Without hardware decoding, it will take more compute to decompress, but sites usually wait to fully roll out new codecs until hardware decoding is more ubiquitous, because of how many people use low-powered streaming sticks and Smart TVs.

It’s not for the end user at this point, it’s for YouTube/streaming companies to spend less on bandwidth at existing resolutions. Even a 5% decrease in size for similar quality could save millions in bandwidth costs over a year for YouTube or Netflix.

I would imagine they mean something like jellyfin/plex, which don’t necessarily get you away from torrents. Unless you want to go the slightly more legal route of ripping DVDs and Blu-rays and re-encoding everything for yourself. I say “slightly more legal” because while you are legally allowed a backup or archival copy of your own media (in the US), you still usually have to violate the DMCA to break encryption so you can rip your archival copy.

Is anyone even working on AGI or have any clue how to get there? Or are we just going to wait a few years, move the goalposts again, and let them call GPT X “AGI”?

Based on the attempts we’ve seen at censoring AI output so far, there doesn’t seem to me to be a way to actually do this without building a new model with pre-censored training data.

Sure they can tune models, but even “MechaHitler” Grok was still giving some “woke” answers on occasion. I don’t see how this doesn’t either destroy AI’s “usefulness” (not that there’s any usefulness there to begin with) or cost so much to implement that investors pull out because none of the AI companies are profitable, and throwing billions more to sift through and filter the training data pushes profitability even further away (if censoring all the training data is even possible at all).

Correct, they do scale the boss HP when solo vs a normal trio game, you also get one guaranteed free revive and shops are guaranteed to sell a revive item. Personally, I’d still rather queue with randoms, but we’ll see how that goes when they add duo games. Queue times can already be a bit long sometimes, and I’m a bit concerned that losing duo teams to their own mode will make solo queues even longer and more annoying.

I’ll admit I tried talking to a local deepseek about a minor mental health issue one night when I just didn’t want to wake up/bother my friends. Broke the AI within about 6 prompts where no matter what I said it would repeat the same answer word-for-word about going for walks and eating better. Honestly, breaking the AI and laughing at it did more for my mental health than anything anyone could have said, but I’m an AI hater. I wouldn’t recommend anyone in real need use AI for mental health advice.

if you’re out getting a coffee and a bagel as a 30 or 40 year old would you go into the McDonald’s on the left or the right?

I’m 35. I’d take whimsy and fun over the “trendy bank” look.

Fakespot was somewhat accurate at catching when Amazon sellers take a well-reviewed item and swap out the product for another, by changing the title, description, and pictures. We’ve probably all read a review on Amazon that feels like the reviewer is posting a review of a completely different product, like a review that seems to be about a kitchen utinsil on a listing for an unusually affordable camera. It’s a pretty common scam that Fakespot was pretty good at catching. It didn’t seem as good at adjusting ratings for legit products and seemed to kind of randomly knock off a a half to one and a half stars on pretty much every listing, even on quality products.

Mine (early LCD model) has “Made in China” on the label, which even if most of the parts are made elsewhere, if final assembly is in China, that’s the tariff rate that will apply.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the SteamDeck doubles or triples in price before long. We already knew Valve wasn’t making much, if anything, on them, and with a 245% tariff, I kinda doubt they’ll just eat that.

But what qualifies as social media? We can all probably agree that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, etc. count, but what about say Discord or WhatsApp? How about browsing older forums (like open ones where you don’t need an account to read them)? What about news articles or blogs with a comment section? Is a wiki social media? Depending on how you define it, the majority of the internet could be considered social media.

Plus there are plenty of sites that just won’t ever bother to try to comply. For example, I live in one of the more stupid states in the US that has required age verification for porn sites, PornHub has complied by just blocking their site in the state with a notice that they won’t implement a system like that for privacy reasons. But they and their sister sites are the only ones I’ve seen that have bothered to make any changes. The same will inevitably happen with social media. You’re just going to push kids to shadier corners of the internet that don’t care about laws, and they’re gonna end up radicalized by nazis, or taken advantage of in worse ways.

The whole problem is parents who don’t want to be parents and tell their kids they can’t have a smartphone. And I get that the dumbphone market is kinda limited, and that some parents just don’t care what their kids are exposed to. But trying to fix this problem by changing the internet is never going to work. The only way to fix the problem is to have a spine and make appropriate changes IRL - like banning smartphones for underaged kids in school, or show your full distopian side and prosecute parents who let their kids use social media.

Yeah, check lists in Notes could really use some improvement for sure. Honestly, just now looking through the Github for the Android Nextcloud Notes app it looks like there’s a good deal of technical debt that has been stacking up over time from trying to bring more modern features to what started as a minimal text-only notes app.

There is a way to enable “grid view” in the app settings for the more post-it view that shows the first part of the contents, but doesn’t seem to show on notes with markdown formatting, so anything with a list doesn’t show a preview.

The Nextcloud Notes app for Android does have a couple of widgets (note list and an individual note), is there widget that is missing?

Based on their current management model of “desks on wheels” they’d probably be most comfortable becoming a worker-owned coop. I know I’m in dreamland, but it would be amazing if they could go that direction when Gabe is gone.

Glad they clarified. To me the “selling data being defined broadly” argument made sense in the context of Google paying them to be included as a search provider. Because there is an argument that Google paying Firefox, and then the user entering a search and that being sent to Google’s servers could be legally seen as Mozilla selling data to Google.

When I first got a Bluesky account, back when it was invite-only a whole bunch of the Physicists and Astronomers I used to follow on Twitter were already there. If anything it seemed like scientists were early adopters.

Fire your CEO.

Out of a canon, through some flaming rings, and into an empty bucket of water. If I have to watch a clown-show, at least make it entertaining.

I saw a tiktok of a Brit talking about this with the upcoming ban in the US, and he made an interesting point. The Americans who can afford to travel and take time off work, are more often the ones who have lived privileged lives, and as a result act more entitled than the average American. He commented how interacting with regular Americans on tiktok changed his perception of what they are like, because only interacting with the tourists makes it seem like there’s a higher percentage of entitled a-holes.

There is a plan going around over on TikTok that everyone should delete their Meta accounts on the 19th (when the TikTok ban goes into effect). We’ll see how many actually do it, but so far it’s fascinating to watch.