Given the usual quality of BIOS/UEFI option descriptions it’s remarkably close to being sensible. I would’ve expected something like “enables limiting CPUID maximum value”.

Ever since the BE200 debacle I don’t know if I can trust Intel to deliver. Sure, the stuff that’s already out there works but who knows if any of their future stuff will?

AI usually got better when people realized it wasn’t going to do all it was hyped up for but was useful for a certain set of tasks.

Then it turned from world-changing hotness to super boring tech your washing machine uses to fine-tune its washing program.

Why not submit a million vibecoded PRs against various Microsoft repos? At some point they might get it.

Mind you, Highlander II would’ve made more sense as a non-Highlander movie that just revolves around space aliens dealing with Earth having a planetary shield now. As a sequel to Highlander its premise was really weird.

Of course you wouldn’t use an existing database engine as the foundation of a new database engine. But you would use an existing database engine as the foundation of an ERP software, which is a vastly different use case even if the software does spend a lot of time dealing with data.

If I want to build an application I don’t want to reimplement everything. That’s what middleware is for. The use case of my application is most likely not to speak a certain protocol; the protocol is just the means to what I actually want to do. There’s no reason for me to roll my own implementation from scratch and keep up with current developments except if I’m unhappy with all current implementations of that protocol.

Of course one can overdo it with middleware (the JS world is rife with this) but implementing a communication protocol is one of the classic cases where it makes sense.

I find that LLMs also tend to create very placative, kitschy content. Nuance is beyond them.

Yeah, the 13 feels a lot more solid. The 16 pays a certain price for its enhanced configurability. Honestly, though, a full-size touchpad module would go a long way to fixing that. The two spacers next to the keyboard look fine (if the keyboard is centered) but the touchpad spacers look less great.

I have a Framework 16. Is it as well-built, efficient, or quiet as a MacBook Pro? Nope. But if something breaks I can easily replace it, and I can upgrade it without having to throw everything away. Also, hot-swappable ports. That’s nice too.

It’s all about trade-offs in the end.

Welp, there goes the neighborhood. If they want to do an IPO they’ll probably enshittify the hell out of the platform and jettison all remotely raunchy communities. Because nothing says “good investment” than a service that just drove out a fair chunk of its user base.

That undersells them slightly.

LLMs are powerful tools for generating text that looks like something. Need something rephrased in a different style? They’re good at that. Need something summarized? They can do that, too. Need a question answered? No can do.

LLMs can’t generate answers to questions. They can only generate text that looks like answers to questions. Often enough that answer is even correct, though usually suboptimal. But they’ll also happily generate complete bullshit answers and to them there’s no difference to a real answer.

They’re text transformers marketed as general problem solvers because a) the market for text transformers isn’t that big and b) general problem solvers is what AI researchers are always trying to create. They have their use cases but certainly not ones worth the kind of spending they get.

Because giving answers is not a LLM’s job. A LLM’s job is to generate text that looks like an answer. And we then try to coax framework that into generating correct answers as often as possible, with mixed results.

I remember talking to someone about where LLMs are and aren’t useful. I pointed out that LLMs would be absolutely worthless for me as my work mostly consists of interacting with company-internal APIs, which the LLM obviously hasn’t been trained on.

The other person insisted that that is exactly what LLMs are great at. They wouldn’t explain how exactly the LLM was supposed to know how my company’s internal software, which is a trade secret, is structured.

But hey, I figured I’d give it a go. So I fired up a local Llama 3.1 instance and asked it how to set up a local copy of ASDIS, one such internal system (name and details changed to protect the innocent). And Llama did give me instructions… on how to write the American States Data Information System, a Python frontend for a single MySQL table containing basic information about the member states of the USA.

Oddly enough, that’s not what my company’s ASDIS is. It’s almost as if the LLM had no idea what I was talking about. Words fail to express my surprise at this turn of events.

That does make encryption was less appealing to me. On one of my machines / and /home are on different drives and parts of ~ are on yet another one.

I consider the ability to mount file systems in random folders or to replace directories with symlinks at will to be absolutely core features of unixoid systems. If the current encryption toolset can’t easily facilitate that then it’s not quite RTM for my use case.

If you use a .local domain, your device MUST ask the mDNS address (224.0.0.251 or FF02::FB) and MAY ask another DNS provider. Successful resolution without mDNS is not an intended feature but something that just happens to work sometimes. There’s a reason why the user interfaces of devices like Ubiquiti gateways warn against assigning a name ending in .local to any device.

I personally have all of my locally-assigned names end with .lan, although I’m considering switching to a sub-subdomain of a domain I own (so instead of mycomputer.lan I’d have mycomputer.home.mydomain.tld). That would make the names much longer but would protect me against some asshat buying .lan as a new gTLD.

No, there is no punctuation missing, the headline writing style is just hurting comprehensibility. I’ll expand it a bit.

“A startup, which is set to brick an $800 kids’ robot, is trying to open-source it first”

It is a well-designed system font. Say what you will about Microsoft but they do know how to make a good font or two.

You are insanely naive for saying this. If you’d used non-corporate email servers, like the much smaller email providers out there (which are basically extinct at this point) you’d know just how wrong this actually is. Most smaller email providers out there are blocked or limited by the big ones and the ones that are blocked your mail will never reach the inboxes of people on the big servers, not even the spam folders on those servers. They won’t bounce it back to you either, so it’ll just go into the void.

Most email these days is used primarily by the all mighty trinity: Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, and a Few on Hotmail and AOL and while there are a few smaller companies out there like Proton, when it comes to something that isn’t a company or is self-hosted you can expect a lot of problems with domains being blacklisted, IPs being blacklisted, or both. And it’s actually much worse than defederation.

I’ve been using a self-administered mail server (running on a root server at a major hosting provider) as my main email provider for well over a decade. I think I’ve encountered one website where that actually led to issues. Heck, the server once got on Spamhaus’s bad side for a week and once we were off the list everything was back to normal.

Self-hosted mail works very well one you’ve jumped through all of the appropriate hoops (DKIM, SPF, etc.). Sure, running a mail server out of your bedroom probably won’t work very well but if you’re with any kind of reputable hosting provider you should be fine.

You’re beginning to realize why the decision to limit spam and illegal shit was chosen over catering to the people who want the whole federated world instead of what they’re allowed access to. Ultimately it is better for everyone if the depraved shit and spam gets blocked, than it is for the people who want the whole world to have their way. If you want the world, go to Nostr, you’ll learn why most people do not want the world.

The problem is that defederation leads to confusing situations. Being told about a response to your post/comment/toot and then finding nothing when you look is bad UX. Better UX would be a notice that what you’re looking for comes from a defederated instance and can’t be viewed – but that’s obviously impossible because your instance doesn’t even know anything is there.

Not wanting all the content on your instance is perfectly reasonable. But the way defederation works exposes details of the underlying technology to the user in a way many users don’t want to have to deal with, serving as an impediment to growing the fediverse.

It’s not easy to keep unwanted stuff off your instance while also being user-friendly about it. That’s why I called it tricky.

There is one metric where Intel is better and that’s Thunderbolt. You typically get more full-featured Thunderbolt ports with an Intel CPU. Of course whether that point is relevant is highly dependent on your use case.

Honestly, this suggests to me that the ability to defederate might be a bug rather than a feature.

If my instance doesn’t talk to the instance at foobar.example, I might be unable to see (parts of) relevant discussions. This is worse for a microblog like Mastodon than it is in the threadiverse but it’s still something to keep in mind even over here. And most non-enthusiasts don’t want to have to do that.

Email is an example of a successful federated platform and it barely has defederation support. But in general all mail servers can talk to all other mail servers as long as they provide the right look-at-me-I’m-legitimate signaling. That makes email easy to use for regular people no matter if they use Gmail or their cousin’s self-hosted mail server.

Perhaps that is how at least the non-threaded fediverse should work… However, that would also mean that some instance hosting heinous shit would keep being visible to everyone. It’s a tricky problem.