Giver of skulls
Is there a database of “this IP belongs to this state” these companies use? Or do they just use GeoIP stuff? I don’t want my Lemmy server to accidentally violate American laws and get in trouble/banned, so I may need to start doing some IP filtering myself.
That’s the point of VPNs, isn’t it? Do you trust the companies that sell your location information to shady people like bounty hunters or some foreign VPN company?
Personally, I trust Mullvad more than I trust many ISPs. It all depends on how good your ISP is and your country’s laws are. ISPs here in the Netherlands used to collect the IP addresses and other metadata of all websites you visit, as well as location information, for six months or more, because the law forced them to, in case the police ever needed that information. The law got overturned (though that doesn’t mean ISPs can’t track you anymore, they’re just not forced to) but this definitely feels like a reason for an always-on VPN to me. The government also pushed for IPv6 not because it’s not 1980 anymore, but because they foolishly thought that it would give every device a unique IP address so they could track people better.
Not that I want to evade the police, but when crazy religious people get in power, I don’t want to get convicted for contacting porn sites at some point. VPN providers that you don’t trust not to log anything are still better for privacy than that.
Some VPN providers lie and say they will never log anything (only for lawsuits to prove otherwise). You can’t trust those. I consider every VPN that pays for YouTube ads to be untrustworthy. Mullvad, and some of its competitors, however, seem to be relatively trustworthy.
With VPNs, you move your point of tracking to another company or country. Whether that benefits you depends on who you are, where you live, and what your priorities are.
I remember a long blog post about it on f.lux comparing it a bunch of competitors with actual measurements rather than pure RGB values.
Of course LCD doesn’t turn on any pixels, it just stops blocking the white light from behind the panel, but the result isn’t any different.
Unfortunately I can’t find the link right now, I must’ve read it a decade ago. Perhaps it’s been lost to time.
The end conclusion was that a bunch of free apps/cheap software thought they could get in on the blue light fad and turned the screen redder without significantly reducing the amount of blue light transmitted. At the time, there were one of two kits of software that actually showed a significant drop in blue light because their colour mixing algorithm/colour profile adjustments were done correctly whereas the competition just implemented it wrong.
Oh, that’s not what I meant. Weight loss programs, especially the ones designed to help you maintain weight for the long term, work well. I’d say they’re probably the best way to lose weight if you can’t do it alone (and very few people that really need it can). There are some bullshit ones, but there are also great alternatives.
What doesn’t work is the “drink a bag of this powder every day and you’ll lose weight automatically” bullshit. Sometimes this bullshit is also sold as berries, sometimes it’s some foreign kind of nut, but new “magical weight loss food” bullshit pops up a few times per year and desperate people will fall for it over and over again.
Any weight loss pill, drink, or food. It’s all scams built in top of scams.
Those new ones based on diabetes medicine seem nice, but as soon as you stop taking them their effects wear off. They’re a medically induced crash diet. The real hard work, fixing your bad habits long-term, still needs to take place.
“Almost everyone” seems a bit broad. Lots of people watch porn and illegally download stuff that they don’t want their ISP to know about, especially in countries like the USA where ISPs are allowed to sell browsing statistics of their customers for marketing purposes.
I take offence to the “protect against hackers” bullshit those ads keep repeating, but for their intended purpose, VPNs are a good solution.
Night mode kind of differs. I think there was one piece of software that did it way before operating systems got night mode, and with the help of some measuring device they found out that most competitors turned the screen red but did not actually lower the amount of blue light much, negating the whole point (as the theory behind this stuff is that blue light messes with your sleep schedule). Your screen turning reddish yellow does very little if the effect is achieved by turning on more red and green pixels.
I always thought the point was for the vitamins to be absorbed by your skin. Human skin absorbs all kinds of stuff so as long as the vitamins make contact it sort of makes sense?
Though I suppose for most people it won’t have much of an impact unless you have a severe vitamin deficiency.
I have yet to see any benefit to AI beyond the current browser UIs. The MS Paint image generation feature is neat for creating some quick clipart, if you mind the plagiarism, I guess.
Windows Recall shouldn’t be too hard to copy (it’s just OCR + CLIP on pediodic screenshots, after all) for those who want that sort of thing. Perhaps excluding private browser windows will be more of a challenge, especially on Wayland, but if the feature is built as an extension/plugin to the DE then I don’t think that’ll be impossible either.
Currently, the power and hardware requirements are too high for me to run anything useful locally, though. Even low-res image generation takes half a minute on my gaming GPU while burning a steady 180W of power.
The kind of text reformatting Apple has shown (selecting text and allowing a quick “make this paragraph more professional” in the context menu) takes forever on my hardware. Granted, it’s a few years old, but at 3 tokens per second I’m not exactly ready to install an AI addon yet.
I look forward to the Qualcomm and Apple advancements on this area, though. If the AI hype doesn’t die down, we may just see affordable and usable local AI in end user devices in a couple of years, and that’s pretty neat.
Hell, we may even see useful AI accelerator cards like that Coral thing or whatever it’s called, but with a usable amount of RAM. An upgradeable, replaceable AI accelerator could do a lot if AI stuff is going to be a hit in the future.
Like always, I expect Linux to be ahead of the curve when it comes to the technical ability (after all, Stable Diffusion ran on Linux long before Microsoft added it to Paint) but actually user friendly implementations will lag behind several years. Especially with the current direction of AI, basically advanced plagiarism and academic dishonesty machines, I don’t expect the free software community to embrace LLMs and other generative AI any time soon.
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I think it depends on where they insert the ads. If it’s in free to air channels (government backed broadcasters, PBS, etc.) then they’re getting the content for free with negligence transfer cost, so ads would be out of the question in my opinion. The video is already paid for and Google should be happy they’re even allowed to provide their customers with those channels without paying a dime.
If they also provide services like recording or have to pay to receive the channels, it’s fair game to put ads in that, unless you pay for the channels. Same with YouTube, which costs a significant sum of money to store and transcode.
I don’t think the people who complain about YouTube have ever tried to run even a small video server. It’s honestly mind boggling that YouTube is somehow free to watch without the platform deleting the barely watched videos.
In theory, someone could write a tool that will run the extension’s code and translate it into KDE compatible code. I suspect this will be brittle as hell, and most GUI interaction features will probably be broken, but it could be done.
In practice, I don’t think such a wrapper exists. Either the application needs to be ported or you or someone else will need to set up such a wrapper hack.
What I’d recommend instead is looking for Gnome extensions to make Gnome feel more KDE like. Task bars and start menus can all be added to Gnome, and you can install all the KDE tools you like (Dolphin, Konqueror, you name it) without any extensions at all. Extensions like dash to panel may not match KDE exactly, but you can cobble together something functional much faster than porting this application tracking tool will ever be.
Wayland doesn’t need to be a problem. The extension is running within Gnome, after all. Existing code will need to be rewritten, but extensions at this privilege level should be more than capable of doing what this program is doing.
In theory someone could write a GJS wrapper to get basic Gnome extensions to run on KDE but if there’s any kind of GUI modification/interaction involved, things will quickly break down.
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Damn, they really overfit their music models. With image generation and text prediction it’s very hard to prove a direct connection, but with four or five of those songs it’s unmistakable that the original songs were used to generate the music output
I wonder what the effect will be of fixing the models’ overfitting. I’m guessing it’ll generate worse music, or they would’ve done so already.
Quite sad that it took the music industry to notice before any lawsuits with a chance of succeeding got off the ground.