davidee

Same, but, until recently, I've been using Microsoft's Co-Pilot because for the longest time it did exactly what this new "search" feature added to ChatGPT: it produced a list of source material and links to reference the LLM's output against. It was often instrumental for me and I did begin to use it as a search engine considering how polluted a lot of first-search results have become with spam and empty, generated content.

Oddly, Microsoft recently changed the search version of Copilot to remove all the links to source material. Now it's like talking to an annoying growth-stage-startup middle manager in every way, including the inability to back up their assertions and a propensity to use phrases like "anyway, let's try to keep things moving".

Happy to see this feature set added into ChatGPT – particularly when I'm looking for academic research in/on a subject I'm not familiar with.

In with an annoying "acutally".. I wish I wasn't but I just filed some feedback with Apple today (really this morning) on how the "profiles" on Apple TV are a misnomer. They're not real.

Here's our experience for what it's worth and why I say misnomer.

I setup an Apple TV in a parent's apartment. It turns out that when they re-arrange the icons, even if they're in their profile, they rearrange the icons on the "default" profile - which is mine.

So I came home to an Apple TV with the apps all moved around.

Digging into it, it seems that while there is the cover of "user profiles" on Apple TV, they simple aren't useful. Logged in apps stay logged in across all profiles. So it's not like a browser profile where you can have two different logins to say Jellyfin or Plex or Youtube or Disney+.

As such, the profiles are indeed a misnomer when compared to what any reasonable user would expect of changing "profiles."

In other words, a sham!

Ref from reddit confirming as much: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/qeatju/the_way_that_...

Ref from Apple that buries the lede: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/tv/atvb0753b37d/tvos

Here's the salient bit from that apple page:

When each member in a household has an Apple Account, you can create unique user profiles for each person, with Up Next lists, system language preferences, paired AirPods settings, music, Game Center data, and content recommendations personalized for the currently active user.

Note how little profiles actually do. You can't use your own logins to any services, or have a home screen that is yours with your apps. It's still just a one-user device sadly.

Chiming in as someone who switched, completely, to Bitwarden w/ Vaultwarden backend for a year: the experience was dramatically sub-par when compared to 1password (which I was coming from).

Part of my framing for the assessment was "everyone in my family uses 1P and they're happy with it, will this be good enough to convince them to switch." While I ultimately can make the call for the switch, user experience is very important when you're trying to get elderly parents to do something new.

It was not to be.

Aside from the generally poor UX, Bitwarden's clients (on linux, mac, windows, and ios) were also dramatically slower (in every way, from search to login), had fewer features (sorting passwords, favourites, good organization tools to name the most glaring omissions), and I found autofill far less reliable.

I've taken great issue with 1password's way of doing business and dealing with customers over the years. Sadly, and with some regret, I went back, because a password manager (really a secret manager at this point with so much more than passwords in it) is so central to daily life, I feel that I need one that is as as painless as possible.

I wasn't one that used Bitwarden because it was open, I tried to use the best password manager possible.

However, I LIKED that it was Open. And Vaultwarden is a gem. Wish I had the time and skills to make a better front-end for it really.

Lots of aircraft pilots love the iPad mini. Ideal sized tool for having strapped to a yoke, or to one's knee.

This is just like Oracle claiming OpenOffice is the better project and the LibreOffice fork is a shady knock-off.

Nightmare seems like a bit of hyperbole.

Look, it's not without its quirks, but it's pretty reliable. Speed and responsiveness can be further upped by using an in-memory cache like Redis/Valkey.

Nextcloud can try to be everything it wants, but as users we can ignore that and stick to file-sharing/online/cloud storage.

If one is using it primarily for file storage/sharing, it works reasonably well. We have ~1TB of Nextcloud data on an NFS share (itself snapshotted ZFS), backed up to B2 regularly.

If something happens to a Nextcloud server (and it has), restoring the data is as simple as recreating the users and copying over the data directory for each user (provided you're not using it for calendaring and such). A quick OCC command to re-index user data and we're back.

We haven't had any issues running the docker image (orchestrated via HCP Nomad).

We have also helped a friend run Nextcloud for their small non-profit, as a snap on an EC2 instance in AWS. It keeps itself up-to-date and has been pretty-much problem free for years. EBS Snapshots cover backups there.

After being fed up with AgileBits' (1P's owner) shenanigans (hiding critical threads on their user forum, ignoring customer voices wilfully, being generally dismissive of criticism), I decided to give Bitwarden a try.

I used it in conjunction with Vaultwarden for a year with the idea that I'd evaluate it as a family-wide replacement for 1P.

In the end I went back to 1P.

1P does some things amazingly well. Here's the shortlist:

- It loads quickly. This wasn't the reason I went back to 1P, but it loads an order of magnitude more quickly than any of Bitwarden's clients: Windows, Linux, iOS, Mac. Bitwarden is slow, slow, slow. I was willing to put up with it for freedom. I wanted Electron 1P to be awful. It's not. Electron Bitwarden kinda is...

- The (I can't believe I'm saying this) killer feature: being able to sort passwords by date (or well - being able to sort at all). If you use a password manager long enough, you'll have a lot of passwords. Sometimes you need to find one manually. Bitwarden made this far more difficult than it needs to be. There's no way to sort the passwords. You have to use the (lackluster) search.

- 1P can put your most recent passwords, secrets and make them easily accessible by default. Yep, more sorting issues. This is particularly helpful in my work related to software and infra development. There are often a lot of secrets, especially during spikes. It's nice to not have to hunt for them too much.

- Shared vaults are better with 1P. Easy to move secrets, easy to de-dupe. Etc. etc.

Everything about Bitwarden is fine for a single, technical user, but it's not for sharing secrets with non-technical family members at any scale. It's just too clumsy with too many sharp edges.

I really, really wanted to leave 1P behind. But I came back to it. And I don't regret it.

Absolutely. I run Ghost on a *.small instance in AWS.

The one caveat with Ghost is that it only works with Mailgun for drop-in support of sending newsletters: https://ghost.org/docs/faq/mailgun-newsletters/

It was the one thing that gave me pause before taking the leap. At least they're being transparent about what and why even if I disagree with some of their reasoning. I have sent newsletters successfully via a self-hosted SMTP server to thousands of readers for years. I mean, I wouldn't recommend anyone doing that if they value their sanity, but I also think self-hosters should be free to experiment.

The reactions: weird for sure. On-by-default is intrusive.

That said, they're so easy to disable. But the silly reactions aren't the feature though, just the sugar.

Having a system-wide virtual video output and camera control is/was a great addition to the OS.

(Article link is missing a token to be read by non-subs, btw).

Long, long, long-time 1P user (2007?) increasingly fed up with their anti-consumer practices (dishonestly hiding discussions on their community forum about App Store versions and dismissive “responses” were the final straw).

So I put vaultwarden on the cluster at home, built a backup routine I was comfortable with and started using BitWarden to evaluate it before trying to help the whole family switch (we have 8 users, including a grandmother and grandfather from different sides of the family).

All this to say, I have to agree. I could not, and will not, switch my family to BitWarden (for the foreseeable future). Search is AWFUL, there’s no way to sort my passwords (recently added, recently updated, etc.) and the clients are way way way slower than 1P (sure, probably in part to server on an underpowered compute instance). However, even the “offline behaviour” (when BitWarden clients can’t contact the server) is slow, and sometimes syncing just doesn’t work.

I completely agree, the worst part is just how limited and clumsy the front-end is for secret storing. It’s limited, ugly, and often hard to parse visually. I can’t imagine trying to help my aging father use it on his desktop, much less his smartphone - where he’s had great success with 1P.

While I continue to have great disdain for AgileBits, 1P is still the most user friendly password manager for a group that includes definitely-not-technically-inclined people. I wish it wasn’t, I wish I could stop giving them money, but compared to the competition, there’s just nothing else that comes close.

I loathe Adobe, and yet we still pay for their products. I hated when they moved to subscription and stuck with CS5.5 for ages.

However as the team grew and we needed seats for our talent, Creative Cloud was a small added cost worth paying.

This might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

But, Libraries were a game changer - especially for those who needed quick, easy access to assets generated by other artists on the team.

And generative fill in photoshop is exceptional.

Still, we’re a much smaller team now and we can absolutely transition our skills to other suites/applications.

I’ve long been an affinity customer just to encourage the development of the alternative. Time to start playing more seriously.

Not really but they’re loosely related.

Apple did discontinue Shake and released Motion.

Some of the technologies that were part of Shake (optical flow retiming for one) were included in Motion and Final Cut Pro X but very little of what made Shake, well Shake, carried over.

I haven't paid too much attention today, but what I did see with the iPad Pro was that they're using an OLED display (maybe even some kind of double layer OLED for increased brightness if I'm understanding the marketing jargon?).

I believe that OLED is much more power hungry than the previous display type (LED backlit LCD of some type?). I could be wrong, but in TV land that's the case...

Could explain, at least partly, why run time isn't greatly increased.

Cool! Also an opportunity missed: Arti Rust Tor Implementation

According to a recent Stumpy Nubs video, Saw Stop isn't the villain they've been made out to be (or at least has changed their tune substantially).

TLDR; They've offered not to defend their patent (or whatever the patent mumbo jumbo is) if the legislation goes through.

Stumpy Nubs on the subject: https://youtu.be/nxKkuDduYLk?si=c0GchB2hc3g0OtG4

The recent CPSC hearing where many of the revelations came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyJGE2Vyid0&t=0s

I believe the only feature is “boot environments” at the moment. In fact they've diverged so little that, according to various sources online, one should be able to take a working 23.05.1 config (read: pfSense plus) and install it on 2.7CE without issue.

In the Netgate world, it now seems that the CE edition is the most stable, inheriting changes/fixes after they've settled into the plus channel.

I share your hope.

Sadly, though, I don't think off-the shelf e-bikes will likely ever head that way unless there's a sea-change in consumer behaviour.

Even regular old human-only powered bikes have been getting increasingly proprietary, at least at the middle to high-end of the market. It's not dissimilar to the increase in tech for cars, making it more challenging for DIYers to get their elbows dirty without involving some business related to the manufacturer.

DIY e-bikes are pretty easy; although they often require a bit of assembly. The assembly is not particularly hard, certainly no harder than building a simple gaming PC.

DIY ebike kits usually operate with standard, off-the-shelf bikes and bike parts. Even more poignantly, the kits are typically best on used bikes that followed common standards for a long time. The bike industry has worked hard to make us think hub-drive motors are the lesser option. They have some serious advantages for most commuting and general cycling (MTB'ing is a place where mid-drive motors excel), including more available power, lower drivetrain wear and the ability to use regenerative braking.

I built an e-bike recently around a late 90s MTB. The only complicated bit was figuring out the cable routing and hiding some of the bird's nest of wires well (some 3D printing took care of that).

In our conspicuously consumerist milieu, where form is often valued over function, bikes like the VanMoof offer a (deceptive) look of simplicity and elegance.

To my mind, that's a perspective we have to shift. Things should be easy to reason about, easy to fix, easy to customize—it's really the right-to-own (right to repair?) by another name.

Hyperbole and extremism in info-sec publishing. Film at 11.