Posts by zimzam

Microsoft set to pull the plug on Bing Search APIs in favor of AI alternative

They must be really desperate for a way to tell their shareholders that they found paying customers for their years long cash dump into AI.

Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection

Re: But will the companies that benefit put back in ?

I could be wrong but I read that as being about corporations using FOSS projects without contributing to them. I'm not sure why that's relevant here but still.

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

Re: How to opt out of the enhancements

That's actually been my favourite thing since switching. If a distro adds a thing you don't like, just delete that package and tell your package manager not to download it again. If another distro adds something you want, just install it from their repo or git.

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

Re: Morons Are Governing America

Quote: "the department currently lacks visibility into the origins and security of software code"

By the way, don't use open source code.

Dot com era crash on the cards for AI datacenter spending? It's a 'risk'

I feel like Max Bialystock

Yes… [with] AI [there] is a sense of incredible productivity for companies and then for individuals

You keep saying that but you don't tell me how!

UK officials insist 'murder prediction tool' algorithms purely abstract

I'm curious what qualifies someone to be a murderer. If I have plans to cut up a dance floor, is that in the training data?

Trump tariffs to make prices great – a gain

Re: High wages can be lowered

They haven't introduced laws reversing child labor restrictions (though the number of new laws introduced has been cut by more than half in the last 20 years) but the number of violations of laws has seen a small increase in the last 10 years.

No big changes to UK broadband regs, despite no real competition for BT

Many ISPs piggy back off Openreach's FTTP network but only EE (now the official provider of BT broadband) has access to the full 1.6Gbps. Every other provider can only offer 900Mbps.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

As mentioned in the article, PhotoGIMP can alleviate some of those issues by organising GIMP to be more Photoshop like, including shortcuts.

https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP

Re: Humm - really?

Raw formats are actually proprietary (Photoshop uses their own format to approximate them based on TIFF). For GIMP you'll need to use a RAW format processor like RawTherapee or Darktable which are equivalents of Adobe Lightroom. When you drag a raw file into GIMP with one of them installed it will ask you for permission to open the file in whichever program you have. You set whatever parameters you want in RawTherapee/Darktable, then when you close it the image will open in GIMP.

Vivaldi 7.2 browser wants to topple tech's feudal lords

They have a donate page.

https://vivaldi.com/donate/

Eutelsat in talks with Euro leaders as they mull Starlink replacement in Ukraine

Re: Hmm

And the media has made a lot of the Russian offensive that's been going on for a year and a half, but they ignore the fact that they've not taken very much territory. They've only taken maybe half the territory that Ukraine took back in Kherson, and that's not accounting for the territory Ukraine has taken in Russia. There's a reason Russia's offensives are so often referred to as a meat grinder, it's for their troops, not Ukraine's.

Re: Hmm

The problem is that Trump isn't trying to negotiate a peace deal, he's trying to orchestrate a surrender.

Signal will withdraw from Sweden if encryption-busting laws take effect

What's Good For the Crooks Is Slop For The Citizens

Saying "We like encryption so leave it alone" isn't going to be effective against the 'think of the children'-types. I think a better strategy is to point out that encryption protocols have been open source for decades and criminals can just encrypt their nefarious contents before sending it. Breaking encryption will only make the law abiding less secure, not the criminals.

Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands

He certainly is making America grate again.

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

Re: I give it 30 years...

I didn't say change the orbit, I said deorbit. It doesn't require that much fuel to give in to gravity. You pick an orbit where active zones are common and wait for one to come to you. Presumably you want the probe to survive long enough to actually transmit that data back to you so developing electronics hardening would be part of the mission as well.

Re: I give it 30 years...

Who says you have to hit a particular one? They often last days, you can wait for an active zone to appear near the probe's orbit and deorbit through it. I don't know how much more data we'd get compared to observing them from a distance though.

Fedora Asahi Remix 41 for Apple Macs is out

2025 will be the year of the Linux set-top

Trump wants SpaceX customer Jared Isaacman as next NASA boss

...pledges Americans will get to Mars

Dead or Alive!

Microsoft confirms there will be no U-turn on Windows 11 hardware requirements

Can anyone clarify if the TPM requirement has resolved security vulnerabilities of note in Windows 11? Is it non-negotiable because it's providing a levee against a persistent vulnerability or has it simply introduced theoretical "dependencies" they can't remove?

Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz

Not so much a distro recommendation as a trial recommendation. Try out some distros on VMWare Workstation Pro, it's free now (get it from techspot though, the Broadcom website is impossible) and lets you install as many VMs as you like.

People can recommend distros all day long but we don't know how you like to use your computer. Do you want to be always, or mostly on the bleeding edge (with the potential instabilities that might cause) or are you OK with scheduled releases that might not have the absolute latest hardware supported on day-1 but will in a few months? Then there's desktop environments. If you've only used Windows then some of the options on Linux might be completely alien to you, like Hyperland and Sway. You have 10 months, so it's worth trying them out to see if you like them.

Arch Linux installer now slightly less masochistic

Let me introduce you to...

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org

It was always possible to use cursor keys (at least in 2.0 anyway), 3.0 mostly just reorganises the menu layout so it feels more like an installer.

Brits are scrolling away from X and aren't that interested in AI

Re: GenAI is Bullshit

When I was in college I spent weeks on an assignment, only for my teacher to fail me because he thought I'd copied it from Wikipedia. I appealed and had the board ask him to point to the article I copied from. Needless to say I got a nice, shiny A for my trouble. I don't know how students would appeal in that situation if they're accused of using AI.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 struggles to take off

I was referring to it having over £10,000 of DLC.

Don't look up Train Simulator then.

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

Re: When stuck in a hole

So far it only qualifies as half a hole.

One thing AI can't generate at the moment – compelling reasons to use it for work

Re: It's like any tool...

I don't know, when I was younger I had a tool that worked all by itself pretty much constantly.

Why Google's Chrome monopoly won't crack anytime soon

Indices

One of the other remediation options is for Google to provide access to its search index for 10 years. This is arguably a bigger part of the problem. Changing Chrome's market share is more a matter of convincing people to not use Chrome. Convincing people to not use Google's search index is a matter of convincing them to use Bing's search index or... Yandex? It's far less feasible for a competitor to build an index and make it competitive than to make a browser competitive.

In my opinion, all of the search indexes should be treated as utilities.

AI PCs: 'Something will have to give in 2025, and I think it's pricing'

Gartner Maths

"Businesses want to upgrade" + "Manufacturers are only making AI PCs" = "Businesses want AI PCs".

Vivaldi gives its browser a buffing, adds a dashboard

For anyone wondering: Go to settings -> Appearance -> set User Interface Density to Compact.

Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise

Re: "run both Firefox and Chrome and wanted to keep both on the same ad blocker."

But Liam seems to be suggesting there's some reason to use uBo Lite over regular uBo on Firefox simply to have the same addon as Chrome.

"run both Firefox and Chrome and wanted to keep both on the same ad blocker."

I'm confused by this. Why would you intentionally nerf Firefox by using uBo lite just to have the same blocker as on Chrome?

Rival browsers cry foul after Microsoft Edge slips through EU gatekeeper cracks

Clippy

It looks like you're trying to write some regulations.

Would you like help with that?

Two years after entering the graphics card game, Intel has nothing to show for it

The fact that it was designed to only accelerate DX12 games and had to emulate DX11 and older was probably the biggest killer. They assumed that PC gamers only play the latest and greatest live service games. Weird, I don't know anyone else in the industry who... sorry I just spat over my monitor.

Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, going gray

11% to 27% to 21% in 3 years? I think counting might be part of the issue there.

AI giants pinky swear (again) not to help make deepfake smut

Given that people can just create loras to add it back in, this seems like they just want to avoid being accountable for it themselves. If they were serious they'd be researching ways to render illegal content unusable.

Never let it be said they didn't do the least they could do.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change

Re: Stop being so pessimistic

Good to know.

Re: Recurrence

A later paper showed this wasn't really true, that almost all plastic actually comes from upstream rivers and more distributed than the pretty sensationalist "10 rivers" story.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5803

It's a nice idea, but most plastics sink. They're only dealing with the superficial, immediately visible problem, like we usually do. For the money they spent on it, they could have developed better technologies to clean up the small upstream rivers the plastics are coming from (~95% according to two studies in 2018 and 2020). Unless we deal with it at the source, we're just going to keep making new garbage patches and losing the majority of plastics under the surface. Not to mention the harm the plastics do in the rivers as well.

Upgrading Linux with Rust looks like a new challenge. It's one of our oldest

They should, but they don't. Documentation is also subject to the idiosyncrasies of the author. I'm sure we've all read comments that seemed perfectly clear to the author but left "obvious" points out.

"It's not an undesirable behaviour that we want curtailed."

This is the problem. You want to write code the way you want to, but it's not about you, it's about the maintainers who come after you who have to try to parse the idiosyncrasies of how you write.

Of course the Internet Archive’s digital lending broke the law, appeals court says

By the government's own admission it's only £6 million a year. So they're "paid".

WHO-backed meta-study finds no evidence that cellphone radiation causes brain cancer

Other than anecdotal and observational studies, was there ever an actual physical reason given for what aspect of cellular radiation would cause cancer? Because simple physics says they shouldn't. That would have been my first question. Ok, you think it causes cancer. How?

Linux Deepin 23: A polished distro from China that Western desktops could learn from

I wonder how many people are using the DE on a different distro, it is prettier than most default DEs.

AGI is on clients' radar but far from reality, says Gartner

Re: AGI is possible.

They moved the goalposts on AGI a while ago, it now effectively stands for Artificial Generic Intelligence and has practically no connection to what has historically been called Artificial General Intelligence. Because they rebranded machine learning as "AI", since it's more marketable, they've had to move AI to a new branding term.

Chrome Web Store warns end is nigh for uBlock Origin

Re: Firefox add-ons

From the looks of it that's doing what uMatrix does, which is discontinued by Raymond Hill because he claims uBlock Origin does the same thing (it doesn't) but it still works fine.

According to that website there is a new version though (requestpolicycontinued.github.io).