Posts by brep51r

Who, Me? Techie sent to fix Nobel Prize winner’s PC almost set it on fire

usb-c

and now i need to run a helper app to tell me which of my several physically identical USB C cables does what. the bandwidth range in my bag covers a factor of 12, but if i were to own dumberbold cables it would go up to 80.

The search company that plants trees just launched a Linux browser to help Europe battle big tech

Re: a version of the company’s Chromium-based browser

the use of chromium is a clear sign that it’s just a low effort for-the-vibes project and not a serious attempt at addressing the market (which they did correctly identify).

Firefox and Thunderbird hit the fortnightly release treadmill

fireforks

is there a nice overview of all the forks somewhere? i can’t for the life of me decide whether zen, water fox, or librewolf would work the best for me. and there are many others

Re: Zuzai All the Things

i want more granularity on AI. a zuzai switch ought to be ubiquitous in software products as a first step. but alongside that i want more products to simply offer an MCP endpoint so that users can choose to roll their own implementations if they wish. the way it’s being done now, every app is reinventing the slop wheel and there’s no control over it whatsoever

Omarchy distro gains serious backing

Re: you’re not off base

i’d intended this comment as a reply to someone else so it reads oddly now. but i agree with you and my only interaction with Nazi bars is wondering if they have CCTV that would catch me desecrating their doors.

you’re not off base

about the creator since he has purportedly written in favour of Tommy Robinson. safe to say i will never install anything by such a person, belonging in the same bucket as Urbit.

however i think it’s ok to call software and UX design opinionated. it’s not a value judgement.

The AI bubble is already popping; we just don't know it yet

Re: The AI bubble is already popping

see, this is why i like being pseudonymous on the web. i am from the third world. thank you for educating me about my people. i’ll be sure to tell those that are lucky enough to have stable jobs that they’re better off than the working poor in the first world.

yes, most third world countries have a burgeoning middle class that has profited off of the globalisation of the past few decades and influx of dollar and euro salaries. this however only led to the further uplifting of sections of the populace who were reasonably well-read and educated and had inherent class privilege. the underclass in most of the third world is utterly invisible. very few expatriates to the west come from this layer of society. consider: who makes cheap garments in Bangladesh? definitely not those you are talking about!

in fact, the third world middle class enthusiastically participates in the further repression of the local underclass. their lives are more comfortable than yours because of the labour they steal from their own people.

Re: The AI bubble is already popping

most of the world is struggling anyway and the wars have exacerbated it. the global elite are insulated. the only people whose lives will meaningfully degrade will be middle class people in rich western democracies, who will still be incomparably more comfortable than the third world.

Give Google the boot by building your own search engine

so we’re back?

to home grown directories, custom search engines, and the unorganised web? i’m kind of happy about it, this is great for the open web!!

i’m also mystified as to how exactly Google messed up this bad. they had the whole internet in their hands … but don’t get me wrong, i watch their downfall with glee.

How Voyager engineers found two more years in a 50-year-old power budget

Re: The art of the possible

reading about missions like Voyager inspired me as a child and i seriously dreamt of being an astronaut. sadly space is now a commercial venture for the likes of Musk…

Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer

Re: Huh?

maybe my needs are too basic but never have i seriously thought “my terminal is too slow”. all the usual utilities are very efficient, too. i’ve been curious about alternative terminals but im just not finding an issue with the one that ships with macOS.

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

managed nextcloud?

i know it’s not the same but managed nextcloud is a thing and very competitively priced at most retailers. and by nextcloud i mean whichever of that family of managed officelikes.

The truth nobody wants to admit: Chinese or not, open models are competitive now

was it deepseek with the R1?

Re: Open Weights or Nothing

there are much lighter (1 server as opposed to a rack) models that are good at specific tasks though, such as coding

Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off

he’s not wrong, but …

as one of the most well known FOSS voices i wish he would also advocate for open weights models and running locally on your own hardware etc. in the same spirit as developing software/linux. AI is literally trained on the commons of the internet and he is well placed to begin the conversation of righting the balance. as it stands this statement is dual use as an ad for the AI giants. and that’s a damn shame.

Homebrew 6.0 released with new security mechanism, Linux sandbox and more

Re: AI walls of text on trust

i’m with you and i was quite mystified by the wall of warnings when i was recently using brew. it seems like trusting has become mandatory before dependencies are even resolved.. i guess this would prevent maliciously injected code in a tap definition from executing.

if i got that right, then what puzzles me here the relevant window of exposure. if i’ve trusted a formula that went rogue then it’s too late. if i know a formula is bad i wouldn’t tap it or even search for it, so trust makes no difference. if i don’t know to be suspicious then what stops me from tapping and trusting it? it’s not like im going to develop a sixth sense the moment im asked to explicitly trust a tap.

Three in ten HP customers still clinging to Windows 10

every misstep possible (tm), might be the beginning of the end for the big M

astounds me sometimes. windows 11 was called bloated at the start, then it became a hateable AI OS, all the while not offering a single good reason for W10 users to upgrade. besides, no private consumer would ditch their perfectly functioning hardware for a new Windows update of all things.

other OSes have been steadily adding pressure. valve have finally begin to make a dent in the gamer community with the state of steam on linux/steamos/bazzite. it’s not the prophesised year of linux but i think linux game boxes are here to stay, threatening to bite into one of the more entreched MICROS~1 user bases. then we have apples knockout macbook neo, which has incredible appeal. plus, its target demographic doesn’t understand how apple are in the middle of their own os update nightmare with tahoe/liquid a**.

and with the recent EU push to cast off Ameristan ties, office alternatives that have been maturing for years are finally getting some visibility too, and office is definitely one of the strongest anchors for WIN install base outside the west (the MEA and bits of AP).

i hope this turns into a real downfall, gosh im excited

Dissatisfied: Three-fourths of AI customer service rollouts are a letdown

Re: hype killed the AI star

it’s used that way around me quite a bit, chat bots redirecting me to relevant FAQ pages or collecting my complaint and case details to smooth over transition to a human. i didn’t mind it. it worked because the translation to the decision tree was transparent and i had the ability to interrupt and choose differently or ask for a human.

hype killed the AI star

i hate the hyperscalers as much as the next non sociopath but let’s be honest – there was potential for these bots to make customer support better for everyone, workers and customers. i can imagine them being used as efficiency multipliers for customer support agents, like canned responses on steroids or slightly more interactive forms. and with more capable models more features could be tested and slowly added. it was the over promising and under delivering of the silicon valley biggies that led to this mess.

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

Re: why

i don’t even live in Ameristan but seeing as this war has led to the biggest fuel disruption in history, i think it’s understandable that people are a little miffed

disturbing timing

given the recently disclosed privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel. bad time to be unable to access your distro’s guidance.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/04/as-the-most-severe-linux-threat-in-years-surfaces-the-world-scrambles/

Friendster rises from the grave to make social media great again

no activitypub? DOA.

of course, we know *why* this slop isn’t ActivitiyPub compatible. the guy is clearly an ad magnate and has his own interests in mind. but the space for new platforms without the promise of platform agnostic interoperability via ActivityPub is very small indeed.

PrismML debuts energy-sipping 1-bit LLM in bid to free AI from the cloud

Re: everyone wins when slop machines get cheaper

unless i’m quite mistaken about this, we are already at the point where this is possible using newer generation special purpose distilled models. there’s a raft of apps that just wrap a gui and some workflow integrations around local text recognition.

everyone wins when slop machines get cheaper

this is the logical end point isn’t it? soon enough improvements at the cutting edge of the slopularity will matter less for the average slop monkey and super optimised, edge device models like these will receive filtered down improvements from previous generations. plus, on-device offers inherent efficiency and privacy advantages. that ought to spell trouble for the funding case for hyperscalers.

i can imagine AI bros insistently sticking to bleeding edge SaaS LLMs but the moment on device becomes good enough for everyone, the big firms will have lost the market.

Apple's chips are the core of a new landscape, but its biggest win is Windows

if drivers are critical to you

i’m the same, plus i work in audio and i got really tired of the ad hoc and buggy way drivers work on windows. macs are unbelievably stable for this and while i’ll definitely going to install linux on older win hardware i don’t see it being feasible for a laptop for my use case.

India’s top telco tackles AI with $110 billion build plan and proven fast market dominance playbook

profitability and regulation no bar!

"market dominance" isn't hard if you can just burn cash to undercut your competitors at unsustainable prices and the regulators look the other way.