Is this legit? This is the first time I’ve heard of human neurons used for such a purpose. Kind of surprised that’s legal. Instinctively, I feel like a “human brain organoid” is close enough to a human that you cannot wave away the potential for consciousness so easily. At what point does something like this deserve human rights?

I notice that the paper is published in Frontiers, the same journal that let the notorious AI-generated giant-rat-testicles image get published. They are not highly regarded in general.

DuckDuckGo is an easy first step. It’s free, publicly available, and familiar to anyone who is used to Google. Results are sourced largely from Bing, so there is second-hand rot, but IMHO there was a tipping point in 2023 where DDG’s results became generally more useful than Google’s or Bing’s. (That’s my personal experience; YMMV.) And they’re not putting half-assed AI implementations front and center (though they have some experimental features you can play with if you want).

If you want something AI-driven, Perplexity.ai is pretty good. Bing Chat is worth looking at, but last I checked it was still too hallucinatory to use for general search, and the UI is awful.

I’ve been using Kagi for a while now and I find its quick summaries (which are not displayed by default for web searches) much, much better than this. For example, here’s what Kagi’s “quick answer” feature gives me with this search term:

Room for improvement, sure, but it’s not hallucinating anything, and it cites its sources. That’s the bare minimum anyone should tolerate, and yet most of the stuff out there falls wayyyyy short.

Something like for-jay-yo.

From https://forgejo.org/faq/ :

Forgejo (pronounced /forˈd͡ʒe.jo/) is inspired by forĝejo, the Esperanto word for forge.

“Smart” may as well be synonymous with “unpredictable”. I don’t need my computer to be smart. I need it to be predictable, consistent, and undemanding.

Because it’s not the same class of device. The PS Portal is very niche. It’s a $200 device that basically just runs the PS Remote Play app.

I’ve used PS Remote Play on my phone and laptop, and it’s just not good in the cases I actually want to use it: when traveling away from home. Even with a good Internet connection it’s only “okay”. It’s utterly useless when in transit (trains, places, etc.), and 99% useless in any public place (e.g. cafe or library WiFi).

These are all cases where the Switch, Deck, and similar devices excel. The PS Portal addresses a much smaller market.

Correct. This is also why Apple switched to zsh as the default shell over bash. They still ship Bash 3.2 in macOS, because from 4.0 on, Bash started using GPLv3 instead of GPLv2.

I’m not against the idea of creating proprietary software out of open-source software, if the license allows that. However, I am always against this practice of “closing the door behind you”.

Apple: builds their entire software ecosystem on free, open-source foundations.

Also Apple: better have a million euros if you want to even start distributing software.

The best use case for an external app store is free open-source software, like we have on the Android side with F-Droid. Apple stopped that before it even started. Jeez.

Yeah, I wouldn’t be too confident in Facebook’s implementation, and I certainly don’t believe that their interests are aligned with their users’.

That said, it seems like we’re reaching a turning point for big tech, where having access to private user data becomes more of a liability than an asset. Having access to the data means that they will be required by law to provide that data to governments in various circumstances. They might have other legal obligations in how they handle, store, and process that data. All of this comes with costs in terms of person-hours and infrastructure. Google specifically cited this is a reason they are moving Android location history on-device; they don’t want to deal with law enforcement constantly asking them to spy on people. It’s not because they give a shit about user privacy; it’s because they’re tired of providing law enforcement with free labor.

I suspect it also helps them comply with some of the recent privacy protection laws in the EU, though I’m not 100% sure on that. Again, this is a liability issue for them, not a user-privacy issue.

Also, how much valuable information were they getting from private messages in the first place? Considering how much people willingly put out in the open, and how much can be inferred simply by the metadata they still have access to (e.g. the social graph), it seems likely that the actual message data was largely redundant or superfluous. Facebook is certainly in position to measure this objectively.

The social graph is powerful, and if you really care about privacy, you need to worry about it. If you’re a journalist, whistleblower, or political dissident, you absolutely do not want Facebook (and by extension governments) to know who you talk you or when. It doesn’t matter if they don’t know what you’re saying; the association alone is enough to blow your cover.

The metadata problem is common to a lot of platforms. Even Signal cannot use E2EE for metadata; they need to know who you’re communicating with in order to deliver your messages to them. Signal doesn’t retain that metadata, but ultimately you need to take their word on that.

Any Safari extensions installed that might be interfering with this behavior? That’s the best I can figure.

Bell Riots are coming this year. The Second American Civil War starts in 2026, which leads directly into WWIII.

From there, everything is pretty much terrible until warp drive is invented.

This is correct, albeit not universal.

KDE has a predefined schedule for “release candidates”, which includes RC2 later this month. So “RC1” is clearly not going to be the final version. See: https://community.kde.org/Schedules/February_2024_MegaRelease

This is at least somewhat common. In fact, it’s the same way the Linux kernel development cycle works. They have 7 release candidates, released on a weekly basis between the beta period and final release. See: https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

In the world of proprietary corporate software, I more often see release candidates presented as potentially final; i.e. literal candidates for release. The idea of scheduling multiple RCs in advance doesn’t make sense in that context, since each one is intended to be the last (with fingers crossed).

It’s kind of splitting hairs, honestly, and I suspect this distinction has more to do with the transparency of open-source projects than anything else. Apple, for example, may indeed have a schedule for multiple macOS RCs right from the start and simply choose not to share that information. They present every “release candidate” as being potentially the final version (and indeed, the final version will be the same build as the final RC), but in practice there’s always more than one. Also, Apple is hardly an ideal example to follow, since they’ve apparently never even heard of semantic version numbering. Major compatibility-breaking changes are often introduced in minor point releases. It’s infuriating. But I digress.

As a Kagi subscriber, I’ve been very happy with their transparency in general. The feedback site is open to the public and Vlad and other staff members regularly engage in conversation about possible future features, limitations, and even business decisions in the Discord. It’s been refreshing.

…which makes the response to this issue all the more frustrating and disappointing.

I think Vlad’s comments in the original feedback thread were fair enough, but then later, in the Discord, I saw a lot of “let’s move this to a private chat”. They even changed their General channel to “slow mode” to prevent live conversations as this topic became hot. Now I see they were also deleting threads?! Ugh. That’s not transparent at all. Not what I expected based on my previous experience with Kagi.

Oh, gotcha. I misunderstood and thought you were describing a Chrome-vs-Firefox difference specifically. Yeah, I can relate. I’m de-googling my life but I’m not sure I’ll ever be 100% de-googled. I’m taking it bit by bit. I sign up for new things with different email addresses now and occasionally I’ll change existing services if it’s possible. But there’s no way I’m going to go through my bajillion web site accounts and move them all.

I don’t understand the problem. Google services work in Firefox pretty much the same way, yeah? Does Chrome integrate an authenticator app? If som you might want change your 2FA settings at https://myaccount.google.com/security . If you have an Android phone you can get push notifications on it, or you can also use third-party authenticator apps.

It would be great if the frontend and backend were separated with a unified API and you could simply choose a frontend/interface (Vivaldi) with whatever backend/engine (Gecko). That’s not how it (currently) works though.

Arc has floated this idea. Currently Arc is Chromium-based, but they say they’ve designed it to allow for swapping engines in the future.

IIRC, Edge had a similar feature for a while, allowing you to run legacy Internet Explorer tabs if a site required it. Not sure if that still exists.

Firefox syncs across devices as well, if you sign up for a Firefox account and enable sync. This works for bookmarks, logins, history, and you can even access remote tabs if you want. It’s also easy to send a single page from one device to another.

On desktop, Firefox has an import feature that will pull your bookmarks and logins m other browsers (like Chrome) into your Firefox profile.

Even if you’re neck-deep in Google services, Chrome doesn’t do anything special.

A non-smartphone, that is, a cell phone like the ones that today’s parents had when we were young and with which we made calls and sent text messages, was enough for us, and it did not cause addiction.

That’s not the way I remember it. Texting addiction was a thing. That’s how Twitter became popular; it was basically a way to broadcast SMS to friends at first.

I guess it’s a matter of degrees.

Ad-based services are the real problem here, I think. You don’t hear people complaining about Wikipedia addiction.

All the time. Not always by choice!

A lot of my work involves writing scripts for systems I do not control, using as light a touch as is realistically possible. I know for a fact Python is NOT installed on many of my targets, and it doesn’t make sense to push out a whole Python environment of my own for something as trivial as string manipulation.

awk is super powerful, but IMHO not powerful enough to justify its complexity, relative to other languages. If you have the freedom to use Python, then I suggest using that for anything advanced. Python skills will serve you better in a wider variety of use cases.

Not sure what you’re seeing on your end, but I get a fairly lengthy article with graphs.

Thank you for saving me the trouble of investigating this as an option.

No reason to tolerate proprietary licenses when there are so many viable FLOSS solutions out there.