The history of tech is full of "X is better than Y. We should use X", only for X to die. It doesn't matter what is better; it matters what is used. For better or worse, Markdown is what is used.
My 32GB RAM M1 is a fantastic machine, but it's getting old for the type of work I do. And I can't upgrade the RAM.
I installed Omarchy via Asahi Alarm [1] and have been running it for 3 weeks without issues. I spent half a day setting everything to my taste (keyboard bindings, monitors, waybar, etc.), and I'm still getting used to Hyprland, but I have a fast machine. RAM usage with everything I need open is considerably lower than on macOS (80% -> 50%), and I don't have to pay a monthly subscription for every little piece of software not built into macOS.
Asahi isn't perfect (touchpad rejection being my main issue), but I can live with the inconveniences. This is still a very good machine, and I can't afford a new one right now.
Twitter/X is what one makes of it. The algorithm is easy to tune to your personal interests. And with Grok available on every post, your options to go deeper on topics are almost infinite. I tried to use Bluesky and it was insufferable (I don't follow politics BTW).
If you don't want Twitter/X because the owner makes you sick, I respect that but it's a different topic.
If I'm not in front of a tribunal, formerly accused of committing/attempting to commit a crime, who are you to check my private chats?
This is not a problem with some messages' content. It's a privacy problem.
Would people here be happy if the USA (or any other country, for that matter) had the authority to record all your private conversations with friends at the bar and use them against you?
> If I'm not in front of a tribunal, formerly accused of committing/attempting to commit a crime, who are you to check my private chats?
CBP in the U.S. and equivalents pretty much everywhere deny foreigners the right to privacy. Heck, even in the U.S. the Fourth Amendment is taken to not apply at the border and ports of entry (and within 100 miles of any such, including the coasts!!). I too think that's quite a stretch, but that's how it is, and not just in the U.S.
I think there have been cases of CBP refusing entry to people who didn't even have smartphones with them.
So I agree that it is a privacy problem.
However given that we all have very little privacy when entering a country (even our own) the contents of this researcher's messages is relevant to deciding whether CBP acted reasonably even though we might say (I do) that CBP should never ask to see your communications without probable cause that you've committed or intend to commit a crime.
One advantage of being a US citizen. If I'm entering the country and they want to see my phone, I can tell them to get lost. Worst they can do to me is hold me briefly and confiscate my phone for a while. That would be annoying and costly but not a particularly big deal.
I can't do that when entering any other country, of course, but they seem to be much less likely to try it.
You might want to consider whether your definition and the government's definition of "briefly" agrees.
For example Carlos Rios, a naturalized U.S. citizen was held for a week before being released. Peter Sean Brown, another U.S. citizen born in Philadelphia was detained for three weeks. Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/more-americans-will-be-ca...
So far they are, for citizens. The worst case I've heard of was a citizen who was held by ICE for a few hours because they didn't believe him. Which, don't get me wrong, is bad given the racist underpinnings of it, but not something that worries me in and of itself. And yeah, they've gone so far as to deport US citizens from time to time over the years, but it's not anything like systematic.
They're not refusing entry or holding citizens indefinitely for refusing to unlock their phones at the border. Maybe they will, but until it starts, what I said holds.
When I say “they”, I’m referring to the people ICE reports to. Precedent and rules don’t constrain them, so what happened in past years seems irrelevant.
Swapping LLM models isn't hard, but if you build a production app or business process around it, how much time/effort is the testing to have confidence?
Which is easier when maintaining an LLM business process, swapping in the latest model or just leaving some old model alone and deferring upgrades?
Swapping is easy for ad hoc queries or version 1 but I think there's a big mess waiting to be handled.
I can still use Kindle Scribe exactly the same as before the Jailbreak. Think of it this way - before it had Library (for reading and annotating Kindle books) and Notebooks (for writing). Now it has a third thing - KOReader (for reading only, KOReader doesn’t support handwriting annotation).
One thing is to have someone visually checking on your ID you're an adult, another thing is to record your full name and IP address, along with the site you access, who knows on what insecure database and probably forever. When you leave a brick-and-mortar adult store, no one asks you what your name is, records it down next to your purchase, and sends it to state authorities.
These are two very different things.
This law is not only about Pornhub or porn, but about anything each state government consider "harmful". Porn is the excuse for blocking you from accessing, in a not-so-distant future, any topic your local government frames as harmful.
The solution is the general populace becoming more tech literate, much like I became more literate in the yellow pages 20 years ago.
The reality is these are no longer mere tools, they are instruments for conducting life. They are a prerequisite to just about any activity, much like driving in the US.
We expect each and every citizen to have an intimate understanding of driving, including nuances, and an understanding of any and all traffic laws. And we expect them to do it in fractions of a second. Because that is the cost of utilizing those instruments to conduct life.
We can act on two levels. We (as a society) can work for regulation and we (computery people) can take direct action by developing and using software and hardware that works in the user's interest. One does not exclude the other.
That said. You can order a Pixel with GrapheneOS pre-installed and Google Apps and services can be isolated.
Apple knows an M4 is a hard sell for M2/3 owners. Except if you have specific workflows that can take advantage of the newer silicon, you'll spend a lot of money on something you probably don't need. I have an M1 32GB with multiple software packages running, and I see no reason to replace this machine.
This is why Apple is comparing against M1: M1 owners are the potential buyers for this computer. (And yes, the marketing folks know the performance comparison graphs look nicer as well :)
> I don't see how this is different from disputing the banking sector by conducting a heist.
Let's leave aside this logical fallacy; we're all adults here.
Buying music on iTunes became popular because it was easier than pirating the music. You could buy individual songs for less than 99 cents (you still can do that [1])
News outlets have the option of selling content by the piece (as you suggest) instead of forcing you to go into a monthly or annual subscription you don't need because you just want to read 1 or 2 articles per month from a particular newspaper.
However, they don't want to do so. And because of that, pirating the content becomes again more convenient; like in the pre-iTunes years.
Your idea of using an intermediary service to get that content isn't the solution. I'm not interested in a third party profiling me based on the content I read online.
There's no profiling going on, we take a cut of the sale price and that is it. But I understand your concern and will think hard about how we could make this more obvious. I'm not sure if it's a general concern or it applies more to people like us.
Also, I assume you read stuff on Substack, Medium, Reddit, etc. Definitely so on a third party commonly known as HN.
Re iTunes: it's not about the will of the news outlets. It is impractical for them to offer a model which sells by the piece. And the most prominent cause is banal: payment fees are too high a percentage on what would be a typical price for a single piece of content.
Keeping a credit balance solves that, but keeping a credit balance at every outlet is just as bad as monthly subs.
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