Lots of recommendations for groups, recommendations of random people to follow, and things like that. If these are paid ads, they are not clearly presented as such.

Though I just logged in (first time in a while) and I didn’t see that, so…maybe it changed, or maybe my ad blocker is doing better than it used to? Not sure.

I honestly don’t know how I could use Facebook that way. Seriously. I log in once in a blue moon, and half the stuff I see scrolling through the main feed has nothing to do with any of my friends as far as I can tell. And that’s with an ad blocker.

I don’t understand how anybody can stand it. Maybe it’s a “boiling frog” situation, or maybe they’ve developed better counter-strategies than I am familiar with? I quit Facebook about 10 years ago and when I poke my head in now, it’s completely different. It is terrible in ways I wouldn’t have believed 10 years ago.

I’m not well versed enough in Android app development to answer whether or not one userspace app can even access the screen contents of another app without root or special permissions

This requires special permissions and explicit user approval every time an app starts screen recording, plus it shows a red notification whenever screen recording is active.

I think you could get by with a one-time user approval as a device administration or assistive app permission, which you’d need to manually grant in Settings. Unlikely anyone would do that by accident.

That might be different for system-level apps. I haven’t bought a carrier-branded phone in 10+ years so I’m not sure what that’s like these days.

Oh! I knew European outlets operated at higher voltage, but I didn’t know the standard circuits supported such high current. Jealous!

Almost has to be. 2400W would put it completely outside the consumer market. Consumer PSUs don’t go that high. Home power outlets don’t go that high unless you have special electrical work done. I can hardly imagine what a cooling system for a nearly 3KW system would look like.

Works for me in Wayland on Bazzite. Maybe depends on your distro and GPU drivers.

It means that when they go to KFC, they bring their own tactical spork.

Removing copyright entirely is a bridge too far.

Just roll it back to a reasonable time limit (I dunno, 7 years?), and categorically reject all further lobbying attempts from Disney and the like.

Yes, I loved classic Trek for showing a better a future, where humans have moved beyond our greed, prejudice, and self-destructive tendencies. That was the through line in TOS and TNG, even if it wasn’t always 100% on-point and didn’t always age well (you need to view TOS in its historical context to get past the baked-in 1960s sexism, for example).

There’s a place for cautionary tales, and there’s a place for aspirational tales.

I liked Discovery well enough for what it was, but I hated its picture of a future where good humans are the exception rather than the rule.

Nowadays, I think solarpunk is where its at.

Are you sure about that? The star over each icon indicates that both of them are bookmarked.

So either this is a bug or there is a second bookmark hiding somewhere. If you go to Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks and search for “qb”, what appears there?

Buy a dozen and you could fit a good chunk of LibGen.

Is it more for situations that need to be compatible with most *nix systems and you might not necessarily have access to a higher level scripting language?

Yes, and also because integrating Python one-liners into shell pipelines is awkward in general. I’m more likely to write my entire script in Python than to use it just for text processing, and a lot of the time that’s just a pain. Python isn’t really designed for one-liners or for use as a shell. You can twist it into working in those use cases, but then I’d ask the reverse question: why would you do that when you could “just” use awk?

On macOS, Python is not installed by default. So if you are writing scripts that you want to be portable across platforms, or for general Mac administration, using Python is a burden.

This is also true when working with some embedded devices. IIRC I can ssh into my router and use awk (thanks to it being included in Busybox), but I’m definitely not going to install an entire Python environment there. I’m not sure there’d even be enough storage space for that.

The Hyperlegible web site makes no mention of dyslexia, only visual impairment. Those are two totally different issues.

I’ve never replaced a watch (smart or otherwise) in less than 5 years.

Wat.

How’s navigation with Pebbles? If I start bike navigation in Google Maps on my phone, can I get turn-by-turn directions on the watch, and does it not suck?

According to the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, 2013, the median score for the US was “level 2”. 3.9% scored below level 1, and 4.2% were “non-starters”, unable to complete the questionnaire.

For context, here is the difference between level 2 and level 3, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_the_International_Assessment_of_Adult_Competencies#Competence_groups :

• Level 2: (226 points) can integrate two or more pieces of information based on criteria, compare and contrast or reason about information and make low-level inferences
• Level 3: (276 points) can understand and respond appropriately to dense or lengthy texts, including continuous, non-continuous, mixed, or multiple pages.

Geany is a nice GUI option. It’s a bit more capable but still lean.

It’s probably time for me to re-evaluate the host of coding editors out there. For the most part I just use good text editors. Though I do love Spyder, I only use it for a certain subset of tasks.

I think they reached a point where their user base was predominantly mainstream, not tech-savvy enough to know the difference.

I mean, how else can any site survive on advertising when the ads are so obnoxious and it’s so easy to block them? Either the site is great and the ads are non-intrusive enough that I’ll make an exception in uBlock, or I’m never seeing the ads in the first place.

Gemini might be good at something, but I’ll never know because it is bad at all the things I have ever used the assistant for. If it’s good at anything at all, it’s something I don’t need or want.

Looking forward to 2027 when Google Gemini is replaced by Google Assistant (not to be confused with today’s Google Assistant, totally different product).

In case anyone is unfamiliar, Aaron Swartz downloaded a bunch of academic journals from JSTOR. This wasn’t for training AI, though. Swartz was an advocate for open access to scientific knowledge. Many papers are “open access” and yet are not readily available to the public.

Much of what he downloaded was open-access, and he had legitimate access to the system via his university affiliation. The entire case was a sham. They charged him with wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer system, breaking and entering, and a host of other trumped-up charges, because he…opened an unlocked closet door and used an ethernet jack from there. The fucking Secret Service was involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosecution

The federal prosecution involved what was characterized by numerous critics (such as former Nixon White House counsel John Dean) as an “overcharging” 13-count indictment and “overzealous”, “Nixonian” prosecution for alleged computer crimes, brought by then U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz.

Nothing Swartz did is anywhere close to the abuse by OpenAI, Meta, etc., who openly admit they pirated all their shit.