Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
OpenStreetMap is a 2D map with limited 3D features, not a streetview alternative. For crowdsourced street view there are services like Mapillary (now owned by Meta) and Panoramax, both of which are cleared for use in mapping in OSM (and in case of Panoramax which is self-hostable, often run by a local OSM community).
Comment · 3 months ago
> South Korea has some notorious law around data residency

if you're talking about the export restrictions of map data, that only applies to official, government-managed geodata. OSM explicitly doesn't rely on any other maps, so the law doesn't apply.

Comment · 4 months ago
> I am saying that the sound at the intersection of “s” column and “i” row is “shi”.

That is exactly the problem. Japanese doesn't distinguish between 'shi' and 'si', so all you're really gaining by pointing that out is learning how to correctly romanize Japanese, in a single system. Instead of learning the language you're learning how to represent the language in a foreign way.

The rule 0 of learning a language is to get rid of the crutches as soon as possible. Use their native writing system (or if they're one of the latin alphabet users, use their pronunciation rule), learn words of the target language using said language, and learn how to formulate concepts with the language rather than translating it from what you already know. Crutches should only be used to get to this point and no more. If you do that, details like 'si' and 'shi' are not even worth mentioning. Romanization methods have their own goals, and rarely is it about facilitating language learning.

Comment · 4 months ago
ATProto is good at what it was originally designed for: decentralizing Twitter. It allows a gradual introduction to the network and ensuring you have control over it at the same time.

When a user decides to jump ship from mastodon.social run by Mastodon gGmbH to another server, they are using a similar but different service. It has different moderators, different emotes, different themes, different federation list, etc. They all have a different flavour, and, for better or worse, they come in a single package.

When a user decides to jump ship from bsky.social run by Bluesky Social, PBC, first of all... what does that even mean? Do you want an alternative storage (PDS) for your data that will still be read by Bluesky the app and Bluesky the relay? Do you want a different "service" (what @ calls AppView) which is then not Bluesky? Do you want a different handle other than @[username].bsky.social? If that's the case, you don't even need to faff around with alternative PDSes or AppViews, you can just slap your domain on it!

Mastodon invites users to federate by giving it a character. Bluesky slices and dices it to a point where the only reason you would bother considering decentralisation is for ideological reasons. And to that point, Bluesky has consistently prioritised building their own service up rather than decentralising. You still can't export photos and videos you've uploaded (through their AppView). Until some time ago you weren't able to return to using Bluesky's PDS once you've moved away. And of course, because ATProto operates out in the open, features such as bookmarks that are supposed to be private doesn't even go through the ATmosphere. (I'd love to know if these are exported but I don't know of a way to open their ".car" file which is neither a plaintext nor a zip file.)

Comment · 8 months ago
As a non-American they've lost me already at the first sentence.

United States, even before Trump, has always been about projecting power rather than spreading democracy. There are several non-Western, former colonies who does democracy better than the US. Despite democratic backsliding being a worldwide phenomenon very few have slid back as much as the US. The US have regularly supported or even created terrorists and authoritarian regimes if it meant that the country wouldn't "go woke." The ones that grew democracy, grew in spite of it.

This statement shows just how much they align with the DoD ("DoW" is a secondary name that the orange head insists it's the correct one. Using that terminology alone speaks volumes.) rather than misalign. This coupled with their drop of their safety pledge a few days ago makes it clear they are fundamentally and institutionally against safe AI development/deployment. A minute desagreement on the ways AI can destroy humanity isn't even remotely sufficient if you're happy to work with the bullies of the world in the first place.

And the reason is even more ridiculous. Mass surveillance is bad... because it's directed at us rather than the others? That's a thick irony if I'd ever seen one. You know (or should have known) foreign intelligence has even less safeguards than domestic surveillance. Intelligence agencies transfer intercepted communications data to each other to "lawfully" get around those domestic surveillance restrictions. If this looks at all like standing up that's because the bar has plunged into the abyss, which frankly speaking is kind of a virtue in USA.

Comment · 11 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
GrapheneOS lost me on PR. For every updates they post on their social media there's guaranteed to be a rant about how other projects are doing things Wrong. They talk down on any and every security- and privacy-related projects (or open-source projects in general) if they align even slightly out of line according to their idea of security and privacy, regardless of their own merit. Dig even deeper they also like throwing around the word "slander" and "attack" without backing it up. In fact I am certain I will be greeted with a friendly wall of text by somebody from GOS in this very thread sooner rather than later.

GrapheneOS is the most secure, arguably most private, hell the most feature-complete, user-friendly custom ROM (but they also hate the word "custom ROM") out there. I've imported a Pixel, because it wasn't available in my country, just to use GOS. So it is deeply frustrating that they are doing things the way they do. Hubris is their longest-standing, "wontfix"-labelled vulnerability.

Comment · 1 year ago
The image indeed gives me a strong AI vibe, in particular the "Ghibli update." It's getting really hard to uncloak it by the day but those drab colours instantly throw me off.

(For the "real artists also can draw like that" crowd I don't think the OP is an artist and it has no credits.)

Comment · 1 year ago
It assumes that you have a DE running and depends on features like D-Bus. So it's not designed to run headless except for building flatpak packages.
Comment · 1 year ago
My bad - I forgot that Free Software need not be copyleft. The point on Android still stands tho, and the freedoms on AOSP are decresing by the day as well.
Comment · 1 year ago
> it's already free software

I'd just like to interject here for a moment. The word Free Software has a specific meaning that AOSP does not meet. The only component of AOSF that is Free Software is the Kernel, due to GPL, and aside from low-level Android-specific modules such as binder there's no secret sauce in Android kernels; even the vendor modifications are mostly gutted out in favour of Project Treble and GKI. Everything else is only Open Source and not Free Software, and even then developed privately and only published upon release. Because nobody releases a pure AOSP phone (Google Play Services alone changes the OS behaviour dramatically, punching through all the usual app sandboxes) and the source code for the modification, it's effectively proprietary with open source components.

Comment · 1 year ago
You can either use: separate user accounts (needs context switching) or a new private space feature. Private space was introduced with Android 15 and can hide its existence (from the launcher).
Comment · 1 year ago
There's somehow this belief that "newer models will disprove <insert LLM criticism here>" despite the "newer" models being... just a scaled-up version of a previous model, or some anciliary features tacked on. An LLM is an LLM is an LLM: I'll believe it when I see otherwise.

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