recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?
There is a mountain of anecdotal evidence, and a small mound of scientific research, suggesting that psychedelics can improve creativity even in the long term. Ask your doctor if LSD or psilocybin might help with your imagination deficit.
Ebooks.com has a ton of DRM-free ebooks. They have a whole DRM-free section, plus a search filter, and they clearly display all available formats before purchase. That’s my first stop for ebooks.
This is the clearest sign to me that Apple has jumped the shark.
Apple has a long history of waiting until they could do something right rather than rushing to market with some fad. And here they are tripping over themselves to ship something that is obviously half-baked (at best). There’s no vision, there’s no attention to detail, there’s no careful UX design. It’s just “oh shit we need AI right?”
Also interested in this. The ideal solution would stream to a private server for storage in real-time, with access control so you can grant trusted individuals access.
This would allow retention of evidence in a scenario where your phone is seized/destroyed/lost or you are detained, and would give you (and whoever you choose to grant access) the ability to control distribution, unlike a livestream to Twitch or YouTube or whatever.
FOSS projects are often labors of love.
Nobody who isn’t completely deranged loves marketing.
SEO (search engine optimization) has dominated search results for almost as long as search engines have existed. The entire field of SEO is about gaming the system at the expense of users, and often also at the expense of search platforms.
The audience for an author’s gripping life story in every goddamn recipe was never humans, either. That was just for Google’s algorithm.
Slop is not new. It’s just more automated now. There are two new problems for users, though:
Well I’m sorry, but most PDF distillers since the 90s have come with OCR software that can extract text from the images and store it in a way that preserves the layout AND the meaning
The accuracy rate of even the best OCR software is far, far too low for a wide array of potential use cases.
Let’s say I have an archive of a few thousand scientific papers. These are neatly formatted digital documents, not even scanned images (though “scanned images” would be within scope of this task and should not be ignored). Even for that, there’s nothing out there that can produce reliably accurate results. Everything requires painstaking validation and correction if you really care about accuracy.
Even ArXiv can’t do a perfect job of this. They launched their “beta” HTML converter a couple years ago. Improving accuracy and reliability is an ongoing challenge. And that’s with the help or LaTeX source material! It would naturally be much, much harder if they had to rely solely on the PDFs generated from that LaTeX. See: https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessible_HTML.html
As for solving this problem with “AI”…uh…well, it’s not like “OCR” and “AI” are mutually exclusive terms. OCR tools have been using neural networks for a very long time already, it just wasn’t a buzzword back then so nobody called it “AI”. However, in the current landscape of “AI” in 2025, “accuracy” is usually just a happy accident. It doesn’t need to be that way, and I’m sure the folks behind commercial and open-source OCR tools are hard at work implementing new technology in a way that Doesn’t Suck.
I’ve played around with various VL models and they still seem to be in the “proof of concept” phase.
I’ve been using cryptpad.fr (the “flagship instance” of CryptPad) for years. It’s…fine. Really, it’s fine. I’m not thrilled with the experience, but it is functional and I’m not aware of any viable alternatives that are end-to-end encrypted.
It’s based on OnlyOffice, which is basically a heavyweight web-first Microsoft Office clone. Set your expectations accordingly.
No mobile apps, and the web UI is not optimized for mobile. I mean, it works, but does using the desktop MS Office UI on a smartphone sound like fun to you?
Performance is tolerable but if you’re used to Google Sheets, it’s a big downgrade. Some of this is just the necessary overhead involved in an end-to-end encrypted cloud service. Some of it is because, again, this is a heavyweight desktop UI running in a web browser. It’s functional, but it’s not fast and it’s not pretty.
For instance, Mozilla said it may have removed blanket claims that it never sells user data because the legal definition of “sale of data” is now “broad and evolving,” Mozilla’s blog post stated.
Uh huh.
The company pointed to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) as an example of why the language was changed, noting that the CCPA defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”
Yes. That’s what “sale of data” means. Everybody understood that. That’s exactly what we don’t want you to do.
Hmm. According to Wikipedia you are correct, and the original SEQUEL was simply renamed to SQL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History
I’m not sure how much that original SEQUEL/SQL has in common with later publicly-available SQL implementations. I never personally worked with SEQUEL but I was under the impression it was more of a spiritual predecessor to SQL than a direct ancestor. But I trust Wikipedia more than I trust my my memory here, so I guess I was wrong.
Something like that, yes. More info at https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/431329/what-is-the-correct-pronunciation-of-sqlite with links to videos of Richard Hipp (creator of SQLite) pronouncing it.
I actually couldn’t find a section on pronunciation in the official FAQ, though I think it was there in the past. Still, they do use phrases such as “an SQLite database”, indicating that “SQLite” starts with a vowel sound.
SQL is not traditionally pronounced like “sequel”. Sequel was a whole different language.
Official pronunciation for MySQL, SQLite, and PostgreSQL all pronounce each letter.
But “sequel” is probably more common at this point and some of them include it as an alternate pronunciation now.
Yes, his name is Headmaster Gandalf.
DNS over HTTPS. It allows encrypted DNS lookup with a URL, which allows for url-based customizations not possible with traditional DNS lookups (e.g. the server could have /ads or /trackers endpoints so you can choose what to block).
DNS Over TLS (DoT) is similar, but it doesn’t use URLs, just IP addresses like generic DNS. Both are encrypted.
No love for cvs?
The experience of installing and updating GPU drivers can be very different across different distros. Especially if you use secure boot. This was such a pain point for me on Tumbleweed that I just pinned my kernel.
In my experience, this is more a problem if you are fully running your own mail servers, not so much if you are using an established email service. My MX record reflects my email provider, and my outgoing mail goes through their servers. So I’m as trusted as they are, in general. Your mail provider should have instructions on how to set up DNS for verification.
If you’re willing to pay money for it, you can get your own domain for $2-$15 per year, then use it with pretty much any commercial email service. That way you can change email providers without changing your address.
This is my plan going forward. I’m going to suffer the inconvenience of changing my address, but only one more time, not every time I want to change providers.
I don’t see any mention of whether this uses local models or cloud models. I’m not interested in sending anything I care about it into the cloud.
If you like hiking, you might also enjoy indoor rock climbing. It’s more social and fun than a gym and you will have the opportunity to interact with a lot of the same people repeatedly. You might even have some beginners groups in you area to get started. Meetup.com is good for finding groups like that.
Good luck out there!