Indeed. If whatsapp isn’t on the list, then I have all the confirmation I need.

What’s getting old is continuously asking for a Linux Drive client. I will keep on whining about it, probably until the end of my subscription.

So it is not sarcasm. As I, too, am getting old I just tend to repeat myself. A lot.

Mandatory “I want a Drive Client for Linux” comment. Why should I care about features I won’t be able to access out of a cumbersome web app without even a search tool?

Also, why should I since I won’t be renewing anyway.

Just follow Improbable Research and their famous ignobel prizes ceremony for more.

What would be a configuration to maximize battery life?

Funny story the other way around: the year is 2002 and I live in Laos. Bootlegs Everything Galore, all movies games music cost $1 or about. I discover a game, and then begins a quest to buy The Real Version because it’s a small studio and I really like it all, the storytelling, the modding tools, the community… A quest that would end up in Bangkok looking like the proverbial insane foreigner looking for the most stupid way to spend his money.

I found it eventually, in a shop that didn’t look any different among all its brothers in Pantip Plaza. Took me a while lol.

You can also ask it when is the cutoff date of their database - there is a gentleman’s agreement between providers not to have ai involved in news / current politics in it’s public chats.

I tried them on a topic I’m pretty proficient on, (a spaghetti recipe lol) and the answer was the most bland imaginable.

The way it is setup by DDG, the restrictions and blandness, shallowness of the replies give me peace of.mind when a ‘natural language’ query is the easiest one. And Claude wouldn’t give me the DOB of that queen because it is Personal Info!

I may loose some answers in searches since I only use DDG

I often do not read articles or information from websites if the gdpr popup isn’t solvable in a click but the site ask to click on a thousand toggles

Where I am at the moment, the lack of FB marketplace sucks

A lot of cultural info goes through Instagram here, so I have to be a bit proactive if I want to know what’s happening

I use signal or text when possible, but work is impossible without whatsapp

DDG has it’s non-track version online since a bit now. Use the !ai bang to get to it

Also you have the choice of Claude insted of ChatGPT, and your queries aren’t harvested for further ai training

In any case, it’s a completely different tab, it’s not mingled in general search results

I know everybody always grandly takes on the High Seas, sailing them with lots of "arrrr“ and stuff, but I’ve found that small, quick flowing rivers oftentimes do yield a good catch.

Thank you for taking your time about this. I will make sure to give Startide a go, since as I said, I like the themes but couldn’t go through Sundiver actually.

Don’t miss “The freeze-frame revolution” then!

(+ it is available drm-free from its publisher, Tachyon)

There’s a lot more to Peter Watts, with the Rifters trilogy in particular.

Thanks for sharing this list ; about everything I enjoyed recently is there, so I’m saving this as “I should probably like most of them”. Martha Wells, Becky Chambers, and Ann Leckie - Leckie is fab. I get your point about Connie Willis, but her portrayal of London’s wartime is poignant.

One author that didn’t do for me is Sergei David Brin. I like the themes, I can’t go though the books (uplift).

And anyone feeling overwhelmed by your olympic-grade S-F nerdery should just pick any John Scalzi book and stop worrying.

It all works quite smoothly ; the install process is a breeze of a single .sh script to run directly from macos. The amount of software available for Arm64 is surprising, tho gamers will be disappointed there’s no Vulkan / Steam available yet.

That “Default” install is really just Fedora, shipped with KDE for it’s superior handling of fractional scaling. There’s the dnf package manager, flatpaks, the works.

I’m 80~90% of the time on the Asahi side of things on my device. Showstoppers today are sleep battery drain (50% a day) and pure “ooomph” - performance of an M2Pro chip is more akin to a 12th gen i7 than the same chip under macos. Rendering in kdenlive or blender is noticeably slower on Asahi. But it’s a huge reverse-engineering undertaking, and it will be getting better.

It’s a blog post on how to get Netflix and Spotify to work on Asahi Linux, the project to run Linux on new “M” chipsets 64bits Arm apple computers. Their solution (and widevine hack) is now integrated in the Fedora Linux Asahi Remix project’ default distro. You still have to do the user agent mod tho.

I posted the above for the sake of precision - OTOH, I had my workplace buy an ipad and that was impossible to setup without email + creating an apple id. I don’t care much (used work email), but still. Same with:

• Windows 11
• my latest kobo ereader
• Stay away from Sonos loudspeakers too

Since I’m borderline psychotic about this, I always create a temporary access point on my phone that I delete right after setup is done, over a disposable email address from simplelogin.com.

Disclaimer: Linux user through-and-through ; I have a modern “m” mac for some work specific applications.

Setting up a macbook today doesn’t require an apple id or even an email address. My warranty is with the non-apple authorized retailer I bought the computer from, I don’t use the software store (but I think it would work) nor do I use any apple services like itunes, or, without the apple id, I don’t have icloud backups. And I don’t/can’t buy anything from the store, of course.

I am able to update the os, I have just one notification in the settings about setting up the account but no showstopper at all.

So what does apple get from me? I’d guess crude location (from my vpn), hardware/OS version and maybe installed software? That’s not much, and since it’s a work machine it’s offline all the time, I can’t see that device doing much behind my back.

If apple is indeed looking deep into that laptop, then I guess they’ll see I also have Asahi on it. And maybe they are really really intrusive and notice I’m using that Asahi partition 80% of the time (;

Joking aside, if you need macos, it is possible to use macos. With some limitations: handle your own backups, get your software from the vendors and… And that’s it.

You wonderfully deviated this conversation towards the real threats we are facing in the near future, and right now. That was very well said, thank you.

OP’s premises may be not wrong on the first point, is in need of some realignment on the second, and I have no idea about the third.

The idea of a post-piracy world can still be envisioned and discussed; will it be full of FOSS and CC-BY-SA? Will it leaves us with only secondhand pulp comics while our roku devices blast 23h out of 24 of ads? Who knows?

Lifa has a lot to offer beyond screens

Yarr, mateys, all sails to the Public Library! We’ll drop anchor at the secondhand bookshop on our way back! And drop all that electronic ballast, it’s only slowing us down…

You are absolutely right; I hadn’t thought of it this way but a post-piracy world should be a frugal one, could be a quiet one. A planet-friendly one.