I have my own shopping list of Mastodon features that i watched languish in PRs on GitHub. I like Rochko, but he completely failed to meet the moment of Twitter’s explosion and make the massive flood of excitement about Mastodon into the real permanent gains that were up for grabs.
Most of my wish list have nothing to do with safety because I’m a straight cis white guy and so my experience of Mastodon is that its userbase is painfully anodyne.
But the point stands that a hard fork with a focus on development velocity is long overdue.
The other two are in AP mode and are not running as routers.
Merlin has the problem that it doesn’t have something like like aimesh where you can auto synch the config between all your routers. I’ve got a network of three Asus routers and they work great and I can admin them like they’re one router, and I’d hate to have to give that to up.
Never turn on remote admin. You don’t need to admin your router from outside of your house.
May as well just say “only when you ask me that” and get to where you were going eventually anyways.
The animation and aesthetic is amazing and I like the music but … what’s the gameplay? I confess I got a little disappointed when it shifted to platformer perspective.
They’re great hardware but the software is bad.
WearOS, at least the Samsung variant of it, is goddamned awful. It seems to want to be a full standalone device when I want it to just be an extension of my phone, and it’s an extension of my phone when I want it to stand alone. Worst of both worlds.
I miss my Pebble. Week-long battery, truly always-on-screen, and knew what it was trying to be (just show me notifications)
That’s not what I mean. I’m not thinking about Play Store security, but Android OS security. Like, your app physically has to ask for permission (or even require the user manually change settings) to do most unsafe things.
As somebody who occasionally had to develop for android: the churn of improvements to app security was a huge pita. And as a user I know many of the abandoned apps that I liked that lost compatibility was for that reason.
So the fact that in spite of this pain, Android security still allows apps to do horrible crap like that is infuriating.
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And I don’t make my own paints either when doing art. I still agree with the basic original point:
It is disappointing that we’re currently automating creativity far faster than manual labour. I’m angry that my art is getting automated away faster than my folding of laundry.
I mean yeah. I’m not disagreeing with any of that (except the fact that AI caused it - search engines got destroyed by SEO before AI textgen started crapflooding).
But it is what it is. The SEO spammers won. They defeated Google and Microsoft and DDG’s respective search algorithms. Traditional search got killed. The internet got worse instead of better.
In light of this miserable new reality, AI-based content synthesizers (particularly ones that can coherently point to the references for their synthesis) are the current solution to SEO spam. Maybe this is another temporary plateau that the SEO spammers will murder. And yes, it’s tragic that this energy-pig of AI is the best solution to something that used to be doable with a simple trie.
But still: there is a real problem today for which an AI-based tech provides the current best solution. In this one specific case, the AI lives up to the hype. It swallows the hellscape of noise of the internet and gives you the signal.
Bing Chat provides its sources.
Okay but I still have to fold my own laundry.
Absolutely.
Bing Chat Assistant is better than Google, Bing search, or DDG today. If I search for “how do I do X in software Y” on a normal search, I get zillions of dead-link-filled MS pages, some interesting tangentially-related stackoverflow posts, and a bunch of old blogspam.
If I ask the robot, I often get “no, there’s no supported way to do that officially” which is the clear clean answer I can’t find elsewhere. Or sometimes it misunderstands the question and gives me a tangentially-related result, which is bad but is the same thing I get from Google via StackOverflow, except Bing is much more responsive to me saying “no, I didn’t mean that way, I meant this” in which case I often get either the right answer or the “no” answer, which is still good and accurate! The problem is as you iterate, the conversation accumulates cruft and becomes more erratic and hallucinatory.
But right now, with the level of SEO that has ruined all major search engines (ironically partially caused by AI), Bing Chat is the best search on the market now imho. <homer>The cause of and solution to all of life’s problems </homer>
So yeah, in terms of “things where AI has lived up to its potential”? It is winning the search war today. Everything else is something on the horizon in various distances (art, music, text generation, true general AI) but better search for information is here right now.
Except there isn’t much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn’t better. DDG isn’t better.
I have a simple opinion on paywall bypassers:
If it’s possible to bypass the paywall, that means there’s already a class of unauthenticated clients you’re allowing to see it. I have no interest in complying with whatever infrastructure you use to implement this discrimination.
Implementing a true hard paywall is trivial software. The only reason bypassing is possible is because they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too by allowing (eg) search engines to see it unauthenticated.
You know those “X is now older than Y was when X came out”?
Like, in this case: “Pearl Jam Ten is now older than The White Album was when Pearl Jam Ten came out”
That happened in 2014.
And a train can even be greener than his silly cars with direct electrification via 3rd rail or overhead catenary.