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  • There are still phones that have it. Sometimes even pretty good ones. It's just that they are not advertised so heavily. I recently learned about HTC U23 or 24 or something. Now I feel dumb because I never bothered to check because I always thought all good phones don't offer headphone jacks anymore.

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    Any ideas?
  • It depends.

    It's the reason I stopped making so much fun of people that recreate the "MAMIL" trope - "Middle Aged Men In Lycra". Meaning men who start their midlife crisis buying an expensive bicycle with neon-colored bicycle clothes and bicycle glasses and all the other stuff.

    Why don't they just start riding their bicycle they already got? They can use their sunglasses and normal sport shorts. What's the problem?

    But I some cases or age-ranges people want to make a change and get out of their usual habits. A real phase shift. People think they want to work out more regularly. Or really start a new hobby. Buying a bunch of expensive stuff can increase the need to go through with this phase shift - at least in the minds of the people buying it.

    As an adult picking up a new hobby often means that other things in their life have to make room. It's usually not that adults in their (let's say) mid 30s until early 50s have problems filling their day. So whatever new hobby or task they want to do has to push away other habits and stay there until these new habits can take root.

    So starting with some expensive shit can be something I can understand - if one has the money.

    If I would start making music again, I'd probably start by buying an expensive synth like the super-6 from UDO (that I always wanted to buy) instead of a bunch of bleep-bloop-machines that need a lot of initial time for understanding them and then only fulfill one specific function in my music.

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    [Opinion / Technology] Telegram founder’s arrest is radical — if it’s a crime to build privacy tools, there will be no privacy [Chris Berg | Aug 29, 2024 | crikey.com.au]
  • Why do they have the data in the first place?

    Your communications on telegram are not encrypted by default. You can have e2e encrypted 1on1-conversations, but group chats are blown for them to do everything.

    They had a hilarious argumentation where they claimed that the key to unlock your chats is stored on a different server than your chats are and therefore they cannot access it. A company that argues like they ("trust us") isn't trustworthy.

    Signal has been audited over and over again by internationally respected cryptographers. They cannot decrypt your chats by design. No need for "trust us bro".

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    Swift? more like Supersonic
  • True.

    I'm very much opposed to and sad about an international pop star and apparent progressive taking a private jet all the time.

    But there's two things at play that should be differentiated.

    1. The role model aspect. She has millions of fans that look up to her. She could lead by example and use different means of transportation.
    2. She's obviously a unique figure. She's not replaceable or generic in the position she's at. Her "position" cannot be replaced by someone else as would be possible with the Starbucks CEO. She's not "some CEO" taking a Jet to work and thereby normalizing this as a habit for CEOs". Right now there are few if any other celebrities with her status l, so she stands for herself.

    The precedent of Starbucks CEO commuting by jet is much more of a blueprint that might be applied to other CEOs. Or already is. I don't even know his name FFS. So he's making a precedent that a lot of other people could readily adapt.

    I don't want to excuse anything. I just think that it would be more beneficial to attack CEOs for taking private jets. There's a lot more of them. They areuch more susceptible to the pressure if the companies is seen as a polluter than Taylor Swift might be. She's much more independent than any CEO. She doesn't have to worry if the board of directors or the shareholders are going to replace her if her if her habits are becoming a PR problem. So our energy might be more productively applied elsewhere.

    I'm still sad about a seemingly progressive and apparently Intelligent pop star like her flying that much.

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    It must be a silent R
  • It cannot "analyze" it. It's fundamentally not how LLM's work. The LLM has a finite set of "tokens": words and word-pieces like "dog", "house", but also like "berry" and "straw" or "rasp". When it reads the input it splits the words into the recognized tokens. It's like a lookup table. The input becomes "token15, token20043, token1923, token984, token1234, ..." and so on. The LLM "thinks" of these tokens as coordinates in a very high dimensional space. But it cannot go back and examine the actual contents (letters) in each token. It has to get the information about the number or "r" from somewhere else. So it has likely ingested some texts where the number of "r"s in strawberry is discussed. But it can never actually "test" it.

    A completely new architecture or paradigm is needed to make these LLM's capable of reading letter by letter and keep some kind of count-memory.

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    BMW Adaptive Suspension Can Be Added via Subscription. Suspension As A Service (SAAS)
  • We long left the era where we "own" things that we buy. As everything is a computer now it has become very simple to control stuff that remotely that was working on its own before.

    So the answer to "why would <CORPORATION> do this" is simply: "Because they can".

    Every tiny decision is guided by increasing profit. No matter the side effects (short or long term ). Because with many shareholders administering pressure to maximize profits there's only one way to go (even if it's a dumb and shortsighted decision) maximizing profits NOW. If you are not doing that because you can see that increasing profits now will hurt profits in the future then you are hindering the project. You have to increase profits now, because if you are not then your competitor is doing it and that is a problem. If you are not going with the project you will be out of a job sooner or later. Then someone will take over that will make the decision you couldn't do.

    This is a race to the bottom. Morals, integrity, honesty, responsibility and foresight are only obstacles in this logic (because the competition is not bound by them which gains them an advantage).

    It's simply cheaper now to build everything in the car always and run an operating system that manages all these things and can control what you are doing in your car.

    Cory Doctorow held a great keynote about this some ~10-ish years (?) ago with the title "The coming war on general computation" where he explained the side effects of putting DRM in every stupid appliance. The side effect here is that we cannot hack our cars to switch on the heated seats (or whatever other feature BMW is not allowing us to use for free) because of DRM. It is not "our" car, even though we bought it.

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    Procreate takes a stand against generative AI, vows to never incorporate the tech into its products | TechCrunch
  • I agree, but as long as we still have capitalism I support measures that at least slow down the destructiveness of capitalism. AI is like a new powertool in capitalism's arsenal to dismantle our humanity. Sure we can use it for cool things as well. But right now it's used mostly to automate stuff that makes us human - art, music and so on. Not useful stuff like loading the dishwasher for me. More like writing a letter for me to invite my friends to my birthday. Very cool. But maybe the work I put in doing this myself is making my friends feel appreciated?

    Edit: It's also nice to at least have an app that takes this maximalist approach. Then people can choose. If they're half-assing it there will be more and more ai-features creeping in over time. One compromise after the next until it's like all the other apps. It's also important to have such a maximalist stand in order to gauge the scale in a way.

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    Movie Discussion - Alien Romulus
  • Honestly, do yourself a favor and watch the OG Alien from start to finish with no distractions. Then do the same with Aliens as well. Those two are masterpieces with Aliens being much different in tone. Every sequel or prequel made afterward tried to rekindle the fire/brilliance of those two. Unfortunately Alien was made worse by the later films where the Xenomorphs origin is basically explained as human in origin (caused by humans). So pretend that you didn't see any movie from the franchise and try to be "fresh".

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    Disney Seeking Dismissal of Raglan Road Death Lawsuit Because Victim Was Disney+ Subscriber
  • It's also a great example why these mega corps should be broken up into smaller pieces.

    If forced arbitration persists (and this argumentation from Disney is successful and then used as precedence) any service used from one company can be used to forever ban you from taking legal action against that company again even if the service and the reason for the legal action have nothing to do with each other.

    Am I right in understanding that this case is about someone dying from eating in a Disney owned restaurant that by accident was a Disney+ subscriber?

    If one company owns everything like Amazon, Google, Apple and in the future maybe even water supply, garbage collection, operates my car and is my insurer or bank account (and owner of one of the 4 remaining fast food chains in the country) how can people actually sue a company then ?

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    Ghosts
  • Well, but general relativity teaches us that all coordinate systems (also constantly moving, but not accelerating ones) are equally relevant. This means that the one with earth as it's origin is as correct as one where with the center of the galaxy (or the sun ) as is every other. So the one where earth moves somehow through space is just as random as any other.

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    What's the oldest technology you continue using?
  • me too! I shattered the screen of my pixel 4a and without much thinking I bought a used Pixel 6a off ebay. (I needed a phone quick that worked and the shattered screen was somehow disrupting the touch -accuracy. Now I have a phone without a headphone jack and its seriously an issue. Bluetooth is still not usable. There's so many situations where it suddenly doesn't work. Then I have to restart my headphones or fiddle around with bluetooth. It's seriously annoying. A fucking cable is the superior technology - still!

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    What's the oldest technology you continue using?
  • I'm pretty similar. I don't have an analog camera myself, but I'm using one. I Like that the cost of a picture (both in money and in Work that i have to do for getting and developing Film ) forces me to BE more considerate about what to Photograph.

    I also have an old Tapedeck (Yamaha K350) where I'm still planning to replace the ribbon as well. I started making Mixtapes a few years Back.

    And I buy CDs. It's the best time to buy them IMHO. People sell them very cheap on eBay.

    Edit: And I have an old iPod 6th gen with Rockbox that I use almost every day. -> 3.5mm jack is also apparently an old technology that I find Superior.

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  • Idea / Question about tiling window managers

    First of all: Please don't tell me how impractically this might be or confusing or whatever. This is like a thought experiment and let's be honest: We don't JUST want efficiency when modding our desktops -- we also want it to look sick and individual and have people watch in admiration -- or something like that. So keep that in mind before dismissing rightaway :-) thanks!

    • I recently thought about a concept of tiling window managers. I don't know If this already works out of the box in some window managers. It was originally how I understood the concept of "tiling window managers" before I really got to know how they worked.

    My general idea: Everything is just tiles on a larger canvas - with some exceptions everything visible can be laid out as a position on the screen. Also widgets are just tiles placed next to each other. There can (imho should) exist some rules for easy sizing of tiles / widgets, but that's details. I sometimes have the problem of working with one main application, but having to look up two other things A) and B) one after the other. I would switch between two screens all the time, but more ideally I would only move my screen slightly to get a look on either A) or B) while in both situations still having my main application in view. Moving between apps can be done simply with arrow keys (e.g. super + arrows) or mouse. There's also quickjump-positions. For example pressing 1 2 3 4 etc would move the screen to a previous set position (and could also preset the focused application)

    Similar to a smartphone the background can move along in a more subtle way.

    The login screen would just be a different place on that canvas - for security the rest outside the view has to disappear even when invisible while logged out (to avoid weird security issues :D

    possible exception: An exception to "everything is in the canvas" could be when maximizing a focused application: Then the actual application is moving in front of the view (while the rest of the canvas is getting slightly further away). Some nice blurring could make that really nice. If the application tile isn't in the screen's aspect ration before it will change its aspect ration in the same motion while moving.

    So in short: Instead of having tiles fixed to screens why not have tiles everywhere and move the screen step by step.

    A lot of hotkeys need to be thought about here of course. Also specialized behavior to resize tiles. Increasing the width/height or changing the aspect ratio would require moving surrounding tiles around in certain situations, but these shouldn't bee too complicated. Again: some rules about minimum/maximum values for width/height/desired aspect rations could help.

    Even the angle of viewing could be changed in some situations not in situations where switching often is required. But I'd love me some nice rotation and translation when locking my screen :-)

    What do you think?

    ( I might cross post this to reddit's unixporn subreddit later as well)

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    Hi, I've got an old netbook from Samsung that has an old Intel Atom CPU (Intel Atom N455 1.66 GHz). I installed Arch on it and am now thinking of a suitable window manager. I tried Hyprland (kinda expecting it to not work really) whick didn't start at all. Before I had Debian with Gnome, which technically worked, but everything was extremely slow.

    I've used Gnome for a long time, but I know that there are a lot of other window managers out there. I would like to have one that avoids graphical gimmickry in order to be fast. (I like some nice little graphical details, but only if it's still running buttery smooth).

    If you have some tips that would be very nice!

    EDIT: thank you for all the recommendations I'll try out a few!

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    yew.rs Tutorial | Yew

    Introduction

    Hi! I tried out yew last night and was going through the tutorial (the link). At the end the tutorial is using a link to an external resource. My guess is that the tutorial app shall create a website with a list of (empty) videos that is created by reading an external json-file from the yew-website. The problem is that this doesn't work for me, the list stays empty. I also don't find the full source of this example somewhere. On the site it is only iteratively described. I am pretty sure I have everything like on the website.

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    The Matrix is an often used example, but for me it's the Alien Prequels - especially Alien: Covenant really makes the Original Alien much worse. When the original was released in 1979 it had the perfect Monster. A dangerous killing machine of unknown origin. The missing background of the alien is a big part of its scary mess. It's a blank space in its mythology that the viewer can fill with many explanations. As these explanations are not precise they don't have to be logically coherent.

    Covenant (and to a lesser degree Prometeus) wanted to fill this blank space and tell us the aliens origin. But once you fill out this missing piece of information it is fixed and can only be one piece. There exists now only one singular explanation. And its a boring: The Xenomorph is basically a creature with it's origins on earth (because David, who's origin is on earth created it).

    I find this hugely dissapointing. The biggest dangers of deep space are all human in origin is extremely small minded.

    (Star Trek: Beyond had the same boring plot - the mysterious villain turned out to be a human after all. As if only humans are capable to pose (or create) a serious thread to humans.).

    What are your examples for franchise-movies that somehow made the original worse?

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    mastodon.gamedev.place Mario Zechner (@badlogic@mastodon.gamedev.place)

    Today was ... interesting. If you followed me for the past months over on the shitbird site, you might have seen a bunch of angry German words, lots of graphs, and the occassional news paper, radio, or TV snippet with yours truely. Let me explain. In Austria, inflation is way above the EU average. ...

    Ein sehr interessanter thread, in dem ein Entwickler ein paar Analysen beschreibt über die Preisentwicklung von Waren in österreichischen Lebemittelketten.

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    I'm not a fan of outright blocking certain communities and would rather have a kind of "relevancy-factor" or "weight" with which i could tune the frequency of seeing posts from certain communities. A factor of 0 would be the same as blocking a community. 1 would be normal.

    I am not familiar with the exact method with which posts are displayed in "Everything" or the ordering thereof. But I'm sure it's taking the up votes into account. A relevancy factor of 0.5 would treat a post with 1000 up votes as if it had 500 and there for position it lower.

    This way highly up voted posts from certain communities would be able to appear.

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    Using filters is very useful. Though I like them I often fear that I forget about them after a while and don't know what I'm missing.

    In other applications that are more structured as fixed channels like discord, or messaging apps like Signal etc I am able to mute notifications for a limited amount of time.

    For people who are hesitant about filters (like me) it would be nice, if I could set a filter for e.g. "Linus Tech Tips" with a timeout of 2 weeks. I don't care about this sub/community that much, but blocking them completely because of the recent drama seems strange for me.

    Another thing that I would love would be a way to still see the filtered content. The filters would then be like automatic labels/tags that would be attached to posts. The normal view would be only "unlabeled/untagged" items. But for every filter there would be a button clickable to show only the filtered items.

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    Lemmy (and by extension the fediverse) is theoretically more robust against powerhungry individuals because people can move to another server. But if users loose all their data (their liked / saved posts and subscribed communities) when moving to another server they are less likely to do so, which increases the power of the people who run the servers over the users of those servers.

    So if there's some time in the future I'd love to have a feature that is making it simple to "move my stuff".

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    was-tun.podigee.io Finanzialisierung: "Wir dürfen unser Gesundheitssystem nicht dem Markt überlassen!"

    Privat Equity Firmen kaufen Arztpraxen auf - unsere Gesundheitsversorgung wird so zur Ware. Darunter leiden alle: Ärzte*innen, Pfleger*innen und die Patient*innen. Polikliniken sind dazu ein Gegenentwurf: Um auch soziale Determinanten von Gesundheit einzubeziehen arbeiten Ärzte*innen, Sozialarbeiter...

    Super krasses Thema. Unbedingt mal anhören und mit beschäftigen! Undurchsichtige internationale Private Equity Management-Firmen kaufen gerade massenhaft Arztpraxen. Was das für uns alle bedeutet wird in dem Podcast ein bisschen erklärt. Ziemlich krass.

    Schickt das vielleicht mal weiter an eure Eltern, die werden zuerst die Auswirkungen zu spüren bekommen. (Die werden dann euer Erbe in dieses Geschäftsmodell versenken ;-) )

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