I don't usually get involved in internet drama so I wasn't aware of this.

I started with Conduit. I hit some bugs though, and development was very slow. I looked at all the forks. Conduwuit was the most active, and all the issues I had were solved, so I used it. It got archived because of some other internet drama, and the readme said to use Tuwunel instead, which is what I'm using now.

Should I use something else?

I dunno. Use whatever I guess, as long as it's not Synapse.

They used to charge you more for unlimited data if you didn't use their modem. Renting their modem plus getting unlimited data was $30/month, but just getting unlimited data with your own modem was $50/month.

Not relevant any more though, as (at least in my area) they completely removed the data caps.

I'm so glad I have a local ISP that provides 10Gbps for cheaper than Comcast's 1Gbps.

There's places that still use Styrofoam for food? I haven't seen it in a long time.

Stuff that's out of copyright isn't an issue though.

The reason AI companies are destroying books is because current US copyright caselaw (most recently the Anthropic lawsuit) doesn't allow books to be copied, but considers it fair use if you transform the format of the book (like from print to digital) without creating a new copy. By destroying the original book, they haven't made a copy of it, and so they operate within US law.

This doesn't apply to public domain books (books that are no longer copyrighted) as you can do whatever you want with public domain content.

This is going to happen with every large centralized service, especially if they let you use it for free. These services end up being expensive to run.

The only real solution is to use something decentralized. You're already on Lemmy so I assume you already know this. Matrix is decent (not perfect, but it's pretty good) and it's easily self-hostable using Tuwunel.

rcrypt can handle encryption transparently: https://rclone.org/crypt/. You can use rclone mount to mount storage from practically any provider.

Their pricing can differ by region. Not every region got the data caps back when they rolled them out.

It also depends on competition - if there's a lot of competition in your area, Comcast will have better deals compared to if you live somewhere where Comcast is the only option.

I used to live in an apartment that had an exclusivity deal with Comcast (residents were only allowed to use Comcast for internet service). Now I live somewhere in the same county where there's three different fiber providers in addition to Comcast, and their prices here are noticeably cheaper vs the old apartment.

In my area, they removed the data caps last year, when they also rolled out the higher upload speeds (eg the gigabit plan now has 350Mbps upload speed instead of 25Mbps). I don't think they've rolled that out everywhere though.

They also have a habit of keeping people on old plans that are either slower or more expensive. If you're still using Comcast/Xfinity, check their site and see what they offer to new customers at your address. (you may need to use an internet connection other than your Comcast one, otherwise they may detect that you're an existing customer)

Do you disable SMS too? It's far, far less secure than RCS so I'm not sure why you'd avoid RCS but not SMS.

At work, I use AI for some things. Right now I'm rewriting some legacy spaghetti code that's had a bunch of things hacked into it over the years. I spoke to the person most familiar with the expected behaviour and used AI to combine his info plus the existing code and unit/integration tests into a list of requirements.

I wrote the new code and tests based on the requirements rather than based on the old code. After each commit, I used AI to check for parity between the old and new code, and it keeps a Google Sheet up to date with the progress (which features were fully implemented, and which ones were missing or had gaps). I had AI write some tests cases too - given the list of requirements, write integration tests for them based on the style of a few tests I wrote by hand.

It has some quirks (eg for tests it loves over-mocking even though our skills tell it to mock as little as possible) but it definitely speeds things up.

I use AI for small side projects at work too. Tweaking and adding features I want to shared libraries, internal tools to help our team debug stuff and automate triaging of bug reports (they're all still reviewed by a human), etc.

The entire reason I can trust its code is because I can read it and tweak it myself. I sometimes need to go through a few iterations to get AI code into an acceptable state. AI writing machine code directly, like what's been talked about recently and what this post is referencing, is such a dumb idea.

There's other people at work that use AI for absolutely everything. Writing code, reading code, writing posts in our internal groups, etc. That's something I don't understand. Some people that are all-in on AI produce so much low-quality AI slop.

Also

The ICE agents arrived after she was gone. Laurie recognized two of them from an earlier encounter. About 10 minutes later, one approached her, showed his badge and asked whether she could confirm that the passenger had checked in. Laurie refused, telling him airline employees could not provide passenger information.

As the flight neared final boarding, another ICE officer accused Laurie of interfering with the operation and pressed her to help locate the passenger. Laurie declined to say whether the woman was on the flight's passenger list and told the officer he would need to contact the airline’s corporate security department for information. “You're going to need a subpoena,” she said. No arrests were made at the gate that day.

Legend.

Unfortunately I worry that ICE is going to target Laurie in some way now :/

Infinite scroll is used in so many UIs that I can't imagine it being wholly banned.

"You're absolutely right!"

I'd like to see that too, but R&D costs for a product like this are enormous so I doubt it'd happen any time soon.

Very interesting post! It's a good technical deep dive into the guts of the compiler, yet doesn't require background knowledge of it to be able to understand.

These days, apt is for humans whereas apt-get is for scripts. apt's output is designed for humans and may change between releases, whereas apt-get is guaranteed to remain consistent to avoid breaking scripts.

apt combines several commands together. For example, you can use it to install packages from both repos and local files (e.g. apt install ./foo.deb) whereas apt-get is only for packages from repos and you'd need to use dpkg for local packages.

Why does Apple feel they deserve a 30% cut? In cases like this, Apple aren't providing any value at all.

• Apple aren't providing the content - the creator is.
• Apple aren't providing a platform for the content - Patreon is.
• Apple aren't providing a platform for discovery - people aren't finding Patreon creators solely via Apple products.

Sure, Apple are providing a payments platform, but why do they deserve 10x what Stripe charges?

and you shouldn't be using any of those, since the order can and will change. The numbers are based on the order the devices and device drivers are initialized in, not based on physical location in the system. The modern approach (assuming you're using udev) is to use the symlinks in /dev/disk/by-id/ or /dev/disk/by-uuid/ instead, since both are consistent across reboots (and by-id should be consistent across reinstalls, assuming the same partitioning scheme on the same physical drives)

This is also why Ethernet devices now have names like enp0s3 - the numbers are based on physical location on the bus. The old eth0, eth1, etc. could swap positions between Linux upgrades (or even between reboots) since they were also just the order the drivers were initialized in.

I hate these proprietary systems because companies have very bad track records in terms of maintenance, since they'd rather you buy a newer product.

In 2022, the automaker told drivers of the affected cars, some only three years old, that a technical solution was delayed by the pandemic. Now, more than two years later, those drivers still don’t have access to telematics services. [...] Vehicles from Hyundai and Nissan, some as late as model year 2019, also lost some features after 2022’s 3G sunset.

In a country with good consumer rights, this would be a valid reason to return it and get a replacement or refund: It's no longer offering functionality that was advertised and that you paid for as part of the purchase price.

Should the USPS/AusPost/your local postal service be allowed to cut off a household's postal service because someone received pirated CDs in the mail? That's essentially the same thing. If anything, internet access is more important than mail these days.