That’s a wide opening for a lawsuit, though. This is the kind of thing they’re probably telling the truth about, at least in as much as what they intend to do.

Agreed, but since it’s FOSS, I’m not worried. If it implodes, there will be forks available and the migration path will be fast. In the meantime, Bitwarden is (imo) the most polished option.

Bitwarden has been great.

According to the boyfriend, yeah, that’s exactly what happened. The argument was probably a cause of the accident, but not a motive for murder.

Don’t forget to read beyond the headline, folks! The headline makes it sound like she was killed because of the argument, but based on the account of the events in the story, that isn’t what happened. He was clearly drunk and handling a firearm recklessly (and probably more than a little bit trying to “own the libs”), but according to the late girl’s boyfriend who was nearby, the father was horrified and screaming for help immediately after this happened. This wasn’t any sort of “honor killing” or anything, just an idiot redneck being an idiot.

That might well be the best thing that any government could possibly do to drive open source adoption.

I mentioned two of those above, and the third is one of the six I was thinking about (alongside System76 and Slimbook, etc; Pine is getting out of the game for the time being, iirc). I own a Framework and love it, but none of them are mid-range brands. None of them ship worldwide. Apple is…well, arguably worse than Microsoft, and they literally only have one mid-range laptop SKU. Likewise, Acer and HP (and maybe Dell?) each have, like, one laptop that will ship without an OS.

This is what I’m saying. Trying to buy a laptop without Windows installed means accepting that you’ll either be buying at a higher rung on the pricing ladder (not that it’s never worth it, but not everyone can afford to climb), or you’ll be buying a disposable machine.

Ok. But for people who need a laptop today, they don’t have the luxury of waiting for us to live in a more just world. They have to deal with the world we’re currently living in, and this is a fair way of registering our frustrations with the OEMs about the state of affairs they’ve put into place.

There are like six manufacturers that let you buy a full-featured laptop without a Windows license included in the price, and one of them is Apple. None of them are budget-friendly brands, except the Chromebook manufacturers who are selling near-e-waste. Microsoft has done a gigantic amount of work signing deals with OEMs over the past forty years to make sure that Windows is the default and keeping it off the device is hard.

Even refurbishers and second-hand resellers often put Windows on a device by default. It’s massively easier to buy a device without an OS at all than it used to be, and even with that, you have to either pay for a more expensive machine or settle for something really underpowered.

Skip today’s Windows 11 update

Way ahead of ya, champ.

With their budgets as they are, absolutely.

I work in edtech, and the current landscape is something like 55% ChromeOS, 25% iPad, 15% Windows, 5% Mac. I might have the exact percentages wrong, but I’m pretty sure about the order. The old Mac advantage from the gifted computers is basically gone, and though a lot of primary schools do give students iPads, Windows isn’t really gone gone; a lot of edtech apps are either web-based or built for Windows. You’re right about Google undercutting the market with ChromeOS, though.

Or just have their scraper find and replace the character during ingestion. They’re probably already doing it for common misspellings like “teh” anyway. In either case, you’re right. It’s not even costing the LLM any measurable time or energy.

The guy just really likes Þorn.

I’m about a kilometer from the ocean right now (I’m standing in front of the window through which I can see it), and it’s a partly cloudy day. When the sky is clear (as it was five minutes ago), the ocean is a rich, saturated blue or even teal. When it’s cloudy (as it is currently), I can see that it’s a cool gray color. I might call it a very dark, desaturated cyan at most. So from my observation it has to be the opposite: the relative blueness of the ozone and the water must be the less dependent factor, and the color of the sky the more dependent one.

It’s tricky, though. I guess I might be in a place with weird salinity or plankton or something.

You’ve got it partially backwards. The sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering, but it doesn’t reflect the ocean; the ocean is blue because it reflects the sky.

Incidentally, I’ve heard it said (I think it was xkcd) that we use the term “Rayleigh scattering” because it sounds silly to say that the air is blue (via the mechanism of Rayleigh scattering); so maybe that’s part of it?

It’s not “perfect being the enemy of the good.” It’s “effective being the enemy of actively harming others.”

How else can you learn to fight unless you fail along the way?

By learning how they do things. They’re not using some new, unknown tech to scrape their data. They’re using the old ways that have been around for decades and just feeding it to a new system. And the conclusion, after thirty years of companies trying to prevent people from scraping, is that if you’re going to allow people to view your website, you have to allow them to download it; and if people download it, they can do what they want with that data. No exceptions.

In the multimedia space, the way they’re working this problem is called DRM; and it’s basically well-understood that it can’t be solved. Netflix hasn’t been able to stop people downloading movies, despite tossing a ton of cash at it. Disney hasn’t. YouTube can’t solve it. Steam can’t. Spotify can’t. Some of these companies have even gone so far as to try to implement DRM in major browsers and using that as a requirement for using their service, but DRM is always cracked. These companies try to make it slightly harder to download videos or use ad blockers, and that might work somewhat well for millions of individual people who aren’t adept with technology, but a few smart folks can always figure it out.

The AI companies have smart folks working for them, too; and once one of them figures out how to crack this form of text DRM, it’s just automated into a part of their scraped data ingestion pipeline. It didn’t cost them any measurable amount of time or money, and now they never have to bother with it or worry about it again. Meanwhile every blind person who visits your website for the rest of time will have to wait for your text to deobfuscate itself, every single time.

We have tried sane washing billion dollar companies while they loot all our available knowledge, art, and culture to sell back to us in the form of a garbage chat or that helps destroy the planet.

Yeah, it really sucks, and we need to do something about it. But the answer isn’t going to be technological, because they have all the money in the world, give or take a few bucks, to defeat technological solutions. So that means the answer has to be legislative.

Nah you can miss me with this shit. I’m done.

“I’m not going to let facts get in the way of my strongly-held opinions.”

This blogger literally ends by saying they believe all publicly available knowledge will end up free and accessible to anyone.

This has been true for the past 50 years of the internet. It’s not going to change anytime soon. Which means that if we’re going to fight the pillaging of our culture and heritage, we’re going to have to make it impossible for them to spend their way past the hurdle; if it costs them $50 to get data that’s worth $300 to them, they’ll do it. But if it costs them their company being forcibly dissolved and their CEO being led away in handcuffs, they might think twice.

Discouraging fighting in any form now is trying to discourage the anti AI movement. Sorry about it.

Sure, fighting in any form. Doesn’t matter how effective or not, doesn’t matter how harmful to others. Kick dogs to stop Israeli genocide. Burn down national parks for trans rights. Steal candy from babies to stop Republican gerrymandering. It doesn’t matter if it helps your cause or actively harms innocent people, just do it, and anyone trying to stop you is trying to discourage the cause.

Bad strawman! Get off the furniture! No! Down!

This isn’t “it’s inevitable don’t fight it.” This is “punching everyone who walks in the door of your store won’t stop the guy stealing TVs through the window, but it will hurt the innocent customer who just wants to buy a pair of socks.”

I’m guessing autocorrect swapped “US” with “Us.”

“obnoxious in the house style” is hilarious to me, but I know exactly what you’re talking about.