We plan to be a wildly successful company, but if we get it wrong, that’s on us.

That’s incorrect. If OpenAI get this wrong, they won’t (be able to) make investor whole. People would loose part of their savings if they’re exposed to OpenAI through direct or indirect investments.

Even if they get it right, everyone suffers from the pollution caused by AI datacenters, and from the opportunity cost since investors are pouring resources in this hyped technology rather than more reponsible things like renewables, energy efficiency, …

Cory Doctorow is an international treasure

Of course cooking is preferable, but it’s not possible everyday for everyone. Everyone’s situation is different.

Food to go is a good option on days when cooking is not convenient/possible. You can order by calling the restaurant directly over the phone, go pick it up and see the restaurant and its owner/employee face to face, so you’ll see if that’s a chain. There’s no delivery nor app fee. It encourage walking and support nearby restaurants.

Vibe update

:)

I need a new random looking password. Could you generate one for me please?

The first and only thing I ask when a company does this is: how can I ask a question to a human representative?

Pull the plug on datacenters that depend on polluting energy sources.

It doesn’t end on the last installation screen. Then it takes lots of time and digging to scrub bloatware, and to change many settings to make Windows less invasive since the defaults are bad.

The original presentation is german speaking. There’s human-produced english translation in a separate audio channel, thanks to volunteers aka angels.

Use the video settings, ie gear icon, to select the language.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is making 400 million PCs obsolete by ending Win10 and setting arbitrary requirements for Win11. This is causing perfectly fine hardware (and RAM) to end-up as e-waste, so that it can be replace by new, more expensive Win11 compatible hardware.

Now is a good time to buy second-hand hardware and abandon Windows.

Cloudflare drafted the Content Signals Policy which complement licenses.

The Content-Signal directive works by signaling your preference of either allowing (yes) or disallowing (no) certain categories of AI actions

It references existing EU law, ie the DSA. It’s good to set clear policy and terms of use scrappers can parse. It’s new so I suspect most don’t honor this yet. But once they get caught, the website could argue this violate term of use.

# ANY RESTRICTIONS
# EXPRESSED VIA CONTENT
# SIGNALS ARE EXPRESS
# RESERVATIONS OF RIGHTS
# UNDER ARTICLE 4 OF THE
# EUROPEAN UNION DIRECTIVE
# 2019/790 ON COPYRIGHT AND
# RELATED RIGHTS IN THE
# DIGITAL SINGLE MARKET.

IANAL, consult with a law profesionnal for advice on how to enforce this legally.

The extension remains live and featured as of this writing.

The Chrome Web Store should be avoided for security. Google keeps failing at moderaring their store, at the same time kneecaping legitimate adblockers with manifest v3 in the name of security, and failing to remove actual malicious extension after both manual review and dislosure of its behaviour by outsiders.

Running Chrome without any extension isn’t ideal either, it would leave people without protection from malvertising and tracking. So better avoid Chrome altogether, use Firefox or Zen Browser or Tor Browser.

In 10-20 years Microsoft may finally reach a point Windows finally gets a package manager with a well-defined package format, auto update, atomic transactions, just a few decades after Linux.

Schadenfreude

Another reason to stay away from Google Discover.

RSS is the way to get news from online newspapers. It avoids the bias and nonsence injected by AI and algorithms when getting news via social media and big techs platforms.

That’s true of Windows, any process running as the same user can read Firefox data files, probably its memory too. Malware do that, and that’s why people try hard to avoid malware with AV, security fixes, sandboxing, hardening, education, …

There is better sandboxing support on Linux, at least on the tooling side. It’s relatively easy to use firejail to sandbox every program that interacts with the network. Last time I looked I couldn’t find an equivalent on Windows that’s freely available. The “Windows Sandbox” thing is the closest but it’s fairly heavy and inconvenient. Unlike firejail it doesn’t come with profiles tailored for various popular software.

I wish Mozilla came up with useful paid services.

For a moment I thought Mozilla Monitor Plus could be such a service, but it turns out they outsourced that to a company that’s owned by a guy that also owns data brokers siphoning people’s data. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-after-ceo-admits-to-running-people-search-networks/

There’s also Firefox Relay but their phone protection and VPN services still aren’t available. https://relay.firefox.com/

Given what happened to Monitor Plus they’d need to be very transparent about relay’s management and proove their online services are trustworthy.

Some actionnable suggestions :

• Verify disk using smartmontools.
• Verify memory using memcheck.
• (Temporarily) disable unofficial apt repos, do apt update, purge then reinstall the affected packages.
• If that didn’t help or you need more help, you could go to kali forum to politely request help, with a precise description of the issue. Please refrain from ranting even if you’re annoyed.

Keep in mind this is free software provided without warranty. No one ows you a stable experience nor support. People are giving this software away and volonteering time and resources to make this happen. If there’s a bug and you need it fixed, please submit a bug report, ideally with a patch to fix it.

And then Microsoft gets annoyed when people don’t immediately start using Win 10, then Win 11.

Seeing the results, it looks like earlier versions had more QA done before the release, whereas nowaday a bigger part of QA is done by customers after the release.