I want to get one.

The neat part of this is that they're requiring Google to give up their library of apps to other stores and won't allow them to buy up exclusives for at least 3 years. I suspect we will see a lot of scam app stores really soon, though.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20849407

The Fediverse has been teaching me how to be a better digital citizen. Actually, let me rephrase that: without the shadow of a doubt, the Fediverse has made me a better digital citizen.

You may have heard in passing how Fediverse networks are considered to be “ethical social media” – but this description has rarely been followed up by an explanation of how and why. I’d like to give it a shot, through the prism of my personal experience.

this is cool but all my homies hate turing machines, boolean circuits are better

I'm not a lawyer, but I know tech companies run social media platforms to create data models about users for ad platforms. It seems to me that they could attempt to integrate themselves into a fediverse network and still harvest data, and not even provide services. So perhaps a software license could require that content posted to the platform by users is by default licensed under CC-BY-SA-NC or something that would prevent this.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/05/asia/hong-kong-police-cameras-facial-recognition-intl-hnk-dst/index.html

Been playing around with it a bit, very easy to theme, although I think that creating some sort of icon maker for it would be a good idea.

Link here: http://aap.papnet.eu/pub/plan9/themes/Themes.html

Hey c/technology,

I've been enamored by this idea of an internet that runs solely off of solar power. To my surprise, a project like this already exists. It's not exactly like I pictured it, and it leans off a lot of existing infrastructure, but it actually exists unlike my imagination. I'm not involved with this project in any way, I only found it recently and well, I think it looks pretty fucking cool.

Anyways, after seeing the discussion on the Mozilla post yesterday (https://hexbear.net/post/3606323), there seems to be a lot of real desire amoung users here for an alternative to the bloated cesspool known as the modern internet. A common thread I read was this desire to return a more text-based, less rich media focused content. Oh, and LESS ADS. The limitations of a solar web server not only encourage a focus on these but actually require it. An excerpt from the Solar Protocol Manifesto says it way better than I ever could:

"In response and by working within natural limitations, we have deliberately chosen not to use large assets nor energy-intensive tracking technologies on this website. A solar-powered web could reduce the opportunity for these kinds of surveillance and data-driven practices and the business models that go with them, something that is likely to have desirable political effects. As Timothy Mitchel points out in Carbon Democracy, different energy regimes create different political possibilities. "

Sounds tight to me. I didn't see any previous posts here so I figured I'd create this discussion to see what c\technology thinks. As for me, I'm pretty close to ordering a few panels myself and get my hands dirty using the blueprints from Solar Protocol. I think it looks fun as hell.

Anyways, enough of my rambling. What does c\technology think about this? Follow up question: would there be any desire to make a solar protocol-compatible Hexbear instance?

So I use Chromium for work. I installed it through Discovery and selected the "From Fedora Linux" option. It's worked fine for months. Then this morning, I closed out of it then opened it up later and it simply would not launch. It gives the little bouncy icon for a moment, then nothing. So I fiddle around with it, and downloaded the flatpak version, which worked, but I don't want it. Any idea how I can get it back up and running?

Running Plasma 6.1.5, Wayland. I already tried hopping into the Gnome desktop and that didn't work. Thanks in advance!

https://archive.ph/sjngt

I know people here are very skeptical of AI in general, and there is definitely a lot of hype, but I think the progress in the last decade has been incredible.

Here are some quotes

“In my field of quantum physics, it gives significantly more detailed and coherent responses” than did the company’s last model, GPT-4o, says Mario Krenn, leader of the Artificial Scientist Lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany.

Strikingly, o1 has become the first large language model to beat PhD-level scholars on the hardest series of questions — the ‘diamond’ set — in a test called the Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark (GPQA)1. OpenAI says that its scholars scored just under 70% on GPQA Diamond, and o1 scored 78% overall, with a particularly high score of 93% in physics

OpenAI also tested o1 on a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad. Its previous best model, GPT-4o, correctly solved only 13% of the problems, whereas o1 scored 83%.

Kyle Kabasares, a data scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Moffett Field, California, used o1 to replicate some coding from his PhD project that calculated the mass of black holes. “I was just in awe,” he says, noting that it took o1 about an hour to accomplish what took him many months.

Catherine Brownstein, a geneticist at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts, says the hospital is currently testing several AI systems, including o1-preview, for applications such as connecting the dots between patient characteristics and genes for rare diseases. She says o1 “is more accurate and gives options I didn’t think were possible from a chatbot”.

The dialectic of enshitification

I contacted Amazon customer service for the first time since I got my Kindle PW3 in 2017 with "Special Offers". Even after years of ads they want the full $20 to disable the special offers. I said thanks, but not for me! But as part of this process to get them to remove the special offers I preemptively turned on the WiFi on my Kindle for the first time in a long while. Somehow doing so deleted all of my Calibre-managed ebooks. I'm not kidding.

BTW, if you have a kindle do not connect it to WiFi! Especially if it's still on a blessed older firmware. You do not want to let it accidentally upgrade to a version that cannot be jailbroken, not until you are in full control and awareness of the upgrade process yourself.

So with nothing to lose and all my ~~apes~~ ebooks... gone, I said to hell with it. I jailbroke my Kindle following the instructions here (THANK GOODNESS I WAS ON A JAILBREAKABLE FW). This process involves wiping the contents of your Kindle, which effectively already happened to me.

Then I followed the instructions here to install MRPI + KUAL. MRPI is like a command line package installer and KUAL is a GUI one.

In my jailbreak journey I also referenced this page https://blog.fabricemonasterio.dev/kindle-jailbreak/ for some tips and workflow ideas, including how to get a dictionary for the next step...

Which brings me to the Knock Out punch of why this was at all worth it. I installed https://koreader.rocks/. KOReader is an alternative ebook reader interface. By analogy, the experience is like taking your old mp3 player and installing RockBox on it to make it actually good. KOReader is similar, but it isn't a fully alternative operating system. It just kills the default React Native interface process and loads its own when you choose to use it. It also supports epubs natively. It is way more featureful and customizable compared to the default Kindle reader. In fact, it's a bit overwhelming at first. After getting a bit more used to it, I really appreciate what it does, and the advanced customization it offers.

I will admit that navigating its UI is a bit clunkier than Amazon's UI, but I will take a bit of clunky any day when it adds native epub and superior pdf support.

So now I have a Kindle that can load an alternative, superior interface, get epubs pushed to it wirelessly with Calibre, shows me the book I'm reading on the lock screen, and doesn't display or present any advertisements anywhere. I really like my Kindle again.

https://x.com/Tayray_b/status/1841010032768663882

I just came to a community on Session and I found a better alternative to Discord, called Quiet.

It is a Tor based messaging app.