Hopefully it will remain the “Trump era” and not the “first Trump era”. This is my main worry right now.

This is why sideloading addons is so important. They’ve recently removed the bypass-paywalls-clean addon too.

On the desktop version you can easily sideload addons but on the mobile version they forbid this :(

Meh in Holland we are in NATO and they send Tu-53 bear bombers into our airspace every few months. They are escorted by fighters until they leave. I think they do the same with neighbouring countries like Denmark. It hardly even makes the news anymore, it’s so common.

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

Lol 😆 No i’m not a robot 🤖

The question is always: What do you want to use it for?

When raspberry started the landscape was very difficult. Small computer boards were expensive, now there’s the N100 if you need a tiny cheap computer. Microcontrollers were really dumb and unconnected, now there’s the ESP32 which has WiFi and Bluetooth and decent performance. Right in the middle of this wide spectrum is the raspberry pi and its clones.

This is a very different situation than in the introduction era where PCs were heavy and expensive and microcontrollers were dumb. There was a much wider niche for the raspberry then. For a small server I would now get a $100 N100 from aliexpress. For embedded electronics I would grab a $10 ESP32. Only in the middle is the raspberry pi, but the problem is, it’s only in the middle in terms of performance, not price. A raspberry pi with case, PSU, storage etc costs more than a decked out N100, while actually being slower.

The only remaining usecase I see for a pi 5 would be an electronics project where you need some more compute than a microcontroller can provide, like some machine vision project. Otherwise:

• Do you want to make some electronics IoT thingy: Get an ESP32
• Do you want a small light computer or server: Get an N100

Yes I was just writing that, I would love to see more integrations that can talk against ollama.

One thing I’d love to see in Firefox is a way to offload the translation engine to my local ollama server. This way I can get much better translations but still have everything private.

If you had a visual disability you would certainly think otherwise.

Or maybe Affinity Designer? I bought that a few years ago for Mac and it was really good.

I don’t think it will.

Microsoft’s endgame is being the lord and master of AI. AI thrives on knowing more data about the user. What good is an assistant if it doesn’t know your habits, your wishes and desires, your schedule and your attitude towards each person in your life?

This is not really a feature primarily aimed at helping the user directly (even though it’s currently marketed as such), but to have the AI build up a repository of knowledge about you. Which is hopefully used locally only. For now this seems to be the case, but knowing Microsoft, once they have established themselves as the leading product they will start monetising it in every way possible.

Of course I’m very unhappy with this too. I’d like to have an AI assistant. But it has to be FOSS, and owned and operated by me. I don’t trust microsoft in any way. I’m already playing around with ollama, RAG scripting etc. It won’t be as good as simply signing up to OpenAI, Google or Microsoft but at least it will be mine.

Oh it works great for me. In fact a lot better than the Rift did with its dedicated trackers.

It’s also handy to just pop it on and not have to set it up. I often bring it to the office and I’ve given a demo for friends, it’s much harder with lighthouses.

And the cost of them is just insane. If they were 100 bucks for a couple it’s fine.

Yeah that pattern is called “Pentile” or RGBG. Very annoying indeed on screens where you look right up to the pixels. And it reduces the number of subpixels by 1/3 so the resolution really suffers.

The PSVR1 had a real RGB panel but sadly the PSVR2 moved to pentile.

• Inside-out tracking so you don’t need expensive lighthouses
• Wireless connection

Yep this is one of the reasons I kept deleting my account even before the whole spez drama.

Too bad they don’t do OpenPGP like Yubikeys do. I still need that even more (much more!) than Fido2. Sites are so slow adopting Fido2.

I don’t use it for email but I use it for SSH and my password manager (“pass”). And yes I know SSH can use Fido2 natively as well but there’s many embedded SSH daemons that don’t support that yet.

Luckily Yubico is still around but I’m betting on them going down the drain (subscription models etc) soon because they were taken over by a venture capital firm :(

Hmmm weird. I have a 4090 / Ryzen 5800X3D and 64GB and it runs really well. Admittedly it’s the 8B model because the intermediate sizes aren’t out yet and 70B simply won’t fly on a single GPU.

But it really screams. Much faster than I can read. PS: Ollama is just llama.cpp under the hood.

Edit: Ah, wait, I know what’s going wrong here. The 22B parameter model is probably too big for your VRAM. Then it gets extremely slow yes.

Training your own will be very difficult. You will need to gather so much data to get a model that has basic language understanding.

What I would do (and am doing) is just taking something like llama3 or mistral and adding your own content using RAG techniques.

But fair play if you do manage to train a real model!

And the longer the time between episodes, the smaller the chance it would generate new sales because existing users lost interest.

True, but with that particular game what didn’t help either was that there were many years between episodes, it was pretty awful. It’s one thing I really hate about episodic gaming. But Valve already proved it to be a failure, only Telltale And Dontnod still do it (and they do it consistently right, to be fair).

The rest of the gaming industry has gone on to “Early access” which is even more awful. Rather than buying the first part of the story for a lower fee, you now pay top dollar for a game which isn’t even finished and never might be because once you pay them there is no real incentive to actually finish it :)

But really, most categories of mobile games don’t interest me. Arcade and other simple crap like angry birds never interested me even in the 80s. Adventures yes but they’re few and far between on mobile and if they are they’re almost always desktop ports anyway. FPS really really sucks on mobile for me, the input is just too crappy and the screens too small.

For me they have always sucked. The only one I liked a bit was “1112” (also known as Fade), BUT the developer actually cancelled the last episode because they didn’t feel like making it anymore 🤬 So yeah it also sucked big time.

More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/adventuregames/comments/k3wc7b/the_history_of_1112_an_ambitious_adventure_game/

Yeah she clarified that literally, it’s not linked in the article.

https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1677480809450835969

I can’t find the source of her saying it was about the IME thing but I recall reading that from a person close to her. She had just raised it before all this happened. Edit: Oh wait, that’s here: https://skepchick.org/2023/08/maker-naomi-wu-is-silenced-by-chinese-authorities-and-why-i-blame-elon-musk/ (This was linked on wikipedia)

And yes she’s a great person, she was often criticised for being a CCP stooge but that was BS. She was as outspoken as one can be being in China (and unfortunately, clearly a bit more than that).

This is something that the amazing Naomi Wu brought up for years before, and was ordered to stop publishing by the local government. It was about the same thing. It’s sometimes misrepresented as being about Signal, but her point was: There’s no point in using a secure messaging app like Signal if your keyboard (IME) leaks everything you write! So she was making the exact same point as in this article.

I really miss her content. 😢