In reality the flash drive mostly exists to be an extra air-gapped backup.

end-to-end encryption enabled by default

“By default” doesn’t even seem good enough. Can you imagine making or using a password manager that isn’t end-to-end encrypted? Why on earth would anyone ever do that? Anyway I’ll stick with my encrypted text file on a flash drive.

Like many, back when it was fashionable I was open to the possibility of that idea being correct and I guess it’s still best to keep an open mind, but the results thus far suggest otherwise. Using Hurd is somewhat difficult for most purposes. Using cron rather than systemd timers on the other hand is much more pleasant and easy.

In that case there are alternatives for each component, most often more than one, though they may lack here and there some feature you believe to be indispensable.

There isn’t “an alternative” to systemd because nobody who hasn’t drunk the kool-aid believes that anything like it should exist. The syslog, the cron daemon, the dns config, the log rotation, the ntp server, and even the init system should not all be part of one giant tangled mess of a project.

That’s a fine illustration of the problem, whatever it’s properly called.

Having paused to search the web I find that “ablation” according to wikipedia is a term used in AI since 1974. Arxiv.org has a recent paper talking specifically about “semantic ablation” which phrase it uses to describe an operation deliberately removing semantic information from an LLM’s representation of a sentence in an attempt to see what purely syntactical information is left over afterwards, or something like that.

I’m not sure if that writer gets all the details right when it comes to how it works, but I do like “semantic ablation.” It’s good to finally have a name for that after we’ve already seen so much of it.

I like how the “FAQ” answers questions nobody was asking and accuses opponents of truth, freedom, and systemd of “decontextualising comments on merge requests” without mentioning what was actually said by whom in those merge requests so we could judge for ourselves. As a PR move to put out the flame war (which itself does seem really pointless) it seems counterproductive. But it looks like it’s just another reddit post, not an official KDE policy statement or anything.

Have you thought of trying MCTS? It’s a pretty easy algorithm to understand and was good enough to get computers playing Go up to the level where they could offer beginner to intermediate human players a satisfying game.

Actually, if you’re planning to murder someone with a car it’s probably better not to exceed the speed limit while you do it.

That’s one more excuse for collecting all the data about you they can get and running it through the analytics — not that they needed another excuse for such a fair and reasonable business practice.

waiting for the light

When I used to drive through the intersection where that situation would happen I’d ignore their requests for money (I didn’t have much) but unless I was in an especially bad mood I’d give them a friendly hello, and sometimes they’d be happy enough to stop and chat with someone who treated them like human being for a moment. Otherwise they’d ignore me and move on, which is also fine.

He’s the Senior Director of Corporate Communications. “Teams” is what came to mind for him first when he thought of online meetings. To me that suggests more than that he occasionally uses it reluctantly when someone insists on it.

Red Hat and Canonical also get mentioned. Consider my inclination to stick with Debian once again reinforced.

As you seem to appreciate, 95% of the time matrix is exactly what’s needed. People seem to hate it because it’s slightly different than discord, but anything that isn’t discord is going to have that problem. It also has other problems, but at least it’s not as bad as fucking discord.

I don’t know, you’re probably more likely to find Akkoma instances these days. It’s pretty similar.

I sure hope this is the end of Discord. Maybe only 10% of people will rage quit rather than show their ID, but if every group has one in 10 people they invite say “nah, that’s not happening” and everyone has to admit they’re probably in the right, it might make some difference.

Okay fine, guess I really do need to learn (the rest of) Rust now.

Seems like dinosaur, isn’t: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/TGwAAOSw9mFWHRS~/s-l400.jpg

Oh, so that’s what they’re talking about when they say AI will enslave all humanity. I hope the fractured remains of non-assimilated human societies living on the streets among the security drones and human transport vessels will have enough to eat.

If Epic is a megacorp, then what is Valve?

It’s a marginally less problematic megacorp. Being stuck with three or four of them instead of the current one or two would not solve any problems and would make things substantially more annoying for their customers — both publishers and gamers. There’s currently no way for enough of them to exist in that market to provide meaningful competition. It’s the type of service where consolidation and market concentration is inevitable when they’re run the way they are now. You can’t reasonably be expected have 50 different equivalents to the Steam client on your PC; having both Steam and GOG is already a bit of a stretch.

Speaking of the fediverse though, if all the PC game stores were somehow federated such that listing your game on one automatically made it available on the others as well, and they could thus be constrained to compete fairly in a well-regulated market based on the fully interoperable services they provide, that would be a better world.