Indeed.

I have an Immich instance running on my home server that backs up my and my wife’s photos. It’s like an open source Google Photos.

One of its features is an local AI model that recognises faces and tags names on them, as well as doing stuff like recognising when a picture is of a landscape, food, etc.

Likewise, Firefox has a really good offline translation feature that runs locally and is open source.

AI doesn’t have to be bad. Big tech and venture capital is just choosing to make it so.

I don’t see that being the case, it’s relatively low end silicon, with meh levels of RAM and very poor levels of VRAM.

Seems to me like they’re targeting a lower price point, which I think is a good idea if they want to take market share from Microsoft.

So do other Linux PCs on the market, but they can’t help Netflix’s shitty DRM.

If you have a problem with it, tell us why.

The market can remain irrational for far longer than you can remain solvent

Although it’s ambiguous how much of this is due to AI data centres and how much is the natural ramp-down of DDR4 production.

DDR3 also increased substantially in price a few years after DDR4 became available.

Nice addition!

Some extensions have a verified/recommended by Mozilla seal of approval, so these extensions would be checked by a human to see that they comply.

Obviously they can’t check every update of every extension in existence, but even just the above is an improvement and certainly not useless.

I don’t think this could be enforced by the API without also seriously limiting what extensions can do, which people would go crazy about if they did.

No, but Amazon’s are very often the cheapest by far, easiest to find used (since more are sold in the first place). On Prime days they’re often very cheap.

I imagine most of the profit comes from buying/renting the books.

Open source is the exception, and it’s important to note that.

Now you may be thinking “well duh”, but I’ve seen plenty of people, even fairly techy people, refuse to use good FOSS software because they think they’re being monetised somehow and that because there’s no ads, it must be from secret data theft.

Translation: influencers who wont say a bad thing about the product

They didn’t even use an Xbox controller, they cheaped out and used an ancient Logitech clone

I dunno.

Multiple people in my friend group are aware of the issues with big tech companies.

But the second you bring up FOSS with them, or Linux gets mentioned, they either disengage completely or get angry. One of these people heads an IT department.

I don’t know why they react that way. The weird part is, they’ll happily use FOSS software like VLC or something Minecraft launcher. The second you say it’s FOSS they actually seem less into the software, not more.

Adding an optional extra search engine isn’t the end of the world.

They also have Google and Bing, which aren’t nice either, yet nobody was doing this performative outrage over optional search engine inclusions before.

Oh he knows. But this lets him feel edgy and different

There are plenty of these, yes. But there are also plenty of consumer-grade GPUs being used for it too.

Firefox adding another search engine choice isn’t really headline news to me but cool I guess, especially if it’s another option that’s not Google?

I’ll continue using something else, though.

Nah, BMWs were actually pretty great, for a time. Well put-together, fairly reliable, engaging to drive, very comfortable, pleasantly designed.

I daily drive a 2003 E39 5 series with 260,000 miles on the clock. Mechanically it’s great.

I did have to sort some rust out a while back, but that’s par for the course in the UK. Salted roads, never far from the sea, constantly damp roads spraying all that salty road grime under the car. For the love of god people, rust protect your cars.

The way smartphones have evolved has been awful.

When they first started gaining traction, I thought that over time, as the hardware improved, we’d increasingly see devices that were essentially mini PCs, with all of the freedoms that come with it. That as hardware became more capable, PC and smartphone software stacks would converge.

I yearn for proper Linux phones. Plenty of gnome apps are already ready in terms of UX (try shrinking them down to a smartphone screen size, they’ll seamlessly switch to a smartphone UI, it’s pretty incredible). Maybe one day.

Not surprised a user from a tankie instance is angry about a western country imposing rules on a domestic company for reasons of national security, but is completely fine with China allowing barely any western countries in their market at all and, when they are, enforcing that they must be run by Chinese and have a close relationship with the government.

It’s bad when the west takes an inch, but it’s good when China takes a mile.