I think you can replace “Europe” with anything here. Free Software is everyone’s best path to digital souvereignity. (Unless you’re big tech and have an infinite amount of money to develop things in-house.)

Nice. Now try PieFed and MBin 😊 They should have some more compatibility beyond their own niche.

And please broaden this beyond AI. The attention economy that comes with social media, and other forms of “tech-feudalism”, manipulation, targeting and tracking/surveillance aren’t healthy either, even if they don’t rely on AI and machine learning.

As they write in the article… What’s a compelling app? In fact what even uncompelling software (copilot aside) makes use of this?

https://help.zorin.com/docs/getting-started/upgrade-zorin-os/

I was recently made aware of Binoculars and it seemed to have a better than average accuracy. At least with the few texts I fed in to test it. But you’re right. Generally speaking and for most use-cases, they’re all next to useless.

I’m not sure if that’s LLMs. I long suspected people to copy popular Reddit posts/stories here to gain attention. I’ve searched for some and they don’t all seem to be dumped here from other places, so it has to be something else. But so far I didn’t use any LLM detector service to find out if people made them up on their own or used ChatGPT… We might want to do that to gain some more insight.

But it’s very annoying. I’ve unsubscribed from asklemmy and several other popular communities, because of this.

I’ve never had a look at the code of a major commercial platform, so I don’t really know whether those options do something. But sure. I’m not relying on it too much. I regularly decline and switch everything off. And I hope they at least honor my setting to not sell my data to third parties… But I don’t invest a lot of time into this, I don’t trust them so I rather avoid giving them too much data in the first place.

I’m curious how they’re going to monetize services like ChatGPT. Whether they put ad banners on the website and app, or make the chatbot recommend certain products to you…

I don’t think there is a valid reason to this. I mean they offer several other services as well. But I think many, many people use it instead of other web application firewalls, because Cloudflare are good snake-oil salesmen and everyone else is using it too, so it must be valid. And there is a free tier, and nobody cares giving away their and their customer’s private data and introducing one big single point of failure to the internet…

I can tell you the truth about this: Strong or heavy machines in close proximity to humans are dangerous. People get injured every single day around the world while operating machines. Sometimes factory workers get crushed. This is just one more example in a centuries long list of humans building machines and accidents with those.

The video is scary and interesting to watch. But the article is shit. (And no, this is definitely not how robots regain their balance when falling. It’s the opposite of that. Likely a software error.)

Sure. I edited my comment. I didn’t want to imply the thing after that will be any better… That’s still open to debate. It’s likely not going to get better. Though, if we keep the tracking and surveillance, it’s not really changing the business model. So there’s that.

To be fair, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Because the current business model is mass surveillance, selling people’s data, harvesting every tiny bit of user attention and manipulate them, making everything an outrage, confining people into filter bubbles, endless annoyances and enshittification… I wouldn’t make me super sad if that were to die… So if it’s just the title… go ahead. Sadly there is more to the story. And also Cloudflare isn’t exactly healthy for the internet. (And their bot detection doesn’t work very well in practice.)

Sure. Are the labels human-readable? Otherwise I’d rather type it in while I’m in front of the computer anyways, with the new DVD in my hand. Rather than end up with a directory with 200 cryptic filenames… I meaan the interaction with changing the disks can’t be skipped anyway…

I don’t have any good recommendations. I just upload such one-off requests to AIstudio, ChatGPT and the like. But keep in mind AI isn’t perfect at math. They sure make a lot of mistakes with my assignments. I don’t know what level your maths test was, AI does an acceptable job at elementary school maths. With higher level maths, it’ll give both correct and wrong results by chance. Might be good enough, I don’t really know.

I’d recommend Wolfram Alpha. That’s not local, nor is it AI. But it solves equations, calculates and transforms and draws graphs with precision and there isn’t any guessing involved.

I think the best bet to preserve them as is, would be dd or ddrescue (if there are read errors). You might be able to write a small shell script to automate stuff. For example open the tray, read a filename from the user, then close the tray, rip it and then repeat. That way you’ll notice the open tray, change disks, enter the tiltle and hit enter and come back 10mins later. Obviously takes something like 20 days if you do 10 each day. And you’re looking for roughly 1TB of storage, if it’s single layer DVDs.

I think it’s called blind actionism. But I feel (your) strong words won’t help here. People need to be educated. And it’s not like they have a good option to pick. The options with payment providers are mainly: bad and worse. But you should be aware once you sign a contract with the devil…

Is a SSD’s cache even about wear? I mean wear only happens on write operations. And I would expect a SSD to apply the writes as fast as possible. Since piling up work (a filled write cache) means additional latency and less performance on the next, larger write operation. Along with a few minor issues like possible data loss on (power) failure.
And on read, a cache on the wrong side of the bottleneck doesn’t do that much. A SSD has pretty much random access to all the memory, it’s not like it has to wait for a mechanical head to move into position on the platter for data to become available?!

But I haven’t looked this up. I might be wrong. What I usually do is make sure a computer has enough RAM and it is used properly. That will also cache data and avoid unneccessary transfers. And RAM is orders of magnitude faster, you can get gigabytes worth of it for a few tens of dollars… Though adding RAM might not be easily done on the more recent Thinkpads… I’ve noticed they come with a maximum of one RAM slot for some years already, sometimes none and it’s soldered.

If they do it because of someone’s disabilities, it’s ableist. If they do it and someone happens to be disabled, but that’s not connected, it isn’t. This sounds like it is about the disabilities, though. And be aware there is more than ableism, people can be assholes, cruel… as well. And all of the bad behaviour can mix.

I think a SATA connection might be the bottleneck with its maximum throughput of 600 MB/s. So for that use-case you don’t need to be worried about the SSDs speed and cache, it won’t be able to perform due to the SATA slot. But I don’t know how exactly you plan to repurpose it later. Maybe skip the adapter if it’s expensive, buy a cheap SATA SSD now and a new, fast PCIe one in a few years once you get a new computer.

Though, Klarna really isn’t a good company. I read a lot about collection letters, low-quality service, non-existent customer support, so you can’t even settle things, not doing a lot against identity theft, layoffs… They’re a Swedish company, so European. But that’s pretty much all the positive things about them.