That was unconfirmed but Louis Rossmann blew it up into a big thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, he’ll be the first one to admit he’s not perfect, but that was not his finest work and nothing about it was convincing. Brother isn’t perfect either, but as far as printer manufacturers go, they’re pretty okay.
Canada has done some great steps towards indigenous truth and reconciliation, I’m not going to dox myself but I’ve been part of that on a local level and continue to be. It’s not hypocritical to admit that yes, my ancestors invaded another nation and genocided its people. The difference is, we’re all now on the same side saying “Don’t do that, we won’t let you do it”. We’ve done it. It’s wrong. We’re speaking from experience and trying to make a better world where this doesn’t happen anymore.
Your passwords aren’t unavailable at least with Keepass, I don’t know about Vaultwarden. There is a local encrypted copy of the database, it’s accessible completely offline. I sync mine through self-hosted Nextcloud, it doesn’t care if my server is up or on fire. Even if I lose everything remote permanently, I still have the local copy. I have it on my phone, I have it on my desktop, I have it on my laptop, I have it at a backup site at my brother’s house in a different part of the country, I can have it distributed across dozens of locations.
The user is also a Russian propaganda outlet, probably.
I think context is what’s going to kill LLMs. They keep throwing hacks on top of it to try to make it understand context, but it never really “understands” it just makes it look like it is following the context by simulating a few pertinent cues. Every interaction is essentially a fresh slate with a few prompts hiding underneath to seed it with what looks like context, but trying to actually preserve the context of the model to the level that we would consider actual “intelligence” never mind long term planning and actual “thinking” would explode towards infinity so fast there are probably not enough resources in the universe to even do it once.
To be fair, so are statements like yours. Any bleeding heart running around crying “what about the Good Germans?” during WW2 was probably either an idiot or a fucking traitor. The “Good Germans” did nothing but go along with what Germany was doing and shrug. There was no resistance. There was no widespread insurgency. There were exceptions like Oskar Schindler, and the exception is why we still talk about him today. But on the whole most people made no attempt to betray the Reich, to save people from being put in concentration camps, to free the concentration camps, to even improve conditions in the concentration camps. They might’ve claimed they didn’t know what was going on, maybe some didn’t, but they could’ve known if they had paid any attention at all, they didn’t want to know, they didn’t try to know. They were afraid, that’s valid, but why is their fear more acceptable than the fear of the soldiers who were called up to defend their country against German invasion, who are getting shot at and bombed? There comes a point where the “Good German” just becomes a “Cowardly German” and doesn’t deserve the sympathy you’re trying to create for them.
The vast majority of Russians have done nothing to stop Putin, and that’s true of the ones who’ve fled to the west, the ones who signed up for a military payday, the ones who are farming to feed the army, the ones who are building the missiles and the bombs, the ones working on the rails and the ships that transport all this war materiel, the ones operating the oil refineries that pay the bills, the ones building the software that runs and controls all of this.
When they can tell me what specifically they’ve done to try to stop Putin, to sabotage this war and this regime, then I’ll be the judge of whether they’re indeed an actual “Good Russian”, or a “Typical Russian”. Because the “Typical Russian” has done, and continues to do, absolutely fucking nothing while thousands are dying, or worse they celebrate it. They’ll probably tell you they did that out of fear too, that they feared consequences if they didn’t celebrate it, but those kind of loyalty displays are the reasons other people feel fear, they are helping the regime to maintain its control. They’re being part of the problem. They’re not doing good things, and they don’t get a pass for being cowardly while other innocent people are dying. They don’t get to trade other people’s lives for their own safety and get away with it.
Back in the old days, a lot of people went through the “Linux From Scratch” process to literally build up the OS from absolute scratch. No distro, no packages, no precompiled kernel, nothing but the raw ingredients. It is a good way to really understand the fundamentals not just of Linux but of the whole computing paradigm our systems are built on. It is not as hard as it probably sounds, but it’s an investment. It takes some time and you need to put your brain in gear to actually learn.
Yeah, that’s all it is. Calibre Portable. In a folder on Nextcloud.
Kobo has a great balance of good hardware, good price, and good openness. It’s not perfect on any of those categories, it just strikes a nice middle ground balance to make it an extremely popular ereader for people who require the kind of openness people like us do. There’s really nothing locked down about them, they don’t do anything in particular to make it easy, but they don’t do anything to make it hard either. “koreader” installs very nicely on Kobo devices, and then you just load your books from Calibre (or right through USB if you’re hardcore for some reason) and you’re basically off to the races.
All the choices for “ebook stores” and ereader ecosystems are proprietary vendor-locked services with no self-hosting options. While Calibre is primarily a “local” tool it is a true alternative to all these proprietary services and I think it’s at least in the spirit of self hosting, if not strictly the letter.
For what it’s worth, I self-host a Calibre Portable library on Nextcloud, which enables me to access all my ebooks anywhere, and to upload new ones to my ereader from anywhere, as long as I have access to my Nextcloud. And I also share the same library through Calibre Web for when I don’t. I retain control of all my books, I remove all the DRM and convert them to epub. Calibre isn’t a hosted service on its own, but it fits nicely into the self-hosting ecosystem, and for that I am grateful.
China is nobody’s friend. They are an advanced authoritarian autocracy with significant territorial ambitions on this planet and in space. We made the mistake of relatively freely trading with them for decades, which helped destroy our manufacturing base while providing them funds to buy significant parts of our country in return, while they supported terrorist regimes like North Korea and bullied all their other neighbors in Asia. They are not friends, no matter how much they smile at us.
I agree, making a Faustian bargain with one evil authoritarian regime because we’re afraid of the prices of the evil authoritarian regime on our border is just trading one problem for another problem. Both these countries are happy to destroy our economy, destroy the environment we live in, destroy their own people, and to destroy us if they can get away with it.
EVs are going to be expensive if they are made responsibly by people who are paid fairly. Life is going to be expensive. This is the cost of living responsibly on this planet and having a future for ourselves and our children, and it is not negotiable and cannot be dodged, hidden, offset, or rejected. Deal with it. Be prepared to change your way of life. We will manage. We are tough, resilient people, and we will lead the way into a future that, while it might not be the utopian ideal we wished it to be, will perhaps at least be a future where we can continue to breathe air and not wildfire smoke.
The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
Keep in mind that “those games” also have decades of content added through expansions and mods, it’s very difficult to separate the true base games from what they have become today, in fact a lot of them were relatively simplistic and shallow in their very first releases too. Go play the first version of one of the Sims games with no expansions and tell me if you’re having a good experience with deep and interesting mechanics for your Sims, knowing what you know now of what the Sims are capable of.
We are comparing a game in its infancy to an established giant, of course it will pale in comparison… for now, and for quite some time. The question is whether it will catch up, because if it does, it’s going to become something very, very big. Yes that’s a big if, but it’s an if worth waiting for.
Nextcloud AIO via docker is super simple and has clear instructions.
Install docker through whatever tools Fedora has to install packages/rpms/whatever. Then follow steps 2, 3 and 4 at least. 5 if you need it.
The only way we’re ever really going to get a healthy democracy back is if people show up to VOTE. Doesn’t matter if your candidate will definitely win, doesn’t matter if your candidate will definitely lose. We need HIGH TURNOUT to show ALL politicians Canadians are upset and we mean business and signal that we will hold them accountable, an engaged electorate terrifies them. They love the apathy, they love the status quo, they love how it lets them rely on the special interest groups who always vote. But those special interests don’t represent us, and the more they rely on them for votes the less they care about the rest of us. We need to scare them to get them to actually listen to us and keep them on their best behavior.
If you don’t vote you’re not keeping your vote away from them – you’re giving it to them. Decline your ballot if you don’t want to actually vote. But you have to show up to be counted.
As Canadians, we’re happy to help out where we can, and glad we have an alternative source from the US too. Trump has changed everything. We can’t control what he’s done. But where one door closes another opens, and every problem is an opportunity in disguise. It’s up to us to make sure this change is change for the better, for all of us, and hopefully for the world too if we can.
“Local outlets” you say? Pray tell, which ones? I thought they were all dead or absorbed by the media conglomerates already. I must have been misinformed! Are there real local news outlets still producing quality journalism? I would love to know about them and where you found them.
… oh, wait, let me guess, you mean local outlets like the Russian-funded propaganda and disinformation outlet The Grimsby Independent News I’ll bet, don’t you? That’s the kind of quality independent local journalism that’s going to be telling your story, won’t it? I’m sure outlets like that are going to do a very well-funded job right across the whole country, plastered on every social media site they can find. Boy oh boy this is going to be a fun election.
“I used to think the complete breakdown of laws, government and society was just funny when was only happening on TV! I never thought it would happen in my town! This is outrageous!” --Person outraged about 50 years too late.
It is a miracle that Canada is still a full democracy given the flaws of FPTP. I give credit to Elections Canada, it’s a national treasure, and we need to be extremely wary of any of our governments attempting to attack or subvert it.