It was just boring and empty, except for Space Pirates using clean language and some other really bland factions. It tried to cater to everyone and just sucked. That’s to say nothing of the endless load screens and RNG planets

On my death bed, one of my many regrets will be having played Starfield

Yes, I find this credible. At the same time, FOSS and Linux seems to be all the rage now, with big tech’s ties to the Trump regime etc. Even though it’s been nearly two decades ago since I first installed Linux (in the late 00’s I even had an awkward “FOSS as an ethical alternative to piracy” phase), I am not in the tech savy crowd that’s been mainlining this stuff for life – rather I identify more with the growing number of tech illiterate dummies that think “FOSS = good” because Pewdiepie said so or copy/pastes sudo commands that replaces half my boot drive with North Korean crypto malware.

There are actually a few closed apps that do it, some claim to make your phone discoverable as a Bluetooth HID and others via a server/client combo. But I don’t really want to have an internet enabled device being able to track all my screen interactions and control another internet enabled device without some assurance that there’s nothing nefarious going on behind the scenes.

Thanks, yes, I came across it and it looks very good but the target device is an IPad so I didn’t consider it an option (well, I found no closed or open options I liked, really).

I understand you better now. Yes that’s certainly possible, plausible even. But it would seem useful for someone who wants to boost the credibility of their (hypothetical) keylogger app with exotic permissions to have a way to independently be recommended as a good open source option by two leading models in mainstream use.

Strictly speaking, it doesn’t know anything. But regardless of the merits of LLMs, the AI box is the top result on the biggest search engine in the world by default, and what I’m wondering is whether this is an example of intentional manipulation of the search results to give people who don’t know better the false impression that apps are open source.

Yeah, as ridiculous as the record labels are – their reaction is exactly what one would expect after such a high profile move.

The galaxy brain move is buying an old dumb tv for a pittance and use it for watching Jellyfin/Plex/stream from a browser with uBlock Origin/DNS filtering – all running on some relative’s “obsolete” smart toaster from last year that they happily gift you because “the new version’s bagel mode IS LIT – pun intended – but it needs the 128 gb DDR7 ram of the new model, can barely toast on the old one any more”.

Thanks for the link, hadn’t heard about that project, the list of target features looks very promising

But they all suck, or rather the Internet kinda sucks these days. Google very much included in the sucking.

In Google Search’s prime DDG was still terrible and not a viable competitor even with the privacy advantage. Now both services are almost comparable, so it’s kind of a no-brainer to ditch Google.

Yeah, search has degraded along with the Internet, you almost need an LLM now to filter out all the garbage hits. For a while, adding “reddit” to your search term was an OK high level filter to remove blogspam and e-commerce sites, but interacting with reddit is so annoying now that it’s barely an option and many of the quality reddit posters have moved on while the state and corporate astroturfers are running the show. Never mind that the “reddit filter” also removed results from much better sources, like specialist forums.

Then again, people with nefarious purposes are usually highly motivated.

What does Mozilla doubling down on AI and becoming less appealing to core users mean for Firefox forks going forward? How independent of Mozilla are the biggest ones in practice?

The problem is that it isn’t clear what kinds of exposure private credit and other actors in the shadow banking space hold, because they generally operate on a model of financial obfuscation to get around banking regulation (i.e. being actual banks). What is known is that they are deeply intertwined with financing the AI bubble, even if all their exposure is through debt instruments, crypto schemes or insurance contracts (that probably is not the full scope though), they will be hit hard when their “borrowers” can’t pay back.

And possibly the most parts of shadow banking, i.e the alt accounts of major financial institutions.

Fun times ahead!

If you’re rich, you look good

That’s not news

Dry Cleaning – Anna Calls from the Arctic

Tl;dr surveillance equipment working perfectly, used for dystopian surveillance. Major shocker.

In the context of parenting there are certainly better things you can do to prevent “shennanigans” other than subjecting them to surveillance. Like you know… raising them?

Terrifying with a generation of peole grown up under total control and expected to be perfectly obedient. They will be shitty adults. But hey, at least they won’t have memories of that time they snuck out at night to watch the stars.