Anything involving Copilot makes me happy to be a Mac user.
If you have a machine that runs Windows and the hardware is still good, it’s time to give Linux a chance. Look into Proton for gaming (it’s a translation layer, like WINE I suppose). And let’s stop acting like Macs are the odd one out. Macs run UNIX. Windows is the odd one out! ;)
Correct. It’s the same as the logic being destroying or hiding evidence (see: Epstein files). It’s because the evidence is exactly what you think it is, or worse. They aren’t keeping it from you because it’s not as bad as you think. So you can safely assume that it is.
This is more of a canary system, but a little different. Canary is where they constantly say “we’re not sharing your data” and then one day they remove that text. They’re not saying they are, but they’re not saying they’re not — and they used to.
Or it’s code wording. “Never say you’re fine, say you’re okay,” a family sets as a rule. So when they’re fine, when everything’s going well, they say in the group chat they’re okay. Then an aggressor demands one tell the rest they’re safe when they aren’t, so they say everything is fine and that sounds the alarm.
Cryptocommunication is fun.
CM was okay. It’s the one custom firmware I got my wife to install… on something called a Samsung Acclaim back in 2010. Absolute dogshit phone, made tolerable by CM. I actually kinda miss that phone sometimes. Later, it was a little square… nice for an AOSP-like, but then we had AOKP and Paranoid Android doing way cooler shit. I did respect CM for keeping it simple though.
I’ve been through the best years of custom firmware. Back in the Jellybean/Kitkat days. My favourite was a fork of AOKP called LiquidSmooth.
Custom firmware comes at your own risk though. If something goes wrong, maybe you can find some help… but maybe you can’t.
Then you have guys who say “I’ll make custom firmware for your phone if the community buys me one.” The community buys them one from donations, and dude flips it on eBay the next day. I’ve seen that happen too.
There needs to be a commercial interest in private and available custom firmware for Android. Because otherwise it’s just a hobby.
For customisation? No. For privacy? Yes.
One’s made by a computer company and the other is made by an advertising company. These are not the same things at all.
Android is not your friend. If your camera needs to spy on you, then it’s not your camera.
I use iPhone myself — though I was an Android user longer, and I enjoy both mobile platforms for their various strengths — but we really do need a third option. So Android is kind of like Windows now, it leans heavy into AI (especially on the Pixel side), and it’s on everything (except the iPhone), and iPhone has always just been a pocket Mac, but with the walled app garden. Apple says you can trust them with your personal data, but you don’t know that and Apple is big enough that they can basically do whatever they want — and they’ve been cosying up to fascists in the US. So that’s unsettling. Mobiles need a Linux option. A totally open source option that serves the user exclusively, or can be made to do so. GrapheneOS is a fine choice, but it’s limited to Pixels. If you have anything else, you’re out of luck, and if you have a Pixel, you or someone else has paid Google iPhone money for a device that’s at least a few generations behind performance-wise. So not ideal.
Of course, most Android users and certainly most Android fans won’t care about this — I’m coming from the privacy perspective. And Google’s always been pretty clear that they are not there for your privacy.
I don’t hate Windows, but it seems like every day Microsoft gives me reasons to be thankful I’m a Mac user.
Either go all in with Microsoft’s crap, pay for Microsoft 365, and enjoy the ride — or learn Linux. It’s easy, you can run it off a portable SSD. You don’t have to trash your Windows installation. You can do it virtually risk free. I recommend Ubuntu for new users, but Linux Mint is another good choice and it resembles Windows more, so it will be more familiar to you. Linux has never been better. It’s not just a free alternative to Windows; it is very much its own thing. Or, if you aren’t a gamer, and you need new hardware anyway… I’d grab a Mac mini. They’re $500 and they do everything you need. Gaming not so much (though we did just get Cyberpunk this year).
YouTube has been absolute dogshit on my Apple TV box, which ironically is the only place I’m not blocking ads. So ads aside I should be getting the best experience… but no. So most of the time I AirPlay my MacBook to my TV and just use Firefox. I mean outside the outage.
Are you asking how to make em dashes? Hold dash on a phone, Shift+Option+Dash on a Mac, Alt+0151 on Windows.
Shit, you might be able to blame me for LLMs using em dashes. Been using them forever. Maybe even longer than you’ve been alive.
That’s what the article said. I would opt-out as well.
Well no shit. You could also maybe stop a tank if you stand in front of it, but maybe it’ll just keep going.
I mention King because he did a similar thing before. He wrote two books, one as himself and one as his alter ego Richard Bachman, and the two books — Desperation and The Regulators — mirrored one another. He also was one of the first nationally/internationally published authors to support ebook (he released a book online only).
I mean, Ao3 has existed for years, and literotica for years longer, but okay, if someone wants something personalised. Vague concerns of plagiarism aside, it’s interesting. The problem I see is that people will take it back to those sites and upload it as their own and not declare it as AI.
We already have AI generated music that has fooled some people. I think AI generated stories will be harder to track. And it’s going to be divisive. One thing I’d like to see is someone prolific like Stephen King do it as an experiment. So King — or, more likely, a young intern working for him — prompts an AI to write a book in the style of Stephen King. And they prompt it to include certain things. Then, Stephen King himself actually writes the book, and the two are packaged together for the cost of the one book. You get the Stephen King version, and you get the AI version which has some ridiculous name. And it’s going to tell the same story, but it’s going to do it slightly differently. So you can read King’s version — I think most readers would either read this one first, or this one only — and then, if you’re up to it, you can read the AI version. This would do two things. One, it would (possibly) prove that AI cannot fully replace human writers. Two (and not mutually exclusive to the previous point), it would give you an alternate-reality version of the first story, and that could be interesting.
TL;DR: Woman missing an arm couldn’t get AI image generators to generate an amputee. It apparently didn’t know how. Now it does and the woman says the representation is important. </tldr>
I guess it couldn’t find enough art to steal of amputees for it to form enough of a basis to draw them? And so in reaction to the backlash (such as it was), they gave it more data?
I use fre:ac. It is open source but I’m not savvy enough to see what the license is.
I don’t use MP3, I use AAC. Never liked Opus. I get it’s a free/open codec, but I’ve never liked the format. So I’m not sure what the licensing is for AAC. But I’m sure fre:ac can do Opus as well.
Nothing.
My daily driver is an iPhone. We’ve always had the problem of limiting sideloading (to be nonexistent for most people) and it’s never been a problem for me.
I also have a Galaxy S10, but all my apps on that come from the Play Store.
This won’t affect 99% of users, just like it doesn’t on iPhone.
I just hope now that they’re taking sideloading, and they’ve already taken memory card slots, headphone jacks… and they’re still taking a cut off the back end by selling your personal information… maybe the cost will come down. But I doubt it. Android makes sense when it’s cheaper than iPhone. I mean, iPhone makes sense to be expensive. It’s a pocket Mac, it’s made by a computer company. Sure, they have telemetry but it’s not an ad company like Google. So for a phone that’s less powerful and still has the same restrictions, and I’m paying with my personal data? I expect the phones to be cheaper. They really should be cheaper.
But I’m gonna let you in on a secret. Smartphone performance plateaued a long time ago. All these new phones are kind of a scam. Okay, so the Pixel 10 has the benchmark performance of an iPhone 11. The Galaxy S25 is like 40% faster than the iPhone 16 Pro until it hits load (like the top 1% of games, maybe) then the iPhone is like 10% faster… Who Cares? My 2019 Galaxy S10 is still a viable daily driver in 2025. So, I think I’m done chasing the latest model for a while. If Apple Health comes to iPad (I’m not sure if it’s there or not), I’d even consider replacing my Android phone with a newer phone next, like a gently used Galaxy S24 or S25 (I mean in a few years). These new phones talk about performance numbers, but for most people, they don’t really mean shit. Phones don’t slow down like they used to. They got a lot better and it wasn’t even that recently.
I use Telegram. Eek? It’s just my wife and I though. All these things I’ve heard about Telegram? Never actually seen them in mine. I have looked at groups, but I’ve only seen memes, crypto crap, and what look like scams (“post this in 5 Reddit threads to get invited to the actual group”). There’s nothing of value out there that I’ve seen. So I just use it to message my wife, because texting wasn’t good enough when we started using it (both our phones have RCS now) and I don’t use Facebook, and she doesn’t have an iPhone (so, no iMessage).
I completely reject this notion that you have to pick one and stay with it. My messaging apps include iMessage, Session, Signal, and Telegram. I also have a fork of Telegram that lets me use it from my watch (as in, it has a watch companion; official Telegram does not). I also have Discord (need it for a couple things).
Even if you don’t like the guy, I think it’s worth reading what he has to say. And you can agree with what he says and go on not liking him.
Honestly, even as a privacy guy, this makes sense. SkyDrive was unique in giving people 30GB, plus 5GB if you turned on photo upload (even if you turned it right back off). So even without paying, my OneDrive is still 35GB. That’s plenty for documents.
What Windows 10+ does with backing stuff up to OneDrive and sharing it across builds is smart, if not the best execution. I kind of have that between my Macs and iPhone with Safari bookmarks and passwords.
I would be asking how safe OneDrive is and if it had any major breaches, if I were a Windows user. I’m actually using iWork and iCloud though, and I trust that a little more, but OneDrive doesn’t seem that problematic to me. There’s a lot I don’t like about Microsoft, but OneDrive doesn’t earn any ire from me. Should it? (Probably not since I’m a Mac user and it’s all abstract anyway.)
Even without having other Apple products. The only real benefit I see with the Apple TV — I do have other Apple products — is I can AirPlay to it. But, it isn’t very stable for whatever reason. The connection will just drop. So I AirPlay to the TV itself instead, and that works, though sometimes the audio doesn’t, so I just route it back to the MacBook, which has very good speakers, and it’s fine. Or I grab my Thunderbolt to HDMI and plug in directly, turn the TV into a monitor — but, this bypasses the Apple TV (but, so does AirPlaying to the TV itself). Oh, and I can use my phone or watch as a remote. All in all it’s perfectly fine if you don’t have any other Apple stuff.
The one thing it’s really lacking is some Dolby codec that people need to play Blu-ray rips. People in communities like Plex and Jellyfin complain about that. But those are like 50GB+ per movie, I don’t have that kind of storage to even come close to caring about that issue. It can still play 4K content, just not with that one codec.
In fact, it’s probably one of the best Apple devices out there, just because the competition is so much worse. I’d also say the same thing about the iPad, and the MacBook. You can make a case for a gaming PC, but for a laptop that isn’t gonna game because battery is an issue, you’re going for efficiency, it’s really hard to beat the MacBook. As for the iPad, it’s hard to tell which Android tablets are good and which ones aren’t — or which ones will never get updated. And iPad got a lot of love this year, it’s basically a desktop OS now (it’s like macOS lite at this point). No, you still can’t install whatever you want — need an actual computer for that.
It sure looked like a gun in the message, assuming that was the image that was sent out and not a dramatisation.
Also, I think it worked exactly how it was supposed to. It SWATted a person of colour. Par for the course. As it was trained to do.