Amikke @Amikke@qoto.org

Mozilla neglecting its core product for years and losing marketshare while the suits that run it flail around wildly feels really true to its Netscape heritage.

A quick reminder from @eff :

People are angry because they care about privacy, not because privacy is dead.

The World Wide Web is Now Encrypted
Cell Phone Location Data Now Requires a Warrant
Privacy Options Are So Much Better Today
We Are Winning The Privacy War, Not Losing It

Don’t give in to privacy nihilism. Instead, share and celebrate the ways we’re winning!

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/02/privacy-isnt-dead-far-it

no centralised social network could ever produce "the taliban deleted my account". that's a mastodon special.

"Why is Google's AI better at writing emails?"

Gosh golly, I wonder if Google has a dataset of emails that people actually send...

Congrats to @collabora for bringing DRM-CI to life!

We badly need a cross-driver CI solution that isn't mailing-lists-based and largely opaque to developers. We need CI that is integrated in the development workflow and that provide guarantees about code quality, not just a service that can be ignored by chance or malice.

It isn't perfect though as it inherits testing methodologies better suited for userspace testing, but kernelCI is no better in this regard ;)

https://floss.social/@collabora/111897664377321026

#bluesky devs trying to convince people who thought picking a server on mastodon was too hard, to use regex

🇬🇧Consumer-hostile #Whatsapp messenger will soon be interoperable - we #Pirates ensured this via the #DMA. In the coming months, we will be able to switch to better and open messenger services such as Matrix and continue to communicate with our consenting Whatsapp contacts securely and end-to-end encrypted across platforms using the Signal protocol. Wired reports: https://www.wired.com/story/whatsapp-interoperability-messaging/

Facebook Messenger will also become interoperable, possibly iMessage too.
Anonymous use of the participating alternative messenger services remains possible, and Whatsapp only receives data on messages sent across platforms.

Even if Threema and Signal want to stay on the sidelines at first, I am confident that more and more messenger services will join in over time, because interoperability is the future and brings real competition and real freedom of choice!

Feb/8/2024: Google announces Gemini Advanced

Feb/8/2028: Google announces the retirement of Gemini Advanced with one month's notice, as all other AI services are dead or Google found that the ad-supported AI model works better.

Killed by Google adds Gemini Advanced to its webpage.

The end.

A few times I have told the anecdote that the singly most baffling thing I ever saw in a code review — not the most insecure, just the most “how could a real programmer have written this? how could this ever make sense?” thing — was simply a C++ variable “number_of_trucks” … declared as float. Unambiguously referring to real physical trucks in a fleet.

Reader, it’s been over ten years and I am blowing the gods damn whistle. I had edited that story to protect the guilty: the variable was named number_of_planes. It was shipped by a company whose name begins with “B” and rhymes with “GOING out of business.”

The stylish, unknown & extremely rare SEGA AI COMPUTER (1986) promised natural language processing and "artificial intelligence" via its Prolog interpreter.

We're making available today, for the first time ever: system roms, game cards, tapes recordings, scans, photos, MAME driver & more: https://smspower.org/SegaAI