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abhibeckert

@ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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509
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • vCard + RSS as an alternative to social media

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  • RSS sucks. Activity Streams are a better in every way (other than compatibility established software, obviously).

    If you're building anything new that uses RSS today, I encourage you to do both RSS and Activity Streams. Or just do what I do, and only do AS.

  • Removed

    AI hustlers stole women’s faces to put in ads. The law can’t help them.

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  • This. The lack of vetting sucks and it goes both ways. Sometimes the algorithm incorrectly flags perfectly legitimate content as fraudulent with no way to recover from that.

  • Should Airships Make a Comeback?

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  • Click the link and watch? It's very good. Looks like Veritasium spent a huge amount of time researching for this video and you're not just trusting his research - he interviews experts on historical (failed) air ships as well as modern engineers working on multi-billion dollar projects trying to fix the mistakes that were made in the past as well as discussing new problems that weren't encountered last time but would have if they hadn't given up almost immediately.

    Still - it finishes on a positive note, those engineers do think the problems can be solved. We could have cheap cargo transport to anywhere in the world instead of exclusively to coastal cities with a sheltered bay and a harbour that takes hundreds of years to build. An air ship could deliver a shipping container, cheaply, to anywhere a helicopter can land. That's a problem worth trying to solve.

    It will likely start with niche use cases, such as delivering massive wind turbine blades to the top of a mountain ridge... without having to first build a mountain road up to the construction site - and a road suitable for trucks that can carry an 800 foot long turbine blade:

    Once air ships are solved for those use cases, it will inevitably be used for other things too.

  • Affinity is joining the Canva family

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  • I don’t want profitable software

    What? You want all the software companies you depend on to go bankrupt?

    I want fairly priced software

    Canva is free for basic features and reasonably priced if you want features that cost them money such as 24/7 phone support, access to their stock artwork library, storing up to a terabyte of documents on their servers, etc.

    I get the hesitation - we don't know what they're going to do with the affinity suite, but I wouldn't immediately assume it will be ruined.

  • Apple co-founder calls out ‘hypocrisy’ of politicians calling for TikTok ban | CNN Business

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  • He was one of the largest shareholders. One third of the company in fact... but he sold most of those way back when they were worth almost nothing (as in hundreds of dollars). And as far as we know virtually all the rest of his shares since then have been gifted to charities. Mostly schools.

    "I do not invest. I don't do that stuff. I didn't want to be near money because it could corrupt your values." -- Steve Wozniak, five years ago

    He makes a good living doing speeches at universities/etc - that's his primary wealth, not his shares in Apple. If he had kept even a tenth of the shares he once owned, he'd be richer than Elon Musk. As it is, the house he lives in is likely more than half of his total worth (it's a nice house, with six bedrooms, in a nice location... more than most people can afford but hardly extravagant, 6 bedrooms is enough to host a large family holiday party, which I think is quite reasonable).

  • Apple co-founder calls out ‘hypocrisy’ of politicians calling for TikTok ban | CNN Business

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  • The title of the video is pretty clear "TikTok is a Cyberweapon".

    Reasonable people can disagree over wether or not that's actually true... but it's worth noting China has banned TikTok within their own country. Clearly they think it's harmful.

    It's also worth noting that congress was acting on an intelligence report which has not been published. I've heard there are rumours they might declassify the report and release it. Personally I'm inclined to reserve judgement until we actually know what evidence they have but the fact China has banned it themselves is a huge red flag.

  • Apple says it spent three years trying to bring Apple Watch to Android - 9to5Mac

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  • What technical limitations?

    I'd guess it was the small battery in the watch. A lot of features on Apple's smartwatch cause serious battery life problems unless they can be offloaded to your phone at least most of the day.

    For example if you have the weather conditions on your watch face... the watch can lookup the weather but it generally will ask your phone to do that. Stuff like that is a lot easier if you control the phone operating system and aren't just running an app.

    ... for example if you never launch the weather app on your phone, both Android and iOS will reduce it's ability to drain the phone's battery by running in the background. Apple makes an exception to that rule for weather apps where the user has a widget an Apple Watch face. How could the Android battery management systems know what widgets are on your Apple Watch?

  • Redditors Vent and Complain When People Mock Their "AI Art"

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  • Um, good luck trying to get that law passed.

  • United States v. Apple is pure nerd rage

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  • That wasn't what-aboutism, I was just using an analogy to make a point.

  • United States v. Apple is pure nerd rage

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  • To be fair, it’s the most interesting story the verge has covered in about, well, as long as the verge has existed.

    This is a big deal - it’s going to shape the entire tech industry for the foreseeable future. And it’s going to drag on in court and probably also congress for years and years.

    Apple is the target of the lawsuit but the DoJ is also telling every other tech company what rules they need to operate under. The last decade of “just do whatever you want” is over.

  • United States v. Apple is pure nerd rage

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  • So ban harvesting and exploiting. Don’t ban superapps.

    By your logic we should ban kitchen knives because they can be used to murder someone.

  • Google is removing third-party apps and clock faces from all Fitbit watches in the EU

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  • I don’t think it’s an oversight at all. The rule is Google can’t do anything on the platform that the competition is blocked from doing.

    If there is no store, then google has no advantage.

    As for removing features from a product - that’s a different issue entirely and I expect compensation will be in order. Refunds for anyone who bought a Fitbit for example.

  • Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem

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  • Tradies may make more by opening their own company

    That's where glassdoor is misleading. The best tradies are not employees - they do contract work and you might, for example, charge a thousand bucks to fix a shop's broken window. And it might only be one hour of work.

  • Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem

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  • I want solid data to back up your bull

    Anecdotal, but my brother does tree maintenance. His minimum callout fee for a day's work is $2,000. And he often earns more than double that for one day's work. He does have relatively high costs, but his income is way better than what I earn writing code.

    We're both at the stage in our career where it's time to stop being an employee and start running our own company and believe me, his company is more successful than mine. Early days still but my money's on him earning seven figures per year very soon.

    He's so much more successful than that if my business fails, there's a good chance I will end up working for him. I'd be on minimum wage for several years while I learn the trade but I think it might be worth it long term and I can eventually pull my connections (the boss being my brother) and get promoted to being a manager with a cushy job driving a company car between job sites.

  • US sues Apple for illegal monopoly over smartphones

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  • Um, you know you can use any bluetooth earbuds right?

  • US sues Apple for illegal monopoly over smartphones

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  • They literally have done that. For example iPhone 15 Pro Max is 12.5mm thick. The iPhone 6 (thinnest iPhone ever made) was 7mm.

    There are several iPhones with different batteries but the largest one is 17Wh. The iPhone 6 had a 7Wh battery.

  • Say Hello to Biodegradable Microplastics

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  • AFAIK under elevated temperatures, it degrades nicely. At typical soil temperatures it slowly degrades into methane which is a greenhouse gas - not great for the environment... but it's still a hell of a lot better than plastic.

    As bad as methane is, at least it has a relatively short life before it becomes Co2 and ultimately is absorbed by trees/etc and re-enters the cycle of life. Plastic on the other hand is really nasty toxin that often ends up in the ocean and causes long term damage.

    The TLDR is methane needs to be managed, we have to make sure we don't produce too much. While plastic should just be illegal. We should never produce any plastic, at all, for any reason. It's going to take a long time but that's where we have to go.

  • Say Hello to Biodegradable Microplastics

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  • You're making perfect the enemy of good.

    Yes, re-usable cups are better than a commercially compostable cup. Use re-usable cups if at all possible. But like it or not some people just aren't going to do that, and commercially compostable cups are a hell of a lot better than plastic. Even if they don't get composted, and you send them to regular landfill, they are still a million times better than plastic.

  • How People Are Really Using GenAI

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  • If I ask an LLM something like “is there a git project that does <something I’d describe in natural language but not keywords>” or is there a Windows program that does X, it may make up the answers

    Obviously it depends on the LLM, but ChatGPT Plus doesn't hallucinate with your example. What it does is provide a list of git projects / windows programs, each with a short summary and a link to the official website.

    And the summary doesn't come from the website — the summary is a short description of how it matches your requirements list.

    I've also noticed Bing has started showing LLM summaries for search results. For example I've typed a question into Duck Duck Go (which uses Bing internally) and seen links to reddit where the answer is "a user answered your question stating X, and another user disagreed saying Y".

    I'm encountering hallucinations far less often now than I used to - at least with OpenAI based products.