Gazoche

Say what you want about Mozilla's propensity to shove useless features into Firefox, but I've been loving some of the recent addition to tabs management. Split-view tabs, vertical tabs, tab groups and tab pinning have made my work so much easier.

I know how to disable it. I should not have to.

The setting is (intentionally) confusing too: "download and keep" implies that photos always have to transit via iCloud first, and the default is ambiguously named "optimise storage" rather than something more explicit like "move photos to iCloud".

Not that it's any excuse, but Apple does something similar by saving your photos to iCloud and deleting them from your local storage without telling you.

I have seen the following scenario play out twice already:

- The free iCloud tier runs out of storage because of the photo backups

- Apple spams the user with warning notifications and emails and incentives to upgrade

- User sees that nonsense and decides they don't really need iCloud backups (sometimes they didn't even know it was on) and turn it off

- But oops, turns out iOS had "helpfully" removed the original photos from the local device to "save space", and now the photos are inaccessible

- User tries to turn iCloud back on to access their photos but iOS now refuses to do it because the account is out of storage space (but don't worry, you can still upgrade to a paid plan!)

- The photos are now held hostage by Apple

You can access the photos from the iCloud website, but the download interface is clunky because it is not made for mass exports. And in this age of smartphones and apps, how many people know this is even an option? When this happened to an elderly family member of mine, it was only sheer luck that he had his iCloud password written down somewhere and I was able to rescue his photos from Apple's jaws.

We’re already past that point, Win 11 cannot be installed without an MS account (at least not without some cmdline trickery)

I have never read an ending that was as sad, happy, clever and beautiful as the ending to Rise of Endymion. To this day it's one of the very few books that made me shed a tear.

Now, over decade later, I am in the middle of re-reading every book in the Cantos series back to back (this time in their original language), and still loving them.

Rest in peace Mr Simmons. You had the words of a poet and the mind of a dreamer.

Oh goddamn. We keep Messenger around in my family because one family member does not use smartphones (and Whatsapp requires one to use the web interface).

This is obviously an attempt to get more traffic to facebook.com, but the chat UI there is just so much worse.

Same here. Until recently I would get maybe 1-2 spams a month, and I just got 30 in the span of a few days.

They’re the very obvious, very obnoxious kind of spam, and Gmail still correctly sends them to the junk bin, so I wonder if they were shadowbanned before and Google simply decided to make the process more explicit (which I don’t hate on principle).

Either that or my address was scrapped from somewhere by a spam bot and the timing is coincidental.

Sure, but what confidence do you have that what the "dumb" LLM says is worth any salt ? It's no different than aggregating the results of a Reddit search, or perhaps even worse because LLMs lack the intent or common sense filter of a human. It could be combining two contradicting sources in a way that only makes sense statistically, or regurgitate joke answers without understanding context (the infamous "you should eat at least one small rock per day").

Evangelists keep insisting that healthcare is one of the things that AI will revolutionize in the coming years, but I just don't get it. To me it's not even clear what they mean by "AI" in this context (and I'm not convinced it's clear to them either).

If they mean "machine learning", then sure there are application in cancer detection and the like, but development there has been moving at a steady pace for decades and has nothing to do with the current hype wave of GenAI, so there's no reason to assume it's suddenly going to go exponential. I used to work in that field and I'm confident it's not going to change overnight: progress there is slow not because of the models, but because data is sparse and noisy, labels are even sparser and noisier, deployment procedures are rigid and legal compliance is a nightmare.

If they mean "generative AI", then how is that supposed to work exactly? Asking LLMs for medical diagnosis is no better than asking "the Internet at large". They only return the most statistically likely output given their training corpus (that corpus being the Internet as a whole), so it's more likely your diagnosis will be based on a random Reddit comment that the LLMs has ingested somewhere, than an actual medical paper.

The only plausible applications I can think of are tasks such as summarizing papers, acting as augmented search engines for datasets and papers, or maybe automating some menial administrative tasks. Useful, for sure, but not revolutionary.

But the thing with debt is that it has to be paid eventually.

> they don't feel intelligence but rather an attempt at mimicking it

Because that's exactly what they are. An LLM is just a big optimization function with the objective "return the most probabilistically plausible sequence of words in a given context".

There is no higher thinking. They were literally built as a mimicry of intelligence.

Systemd: “A stop job is running for User Manager for UID 1000 (1s / 2min)”

I should get one of those Ruuvi Tag...I use a similar cheap Xiaomi sensor currently but the battery doesn't last anywhere as long (probably because it has an LCD screen and isn't made to broadcast via BLE continuously).