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space

@space@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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space ,

Having worked on a product that actually did this, it's not as easy as it seems. There are many ways of drawing text on the screen.

GDI is the most common, which is part of the windows API. But some applications do their own rendering (including browsers).

Another difficulty, even if you could tap into every draw call, you would also need a way to determine what is visible on the screen and what is covered by something else.

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Which is just bing with a few extra editorial changes that aren't really transparent.

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Only recently started using searngx. I would love to see more search engines implement their own indexing and ranking, instead of relying on other engines.

But I am aware that making a good search engine is hard. Even with all their flaws, google and Bing still have the best results, which is why most other engines rely on their results.

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I also wanted to mention that DDG doesn't really say what editorial changes they make to the results. I would like to see more transparency.

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One of those tiny low power PCs with OpenSense is a good alternative, but a bit more work. The only downside is that you need a separate switch and wifi access point.

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Losing the internet archive would be such a huge loss... I really hope they have a backup plan in case things go bad legally.

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And it's made of thin stainless steel sheets with sharp corners and edges

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Will valve allow accounts to exist indefinitely? Will they create an expiration policy, like accounts being closed after 100 years

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)

You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)...

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It's quite simple. Garbage in, garbage out. Data they use for training needs to be curated. How to curate the entire internet, I have no clue.

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Having a curated whitelist would definitely be a good idea, but if it only shows information from a limited list of websites, that would make it a terrible search engine incapable of searching most of the web.

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Running AI models isn't that resource intensive. Training the models is the difficult part.

space ,

DuckDuckStop

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Standing still for too long? Go to jail for loitering.

Crossing the street? Go to jail for jaywalking?

Existing next to a cop? Arrested for resisting arrest, straight to jail.

Have any money on you? Money is arrested for looking suspicious.

space ,

Jails are dehumanizing and horrible places. I would rather starve than live in jail.

Not to mention how having a criminal record pretty much destroys any hope of ever getting out of homelessness. Nobody will hire you, nobody will rent to you.

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I would absolutely love a linux smartphone that didn't suck.

space ,

But I don't want back to monke

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And also legacy... If something is already written in assembly and you want to add a feature, you're not going to completely rewrite it.

space ,

I agree, being out of office is the best

space ,

I agree, being out of office is the best

space ,

I am the opposite, I thrive when I work from home. But it's important for me to have a dedicated space for it, not in my bedroom, and free from distractions like wife, kids, pets, and neighbors with drills.

My home setup is 10x better than at the office... I have a great desk with lots of space, big awesome monitors, awesome keyboard and mouse with kvms to make switching to my personal PC easier. My coffee is better than any work coffee machine I ever used. My internet is much faster and more reliable.

I shit you not, at the last company I worked they proxied all web traffic through another country thousands of km away. As expected, it worked like shit and was failing constantly. And you couldn't even access repos like maven central, because they used a proxy autoconfig file with hundreds of rules, which is not supported by any software except browsers.

And there's also the benefits of having a private office, away from noisy coworkers and prying eyes.

space ,

I also left after they ordered us back to the office.

The company (mid sized, a few thousand employees) was stagnant for many years and losing employees faster than employing them because of the bad management. Then they fired all the people (around 50) from a specific location that we were working with, very senior and really great, that i learned a lot from. From a team of 15, we were left 3. Then one of the colleagues got promoted to management, the other left, and I was the only one working on that product.

For context, the company had two very similar products, and wanted to migrate users of one to the other. Instead of providing a technical solution, I suppose they decided to simply make the support customers were paying for really awful, so customers wouldn't renew.

Other than the lack of manpower to maintain the product, infrastructure and also deal with all the customer escalations, it was fine as a workplace... My direct managers understood the situation and made a lot of effort to shield workers from the shitty upper management. I wasn't stressed at all, and just doing my job.

Then at the end of the pandemic, the company got bought by another. And things turned to shit... They fired a lot of people, especially management where they kept only the bootlickers of the new executives. I ended up working on 2 understaffed projects instead of 1 - both the product being replaced, and its replacement. And they made us come back to the office.

So I left.

EA wants to place in-game ads in its full-price AAA games, again (www.techspot.com)

EA has tried this before, with predictable results. In 2020, EA Sports UFC 4 included full-screen ads for the Amazon Prime series The Boys that would appear during 'Replay' moments. These were absent from the game when it launched, with EA introducing the ads about a month later, thereby preventing them from being highlighted in...

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I'm pretty sure their goal is to bring ads in the same form as the mobile games, not as part of the in-game world. If they can do it on mobile, why shouldn't they on pc or consoles?

I think this will be an important thing for gamers to unite against, because if there isn't enough push back, every big studio will do the same.

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And they already do it on mobile. They are just trying to bring ads to the pc and consoles, just like they do on mobile.

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I seriously don't understand how this could be possible. How does the car manage rain water?

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But what if there is heavy rain? Are you supposed to put the car in car wash mode then? Why wouldn't those things be sealed all the time?

Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps (www.404media.co)

Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...

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That's a clever way of getting people to work for them as moderators.

96% of US Hospital Websites Share Visitor Data with Google, Meta, Data Brokers, and Other Third Parties, Study Finds (www.theregister.com)

Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 non-federal acute care hospitals – essentially traditional hospitals with emergency departments – and their findings were that 96 percent of their websites transmitted user data to third parties....

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The bad part is that even if you block everything on the client side with ad/tracker blocking extensions, there's nothing stopping them from collecting data on the server side.

space ,

Typically trackers are implemented client side because it's more convenient. It's closer to the user, it can collect more data, and there is only one programming language it needs to support, Javascript.

But the disadvantage is that it can be blocked by the users. Data collection and user tracking can also be done on the server side. There are many analytics packages that support it, including Google Analytics. This is much easier to hide from the users. Here is an article I found on the topic.

It's not hacking because the website developers integrate it willingly.

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I was referring to the website. This article goes in a lot more detail about how it works.

I'm pretty sure they are consulting lawyers to see how much data they can sell to third parties without breaking the law.

space ,

Quite simple actually. The supplier knows how much water it puts in the pipes, and consumers have meters that measure how much water they take out of the pipes.

Water is water... It doesn't matter if you're not getting the exact same water molecules put in by your supplier.

Think of it like this... You have a jug of water. The supplier puts in a glass of water, and you (the consumer) take out one glass of water. The quantity of water in the jug stays the same, but you pay the supplier for how much water you took out.

It works the same way with electricity.

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Can be solved by putting a certain quality requirement for putting water into the pipes. Suppliers can compete on price.

It's not realistic to have multiple pipe systems covering the same area. Digging pipes is very expensive. Digging multiple networks of pipes is insane. This solution is the best compromise to have multiple suppliers serve in the same area.

space ,

That would destroy the entire grid and a lot of equipment. It's why texas had rolling blackouts a few winters ago, it's a fine balance between supply and demand to maintain stable voltage and frequency. Failure to do so can result in a LOT of damage. If you don't have enough supply, you have to reduce demand.

space , (edited )

The cost of the parts necessary for the network connectivity is nothing in comparison to the money all that data brings. That's probably why it's happening everywhere.

space , (edited )

The problem is that there are no good alternatives. I don't like Apple and I don't want to support them. The Android world is terrible, all devices are locked down and sold by awful companies, or if they aren't, they are probably made by non-reputable Chinese manufacturers.

The only option is to buy a mini PC (like a NUC, or similar) or reuse some older/second hand PC/laptop, and install your own software.

It's not convenient, but the only way you're not going to get burned. And the software is rough, I personally don't like Kodi... I just use it like a computer with a wireless keyboard with integrated trackpad.

space ,

I'm guilty of doing this (just reading the headlines) as well. I usually do it for these reasons:

  • I don't care enough to want to read more. For example, news about US politics. I don't live in the US. I feel that reading the headlines is enough to keep me informed about what's happening, but I really don't care any more than that.

  • The details aren't valuable to me. For example, the Apple anti-trust lawsuit... Is it important? Yes. I'm already well aware of the horrible anticonsumer practices of Apple. But do I need to know all the particular details about the lawsuit? Not really. In fact, the only thing that matters is the final verdict, which hasn't happened yet.

  • I care, but I already know enough details.

  • I don't feel like the article would bring a lot of value, especially if the title is click-baity. I've encountered too many articles that are void of content, just the title repeated in 10x more words.

I don't like visiting news sites because, in addition to all of them being obnoxious and ad riddled, I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time reading long articles that could be rewritten as 3 bullet points. On platforms like lemmy, users will highlight the important bits in the comments which saves a lot of time.

space ,

A good start would be to require that companies put an expiration date on the products they sell, and until that date they are legally required to support the product. Also, it should be put into law that companies cannot remove features, services or content in a product after it was already sold until the expiration date.

space ,

Not OP, but there is value in having competition. DDG is just a bing front-end. The big search engines have a major problem with the quality of results going down, as the internet is SEOd to death. The companies behind these engines don't seem to be very eager to fix it, they are just hoping to replace them with AI. We've also seen how these engines have been turned into ad platforms, which changes the incentives... Instead of ranking quality, they are ranking who pays more.

Taking a different approach to ranking results that isn't ad driven, that can punish AI generated content and low quantity results would bring a huge value.

Linux distro for selfhosting server

So I have been running a fair amount of selfhosted services over the last decade or so. I have always been running this on a Ubuntu LTS distribution running on a intel NUC machine. Most, if not all of my services run in a docker container, and using a docker compose file that brings everything up. The server is headless. I...

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If you don't want to be on the bleeding edge and want a distro with longer support, CentOS Stream isn't bad. Sure, there was some controversy surrounding it, when Red Hat killed the old CentOS. But ignoring that, the distro itself is pretty good and stable.

space ,

There are a lot of things people do while driving that are dangerous but very common. Things like driving with the high beam, speeding, tailgating, using a phone while driving etc.

The problem is that enforcing the rules is hard. You would either need a large percentage of the population to be police officers, or to put traffic cameras on every street.

space ,

You could say the same thing about the US, it's been under european occupation for 250 years.

Most jews living in Israel were born there. Like it or not, that is their home now. They can't go back to their country because they don't have another one.

What can be changed is only what they do from now on. The right thing is to make peace and make ammends with the Palestinian people. The wrong thing to do is the genocide they are doing right now.

space ,

The post argues how jews occupied the land and are treating Palestinians poorly and the proposed solution is to 'make every country safe for jews' and 'stop creating an ethnostate'. The past is past, you can't undo all the things that already happened. The "ethnostate" already exists. Other countries stopping from being antisemitic won't solve anything now. So what I understand is being proposed, between the lines, is for other countries to stop being antisemitic, so the Israelis can go to those other countries instead of their own and give the land back.

space ,

You can say that about pretty much any nation on earth. We humans have been migrating for as long as we've existed.

But after how long does one become 'native'? Most ties to the original country pretty much disappear after 2-3 generations.

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Let's be real, they did it because they didn't want people training AI models without paying them. They didn't give a shit about 3rd party apps.

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Fuck up #1: no backups

Fuck up #2: using SD cards for data storage. SD cards and USB drives are ephemeral storage devices, not to be relied on. Most of the time they use file systems like FAT32 which are far less safe than NTFS or ext4. Use reliable storage media, like hard drives.

Fuck up #3: no backups.

space ,

PhotoRec and TestDisk are probably the best, but they don't recover file structure.

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Much better. SSDs and HDDs do monitor the health of the drives (and you can see many parameters through SMART), while pen drives and SD cards don't.

Of course, they have their limits which is why raid exists. File systems like ZFS are built on the premise that drives are unreliable. It's up to you if you want that redundancy. The most important thing to not lose data is to have backups. Ideally at least 3 copies, 1 off site (e.g. on a cloud, or on a disk at some place other than your home).

space ,

Because Amazon is shitty with the sellers, the good ones can't make profit on the platform. All that's left is the Chinese garbage sold at huge margins, where the seller doesn't care if it gets returned.

space ,

If the purpose is to provide alternative recommendation feeds, it's not useless. Ever had that feeling when you go to the yt homepage and you don't see anything you want to watch?

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