I’d be surprised if it were anything else. No way in hell OpenAI is going to develop their own browser engine from scratch. Mayyyyybe they go with Gecko? Might make sense if OpenAI is trying to eat Google’s lunch long-term.

In theory, an “AI PC” (please imagine giant eye-rolls along with the scare quotes) has the hardware to run models locally instead of shunting stuff off to OpenAI or Anthropic for processing. So in theory, it’s more private and secure than similar functionality on a “traditional PC”.

In practice…wtf knows what Windows is doing anyway? Or what it will do with the next OS update? Same for macOS. On the Mac side, Apple keeps talking about their local AI and private cloud AI, and yet they’re still partnering with OpenAI for ChatGPT integration. I don’t want to use anything that even has the capability to send my shit to OpenAI, for the same reason I don’t like to put poison in my fridge no matter how clearly labelled it might be.

Weight & Diet Trackers

I’m not going to be detailed with this section because it was honestly the worst one to gather info on

I feel this. I use Waistline. Or I should say I would use Waistline if it wasn’t such a drag, but in reality I haven’t launched it in months. It was the closest drop-in replacement I could find for MyFitnessPal (which is proprietary and extraordinarily bloated), letting me search a database of foods either by type or barcode. But MyFitnessPal was a much smoother experience. I still recommend Waistline because AFAIK it’s the best out there, but the bar is pretty low.

Both have a problem with redundant and contradictory items in the database, because they are at least partly crowdsourced. Lots of entries have weird or meaningless units.

That was the my first distro. Getting it to run off a FireWire drive was an interesting introduction to Linux.

Fun fact: yum stands for Yellow dog Update Manager. I know it’s been replaced by dnf but I still think that’s cool.

And you can’t tell when something is active/focused or not because every goddamn app and web site wants to use its own “design language”. Wish I had a dollar for every time I saw two options, one light-gray and one dark-gray, with no way to know whether dark or light was supposed to mean “active”.

I miss old-school Mac OS when consistency was king. But even Mac OS abandoned consistency about 25 years ago. I’d say the introduction of “brushed metal” was the beginning of the end, and IIRC that was late 90s. I am old and grumpy.

Yeah, they were able (and thus legally required) to hand over the user’s recovery email address, which is what got them caught. You don’t need to enter a recovery email address, and you can of course choose to use an equally-secure service for recovery.

One big technical issue to note is that Proton doesn’t use end-to-end encryption for email headers, which includes recipients and subject lines, among other things. So that’s potentially exposed to law enforcement as well. I believe Tuta does encrypt headers.

Looking over the Fastfox.js config, it looks like most settings fall into one of three categories:

1. Subjective appearance of speed or responsiveness (perhaps at the expense of objectively-measurable load times)
2. Experimental options that don’t apply to all hardware or OSes (e.g. GPU acceleration)
3. Settings that optimize performance at the expense of memory, CPU, or network usage (e.g. cache sizes and connection limits)

I don’t see anything that makes me think Mozilla’s defaults are unreasonable. It’s not like Mozilla is leaving performance on the table, but rather that they chose a different compromise here and there, and use highly-compatible defaults. That said, it does seem like there is room for individual users to improve on the defaults — particularly if they have fast internet connections and lots of RAM.

For example:

// [NOTE] Lowering the interval will increase responsiveness
// but also increase the total load time.
user_pref(“content.notify.interval”, 100000); // (.10s); default=120000 (.12s)

This seems very much like a judgment call and I guess Firefox’s defaults would actually have better objective load times and better benchmark scores. That doesn’t mean it’s objectively better, but it seems reasonable, at least.

// PREF: GPU-accelerated Canvas2D
// Use gpu-canvas instead of to skia-canvas.
// [WARNING] May cause issues on some Windows machines using integrated GPUs [2] [3]

// [NOTE] Higher values will use more memory.

Again, the defaults seem to make sense. Perhaps Mozilla could add an optimization wizard to detect appropriate settings for your hardware, and let the user select options like “maximize speed” vs “maximize memory efficiency”. These are not one-size-fits-all settings.

Fastfox also disables a lot of prefetching options, which…seems counter to the goal of improving speed. Not really sure what to make of that.

Yes. Homomorphic encryption is for data processing, not data storage.

Are there any that are cloud-hosted, secure, and private? My experience is limited, but I’ve never found an easy way in. I can’t imagine anyone who’s not tech-savvy getting started without walking through a minefield of scams.

Every now and then I look at options for how I might actually use crypto, and everything looks either outrageously scammy or way too much trouble. Pretty much every exchange I’ve looked at holds the keys to your account, and several have gone under or outright stolen their users’ funds.

The question is, when Proton embraces bitcoin, should it make me trust bitcoin more, or trust Proton less? I don’t know. I’m still skeptical. Their blog post is interesting, but also doesn’t answer a lot of questions. https://proton.me/blog/proton-wallet-launch

I mean, look at this:

Buy Bitcoin securely in 150+ countries

If you are new to Bitcoin, Proton Wallet also has integrations that make it easy to buy Bitcoin in 150+ countries, and we have also put together a comprehensive Bitcoin guide for newcomers.

That “comprehensive” guide spends three paragraphs talking about the “Blocksize War”, and makes absolutely no mention of how a user can actually buy bitcoin using Proton Wallet. WTF, Proton? Who is your target audience here exactly?

OpenSesame

Or just Sesame.

It’s a good card. Make sure you’re running a kernel with up-to-date drivers.

I’m not super familiar with the GPU market in the UK. What other cards can you get for around that price? If you can get a 6800xt for cheap, it could be better.

Short answer: Enterprise bullshit and Adobe.

On the home computing side, I can’t think of much that has specific OS requirements besides gaming and DRM’d 4K streaming. For better or worse, most desktop apps nowadays are glorified web sites. It’s a different world today than it was 20 years ago.

On the enterprise side, nah. Way too many vendors with either no Linux support or shitty Linux support.

Microsoft is working hard to shove “New Outlook” down everyone’s throats despite still not having feature parity with old Outlook. Nobody in my company will want to use it until it is forced because we need delegated and shared calendars to actually work. And then there’s the “you can take my 80GB .pst files when you pry them from my cold dead hands” crowd. Advanced Excel users are not happy with the web version either, and I don’t blame them.

Its gimmick was that it was compatible with Windows apps, and an easy transition for Windows users. It didn’t really live up to that promise. Wine was not nearly as mature then as it is today, and even today it would be pretty bold to present any Linux distro as being Windows-compatible.

Not at all. But I want to see advertisers make some goddamn effort of their own, and accept some responsibility for the shitshow that they have created.

And until that happens, I’m certainly not going to feel bad about blocking ads across the board.

That does nothing to deal with malware distribution, which has been a problem in pretty much every ad network. It does nothing to address the standard practice of making ads as obtrusive and flashy as possible.

I do not accept the premise that advertising is the only possible business model for quality web sites. History suggests the opposite: that it is a toxic business model that creates backwards incentives.

And what is the advertising industry doing to earn back the trust that they’ve eroded with their incessant, relentless abuse over the entire life of the Internet?

It works, though IIRC there are some features that only work in Chrome. I only use it once in a blue moon so I forget the details.

Thanks! That’ll be my homework for this weekend! :)

Tons of brands use Windows-only software to control button mapping, lighting, etc.

Anything outside basic movement, scrolling, and the first three buttons will need additional software.

It’s been a while since I looked. Anyone know a good universal mouse config tool for linux that would let me map all buttons on a per-app basis?

This is how we got these monopolies in the first place.