Yeah! I used DDG for quite a while and it’s pretty okay. Kagi definitely isn’t without fault but for me it’s the best true alternative to Google and I happily pay for it. Allows me to save so much time (cumulatively) by just guiding me to the actual result in most cases (instead of sponsored and ad-infested garbage sites)

Alright. I had to read up again on why this is newsworthy in the first place. Because of the language in their new ToS regarding usage of user data. The article I read, asked why they would only now update their terms despite the California Privacy Act having been in effect for a while now.

I’m very sure, optimistically assuming they are honest and really didn’t change the way they handle user data, that an auditor found the previous wording of their ToS just not clear enough. Working in Quality Management and having attended quite a number of audits, this happens all the time. Company has a process for years, sometimes decades, but then needs to change the wording in a document because a new and overly by-the-books auditor will demand such to have it not only be “correct in spirit” but also “technically correct”. Nothing in the actual process needs to change.

Again, this is me assuming that they really havent done something different in the way they handle data. Isn’t Firefox open-source? Could some savvy code-reader go through it to see if something about the data collection has changed?

Alexandra is the hero students (and scientists) all over the world need! And I’m so glad that my former profs acknowledged and recommended Sci-Hub to us. So many people wouldn’t be able to graduate without debt (or “even more debt” for the Americans) otherwise.

Not only is it voluntary (can confirm that 1&1 doesn’t block the subset of sites I just now tried out which are on the list) but Germany’s approach seems to be pretty tame in comparison, still. Doesn’t make it good, but a lot less bad than it seems by just reading the highlighted section.

While the CUII website lists 24 platforms for blocking, at last count the exposed list contained well over ten times more domains/subdomains, over 300 in total. For perspective, Germany’s site-blocking program is very modest when compared to schemes in the UK, France, Italy, and Spain, for example, where thousands of sites are blocked with information on domains mostly restricted.

Holy cow that’s a horrible take. Please, if you can spare the time and money, come visit our country and don’t just look at the few high-criminality places or the corruption of key politicians. Yes, they exist and should be criticized, but if your conclusion from that is to think that Germany is still just like during one of the most horrific regimes, then you’ve been grossly misinformed and need to experience the daily reality instead.

“Break a leg” (or “Hals und Beinbruch” in German, which is “Neck and leg fracture”).

I don’t even know what the logic could be. Is it supposed to be some sort of reverse psychology?

It depend on the context/group.

At work, no biggie, it just tells me that you acknowledge my message and currently have nothing useful to add.

With my friends, who usually heavily rely on emojis and “oldtimey smileys” (like xD or y.y)? Ya, unless you completely eminate happiness and friendship, I’m concerned about your mood / standing with me.

Look, man, it’s trying its best. And frankly, I think it’s about as ready as it could ever get to replace every single billionaire in the world, considering the sanity of many billionaire’s choices we hear about lately.

I occasionally check my surroundings (especially when staying at a spot for more than just a couple minutes) for potential ambush and sniper locations.

The funny part about that is that I only served for two years and not once left my home country to even be at risk of combat.

I don’t know how strictly your lessons are monitored, but if they aren’t, you might be able to deviate from your curriculum sometimes, especially if all of your students are on the same side as you. This field manual is a great start for teaching creative civil resistance against an oppressive regime while minimising the likelihood that the resistor loses their job doing so.

As a teacher you wield the power to shape young people in a magnitude that is only topped by direct family and best friends. Use it wisely, while making sure to stay on curriculum enough that your students still pass their mandatory exams.

You’re right! I thought of the typical soda can and, as far as I remember, those tabs are lifted a little so you can get underneath even by just shoving your finger skin in. But just yesterday I tried opening a can of tuna and was surprised not only by how naturally I do the little lift with my finger nails but also by how very difficult it is to open when you don’t use your fingernails.

Genuine question because this might be a design difference between your country and Germany, where I’m from: Can you not lift the tab a little bit with the skin of your finger and then just pull on it? Are they welded onto the can?

True, true. We literally omly have a wood furnace, so are absolutely not affected by this, but I’ll see how reporting potential GDPR violations in the name of someone else works.

Sorry that it didn’t land as an obvious joke. With the NSDAP NPD AfD on such a steep rise, I think I have transcended gallows humour and arrived at necromancer humour levels to be able to cope with this reality.

This is my reasoning, too. I keep my keyboard QWERTZ + German Umlaute, but almost everything else is set to English. Pretty much the only exception are videogames and movies that have a superior German version to them (like Kingdom Come Deliverance)

Samesies!

One very important word of caution (unfortunately coming from experience): Syncthing, as the name suggests, makes it so the content of one device is the same as that of another device. So, even if you have one device set to only receive data, it means that if you delete a file from the sending device, the receiving device will also delete that file to stay in sync with the sending device.

There is a way to use Syncthing as a simple backup storage program (not necessarily the best solution but much better than manually backing up your files every few months and just hoping for the best). But it means that you have to use the advanced folder option “ignoreDelete”. I also use the file versioning system, so even if something is automatically deleted by mistake, it’s still versioned in a special subfolder and accessible to me.

Thank you a lot for the load of information! I just now got to reading it all. I was very skeptical about the fact that it is fed by the output of other LLMs but the way you explain it makes sense to me that it might not be that much of a problem. I guess a super blunt analogy could be “It’s only incest if it’s your children” lol

Thanks for the explanation. I don’t understand enough about large language models to give a valuable judgement on this whole Deepseek happening from a technical standpoint. I think it’s excellent to have competition on the market and it feels that the US’ whole “But they’re spying on you and being a national security risk” is a hypocritical outcry when Facebook, OpenAI and the like still exist.

What do you think about Deepseek? If I understood correctly, it’s being trained on the output of other LLMs, which makes it much more cheap but, to me it seems, also even less trustworthy because now all the actual human training data is missing and instead it’s a bunch of hallucinations, lies and (hopefully more often than not) correctly guessed answers to questions made by humans.

Does open sourcing require you to give out the training data? I thought it only means allowing access to the source code so that you could build it yourself and feed it your own training data.

I really can’t speak on the security or data privacy of it, since I’m not knowledgeable enough in these topics, but I pay 1€ per month for Port87. I just love the ability to easily create sub-adresses and never have to worry about my “main adresses” receiving the spam I get for e.g. online shopping