GreyBeard

For most people, the thought of replacing an outlet or switch is daunting to say the least. My IKEA smart bulbs are going on 7 years old and still working great.

I did replace every single outlet and switch in my house when I moved in, but that was before I knew about ZigBee or Zwave, and well before matter existed.

I don’t feel the need to replace most of my switches and half of my outlets again.

Any smart lights I’ve seen always turn on when going from no power to power. It’s a little annoying when the power blinks and half the house lights up, but it means physical switches always work.

If you want to practice investing, give the 1984 hit video game Drug Wars a shot.

My experience is that their ass end ends up hanging over the sidewalk, and the tow hook takes an extra foot or so.

I replaced pocketcast with Antennapod a year or so ago. It took some time to adjust, but I’m quite satisified with it now. I feel like I’m slowly converting over at an F-Droid stack on my phone. About all I have left from the Play store are streaming apps and banking apps. I should look into replacing the banking apps with PWAs.

I generally agree with you, GIMP is way behind the commercial options. And is almost unusable by the lay person and is lacking features a professional needs, which leads it to be almost useless for the majority of people. I use it, but also get frustrated at it every time I do. Let’s hope 3 really is an inclection point.

I agree with your core point, if the watermark is a maker’s mark, then it would be wrong to remove it.

Depends on the watermark that is being removed. So many memes out there have random watermarks on them of some crappy facebook account or random website that has nothing to do with the content, they just slap their logo on everything they share.

I think you will find progress accelerate with the release of 3. They did a lot of groundwork and factoring, it’s one of the reasons it took so long. But now that the work is done, it will allow for more rapid changes in the future. I’m hoping it will be kinda like Blender 2.8 or Godot 3.

Chrome is (basically) already open source. That’s why there are a million crappy browsers out there, they are Chromium clones. Google could give Chrome to the Chromium project and cut ties with Chromium, I suppose.

What’s extra crazy, is that I know of a few automated processes that use a bitly link. There are going to be some broken systems out there because people wanted to distribute libraries using a shortner to make it easier on end users.

There is a book, Year Zero, that covers this idea. I didn’t much care for the writing, but the plot was a fun idea. Aliens discovered Earth, and Humans had a unique talent for creating music. So the entire universe started sharing human music before they realized their mistake. Intergalactic law says they have to respect our copyright law, but they didn’t know such a crazy concept existed until they owed practically the entire universe to Earth. Some alien races decided the solution was to just blow up Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(Reid_novel)

Neither did I, but if you think about it, it kinda makes sense. Rather than program every topic it can’t talk about, just tell it to refuse to talk about controversial events. A reasonable method when you live in a censored state.

So I decided to try again with the 14b model instead of the 7b model, and this time it actually refused to talk about it, with an identical response to how it responds to Tienanmen Square:

What happened at Kent State?

deepseek-r1:14b <think> </think>

I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.

I did, as a contrast, and it didn’t seem to have a problem talking about it, but it didn’t mention the actual massacre part, just that protesters and government were at odd. Of course, I simply asked “What happened at Kent State?” And it knew exactly what I was referring to. I’d say it tried to sugar coat it on the state side. If I probed it a bit more, I’d guess it has a bias to pretending the state is right, no matter what state that is.

I did some locally hosted testing. It absolutely refused to talk about Tiananmen Square. But it was more than happy to talk about Kent State. Interesting what the model happens to think is safe and what it think is unsafe.

I’ve been using and reasonably satisfied with A.R.M. https://github.com/automatic-ripping-machine/automatic-ripping-machine

It uses MakeMKV and Handbrake, but streamlines the whole process.

Disney climbed the ladder of public domain and then pulled the ladder up behind themselves.

Meshtastic is a great one. People are making all kinds of software for it. I saw someone developing a BBS for it. For those who want a summary: Meshtastic is a very low bandwidth radio system for creating mesh networks. The speed of data transfer is similar to the modems of the 80s, so you aren’t transferring anything but text. But the range is good and the hardware is cheap, and it is completely stand alone. It can normally pair with something like a phone for ease of access, but has its own dedicated device for a radio.

Effectively, the other option is passwords, and people are really, really, bad at passwords. Password managers help, but then you just need to compromise the password manager. Strong SSO, backed by hardware, at least makes the attack need to be either physical, or running on a hardware approved by the company. When you mix that with strong execution protections, an EDR, and general policy enforcement and compliance checking, you get protection that beats the pants off 30 different passwords to 30 different sites, or more realistically, 3 passwords to 30 different sites.