That’s fine. Do what you want. I’m not here to judge your choices, just point out that Mozilla only fucked up the communication, not the policy itself.

Right? I just do my best to ignore the bot and only enter queries any first year CS student would know. The rest comes from my memory and a few bookmarks I have saved.

Thus far, the local models I’ve worked with have gotten a C- on coding, but an A+ on bullshit.

I work at a company that won’t allow us to use a search engine but has a local model we’re allowed to use, and this is a pretty apt summary.

If you’re referring to that fuckup with the ToS or whatever, that’s not what they’ve started doing. You can verify this by their Privacy Policy, which hasn’t changed in almost a year.

But if you are pointing to other examples, I’m open to learning.

Same. Hard times are coming, and I have a suspicion it’s going to be worse than 2008.

People will need to do what they can do, and I don’t blame them for surviving.

As an American, I’m already subscribed to [email protected] and [email protected].

I’ll eat those tariffs to ensure the companies that stood at Trump’s side feel it in their stock portfolios.

The purpose of tariffs (in a normal world) is to make it harder for domestic entities to buy international goods. Typically, this will spur growth of a particular sector of industry within a country over time.

The way Trump is using them as a battering ram in an attempt to punish other countries, rather than incentivize steady growth, is why the US market is tanking and likely headed to another recession (or worse).

By retaliating in kind, the EU will be incentivizing their citizens and companies not to buy from the US. This will hurt companies that are based in the US, like Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc., further sending the US economy into freefall and bolstering the European economy, since they aren’t trying to punish every single trade partner in existence.

There may be other ways they try to move money around to avoid the tariffs, but governments are aware of how big businesses operate and often try to close those kinds of loopholes. Since this has become a global political issue, I would imagine they’ll be keeping a more watchful eye than normal on things.

Mini Apps version 1.2 makes mini apps load faster within the World mobile app, adds haptic feedback, enables customization, and allows you to pin your favorite mini apps to your phone’s home screen without needing to open the Worldcoin Wallet app, according to the company.

Eww, why would I want to have a garbage cryptocoin app that opens other apps?

Cryptobros are so weird. Like, their brains have been so thoroughly addled that they can’t see reality except through crypto

Just for fun, I tried three more pens and writing in an inverted position (i.e. towards the ceiling):

• A Bic Crystal
• A Papermate Gel
• Some random pen from an auto shop with a nonstandard ballpoint tip (so probably some brand other than the first two).

All of them failed. Interestingly, the Crystal lasted the longest, but when it failed, it was almost immediate.

I’m not saying this is an especially scientific test, but I’ve now tried four different ballpoint pens, all from different manufacturers, and none could write upside down. Gravity is an important part of how they work on Earth.

It may be that you can still write in space, but I would hazard a guess that it has to do with whether you can keep ink on the ball. Since there’s no “down,” how you write or how you hold the pen when you take breaks might make things better or worse.

It’s cool, though, that he put it to the test. When I just put my pens to the side, they get refreshed and are able to write again, which is why my hypothesis is that it’s down to whether you can keep the ball continuously wet or not.

Yeah, I know it’s not precisely correct, but it’s a fable that’s commonly understood as an example of over-engineering. I’m open to better and more factual examples, if you have any!

Just tried it, and the ink stopped. There’s no wick in it and apparently any capillary action is stopped by gravity. It wrote for a little bit for as long as there was enough ink sticking to the ball, but that didn’t last more than a few sentences.

In zero gravity, since there’s no gravity pulling the ink in either direction, a typical ballpoint pen would likely write inconsistently as the ink shifts in the tube from inertial forces, like a pen that’s drying out.

You may be right. It’s just easier to get the sentiment across that way than expound about how it’s ridiculously complex and overbuilt to achieve menial results.

AI: The “pen that can write in zero gravity” when pencils exist.

I wish we could make fines a percentage of unrealized gains that are over a certain amount. That would make some of them care.

This framework was tested on nine complex challenges. It achieved an 85 percent success rate, whereas the best baseline only achieved a 39 percent success rate. This suggests its applications in various multistep planning tasks, such as scheduling airline crews or managing machine time in a factory.

85% isn’t good. It’s a vast improvement, but it’s not a good rate at scale. If you have 100,000 actions, 15,000 are wrong. If you have 1M customers, 150K are calling customer support.

Also, even if we’re talking about smaller scales like scheduling airline crews or managing machine time, how is AI not overkill? You have to have relatively massive amounts of hardware for the payoff of what a handful of people could do. Or a “dumb” algorithm. Or a signup sheet. And now we’re adding additional computing overhead?

AI is still a solution in search of a problem.

I would, but I just switched to LibreWolf, and in the process, my settings got wiped out, so I’m still rebuilding.

Surprisingly, there’s still plenty of websites that don’t need much JavaScript at all, so I think it’s better to just start fresh for your personal use.

NoScript is pretty straightforward. Default behavior is to block most JavaScript, but they have a few that have been let through to keep the web mostly functioning. You can go into settings and change the default behaviors or just ignore all that and start whitelisting things as you go.

Another DIY option to look at is Mycroft. They used to sell devices, but they’ve since stopped all development as of 2023. There’s likely still a community tinkering away, so I’d imagine you could still run your own if you wanted.

As will I, but those look like legit release notes and not a joke. Nothing jumps out as too good to be true or just bizarre.

Yes! NoScript is my tool of choice.

It can sometimes be annoying to have to whitelist things, but after seeing that when I allow the main domain (and maybe their CDN) through the filter, and ten more domains will try to do whatever it is they do—Google Tags and Analytics, some data broker, some cookie tracker, etc.—I’m willing to take that extra step just to keep all these companies from snarfing up my data.

A little annoyance is a small price to pay, in my mind.

I run a whitelist. I’d rather be more private than know what to blacklist (and there’s often a lot of extra JavaScript that gets called, mostly for tracking).

It’s not that tedious. You just add as you use the internet. Refresh the page when you’ve whitelisted.