Category Archives: News

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McDonald’s AI Drive-Thru debacle is a warning to us all

Source: Hacker News

Article note: As I've now been saying for years, my body is ready for AI Winter 3.0. The useless bullshit brought about by FOMO and hype has _wildly_ outstripped the useful advances.
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Section 230 Sunset Act Would Cut Off Young People’s Access to Online Communities

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I think for a significant number of conservative folk that's the point. Awful people feel threatened when young people have access to communities and perspectives outside their family/geography/institutions (read: Church) that might lead them to question crazy bullshit.
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systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Source: The Register

Article note: The systemd "You're doing it the way you've always done it! We've immediately deprecated decades of accepted practice after only internal discussion because we know better! How dare you be so regressive!" tradition continues.

Fixes catastrophic data loss, er, bug, er poorly documented feature... user error

Following closely after systemd version 256 comes 256.1, which fixes a handful of bugs. One of these is emphatically not systemd-tmpfiles recursively deleting your entire home directory. That's a feature.…

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Lilygo T-Glass

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Rigging up useful software for this thing is going to be quite a project, but there are a dearth of practical hack-able monocular HUDs, especially since google glass briefly became a dbag signifier then a failure. Would be fun to hook to a bike computer, nice for teleprompter type tasks, etc.
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KDE Plasma 6.1 released

Source: OSNews

Article note: Cool. I'm not happy that they had to do their own hacky bespoke thing to get something resembling session restore, but I've been very irritated at it not being there on the two machines I've been doing Plasma Wayland on.

After the very successful release of KDE Plasma 6.0, which moved the entire desktop environment and most of its applications over to Qt 6, fixed a whole slow of bugs, and streamlined the entire KDE desktop and its applications, it’s now time for KDE Plasma 6.1, where we’re going to see a much stronger focus on new features. While it’s merely a point release, it’s still a big one.

The tentpole new feature of Plasma 6.1 is access to remote Plasma desktops. You can go into Settings and log into any Plasma desktop, which is built entirely and directly into KDE’s own Wayland compositor, avoiding the use of third party applications of hacky extensions to X.org. Having such remote access built right into the desktop environment and its compositor itself is a much cleaner implementation than in the before time with X.

Another feature that worked just fine under X but was still missing from KDE Plasma on Wayland is something they now call “persistent applications” – basically, KDE will now remember which windows you had open when you closed KDE or shut down your computer, and open them back up right where you left off when you log back in. It’s one of those things that got lost in the transition to Wayland, and having it back is really, really welcome.

Speaking of Wayland, KDE Plasma 6.1 also introduces two major new rendering features. Explicit sync removes flickering and glitches most commonly seen on NVIDIA hardware, while triple buffering provides smoother animations and screen rendering. There’s more here, too, such as a completely reworked edit desktop view, support for controlling keyboard LED backlighting traditionally found in gaming laptops, and more.

KDE Plasma 6.1 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough, but of course, you can compile and install it yourself, too.

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We Remember Noam Chomsky, the Intellectual and Moral Giant

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Oh man, the world with out Chomsky. That's weird to contemplate. Ed: and apparently hasn't come about yet.
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“Attention assault” on Fandom

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's the union of a bunch of bad shit. Hosting wikis is ...not actually very difficult or expensive.. but somehow the fandom folks attracted $40M of investment and the investors want returns, leading to a shitstorm of ads and tracking. Leaving is hard not just because Fandom will use hired admins to prevent mass deletion, but because search engines - especially google - treat site-size as a positive indicator, so even an abandoned fandom wiki will be hard to out-rank. I miss the old Internet _so much_.
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Where did you go, Ms. Pac-Man?

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Ms. Pac-Man is probably my favorite classic arcade game, and I knew about the weirdness about it being a GCC game adopted by Midway rather than a Namco product, but this is ..extensive and weird.
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US sues Adobe for subscriptions that are too hard to cancel

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: This is a scam I'd like to see addressed more aggressively. Adobe are pretty high on the list of offenders, so it makes a good case.
Adobe
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The US government is suing Adobe for allegedly hiding expensive fees and making it difficult to cancel a subscription. In the complaint filed on Monday, the Department of Justice claims Adobe “has harmed consumers by enrolling them in its default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms.”

The lawsuit alleges Adobe “hides” the terms of its annual, paid monthly plan in the “fine print and behind optional textboxes and hyperlinks.” In doing so, the company fails to properly disclose the early termination fee incurred upon cancellation “that can amount to hundreds of dollars,” the complaint says.

When customers do attempt to cancel, the DOJ alleges that Adobe requires them to go through an “onerous...

Continue reading…

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Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre (2018)

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's a 2018 essay and _way_ too wordy, but the essential argument - that super-optimizing for present conditions will leave an entity without the energy/flexibility to adapt to changes in conditions - is good and, although everyone would say they agree if asked, there is a lot of personal and organizational min-maxing behavior that indicates they behave to the contrary.
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