I’ve never tested this hypothesis, but I would guess that a big-ass battery would remain useful after years of wear while a normal battery would need to be almost constantly plugged in. It’s one thing to plug in a power bank now and then, but if it effectively becomes a wired device that’s too much of a pain.
I hate to say it, but the idea is doomed to failure from the start.
Both human writing and AI writing are moving targets, and you have no real visibility into the mechanics of either one. By the time you test and validate any detector, it will be obsolete. You will never have the opportunity to test an individual validator’s effectiveness over time, because major new models are released every month or two. And the prevalence of AI writing is already influencing how real people write (especially young people who are only learning to write in the age of AI).
I’m not sure what the answer is here. But pouring time and money into a bad idea just because you don’t have a good idea is not a winning strategy.
Non-Transitory Computer-Readable Storage Medium Having Game Program Stored Therein, Game System, Game Processing Method, and Game Apparatus
Why does their patent title sound like it’s an Amazon listing from a company with an alphabet-soup name like BRENGSTAR?
Or perhaps you do not understand how Discord is commonly used.
People join dozens of servers. Maybe one for every game they play, every TV show they watch, every podcast they listen to. Everything has a Discord.
Even small Discord servers have many channels. Bigger ones will have dozens or hundreds of channels.
Some servers have millions of users. Most of the servers I’m in have thousands.
Many channels are default for all users in the server.
Not sure what the mathematical average is, but this is certainly common at least, and any alternative that can’t handle this is no alternative at all.
If we’re talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.
I’m not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don’t think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.
I set up their accounts
Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I’ll bet you’re going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That’s fine for your family, but it’s hardly going to scale.
The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that’s what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.
Matrix is notorious for its poor performance with large/numerous groups. They keep claiming to improve it, but it’s still bad.
I mean, it’s great that it works for you, but be honest: isn’t your tolerance for technological friction a bit higher than the average bear’s? People complain that Mastodon is too hard, and Matrix is ten times worse to sign up for and use.
I hate to say it, but Matrix is never going to be mainstream. Its UX is bad and it seems like it’s too bloated to fix. If I tried to get people to move from Discord to Matrix, they’d never take me seriously again. It was hard enough getting people to move from Facebook Messenger to Signal.
Also interested in this. The ideal solution would stream to a private server for storage in real-time, with access control so you can grant trusted individuals access.
This would allow retention of evidence in a scenario where your phone is seized/destroyed/lost or you are detained, and would give you (and whoever you choose to grant access) the ability to control distribution, unlike a livestream to Twitch or YouTube or whatever.
Same reason they don’t today, generally: they are reliant on their jobs for their own personal safety and that of their families. Destroying the system that sustains them (even just barely) might not be in their immediate self-interest. They are disconnected from their peers (and those who would be their peers). Any direct action would be met with immediate hostility by the majority of the militia, and the best they could hope for is a volatile power vacuum.
See: prisoner’s dilemma.
This does not rely on the rank-and-file enforcers to be particularly malicious people, only for them to have no clear and safe alternative.
If we’re being perfectly honest, most of us are in similar situations today. I am fully aware that my tax dollars fund oppression all over the world, yet I still prefer to pay my taxes than go to prison. Realistically, I’m not going to stop participating in society, because it would hurt me immensely and it would help no one on its own. But I’m not kidding myself either; I am part of a corrupt system.
Real, lasting change requires organization and synchronicity. My choices as an individual are severely limited.
In the leadup to societal collapse (you are here!), land ownership matters more than anything. It is immune to inflation. To a lesser extent, stocks matter. It’s not like billionaires are sitting on a mountain of cold hard cash.
In the aftermath of societal collapse, control of law enforcement private militias matters. If you can feed and house a militia, then you can control access to farmlands, roads, all kinds of resources. Control of those resources will allow you to support your militia and provide sufficient coercion for people to “willingly” join that militia. The only tricky part here is the transitional phase, and honestly, there’s probably enough cultural inertia that this will not be much of a problem at all.
See: feudalism. It is the wet dream of every ultra-rich piece of shit.
Most of the world is highly dependent on long-distance transport for the necessities of life, including food. Look at any major American city. None of them are anywhere close to self-sustaining. Self-sustainability is something America has not only ignored, but actively avoided and prevented in the design of its cities in favor of the “efficiency” of factory farms.
The best time to eat the rich was yesterday. The second-best time is today. Billionaires are an existential threat to society.
What a bizarre headline and angle for an incredible news story.
TSMC 3nm sounds good.
But I have no confidence in Google’s QA, so I’m wary of any big new things.
FOSS projects are often labors of love.
Nobody who isn’t completely deranged loves marketing.
SEO (search engine optimization) has dominated search results for almost as long as search engines have existed. The entire field of SEO is about gaming the system at the expense of users, and often also at the expense of search platforms.
The audience for an author’s gripping life story in every goddamn recipe was never humans, either. That was just for Google’s algorithm.
Slop is not new. It’s just more automated now. There are two new problems for users, though:
Well I’m sorry, but most PDF distillers since the 90s have come with OCR software that can extract text from the images and store it in a way that preserves the layout AND the meaning
The accuracy rate of even the best OCR software is far, far too low for a wide array of potential use cases.
Let’s say I have an archive of a few thousand scientific papers. These are neatly formatted digital documents, not even scanned images (though “scanned images” would be within scope of this task and should not be ignored). Even for that, there’s nothing out there that can produce reliably accurate results. Everything requires painstaking validation and correction if you really care about accuracy.
Even ArXiv can’t do a perfect job of this. They launched their “beta” HTML converter a couple years ago. Improving accuracy and reliability is an ongoing challenge. And that’s with the help or LaTeX source material! It would naturally be much, much harder if they had to rely solely on the PDFs generated from that LaTeX. See: https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessible_HTML.html
As for solving this problem with “AI”…uh…well, it’s not like “OCR” and “AI” are mutually exclusive terms. OCR tools have been using neural networks for a very long time already, it just wasn’t a buzzword back then so nobody called it “AI”. However, in the current landscape of “AI” in 2025, “accuracy” is usually just a happy accident. It doesn’t need to be that way, and I’m sure the folks behind commercial and open-source OCR tools are hard at work implementing new technology in a way that Doesn’t Suck.
I’ve played around with various VL models and they still seem to be in the “proof of concept” phase.
I’ve been using cryptpad.fr (the “flagship instance” of CryptPad) for years. It’s…fine. Really, it’s fine. I’m not thrilled with the experience, but it is functional and I’m not aware of any viable alternatives that are end-to-end encrypted.
It’s based on OnlyOffice, which is basically a heavyweight web-first Microsoft Office clone. Set your expectations accordingly.
No mobile apps, and the web UI is not optimized for mobile. I mean, it works, but does using the desktop MS Office UI on a smartphone sound like fun to you?
Performance is tolerable but if you’re used to Google Sheets, it’s a big downgrade. Some of this is just the necessary overhead involved in an end-to-end encrypted cloud service. Some of it is because, again, this is a heavyweight desktop UI running in a web browser. It’s functional, but it’s not fast and it’s not pretty.
I wish it were that simple!
There is no good way to back up an Android phone, unfortunately.
By “good” I mean in such a way that you can restore it and be back to a 100% identical state with no additional steps. And that you can validate that backup before erasing the source, and without needing an additional identical test device.
ADB backups will not contain your app data. Not much of a “backup” at all really.
Google cloud backups only work for supported apps (good luck finding out which ones support it!), and restoration is only available during initial OS setup. Validation is impossible. The whole process is highly error prone. In all my years using Android, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this work perfectly. It’s an absolute mess.
Third-party apps either require root or will not back up app data. At least on any recent version of Android. (9+, was it? I forget exactly but it’s been many years now.)
In the default Lemmy web UI, there’s a report button (flag icon) in the messaging page, so it’s not a problem with Lemmy in general.
This is the clearest sign to me that Apple has jumped the shark.
Apple has a long history of waiting until they could do something right rather than rushing to market with some fad. And here they are tripping over themselves to ship something that is obviously half-baked (at best). There’s no vision, there’s no attention to detail, there’s no careful UX design. It’s just “oh shit we need AI right?”