Oh yeah, I’ll just tell my wife that we’re never having sex again because we’ve now got enough kids. I’m sure this will be a healthy and emotionally viable way of strengthening our relationship over the next 30 years or so until the menopause.

DDG is largely Bing search at the backend, unless I’m much mistaken. They do value-add work around privacy, but in the basic sense of “does a DDG search return good results”, it’s largely the same as Bing.

I can imagine an engineer looking at a push-button bean to cup machine and thinking “how can I make this slightly less efficient and a lot more complicated”.

Gestures vaguely at Amazon’s enormous piles of money

It doesn’t say anything about specific software. They have to allow you to use third party stores, they don’t have to allow you to download torrent apps so that you can pirate.

Literally in the quote I posted…

The gatekeeper shall allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software applications or software application stores

but there’s nothing in the law that states they have to let you sideload whatever you choose

That’s pretty much exactly what the law does say.

The gatekeeper shall allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software applications or software application stores using, or interoperating with, its operating system and allow those software applications or software application stores to be accessed by means other than the relevant core platform services of that gatekeeper.

There’s a provision for not letting the user actively break the device, but that’s it. And it’s couched in terms like “if strictly necessary and proportionate” and “provided they are justified”, so it’s not something Apple can apply on a whim.

It doesn’t have a microphone or camera, or any other way of recording my conversations. Other than laundry-related data, it really doesn’t know anything worth sharing.

Why not?

My washing machine has wi-fi. I didn’t buy it for that reason, but it just happens to. Using the app, I have some programme options that aren’t possible to select using the hardware dials. I can do things like change the detergent dosage and the number of additional rinse cycles. It has some “special” programmes for various specific fabrics. And it has things like maintenance diagnostics and the ability to run a specific self-cleaning cycle.

That’s all pretty useful.

And what’s the actual danger of connecting it to wi-fi? Will Big Data know how often I wash my towels? Do I need to worry about the government spying on my fabric softener usage? Will hackers seize control of my machine and ransom my ability to get clean underwear?

I just can’t see the big downside here (other than the fact that the machine is more complicated than it needs to be, but that ship has already sailed seeing as I already own it).

One of many different “third party frontends” for YouTube which, amongst other things, cut out ads and avoid performance throttling.

Personally I use one called NewPipe, and previously one called LibreTube. There are others too.

I’ve just had a look on the Play Store, and they notably don’t use the word “buy” anywhere that I can see. The button to “buy” the app is just a button with the price on it, and clicking through that it uses the language of “install”.

Can’t help but think that that’s deliberate.

“Oh, and 2/3 of our content is only available via ‘channels’ which require an additional monthly subscription almost as much as the subscription you’re already paying for.”

Amazon, you literally own MGM. No I am not paying you even more money to watch MGM content, you greedy fucks.

They’re concept cars. Concept cars always look weird. The actual production models won’t look anything like them; they never do.

Anyone with access to the NYT can also just copy paste the text and plagiarize it directly. At the point where you’re deliberately inputting copyrighted text and asking the same to be printed as an output, ChatGPT is scarcely being any more sophisticated than MS Word.

The issue with plagiarism in LLMs is where they are outputting copyrighted material as a response to legitimate prompts, effectively causing the user to unwittingly commit plagiarism themselves if they attempt to use that output in their own works. This issue isn’t really in play in situations where the user is deliberately attempting to use the tool to commit plagiarism.

We don’t have a monopoly on one class of device, we have monopolies on five different classes of device. That’s definitely different and better!

To be fair, there are (or were) lots of distros downstream of RHEL marketing themselves as drop-in replacements, not just Oracle. And this move isn’t likely to stop Oracle (and the rest), only make the transition experience less smooth for clients (ultimately all the downstream distros can just rebase off of CentOS Stream instead; they lose “bug for bug” compatibility, but will still largely be drop-in replacements).

I also find it hard to muster any sympathy for IBM of all people, even when their opponent is Oracle (who are the lowest of the low).

Minions memes and cartoons about The Wife. That’s the stereotype here.

Celebrities and influencers, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, endorsed Reece Lewis as a strong leader for the HyperVerse. … Wozniak said in a video that he supported “Steven,” proclaiming, "I can’t wait for the HyperVerse.”

In 2022, a writer for the British tabloid called The Mirror, Andrew Penman, attempted to raise a red flag, noting that all three of the celebrities (Wozniak, Chuck Norris, and Lance Bass) who endorsed Reece Lewis declined to confirm ever knowing him.

Oh Woz. How the mighty have fallen. Whatever they paid you, it wasn’t enough. Also you’re filthy rich already FFS.

I’ve not used that tablet, but I have a Star Labs laptop and it’s an excellent bit of kit. Would heartily recommend them as a company.

Can’t vouch for the Star Lite tablet specifically, though.

ChromeOS can run native Linux apps, so realistically if Adobe wanted to support ChromeOS they’d probably go for a Linux port anyway. A lot less work than trying to reimplement every single UI from the ground up as a web interface.

Yeah, it can do that. There are Android and iOS apps (as well as desktop). It has list creation in one click. General notes are technically formatted in markdown behind the scenes, and some users like to write the notes directly in markdown, but Joplin’s default view is a “rich text editor” mode which hides all that stuff away and uses familiar word processor type controls.

Depending on your chosen cloud host (you can pick any you like) it can sometimes be a little fiddly to do the initial setup, but I think the default “Joplin Cloud” option is pretty straightforward.

I use Joplin, and can heartily recommend it, although there are plenty of alternative options out there too.