Tomorrow? Oh, so you already forgot the announcement from last month? Well, I mean I guess we have a lot of our own stuff going on right now…

/s?

Yup. Or anything held against them is now just fakery.

Like this gem from the news today.

Sometimes it feels technology may doom us all in the end. We’ve got a rough patch in society starting now, now that liars and cheats can be more convincingly backed up, and honest folk hidden behind credible doubt that they are the liars.

AI isn’t just on the path to make convincing lies, it’s on the path to ensuring that all truth can be doubted as well. At which point, there is no such thing as truth until we learn yet a new way to tell the difference.

“They don’t need to convince us what they are saying, the lies, are true. Just that there is no truth, and you cannot believe anything you are told.”

Are you installing needed libraries?

For example, the installer runs because it doesn’t need any, but then your app needs say VCRedist 2010, and so won’t until run until you add the vcrun2010 extra library with Winetricks or the menu in Bottles.

I enjoy it, but I feel like it’s something they could do more with and don’t.

Maybe one day they’ll find other ways to sneak it into new content, like the Necramech. That was also interesting but underwhelmingly supported, and now they try to squeeze it into places to make it relevant. But it still feels like it needs….more.

Oh, and who remembers Fish Team? I don’t even know if that feature got added, I avoid the Lich stuff.

It’s not really because it fell over. It’s because it wasn’t supposed to fall over. Consumable launch materials don’t contend with this because failure to return is a success. This is a failure. This must be learned from and fought against/prevented going forward.

If you’ve got a VPS at your disposal, many of the homepage softwares I’ve tried over the years have some amount of caching to make them quite fast or even operate offline(“Homer” for one required me to deeply purge my cache as it would still appear when my site was offline…despite having replaced it long ago! 😂). Or, if you wanted to roll your own static HTML page, you can absolutely add a Service Worker for your own offline caching.

That’s where I’m at now. I use a custom ServiceWorker static HTML for my homepage and tab page on all my devices. This page is a bouncer, checks if I’m at home or not(or if my local dashboard is offline) and either redirects me to the local homepage which has all my HomeLab services on it, or if it fails just tells me I might be abroad or offline and lists a few public websites.

And yes, this works offline or over a shitty connection. Essentially the service worker quickly provides the cached page from the browser storage, then tries to take the time to check the live version. If it gets one, it updates the cache, if not, enjoy the offline version.

Might be a bit over the top, but I set up a custom homepage startpage, and then grabbed the New Tab Override extension so that it opens on new tabs as well as being my homepage.

So if you can think of any websites that might do what you want like cardd or link tree, or are interested in making your own little webpage and hosting it somewhere free, that might work and as a bonus will be the same across all your browsers and devices. Could even load it up on someone else’s computer if you remember the link.

Now would be a good time to look for a .com you like, or one of the more common TLDs. And register it at Namecheap, Porkbun, or Cloudflare. (Cloudflare is cheapest but all-eggs-in-one-basket is a concern for some.)

Sadly, all the cheap or fun TLDs have a habit of being blocked wholesale, either because the cheap ones are overused by bad actors or because corporate IT just blacklists “abnormal” TLDs (or only whitelists the old ones?) because it’s “easy security”.

Notably, XYZ also does that 1.111B initiative, selling numbered domains for 99¢, further feeding the affordability for bad actors and justifying a flat out sinkhole of the entire TLD.

I got a three character XYZ to use as a personal link shortener. Half the people I used it with said it was blocked at school or work. My longer COM poses no issue.

Some would think this is horrible, but to me, it would be wholly dependent on the title/what was bought and sold.

Nothing in this world is free. Development, servers, character licensing, it all costs money and if those costs aren’t passed down, you’ll never afford to continue. So for a game, especially one with online content or continuing content, to be free to play, money has to come from somewhere.

Where the road splits is what is being sold. Things that give an edge in the game, pay-to-win? Uninstalled. Time limited FOMO triggers? Disgusting. Random loot boxes? Begone foul spirit.

On the other end, if all that is for sale is shiny baubles and trinkets, things no one needs but can have as a reward for “supporting development”? I’m cool with that. If I feel no requirement to pay up, it’s being handled right, and if I like they game, sure, I can part with a fiver to look like I’m dipped in gold or whatever the supporter pack adds to help them keep the lights on(at least until I get bored of it in a week or two and switch back :P).

I’d be curious what the divide is between the two kinds of purchases are. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed to find it was mostly P2W scum, though.

Is there a list anywhere of this and other settings and features that could/should certainly be changed to better Firefox privacy?

Other than that I’m not sure I’m really going to jump ship. I think I’m getting too old for the “clunkiness” that comes with trying to use third party/self hosted alternatives to replace features that ultimately break the privacy angle, or to add them to barebones privacy focused browsers. Containers and profile/bookmark syncing, for example. But if there’s a list of switches I can flip to turn off the most egregious things, that would be good for today.

Forgive me, I’m no AI expert to fully compare the needed tokens per second measurement to relate to the average query Siri might handle, but I will say this:

Even in your article, only the largest model ran at 8/tps, others ran much faster, and none of these were optimized for a task, just benchmarking.

Would it be impossible for Apple to be running an optimized model specific to expected mobile tasks, and leverage their own hardware more efficiently than we can, to meet their needs?

I imagine they cut out most worldly knowledge etc/use a lightweight model, which is why there is still a need to link to ChatGPT or Apple for some requests, would this let them trim Siri down to perform well enough on phones for most requests? They also advertised launching AI on M1-2 chip devices, which are not M3-Max either…

Onboard AI chips will allow this to be local.

Phones do not have the power to ~~~

Perhaps this is why these features will only be available on iPhone 15 Pro/Max and newer? Gotta have those latest and greatest chips.

It will be fun to see how it all shakes out. If the AI can’t run most queries on the phone with all this advertising of local processing…there’ll be one hell of a lawsuit coming up.

EDIT: Finished looking for what I thought I remembered…

Additionally, Siri has been locally processed since iOS 15.

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/use-on-device-siri-iphone-ipad/

I think there’s a larger picture at play here that is being missed.

Getting the weather is a standard feature for years now. Nothing AI about it.

What is “AI” is, Hey Siri, what is the weather at my daughter’s recital coming up?

The AI processing, calculated on-device if what they claim is true, is:

1. the determination of who your daughter is
2. What is a recital? An event? Are there any upcoming calendar events that match this concept?
3. Is the “daughter” associated with this event by description or invitation? Yes? OK, what’s the address?
4. Submit zip code of recital calendar event involving the kid to the weather API, and churn out a reply that includes all this information…

Well {Your phone contact name}, it looks like it will {remote weather response} during your {calendar event from phone} with {daughter from contacts} on {event date}.

That is the idea between on-device and cloud processing. The phone already has your contacts and calendar and does that work offline rather than educating an online server about your family, events and location, and requests the bare minimum from the internet, in this case nothing more than if you opened the weather app yourself and put in a zip code.

Plug it into a monitor or TV and keep an eye on the console.

I have an older NUC that will not cooperate with certain brands of NVMe drive under PVE…the issue sounds like yours where it would work for an arbitrary amount of time before crashing the file system, attempting to remount read-only and rendering the system inert and unable to handle changes like plugging a monitor in later, yet it would still be “on”.

Genuine curiosity…what are some proposed solutions we think Valve can implement to solve this crisis?

I ask because the line about VAC being a joke gave me a thought…VAC is such a joke because it is so simple and un-invasive. Do we really want VAC “upgraded” to the level of more effective Anti-cheats, where it cuts down the bots but is now a monitoring kernel service? Just a few weeks ago people were in an uproar about the new Vanguard anti-cheat…do we want that for Valve? Or do we think they can do it a better way?

As an aside, honestly in my mind community servers with a cooperative ban list plugin might be the most effective solution of all…it would still be a game of whack a mole since they can always churn out new accounts, but that’s what gives me pause about other solutions because the only real solutions to slow cheaters start to sound like charging for the game(to make account creation costly) or implementing a bulletproof system of hardware bans, which means invasive solutions that can be certain they aren’t virtual machines or such.

I recommend Dockge over Portainer if you want a web admin panel. https://github.com/louislam/dockge

It’s basically docker compose in a website, and you can just decide one day to turn it off and use the compose files directly. No proprietary databases or other weirdness.

It’s very likely something like this will only exist in the Bedrock version, so there’s that. And even if they also put it in Java, there’ll be a mod to remove it very, very quickly.

I agree cash is the right idea, for now, but can you say for sure cash payment will be possible forever, or even the next 50 years? Wouldn’t it be better to blunder around with new ideas while cash is still a good fallback? Not saying I like crypto, and the cost on resources and the environment sucks bad, but I can at least appreciate them trying something. Now we just need to come up with sustainable options…

I get that cash seems a pretty durable idea, and it’s lasted for hundreds of years, but it did so before the massive societal turn towards technology we’ve made in the last 30 years.

Do you game at all? Gaming on Linux has made great strides, be be fair, but for a lot of titles you still need to consider a dual boot of some form of Windows, thanks to over the top anti-cheat, DRM, and developer support.

Something to consider for the gamers out there.