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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah, the article is right, but for all the wrong reasons. China is taking the lead globally less because of anything it’s doing but more because of what everyone else is. In many ways the US was doomed from the moment one of our two political parties decided its future was best served by appealing to the ignorant and uneducated.

    The GOP has spent decades attacking our education system and painting experts and the educated as the enemy all because they had the temerity to say the emperor had no clothes and point out the many ways in which conservative dogma fails. China got incredibly lucky to have just the right economy and connections in the 80s to become everybody’s outsourced manufacturing hub and has further benefited by the US attacking its own educational and research institutions.

    China hasn’t so much sprinted past the US as they have maintained their steady pace while the US shot itself in the head because the right hand wanted to be the one in charge of everything.

    Trump and the MAGA idiots are just the natural progression of the policies the GOP embraced starting all the way back with Nixon and his southern strategy and accelerated by Reagan and his economic policies.

    It turns out it’s hard to be a leader in a technological society when you put the dumbest people you can find in charge of things.



  • Microsoft’s requirements for Windows 11 include a 1GHz or faster CPU with at least two cores, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage,

    All of this is no problem and essentially any computer manufactured in the last couple decades can meet these requirements. They’re effectively irrelevant for this discussion.

    Secure Boot capability, and TPM 2.0 compatibility.

    This is the problem right here. Pretty much every last computer you hear about that isn’t compatible it’s one or both of these, almost always the TPM 2.0 module.

    That of course is if the reason you aren’t “upgrading” is because the hardware isn’t supported. For a great many of us our hardware is supported, we just don’t want all the bullshit anti-features Microsoft has crammed into Windows 11. Windows 10 was already bad enough with it’s constant telemetry spyware, that annoying Cortana garbage shoehorned in anywhere they could manage, the absolute atrocity that they turned the start menu search function into, and the annoying Teams and OneDrive integrations that randomly reinstalled and re-enabled themselves after updates.

    Then MS went and had to cram in even more spyware by way of their horrible copilot garbage. All for what? What are we getting with 11 that’s better than 10? What feature justifies that upgrade? Nothing, that’s the answer. There’s no reason at all that 11 needed to be made.


  • In my experience dealing with my deeply Republican parents it’s something like:

    • Chinese/China -> Communism
    • Socialism/Socialist -> Communism
    • Government Program -> Communism
    • Anything that helps people who aren’t rich -> Communism and/or Woke
    • Anything the Democrats do -> Communism and/or Woke
    • Any company that does something that isn’t the most evil/amoral thing it could possibly have done (rarely happens) -> Communism and/or Woke

  • Ah, I see the confusion. Originally you mentioned two Proton services, password manager and email provider. The person who replied to you suggested two alternative password managers (one commercial, the other one FOSS). You then replied saying without a specific email feature it would be pointless, which would be fair for an alternative email provider but doesn’t apply in this case.




  • Because they need a constant stream of data to feed the models. If people had to opt in then they’d be less likely to do so and the models would starve and become less accurate and therefore less valuable to sell. Remember the trained model is the valuable piece of the entire thing, that’s what companies pay money to gain access to. There’s no point in sitting on all that user data if they can’t turn it into a marketable product by feeding it into a model.



  • It should be pointed out that modern LCDs use local dimming zones to only light up certain parts of the display, although that only really helps if large swaths of the image are solid black. LCDs have come a long way from the old days when they were side or backlit by CCFLs. So even LCDs might draw slightly less power for light-on-dark, although you’d probably get even more benefit by just turning down the displays brightness regardless of the color scheme.


  • You’re being too literal with the term copyright. Fundamentally what copyright has always been about is preventing someone else using your work for their own gain without your permission. In that respect yes, copyright is critical in the digital age. The problem is that it’s a compromise. It balances the rights of someone who has “purchased” a copyrighted work with the rights of the creator.

    Generally the balance that has been struck is that as a purchaser you have the right to do anything that you want with a work except to sell a duplicate of that work. You can sell the work, so long as you no longer retain a copy of it yourself. In practice this means transferring rather than copying. How exactly that’s accomplished gets into the weeds a bit if you start splitting hairs, but what’s important here is the spirit of the thing, nobody is going to care if technically you both have a copy for some short period of time in the middle of the transfer process.

    As for “copy protection” aka DRM that is and always has been complete bullshit because it is a fundamentally intractable problem. There’s exactly one way to enforce copyright and that’s the legal system, anything else is doomed to failure.

    We also desperately need to prevent companies from using that monopoly to prevent older works from being available by having the copyright and not publishing the work

    This is solved by limiting copyright to a short duration after which the work enters the public domain. If a company wants to squander a copyright by sitting on it for the limited time they have it that’s fine but they’re only hurting themselves. The only reason this is an issue now is because of the ridiculous century long copyright terms we currently have. If copyright was reduced to a decade you would never see this happening anymore. That said a safeguard should also be in place to prevent copyright being used as a censorship weapon by the wealthy. I think a “use it or lose it” clause that immediately enters a work into the public domain if it’s not available for some period of time (maybe a couple years) would nip any potential issues there in the bud.




  • Well AMD just blatantly copied Nvidia’s naming scheme for their new GPUs so maybe they’ll copy Intel for their CPUs. I mean, they kind of already did, since the Ryzen 9 is basically i9, and the Ryzen 7 is basically i7 etc. It’s mostly AMDs mobile CPUs that have horrendous names, but Intel really isn’t much better in that department.