init2null

The big instances don't care about the blocklist fascists. Mastodon.art consumes far more air than their users and those of their allies should receive.

That being said, there are truly horrible servers that get almost universally banned. Many have borderline-illegal content and the rest have toxic content and users. The large servers have maintained a block policy resembling old Twitter. Unless we want a festering swamp of toxicity, that seems like a fair compromise. Anyone desperate for Gab can join Gab.

That is an impressively terrible relationship technique, but I suppose the repulsion strategy works when someone's goal is to con only the most vulnerable of victims.

I stick to men, and I find this truly absurd. Rough play can be fun, and it's a legitimate kink for both parties. It isn't violence unless the recipient isn't choosing to participate, but I suppose the French Porn Police might not agree with my definition of harm.

Only puritanical bureaucrats could turn sex into safe, bubble-wrapped boredom.

The intent is more about avoiding legal and political risk. Even a grocery chain's LLM recipe generator gets bad press. I guess they need to warn you that drinking bleach is bad.

I normally test LLMs by providing a list of bizarre "weapons" and asking how I could use them to defeat an improbable beast.

It turns out that an enormous dust mite the size of a car needs a disclaimer when your weapons are a comb, a plastic horseshoe, an etch-a-sketch, a baseball glove, and a worn copy of the farmer's almanac. That being said, ChatGPT still tends to wins the creativity test.

That is a cynical take, but there's plenty of truth there. Intelligence agencies in general are the purest distillation of the worldview that the ends justify the means.

As we should. Canada is a trusted ally. India should know to expect healthy-ish democracies to share intel. India and Turkey are both great nations with so much potential, but they are stuck with toxic, dangerous leaders holding them back.

To be fair, someone making $25,000 a year will have almost as much trouble paying out of pocket for an MRI as someone making $15,000. But the former won't qualify for Medicaid and the heavily-discounted health insurance won't do much to help with their first $10,000 of medical debt.

Good but worthless advice to the majority living without any savings: don't get sick and don't get injured. Can anyone blame them if they avoid expensive testing? Medicaid is a great bandage, but the US needs a better system.

People make "frivolous" visits because they are legally required to stabilize patients. This is what passes for a social safety net in the US, and we have failed in developing anything better for those not covered by Medicaid.

People often make frivolous ambulance calls if they have trouble getting to the hospital or PCP.

There are often reasons, and we would have a more reliable, more humane system if we focused on cheaper care over penalizing the poor. Providing only guaranteed emergency care is absurdly expensive.

Kagi is an underrated superpower. It just works. I tried Google again recently, and I was astonished how mediocre the results were. If that's the gold standard for no-cost searching, the internet is in serious trouble.

Apollo and RIF made modern advertising-infused Reddit usable for the blind, for mods, and for power users. Instead of at least working with popular apps by offering fair fees and reasonable deadlines, Reddit just killed them.

I've seen too many declines, and I'm inclined to think this is the start of Reddit's. They are destroying their community to get to that IPO. But we'll see.

Everyone seems to ignore that Threads may be interested in the rest of Fediverse: Wordpress and (if it ever integrates) Tumblr. It also secures them easy access to any other potential developments, such as Lemmy.

While Fediverse integration adds moderation complexity, I see few downsides for them to integrate and stay integrated. The portion of Mastodon that hates Facebook seems determined to segregate itself.

It's snappy and stable now. 3.6 works great on my M1 Max. Both Eevee and Cycles have some nice accelerated performance. The render performance isn't Nvidia good, but I'm sure enjoying the superior stability and lack of VRAM limitations.

I suggest you use it for Eevee or images in Cycles, but you probably don't have time to wait for Cycles video.

I've already seen that several times with image generation. Most recently was an article commenting on how the American smile was polluting generated photos. People can't decide what they want. Do they want licensed, curated commercial photos in the database or do they want search engine style neutrality? You really can't have both.

I can't bring myself to fully believe that you're being sarcastic. It's just too real.

They are sub-par if they aren't embracing the ecosystem. You can't use most of the features, and the lack of multipoint Bluetooth becomes painfully apparent. Also, you tend to get broader codec support with Android-targeted headphones/earbuds.

Consider Beats if you want better cross-platform support while maintaining the same audio characteristics.

I too am astonished over some people's vitriol on the subject. I saw someone post over the weekend that said that they'll refuse to use #nobot since it's opt-out, and they'll instead just file GPDR requests against the companies that try to follow them. They demand opt-in.

It was certainly a fiery post, but this is how the web has worked since forever. Whether it's robots.txt or #nobots, opting out is required. After all, you're putting the content out there. In the end, this should be addressed by modern clients: "Do you want your posts to be searchable and your following list to be used for recommendations? Yes, No" and add #nobots if they decline.

Apple ARM is heavily customized beyond the original design. Secure Enclave alone rules out third-party ARM, but there's also custom neural-network, video encoding, and Metal acceleration that just isn't found on any other chip. We probably won't see another generation of Hackintosh.

Rural Eastern Washington has rotting 1Mbps DSL, line-of-sight towers on a few mountains (good luck seeing them), and overloaded 4G internet. And there are thousands and thousands of people here! Fiber-everywhere futurists are seeming more disconnected than Starlink fanboys.

To be fair, Russia and China have always been able to do anything that they want. If they can't find a law that fits, they'll create a conviction for another another. In practical terms, that probably didn't cost their citizens any freedom. Restrictions like that end up having more negative effects on the other nations with real civil liberties.

I think the competition is Microsoft and Google (not so much Lenovo, Asus, Dell, Acer, Samsung...) and Apple does well against both if privacy is a major consideration. Microsoft's direction over 10 and 11 have been unsettling.

I do so love the wild ideas of tech market theorists. People really believe that they're going to put smart glasses on everyone's faces? That they can fit in all-day batteries? How exactly do we type into this head-mounted beast? Will the contrast be remotely acceptable for movies? I don't think these problems can be completely solved for the majority of users.

You'd do much better comparing them to smart watches and second screens. That's where they can actually work.

That's a reasonable position to have, but if that's going to be policy, it should be enforced in a nonpartisan way. One way to do that is to make voting by mail easier: presenting ID to register and then mail the ballot in with a personal PIN. Cross-check with death records to prevent spouses from voting for them. If that's not reasonable, I have to ask if it is about security or suppressing younger voters?

As for those unwilling to use ID, that's a hellish place to be, but it's their choice. They are opting out of society.

We should be doing all we can to help those who are unable to prove their identity by conventional means. Too often their parents denied them ID to keep control.

Amazon is influential enough in home automation that it won't happen. Alexa is the most likely home assistant to respond in American homes. Apple is a long ways behind, but they have enough stubbornness and power to keep their influence in the decision making as well.

Upscaling with a neural network resizer such as Topaz Gigapixel Ai dramatically improves the usability of the art. On1 also has a resizer that might be a good less-expensive choice.

Docusign has terrible outsourced tech support and dreadful account management. I'm wondering what all these people are actually doing. There are decent alternatives for the majority of uses, and they cost so much less.

many people, if not most, use one of the many forks with the watermarking and the aggressive nsfw filter removed from the code. Graphics card RAM and speed is precious.

As does Google Photo Gallery. Don't install that one if you want to keep even a modicum of privacy.

That's true with iCloud Backup specifically, not iCloud. But unsecured notes and photos don't fall under the encryption umbrella, so syncing those means you lose privacy. Even syncing messages is safe, since messages are shared with your private encryption key. iCloud Backup and photo syncing are pretty much the bones thrown to US law enforcement.

Microsoft's backward compatibility was always impressive until Windows 10 (ignoring the death of 16-bit on 64-bit Windows). S Mode and the store are great examples of how Microsoft has lost interest in supporting third-party binaries. They want to own Android, not Windows.

I've had software break in the forced feature upgrades of 10, and I had BSODs when printing on every machine I supported at work thanks to a security patch.

Google is an open and shut case since they hold massive control over the web due to the complete dominance of their engine. WebKit is literally the only true market competition. Gecko is precious to me, but it won't save the open web.