thrdbndndn

Better analogy would be that even though the coffee machine is still worse, we choose it because it's more convenient (at least I think that's the case).

I love this kind of stuff (ASCII art, if you will), but it just breaks down too easily as soon as Unicode characters (mainly CJK, as I'm Chinese) and fonts are involved.

For example, on your website, any chart or plot involving horizontal arrows breaks down because the assigned font-family (`ui-monospace, SFMono-Regular, Menlo, Consolas, monospace`, which ends up as Consolas on my machine) has no such glyph. Thus, it falls back to Segoe UI Symbol, which does not have the same fixed width (or is not fixed-width at all) as other characters: https://i.imgur.com/d2DPGHE.png

I never really use AI via API that much, so I'm surprised reading 'merely' 6000 emails will cost $500?!

Chinese people have been developing similar obfuscation protocols and playing a cat-and-mouse game for years, and most of them are "open source" (in quotes because lots of them have to be somewhat hidden because the Chinese gov threatens the devs).

Props to Mullvad, but it's not like they're unique in this regard.

This happens more often than you would think.

During COVID, lots of live shows (concerts, etc.) in Japan moved to streaming (and most of them stuck, so thanks to that, lots of large concerts today have real-time streaming, which is great for foreign fans).

Out of 10+ platforms, more than half have vulnerabilities that allow you to access the content freely (sometimes including the rehearsals, because they are also streamed internally), and on a handful, you can access the admin panel and, as the author said, stream whatever you want.

Most of them have been patched over the years (some are just the byproduct of them changing the backend/SaaS provider, though), but there remain some major providers where you can get content for free.

The article said Kanagawa so not Tokyo. Well, close enough.

This has to be trolling, right?

I find it hard to believe that anyone, no matter how dense, could come to this conclusion after this whole saga.

How do you allow scripts for tools installed globally?

Sometimes it's not very clear what I really want when typing.

Also, Google Search's AI answer doesn't prevent the actual search results from still showing below; so if I later realize I need those (search results) instead, they're already there.

Also, I use browsers all the time, so typing things into the location bar is quicker than deliberately opening the Gemini app/website or whatever.

I value one fewer click/action a lot when such an action will be performed hundreds of times a day.

Very good write up but I lost it a little at the end. Could someone clarify for me?

The author said:

You cannot just use the shortcut trick to install the evil extension directly because of new publisher trust system;

You can bypass this by using local workspace extensions which has no publisher screening, but CSP blocks it;

The solution seems to be that installing a local workspace extension which binds a shortcut of 'install extension without checking publisher'.

So I assume it means:

1. you need two extensions, 1st one is local and only for the keybinding, and 2nd one is the 'real' evil one and it doesn't need to (actually can't, because of CSP) be local anymore?

2. the CSP only prevents the JS in local extension but nothing about its package.json (or the ability to add shortcuts), right?

I don't want either, if I'm indeed "searching." But I find that often times I am indeed just looking for a quick answer, and Gemini/Google's "new" search does it fine.

It's one of the few AI features, despite still being shoved in my face, that I actually find useful.

With that said, the worst thing is how search results have degraded significantly since the AI years, even before they added the actual "AI mode."

Google now (and quite a few search features on other services, e.g., Twitter) often returns results that have ZERO relationship to the search keywords I gave -- like an entirely different person when searching for a person's name, which I think should never happen and did not happen when search was still based on a "rigid" algorithm of indexed content. So, I can only assume it's because they have some AI thingy along the process.

I lost my 10 years old account this way after being flagged about 2-3 times due to travel.

My account really isn't that important but still makes my blood boil at the time.

In the video, some debris seemed to fly away from the explosion in a wavy path (top left). I thought things only moved like that in video games. What causes that kind of movement?

Good article, but I'd like to ask about two small technical details (I've used Bambu before, but I'm not very familiar with the 3D printing ecosystem).

1. OrcaSlicer: so it's a fork of Bambu's official client, Bambu Studio - but it apparently still goes through Bambu's servers for printing? How exactly does that work? Does it also "impersonate" the User-Agent, and Bambu was okay with that?

2. OrcaSlicer-bambulab: if the goal of this fork-of-a-fork is to bypass Bambu's cloud servers, why would it still need to "impersonate" the UA and communicate with Bambu's servers (as Bambu claimed)? Wouldn't the whole point be to avoid doing that in the first place?

I keep seeing people mention OpenRouter.

Does it effectively bypass regional restrictions for you, so you can use something like the Claude API from unsupported regions such as Hong Kong, or does it still enforce the official providers' geo-restrictions?

Well TBF, the original Notepad++ isn't too good in this regard either.

Whenever I opened a N++ window in a remote desktop session and leave it open, and then use the same computer in-person, the whole UI of that window becomes a blurry mess and the boundary of the window is off (as in, if you maximize the window, moving the cursor to the top-right will actually not land on X.), which I assume it because of changing resolution/scaling between remote and in-person use.

I failed to find the "86%" figure. The total energy mix shows "66% renewable".

I've probably said this a bunch of times already, but based on my past experience, any analysis built on month-to-month changes in the Steam Hardware Survey should be taken with a very large grain of salt, if not considered outright useless for any serious conclusions.

The clue is already in the article itself. The author notes that "part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers." If you actually think about what that implies, it raises more questions than answers. A 31.85% monthly drop is obviously not organic, so yes, it makes sense to call it a "correction." But then why was the previous month's data so far off in the first place? Is there something fundamentally flawed in the survey methodology, like sampling bias, non-uniform distribution, regional skew, or something else?

And if this kind of correction happens this month, what's stopping it from happening in previous months? The reality is: it does happen all the time. You can usually spot at least one clearly unrealistic data point in almost every release.

At that point, it's hard to argue there's any real value in trying to analyze these results in a rigorous way.

I always thought "opt-in" (not "opt in") meant something you have to actively choose to enable; otherwise, it stays off. So calling something "opt-in by default" sounds like a misnomer to me.

But English is not my first language so please correct me if I'm wrong.

The CSS doesn't even load here:

https://trustcompliance.xyz/_next/static/chunks/17psh0.nytnh...: 404 Not Found

Just curious: why your otherwise neatly formatted table uses a different format for the last row?

Majority of laptops works "pretty well out of the box".

Something related to this article, but not related to AI:

As someone who loves coding pet projects but is not a software engineer by profession, I find the paradigm of maintaining all these config files and environment variables exhausting, and there seem to be more and more of them for any non-trivial projects.

Not only do I find it hard to remember which is which or to locate any specific setting, their mechanisms often feel mysterious too: I often have to manually test them to see if they actually work or how exactly. This is not the case for actual code, where I can understand the logic just by reading it, since it has a clearer flow.

And I just can’t make myself blindly copy other people's config/env files without knowing what each switch is doing. This makes building projects, and especially copying or imitating other people's projects, a frustrating experience.

How do you deal with this better, my fellow professionals?

I'm not comparing it to US anything, I'm comparing it to other cost components like raw materials and parts, whose prices are often global.

The point is that transportation within China isn't a dominant factor in industrial cost or efficiency. So the idea that major manufacturing cities are laid out like giant assembly lines isn't nearly as important as OP suggests.

China still has many advantages over the US in manufacturing. I just don't think this is a major one, even if there's a grain of truth to it.

Sorry, but this sounds more like a myth, or at least heavily exaggerated. Similar to how Japan often gets romanticized.

Organizing the entire chain geographically at the scale you described (inter-city) doesn't bring huge cost advantages by itself. In China labor has historically been cheap, so the transport cost between regions was never the dominant factor anyway.

Most industrial clusters in China formed organically over time just like the rest of the world. Aside from some exceptions like mining, there isn't some master plan laying out entire cities as linear supply chains to the ocean It's not SimCity.

One thing you're right about is that there is less bureaucratic friction or 'lawyers' in the way when it comes to economic development. For the former, it's because economic growth is THE metric for the government, especially at the local level, so they do whatever it takes to make it happen. For the latter, it's because… well, in China no one sues the government, period. I'm not sure it's a good thing.

Disclaimer: I'm Chinese living in China.

To me, a project's "hype-ness" is the ratio of how much attention it gets over how useful it actually is to users.

As a browser, Ladybird usefulness is currently quite limited for obvious reasons. This is not meant to dismiss its achievements, nor to overlook the fact that building a truly useful browser for everyday users is something few open source teams can accomplish without the backing of a billion dollar company. Still, in its present state, its practical utility remains limited.

I'd argue Ladybird itself is a "hype" project.

This URL just return empty content (while being http 200) for me.

I don't get how it works.

Encoding: Files are chunked, encoded with fountain codes, and embedded into video frames

Wouldn't YouTube just compress/re-encode your video and ruin your data (assuming you want bit-by-bit accurate recovery)?

If you have some redundancy to counter this, wouldn't it be super inefficient?

(Admittedly, I've never heard of "fountain codes", which is probably crucial to understanding how it works.)

I'm not well-versed in the terms, so I'm not sure which part is the so-called "audio aliasing."

To me, the original has very obvious background noise which the enhanced version removes. But as the author has said, the enhanced version sounds "muffled" (and, IMHO, not just a little), which probably makes most people (including me) feel it sounds worse.

Also, shouldn't most of music be included in the game's official OST? I assume that version would not be limited by the game media's technical limitation at the time and should represent the artistically intended version best.

Edit: apparently in this very case, "Metroid: Zero Mission" doesn't seem to have any official OST release. Unfortunate.