elondaits

Woke up to a 100 billion dollars in S3, which is above the USD 4 alarm threshold I had set (I pay $0.55 monthly) . Some AI decided to prune the most impressionable of us.

The App Store account doesn’t need to be the same as the Apple iCloud account. You can create an account without a credit card associated to it.

Not everything is economic value. For gamers, an online game can be a community hub, part of their identity, a hobby. It’s not about whether they got their money’s worth, it’s about destroying a virtual “place” they’re emotionally and socially invested, and the specific skill they posses when they’re there.

I think they want regulation for them as well, because they have the money to comply… but regulation eliminates the threat of open source models, foreign models, and small independent companies.

But it’s not just convention… JSX files are not valid JS files. Also, as a programmer, I would be annoyed to open a JS file and find out it’s actually something else.

Because part of the price of a work of art is its perceived historic / cultural importance. Autographs are taking this to the extreme, where only the mark of the author exists, on its own, and still gets a high price. On the other end, fakes and very accurate reproductions, would never be as valued even if the effect as a visual piece is practically the same.

AirPods have too much latency for playing music. You want wired audio for running GarageBand or Logic Pro with a MIDI controller. They could have gone with a USB-C to audio adapter, but then you wouldn't be able to plug the MIDI controller and charge the computer.

... Only a few people make music with a Mac, but it's been an important part of its history, and Apple cares about it.

My guess is that they are looking forward to juicy licensing deals with OpenAI, Google or Meta for the rights to generate AI content featuring Batman, Harry Potter, and other characters in the WB stable.

Typically “Game” mode, on TVs, turns off post processing, to avoid the extra frames of lag it causes.

My thought. There should be a mandate to allow downloading all data on account closure from any service.

Back in 2015, I traveled to the US and wanted to buy a Macbook Pro at the Apple Store. The configuration I wanted wasn’t available in Apple Stores, and I couldn’t buy it online because at that point there was some limitation in the online store like they only took US credit cards, or something.

At the Apple Store, the employees suggestion (a more senior one, who was consulted) was to buy a gift card for the computer’s cost (~$1500) and pay at the online store with that. I didn’t do it because buying “virtual stuff” for that amount seemed crazy (this was a huge amount of money for me, at the time).

I don’t think I’ll live long enough to trust AI coding assistants with something like schema validation, just to name one thing I use dependencies for.

For over one decade now, maybe two, seemingly every big (or mid?) budget movie Hollywood has produced is based on existing IP: a comic book, novel, previous movie, TV show, or even non fiction article. I’ve been surprised many times by movies which seem original but are actually based on a French comic, or some other semi-obscure (internationally) source.

That tells me that ideas aren’t free. There’s a value to a fully cooked, ready to wear, tried and tested ideas.

As a second point, many good Hollywood pitches remain in development hell, unable to get a satisfying script, or a “second act that works”.

I administer a PHP website with very little legit traffic per month, but a few thousand pages probably. The bot traffic is crazy. We're not using Cloudflare for that site, but we're using a local static-page cache... and without it, the site simply can't function.

You don't need to be the target of a dDoS to use a CDN.

Also, using CDNs (Fastly via Github pages, not Cloudflare, in this case) once allowed us to be featured in a very large newspaper without worries, extra expenses, or extra work.

I self hosted on one of the company’s servers back in the late 90s. Hard drive crashes (and a hack once, through an Apache bug) had our services (http, pop, smtp, nfs, smb, etc ) down for at least 2-3 days (full reinstall, reconfiguration, etc).

Then, with regular VPSs I also had systems down for 1-2 days. Just last week the company that hosts NextCloud for us was down the whole weekend (from Friday evening) and we couldn’t get their attention until Monday.

So far these huge outages that last 2-5 hours are still lower impact for me, and require me to take less action.

It’s possible to lose one’s irises. Most identical twins have almost identical DNA. Then there’s the “right to be forgotten”, people on witness protection, refugees and immigrants who enter the system as adults, etc. I don’t think there’s an easy technical solution.

QR code generator would be good. Many of the online generators don’t link directly where you ask, but through a tracking domain.

It’s very hard for me to interpret the idea that the www was “given away from free” from anywhere but a very contemporary mindset. Back in the early days of the Internet all popular protocols were free/open (ftp, irc, smtp, usenet, gopher, dns, etc.) (sorry if any of these examples was actually under a patent… I remember multiple free clients for all of these)… there was no chance for anything else, since there was no infrastructure for online payments yet, and platforms were very fragmented.

The WWW wasn’t a closed online dial up service, a BBS, or HyperCard. So to ever be the WWW, it needed to be free and open.

What would be the first propietary/closed popular internet service? ICQ?

In his review of AirPods Pro 3 he says they now stay on better.

What about a malicious DNS (on a public spoofed or hacked WiFi) that forwards you to a lookalike domain? Unfortunately many times public WiFi doesn’t work with Google’s or Cloudflare’s DNS servers (I think the Deutsche Bahn’s WiFi was such a case, if I remember correctly, but I know I came across a few on the last few years while traveling). I don’t think there’s anything protecting against that when you’re using a browser.

Sometimes circumstances force one to connect to a public WiFi (e.g. airports, where WiFi is always super dodgy).

The “Hey *” (Meta, Siri, Alexa) is typically handled by a simpler mechanism on a short buffer that triggers the proper recording and speech recognition workflow in order to save battery. But if you’re not going to trust the company, then the fact that it responds to Hey Meta shouldn’t make any difference because it could still be quietly recording. The fact that it responds to a wakeup prompt changes nothing.

I’m hardly an expert with Rails, and I integrated React twice, on two very different sites, using API controllers. The nice thing about React is that you can limit it to an island on the page, and don’t need to buy into the router, etc. that said, I did disable Hotwire to make my life easier.

No, legislation (the GDPR) doesn’t say anything about cookie pop ups. It says that private data (or any kind) can only be used with opt in consent, given freely, with no strings attached, with the ability to be withdrawn, that it will be kept secure, deleted when not needed for the original purpose, etc. All very reasonable stuff. Tracking cookies are affected, but the legislation covers all private data (IP, email address, your location, etc) … And if Browsers agreed on a standard to get and withdraw opt-in consent, it would be compatible with what the legislation requires.

The other day, Grammarly marked a grammar error in my text. I wasn’t too sure about it, so I asked ChatGPT (4o) to explain it. It agreed with Grammarly. I wasn’t convinced and didn’t understand ChatGPTs justification, so I asked again but using the more advanced o1 model… this time ChatGPT said Grammarly was wrong.

… ChatGPT is good at improving grammar, but it doesn’t “understand” what it’s doing (by design), and doesn’t have a complete and consistent ruleset, which is what you want in a grammar checker. Also, grammar and style rules change with time, and you want to have good and precise control of what rules you’re applying.

I always thought they didn’t want people keeping it wired because Apple always made an effort to minimize cables around their hardware…

…But then I read a good additional reason, which is that the mouse movement during use would quickly deteriorate the socket and maybe the cable, because they’re not designed for that kind of workload.

I guess they could have created a new type of connector… but then a non standard plug would have other negative consequences (higher cost, having to stock and sell replacements, etc.)

Governments sometimes work around limitations by using private third parties that aren’t bound to them. e.g. if they had to pay to use httpd, they would just start paying a commercial hosting company that exists solely to provide http services to that government.

The problem with “non commercial” exceptions in FOSS licenses is that there’s no good definition of “non commercial”. Interpretations sometimes includes “anything that involves money / payments” even if that’s just distribution costs, someone’s salary, etc. And even if there’s no money, someone could be profiting indirectly.

I work for a non profit that creates FOSS and we were explicitly prevented from using something published as CC-BY-SA-NC (by the author) because our completely “free to access” “not for profit” project was being developed by employees working for money (paid for by a private foundation).

So what’s “non commercial”? Someone at home by themselves? What happens if they amass online followers and then monetize them somehow? They lose the license retroactively then? Was Linux non commercial when it began? (It should have been) Is it still non commercial? (Many would argue it isn’t).

I agree, but would like for a way to pay for an article, or a single day, week, or month of access. Just like I could buy a single one-off issue of a publication a couple of times before starting a long term relationship with it. Not all publications support this, and some like the NY Times require chatting with a representative to cancel the subscription. I see a lot of talk about physical media around film and music, but not being able to buy single issues of any magazine or newspaper anonymously when the circumstances call for it, is a great loss for public discourse.

Same. I get really obvious phishing emails on the “priority” part of my inbox at least once a month (although usually it’s on a burst of 3-4 on close proximity).

With JetBrains IDEs (e.g. Webstorm) it’s posible to point the IDE to a central installation of ESlint (independent from the project you’re working on). I use that for smaller projects where I don’t want to include a full installation of ESLint within the list of dependencies.