They don’t make the GPUs in their own fabs, it’s still TSMC.

Ubuntu was a fantastic distribution to start early on. Especially in the pre-10.x days there weren’t many beginner friendly ones. Your alternatives were Debian with very outdated software, SuSE which was kind of OK, Fedora which was also quite unstable and lacking packages (remember hunting RPMs on the old RPMfusion?) or Ubuntu. At some point I’d outgrown Ubuntu and moved on to greener pastures. Nowadays I’m not sure I’d be recommending Ubuntu to new users, Fedora is quite good and without all the snap store shenanigans. Even Debian installation experience is not too bad and it’s not lacking too much in software.

Unfortunately what’s going to happen in reality is that any non-standard ad consumption (including non consumption) will be flagged as fraudulent. “We cannot verify your activity, please disable your add-ons to continue”.

It literally lists countering ad-blocking as a use case.

Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they’re human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.

I run a small server for my family on a cheap VPS. We’ve been using it for about 5 years now and it’s chugging along. It’s simpler and lighter than Matrix (at least from the server’s point of view) but the user facing side could use some polish. It’s perfectly fine for one to one chat. I wish it was more popular for group chatting.

Here’s a list of good servers if you want to try it out. You will also need a client. Check one with E2E suppo ort (called OMEMO in XMPP).

While I’m not opposed to paying for YouTube (it is a service after all) the only way to do so would be by being logged in to YouTube with whatever black box algorithmic tracking and curation that entails. There is no “proper” way to anonymously access YouTube without ads.

Early on when Google wasn’t shit and Facebook was just coming out of the startup phase both of them had chat platforms based on XMPP (the OG federating protocol). For a few glorious moments everyone could chat with anyone through the corresponding XMPP endpoints. At some point they decided they can’t be arsed anymore and shut off federation on their servers. They captured enough market and siloed their users.

There’s 1 million % this will happen again. It’s textbook EEE.

Well done on Mastodon admins for not cooperating with Facebook’s strong arming tactics. Facebook’s server will evolve into another walled garden, Mastodon federating with them will only help them.

Fuck them

Yes, I feel “social media” (or whatever this engagement driven, algorithmically fed hellscape can be called) is driving up the responses. We know, by now, how adversely social media affect the mental well-being of children, being bombarded all the time by the fantastic lives of plastic “influencers”. Add to that cyber-bullying 24/7 which is now common, peer pressure for “green and blue bubbles” and a ton of other nonsense you can probably understand how people in a age bracket that there’s chance of being parents might feel negatively about today’s technological status quo.

You search for anything slightly niche, everything past page one is just rubbish. It’s especially jarring when searching for something programming related and 80% of the results are auto-generated stuff scraped from Stack overflow. It reminds me of Amazon where you search for a product and almost all results are chinese-made clones of what you are looking with randomly generated names.

Don’t sure if it’s exactly hidden but for me Dungeons III (and 2) has been unexpectedly fun. It takes everything that made Dungeon Keeper and it takes a level higher. Pretty fun game.

There are enough power hungry people ready to jump in the first opportunity they get to moderate

Baldur’s Gate 3 that’s (finally) coming out of EA in Auguste.