I did nothing and I’m all out of ideas!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Yeah. GDPR should have been implemented as a mandatory part of HTML or even HTTP that interacts with a builtin browser feature.

    Well, it kind of is. The Do Not Track header has recently seen a court win in Germany (source):

    It turned out that the judge agreed with vzbv, ruling that the social media giant is no longer allowed to warn users it doesn’t respect DNT signals. That’s because, under GDPR, the right to opt out of web tracking and data collection can also be exercised using automated procedures.

    And it is basically the same in California too Source

    GPC is a valid do-not-sell-my-personal-information signal according to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which stipulates that websites are legally required to respect a signal sent by users who want to opt-out of having their personal data sold.


  • Any foundation model is trained on a subset of common crawl.

    All the data in there is, arguably, copyrighted by one individual or another. There is no equivalent open - or closed - source dataset to it.

    Each single post, page, blog, site, has a copyright holder. In the last year big companies have started to change their TOS to make that they are able to use, relicense and generally sell your data hosted in their services as their own for the intent of AI training, so potentially some small parts of common crawl will be licensable in bulk - or directly obtained from the source.

    This does still leave out the majority of the data directly or indirectly used today, even if you were willing to pay, because it is unfeasable to search and contract every single rights holder.

    On the other side of it there have been work to use less but more heavily curated data, which could potentially generate good small, domain specific, models. But still they will not be like the ones we currently have, and the open source community will not be able to have access to the same amount and quality of data.

    It’s an interesting problem that I’m personally really interested to see where it leads.


  • I have a Boox Nova Air which is still going strong after around 2 years, and honestly it’s pretty good for writing. But I heard a lot of people having problems with updates bricking the device or receiving a bad unit and having an hard time returning it, if bought directly from them. I did not have to talk with support and I avoided the updates, so I can’t say more about that. My experience is overall good with it.

    I also have a Kobo Libra H2O that I think is nearing the 4 years mark, and is still going really strong. The biggest problem I had was that it asks for a kobo account during setup, thing that I really dislike. I don’t know if it is still like that.

    But, generally, if you want an epub compatible reader that you can mod (NickelMenu etc) and easily side load stuff to, with a kobo libra you can’t go wrong. Even if, to be fair, I’m not up to date with the latest devices and company policies.

    One note: the kindle format is pretty closed and all the stuff you buy from amazon is generally DRMed to hell, so it’s not certain that you can pass it to other readers. Just avoid amazon’s ebooks.

    EDIT: One thing I missed: PDFs on the default kobo software are bad, the Boox default software for PDF is far better and - in my case - there’s a screen size difference too that can make my opinion biased. Aside from that for pure book reading kobo is generally better, but you need to buy a protective case for it: there are a lot of cheap and good quality compatible ones.





  • Until you have up and down votes there always will be someone making a tally.

    The concept of Karma of other sites, to be fair, is not as simple as that. A lot of times the Karma is not a straight tally, there are algorithms to mitigate abuse (ex. Try to disregard mass voting, sudden influxes of votes, or known bots votes), or it is used to indirectly move the conversation to a preferred subject (ex. Making points obtained in some discussions or communities less valuable, or directly not considering them).

    Luckily or not that kind of Karma is not present here, which basically makes the whole concept of total Karma pretty useless because you really can’t trust the value to be kind of truthful and not manipulated.

    Already with all the anti abuse, and it being calculated in a centralized platform, it was generally worthless. Here it is completely worthless. People should just be reminded of its real nature of an easily gamed system, and that it is not what they were used to.

    We can only hope that in the long run they will drop it.