It shouldn’t be hard to implement the APIs, the problem would be sourcing the models to sit behind them. You can’t just steal them off Windows or you will have Copyright Problems presumably. I guess you could try and train clones on Windows against the Windows model results?

KDE and Gnome haven’t been stable or usable for the past 20 years, but will become so this year for some reason?

So Copilot Runtime is… Windows bundling a bunch of models like an OCR model and an image generation model, and then giving your program an API to call them.

Do they “give high rankings” to CloudFlare sites because they just boost up whoever is behind CloudFlare, or because the sites happen to be good search hits, maybe that load quickly, and they don’t go in and penalize them for… telling CloudFlare that you would like them to send you the page when you go to the site?

Counting the number of times results for different links are clicked is expected search engine behavior. Recording what search strings are sent from results pages for what other search strings is also probably fine, and because of the way forms and referrers work (the URL of the page you searched from has the old query in it) the page’s query will be sent in the referrer by all browsers by default even if the site neither wanted it nor intends to record it. Recording what text is highlighted is weird, but probably not a genuine threat.

The remote favicon fetch design in their browser app was fixed like 4 years ago.

The “accusation” of “fingerprinting” was along the lines of “their site called a canvas function oh no”. It’s not “fingerprinting” every time someone tries to use a canvas tag.

What exactly is “all data available in my session” when I click on an ad? Is it basically the stuff a site I go to can see anyway? Sounds like it’s nothing exciting or some exciting pieces of data would be listed.

This analysis misses the important point that none of this stuff is getting cross-linked to user identities or profiles. The problem with Google isn’t that they examine how their search results pages are interacted with in general or that they count Linux users, it’s that they keep a log of what everyone individually is searching, specifically. Not doing that sounds “anonymous” to me, even if it isn’t Tor-strength anonymity that’s resistant to wiretaps.

There’s an important difference between “we’re trying to not do surveillance capitalism but as a centralized service data still comes to our servers to actually do the service, and we don’t boycott all of CloudFlare, AWS, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo”, as opposed to “we’re building shadow profiles of everyone for us and our 1,437 partners”. And I feel like you shouldn’t take privacy advice from someone who hosts it unencrypted.

I don’t know why your friend doesn’t like it. Ask your friend why they don’t like it.

But now the windows one is getting scrapped whereas Waydroid is presumably sticking around.

How do snaps make money for Canonical?

There are a lot of missing steps people don’t really understand yet R.E. how this all amounts to something complicated like “a liver”. But we think that the basic building block of it is that there are gradients of chemical concentration that some cells set up, and then other cells react to the level of the chemical and decide to different things. There’s a famous analogy of the French Flag Model, where the different stripes of the French flag are imagined to emerge from how far you are from the left edge where a “morphogen” chemical is coming from, because cells detect and react to different concentrations of the chemical in different ways.

And the cells do these things because the DNA programs them to do it. Some genes produce proteins that can turn around and bind to the DNA that encodes other genes, and make those other genes produce more or fewer proteins of their own. Proteins can be made so that they bind or unbind DNA in the presence of other proteins, or particular chemicals, or which can function to turn one chemical into another. So you can have little logic circuits made out of genes that measure chemicals and turn other genes on and off. And you can have little memory circuits based on which genes have things bound to them and which ones are currently on or off, so the cells can remember what it is they decided to be. And so the cells are programmed to differentiate into progressively more specific cell types over time depending on what signals they see, with the morphogen gradients or combinations of them allowing the cells to have some idea of where they are in the body.

And the proteins are these little squishy clicky things, like long strings of magnets that will snap into certain shapes, or that can swap between a few shapes. They can be shaped so they fit really nicely against certain shapes of DNA sequence or other proteins, or so that they fit really nicely against small molecules with a piece pushing on the molecule in just the right place to make it easy for an atom to break off the end of it or whatever. And because they live in this weird tiny world where everything is constantly vibrating around and banging against everything else (because of how tiny the volumes get when you shrink the lengths to cell size), this is enough for them to find and stick to the stuff they are shaped to stick to.

Then depending on genetic variation between people, the proteins involved can e.g. have different set points for the concentrations they react to, and that can translate into the threshold between cells deciding to do one thing or another moving around in the body, and in turn translate into people having e.g. a wider or narrower region of their face decide to be a nose.

They also have Paul Frazee, who is the Beaker Browser dude and one of the Secure Scuttlebutt dudes. And also whyrusleeping, one of the IPFS dudes. So if they manage to enshittify it won’t be because they forgot to hire enough “Wizard Utopians” with decentralization experience.

Zuckerberg Did Nothing Wrong

I’m concerned that the narrative that what Facebook was trying to achieve here was wrong or bad is itself user-hostile, and pushes in favor of the non-fiduciary model of software.

Facebook paid people to let them have access to those people’s communications with Snap, Inc., via Snapchat’s app. This is so that Facebook could do their analytics magic and try and work out how often Snapchat users tend to do X, Y, or Z. Did they pay enough? Who knows. Would you take the deal? Maybe not. Was this a totally free choice without any influence from the creeping specter of capitalist immiseration? Of course not. But it’s not some unusually nefarious plot when a person decides to let a company watch them do stuff! Privacy isn’t about never being allowed to reveal what you are up to. Some people like to fill out those little surveys they get in the mail.

Now, framing this as Facebook snooping on Snapchat’s data concedes that a person’s communications from their Snapchat app to Snapchat HQ are Snapchat’s data. Not that person’s data, to do with as they please. If the user interferes with the normal operation of one app at the suggestion of someone who runs a different app, this framing would see that as two apps having a fight, with user agency nowhere to be found. I think it is important to see this as a user making a choice about what their system is going to do. Snapchat on your phone is entirely your domain; none of it belongs to Snap, Inc. If you want to convince it to send all your Snapchat messages to the TV in Zuckerberg’s seventh bathroom in exchange for his toenail clippings, that’s your $DEITY-given right.

User agency is under threat already, and we should not write it away just to try and make Facebook look bad.

The Uplift series isn’t really that third picture but I can kind of see why this person did the cover art.

The last one actually reminds me of Saturn’s Children where the cover is like a worse CGI version of that, but the book actually thinks it through in a way that makes this person a compelling point of view character.

I read them all. I think I liked the first book fine, it’s more of a self-contained mystery, which might be better. The aliens are probably most prominent in the second trillogy; there’s loads of them and I quite like the Commons of Jijo.

I feel like the series is sort of missing pieces? Like, across the five books it is in, WTF was going on with Streaker’s discovery is never really explained, the whole the-galactics-aren’t-being-honest-with-us thread is never satisfyingly resolved in the whole series, and at several points in the chronology it feels like there could have been a whole book about the stuff that happened since the last book.

The whole series is An Aesop on how science is good. Which is fine, doing science is good and you can spend a series reminding people of that if you would like. But it’s strange to find that as the point of a series that otherwise seems to have all these frankly conservative ideas about colonizing space planets and about some people being just inherently more or less “uplifted” than others. Uplift seems to stand in for a person’s moral value without what I would consider sufficient critique. Like, paternalism is bad when the galactics do it, but when humans just have full power over a dolphin person’s entire life that’s fine somehow, you need it to do Uplift, the thing the books are about. The whole Uplift concept has unavoidable parallels to European notions of “civilizing” people by using military force to make them act more like Europeans, which I don’t think are fully examined.

I also remember them as having weird 1980s gender ideas in them, like the men are normal and the women are viewed through some weird filter and the other gender humans are entirely absent.

I think there are more interesting books to read about the structure of minds and the diversity of subjective experience. For example, Diaspora only comes out a year after Heaven’s Reach, and also has all sorts of weird aliens, but it additionally has defensible gender politics and a much more cogent thesis on autonomy and what the powers of science may or must be used to do. Or, A Half-Built Garden is all about what happens when galactic society arrives to save the humans, and the humans maybe finally don’t need saving.

Watch TikTok’s US operation get sold not to the highest bidder, but to the American entity most intent on using it to destabilize society.

Plastic at the microscopic level, if they aren’t doing anything chemically interesting, really ought to function about like “rock, but light”. Most organisms don’t run into trouble because there are tiny bits of rock in the world, so I would expect tiny bits of plastic not to be a huge problem. Which is sort of backed up by how we have noticed microplastics everywhere and we haven’t seen huge problems resulting from it (most people are still alive, most children still develop to adulthood, etc.).

But it’s entirely possible that some of these plastics are not chemically inert, and that they emit chemicals that do exciting and unwanted things in people’s bodies. If we can’t keep our plastics from becoming microplastics, we probably need to discontinue the manufacture of non-implantable plastics, since all the plastics will end up in someone’s body at some point.

And it’s also possible that the microplastics physically do do something interestingly bad. I think there was a recent study to this effect on heart disease. But at this point, that’s the question we need to be asking. How many or what kind of microplastics does it take to give a ferret epilepsy? Not “are there microplastics in my all brands of peanut butter?”

Linux hobbyists

Who else has opinions on snaps vs. flatpacks? Are they distinct to the “Linux professional” somehow?

Tim.

On phones Android is pretty typical, and on desktop Unix is also pretty typical because MacOS is it. But non-Mac Unix on the desktop is pretty unusual, and stuff built for Mac specifically often won’t work on other Unixes.

I’m going to go with “be normal”.

Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn’t. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.

Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a .c and a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.

But that’s kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it’s often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.

Maybe that’s when I mostly stopped getting the wrong page of stuff.

I took one passing look at how the thing is built, found out it’s “basically all websockets for some reason”, and stopped expecting it to work properly. Whenever it breaks I think “this is why you don’t use websockets when you can just send a goddamn server side rendered web page or make an AJAX POST request” and I feel vindicated instead of annoyed.