With all the recent hype around AI, I feel that a lot of people don't understand how it works and how it is useful. AI is useful at solving certain types of problems that are really difficult using traditional programming, like finding patterns that aren't obvious to us.
For example, object recognition is about finding patterns in images. Our brains are great at this, but writing a computer program capable of taking pixels and figuring out if the pattern is there is very hard.
Even if AI is sometimes going to misclassify objects, it can still be useful. For example, in a factory you can use AI to find defects in the production line. Even if you don't get it perfect, going from 100 defects per 1M products to 10 per million is a huge difference and saves the factory a lot of money.
Opera gave up a long time ago when they abandoned Presto. Today it is owned by some Chinese company, and they are just chasing the latest buzzwords, crypto, AI, you name it.
I wouldn't recommend a phone. It would kill your battery, and speeds would be terrible. Find an older computer or a beat up laptop and install qbittorrent on it. You might also need to forward the port.
To allow multiple simultaneous connections over the network, computers use these things called ports, which are numbers used to identify the connection. When the operating system sees that a network packet has arrived, it looks at the port and then forwards the packet to the right application.
Routers create a local network that is isolated from the outside, and all the traffic that goes to or comes from the internet, goes through the router.
If someone wants to connect to you, they have to go through the router. By default, routers will just refuse any connection coming from the outside. They do allow connections from the inside going out. Note that after the connection is established, communication can be bidirectional. Think of it like a social network where you need to be friends with someone to chat. Establishing a connection is like sending a friend request.
Port forwarding basically means telling your router "if someone tries to connect to you on port XXXX, forward those connections to port YYYY on computer ZZZZ".
Another reason why copyright should be shortened... Society has changed massively in the last 100 years, but every expression of our modern society is locked behind copyright.
Writing the actual code is the easy part. Thinking about what to write and how to organize it so it doesn't become spaghetti is the hard part and what being a good developer is all about.
AI has poisoned the well it was fed from. The only solution to get a good AI moving forward is to train it using curated data. That is going to be a lot of work.
On the other hand, this might be a business opportunity. Selling curated data to companies that want to make AIs.
I have a Surface Laptop 5 as my work laptop. I hate it with passion, it's one of the worst laptops I ever used.
Beyond the lack of IO (not even a fucking hdmi port) and the piss poor cooling, the USB C display isn't connected to the integrated GPU, it uses a different display adapter that is so bad the mouse stutters on high res displays.
The built-in display has a 3:2 aspect ratio. I wanted to use a lower resolution so I could disable scaling (having different scaled monitors is annoying to use), none of the "supported" lower resolutions are 3:2 and they all have ugly black bars.
It has a touch screen, but the lid only opens about 120 degrees, making it completely useless.
And it uses "special" locked down hardware that is very hostile to other operating systems like Linux.
Return to the office isn't about medicine, it's about entitled executives power tripping over the workers. At every medium/large company I worked for, upper management lived in its own bubble completely disconnected from the rest. I can give so many examples of poor decisions made by upper management that had a huge negative impact on the company and especially the workers. But regardless, they never gave a shit about our opinions and feedback. They didn't even tell us why they made those decisions.
Not only that. If you buy an app, you are at the mercy of its creator. If they decide they want to fill it with ads and tracking, or switch to a subscription model, there's nothing you can do. You can't rollback updates, you can't install an older version from the play store. If they decide to remove it from the store, you won't be able to install it any more.
I've been using Firefox as my main browser for a long time. Sites that don't work in FF are very rare. If it's something I really need to access, I just use chrome/edge for that particular site. But as I said, it happens rarely, and there's an easy way to work around it.
What I think the biggest problem with the traditional package managers is that (1) they don't isolate packages from each other (when you install a program files are placed in many random places, like /usr/bin, /usr/lib etc) and (2) you can't have multiple versions of the same package installed at the same time.
This creates a lot of work for package maintainers who need to constantly keep packages up to date as dependencies are updated.
Also, because of this, every distro is essentially an insane dependency tree where changing even one small core package could break everything.
Because of this, backwards compatibility on Linux is terrible. If you need to run an older application which depends on older packages, your only choice is to download an older distro.
This is what snap and flatpak try to solve. I think they are not great solutions, because they ended up being an extra package manager next to the traditional package managers. Until we see a distro that uses flatpak or something similar exclusively, the problem is not solved.
You mean selling unrepairable beta products of questionable usefulness at insane prices?