirely abandoned physical books. It’s just far more convenient using an e-reader which has a backlight for reading in the dark, fits thousands of books in a device that’s pocket sized, and let’s me instantly purchase, download, and start reading the next book in a series as soon as I finish the last one.
I do have physical books still, but I haven’t bought new ones in about a decade now.
- Comment on In Response to Amazon preventing to download books you bought: Some DRM free bookstores and publishers 1 month ago:
While that may be true, so far at least they seem to be doing an OK job. Their ebooks are often sold sans-DRM, and in the cases they aren’t every one I’ve gotten has used Adobe Digital Editions which are easy to strip the DRM from (and is a wildly supported standard unlike Amazon’s proprietary DRM scheme). Additionally their e-reader devices, while not open hardware are repairable with disassembly guides provided by them and they even sell replacement components like screens. I have not verified this claim, but they also claim to use recycled plastic for manufacturing them and recycled cardboard for their packaging (should you care about such things).
For better or worse, if you want a Kindle like experience, you’re likely going to be forced into working with a large-ish corporation, but despite the average experience when doing so that doesn’t mean that corporation must be an evil anti-consumer hellscape of rapaciousness and greed. So far at least, Rakuten/Kobo seem to be doing OK by their customers.
- Comment on In Response to Amazon preventing to download books you bought: Some DRM free bookstores and publishers 1 month ago:
Unfortunately Kindle Unlimited is a Faustian bargain due to the exclusivity clause. We’re now stuck in a catch 22. There are excellent (for consumers) alternatives out there to Kindle/Amazon, the most prominent of which is Kobo which has a variety of very competitive e-readers. Additionally Kobo Plus is essentially Kindle Unlimited, although I don’t know for sure whether it has an exclusivity clause (I hope it doesn’t, and the policies of Kobo make me suspect not, but I haven’t confirmed that). The biggest problem from a consumers perspective is simply that many authors works are just not available from the Kobo (or other) store.
However the consumer perspective is only half the picture. From the perspective of an author/publisher Kindle is undeniably the largest platform out there with Kobo being one of their largest competitors (in terms of e-readers, I suspect in just ebooks Apple is bigger) and it’s minuscule compared to Kindle. While functionally the Kobo store and Kobo Plus give everything that the Kindle store and Kindle Unlimited do, what they are severely lacking in is customers. An author could choose to publish on Kindle and Kobo as well as make their books available on Kobo Plus, doing so means foregoing the option of Kindle Unlimited which will result in fewer consumers having access to that authors works at least in the short term.
So we arrive at the catch 22. Consumers get a much better deal with Kobo, but lose access to many of the authors works they may want to read. Authors need to stick with Kindle and Kindle Unlimited if they want to reach as many consumers as they can, but doing so discourages consumers from switching to Kindle/Kindle Unlimited alternatives like Kobo/Kobo Plus. Until enough consumers move off Kindle Unlimited authors won’t want to abandon it, but until enough authors abandon it consumers will struggle to move off of Kindle Unlimited.
- Comment on In Response to Amazon preventing to download books you bought: Some DRM free bookstores and publishers 1 month ago:
Not going to tear down my de-drm setup any time soon. But optimistic I might be able to before amazon does it for me.
As far as I’m aware it’s now too late for that. Amazon has removed the ability to download ebooks to your computer meaning the only way to access azw files now is if you’ve found a way to rip them out of the Kindle memory (not possible using normal means, but maybe if you’ve cracked one open and probed the flash memory directly).
I used to de-drm all my kindle purchases using the manual download links Amazon had, but those have now been removed. That’s actually what prompted me to switch to Kobo. I’m not going to “purchase” a book I can’t create a backup of.
- Comment on In Response to Amazon preventing to download books you bought: Some DRM free bookstores and publishers 1 month ago:
I recently switched to Kobo as a Kindle alternative, but that also highlighted a problem. Kindle Unlimited includes a TOS for publishers that prevents them from selling their books on any other platform. A significant chunk of the Kindle catalogue is also included in Kindle Unlimited, which means a significant chunk of authors works are locked into the Amazon ecosystem.
It’s been very annoying to discover how many book series I’ve been reading that are simply unavailable elsewhere because they opted to take part in Kindle Unlimited.
- Comment on China advises citizens specializing in artificial intelligence to avoid traveling to America - SabaNet 1 month ago:
It’s not like AI is a massive secret or anything, it’s a very well studied field. The biggest difference is just the training set used. Individual people aren’t going to make any difference unless they’re carrying HDs full of training data around with them.
- Comment on China advises citizens specializing in artificial intelligence to avoid traveling to America - SabaNet 1 month ago:
I mean it’s probably a good idea to avoid traveling to the US for at least a few years for everyone, but I’m trying to work out what AI has to do with anything.
- Comment on New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code 2 months ago:
From one senior dev to another, who remembers when O’Reily books were the gold standard, this, exactly this. Junior devs are junior because they don’t know how to code. The important bit is that they learn and become intermediate devs. If in another decade were sitting here complaining about intermediate and senior devs that don’t know how to program, then we’ll have a problem.
- Comment on Are You Ready to Let an AI Agent Use Your Computer? AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google want to lighten your load. 2 months ago:
AI isn’t allowed on any of my systems, it’s practically the first thing I disable (alongside tracking and metrics, but that’s basically the same thing). The only AI I will ever allow would be something entirely offline and self hosted that I have complete and total control over.
Microsoft insisting on cramming this crap down everyone’s throats has finally convinced me to go 100% Linux for gaming. I’d rather abandon the small handful of games that won’t let you run them under Linux than let MS scrape all my personal data and shove ads into every crack of my OS. It’s been going great so far and I have absolutely no regrets. Best of all, not a single piece of AI or telemetry to disable.
- Comment on Elon Musk-led group makes $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI, CEO refuses and offers to "buy Twitter for $9.74 billion" 2 months ago:
$9.74 billion for the trash fire that is Twitter is honestly a really good offer, the muskrat should definitely take that.
- Comment on Handful of users claim new Nvidia GPUs are melting power cables again 2 months ago:
I got lucky and picked up a 7900 XTX for a reasonable price last gen and it’s been a really great card. I’ve got a couple systems coming up on needing a refresh (1080 Ti and a 2080 Ti) and I’m planning on upgrading both of them to a 9070 XT. I’m staying away from Nvidia until they start pricing their GPUs at prices actual consumers can afford instead of corporations looking to build AI farms.
- Comment on Those YouTube ads everyone hates made $10.4 billion in just three months 2 months ago:
At least German is consistent, unlike English where every so-called “rule” nearly has more exceptions than places it applies. As a native speaker I’m always amazed that anyone manages to learn our train wreck of a language.
- Comment on Reddit is purging NSFW subs as well as trans-related subreddits 2 months ago:
Just like reddit it mostly doesn’t host the images itself, but simply links to them. Redgif seems to be the host of choice for most, although some also use catbox.
- Comment on Dell kills the XPS brand 3 months ago:
Well AMD just blatantly copied Nvidia’s naming scheme for their new GPUs so maybe they’ll copy Intel for their CPUs. I mean, they kind of already did, since the Ryzen 9 is basically i9, and the Ryzen 7 is basically i7 etc. It’s mostly AMDs mobile CPUs that have horrendous names, but Intel really isn’t much better in that department.
- Comment on How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling Growth 5 months ago:
It’s an alternative to Twitter in the same way Pepsi is an alternative to Coke, it’s still essentially the same thing. This is just trading one really shitty corporation for a different not as shitty yet corporation. As it grows it will eventually become the exact same thing and everyone will be back here celebrating the rise of some other corporate social-media network.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
The opt outs don’t work. Even if you opted out of the telemetry that only disabled some of it, not all of it, and MS constantly re-enables it with updates. I can’t count how many times I’ve had to uninstall OneDrive, But. It. Keeps. Coming. Back. Windows 10 you could previously disable most of the worst crapware that MS shoveled in. Windows 11 you can’t disable it, they just don’t give you the opt outs anymore. It’s all mandatory. Even worse, they started backporting that stuff into Windows 10 as well. Did you notice when MS silently installed copilot on your Windows 10 system?
Ultimately though, I just don’t want to keep fighting a losing battle against a company I despise. I’m done giving my money to them. It would be one thing if they provided a good service that I enjoyed like Valve does with Steam, but the last time I actually liked a version of Windows was when XP was released. It’s basically been downhill since then. If there was a decent alternative to Android I’d switch that as well, but unfortunately Linux phone just isn’t ready for prime time yet. But thanks to the amazing work by Valve, for gaming systems, Linux is finally a viable alternative.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
If you don’t see the point, then Microsoft has successfully boiled the frog.