technology
arstechnica.com
Google is now rolling out a system where Chrome directly tracks your activity and shares its summary with advertisers. Also [Firefox is faster](https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?timerange=31536000&series=mozilla-central,3735773,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3412459,1,13) as of like two months ago. It takes five minutes to switch browsers, and the difference is so little that you'll often forget you did it.
blog.mozilla.org
www.nature.com
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”.
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!
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](https://github.com/notmarek/LanguageBreak) (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](https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=320564) 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. ::: spoiler WiFi notes I use WiFi to remotely push books to the kindle. You could choose to never use WiFi and manually manage the ebooks but you have to exit KOReader and use the native Kindle interface, because USB doesn't mount in KOReader on Kindle. I also use a KUAL extension called `renameotabin` to help ensure my kindle never downloads and installs a newer firmware while on WiFi. Currently the latest firmware for my Kindle, 5.16.2.1.1, is also the latest version there's a jailbreak for. But if Amazon ever decides to resume supporting what seems to be an unsupported device, I don't want to be hosed. ::: ::: spoiler Bonus thoughts on the 'special offers' I honestly did not mind the special offers when I first bought my Kindle in 2017. Sure, my lock screen was an ad but otherwise the main Kindle interface was generally unobstructed and fine to use. I mostly disabled WiFi so the loaded ads would expire eventually anyway and just revert to some generic art. One day after using my Kindle like this for years curiosity got the better of me. I thought, as many seemed to, that epub support was finally on the way, so I upgraded my Kindle. As we all found out, the feature was to send an epub by email, which Amazon then converted to an azw3. They never supported epubs on the Kindle. I must've gone from a substantially older Kindle firmware version, because now I had a brand new UI on my Kindle. And in some ways it actually was better, but in more ways it was worse. The home screen was almost nothing but ads and suggested books to buy from Amazon. I do not know what the interface looks like on a non-special-offer Kindle, but it was so aggressively in my face that it did actually impact my experience with the device. It was annoying but I lived with it until my books were wiped for no reason. Once that happened I did the jailbreak as I described above, which reformats the Kindle's disk drive, but I didn't enable WiFi. Good enough for me, I thought. I will just plug in my phone and use Calibre to manage the library. Except even in this way the default Kindle UI is aggressively annoying. Every time I visited my ebook "library" (list of ebooks on the device), an annoying pop-up appeared telling me that to cloud sync my books I had to log in. There is no way to disable this alert from popping up other than by logging into my account. So I did. I had mistakenly believed the jailbreak itself would take care of the ads, but that's not so. The ads were back after logging in. And that's what led me to research removing the ads and, ultimately, KOReader (which by default isn't even designed to remove ads). So the best route I guess would've been to jailbreak, never connect my Kindle to the Internet and then install KOReader and manage it all offline. But I don't feel like wiping it again, so I just keep it off of WiFi except for when I'm managing ebooks. :::
https://x.com/Tayray_b/status/1841010032768663882
SOMEBODY CALL NINE-ONE-ONE SHAWTY FIYA BURNIN' ON THE DANCE FLOOR WHOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I know a lot of people suggest Proton and it seems mostly fine, but their free plan does not offer SMTP access which I use for quite a few things and I don't like the idea of paying for an e-mail service because I'm broke and I don't like the idea of potentially losing my e-mail account because I couldn't afford it when it comes time to renew it. There's Riseup which seems really nice, but it seems you need an invite from an existing user which is also a bummer for me. I took a quick glance at their site and it seems you can't request an account anymore either because they had an issue with spam accounts in the past. :( Is there anything else that maybe I'm unaware of? or maybe someone here even has a Riseup account that'd be willing to invite me?
Tried LMDE and bazzite nvidia, but I just could not for the life of me get Optimus gpu switching on my 7640u laptop from lenovo to play nice. I am going all AMD for my next desktop, but I am frustrated and tired with 
I just came to a community on Session and I found a better alternative to Discord, called [Quiet](https://tryquiet.org/). It is a Tor based messaging app.
gitlab.com
It's a full-frame mirror-less camera designed and assembled by hand. The recent video about this project is truly insane if you're interested in electronics DIY.
www.scmp.com
https://archive.ph/Y7MVs
Up until 3 years ago I guess (thought it was more recent tbh), it would show blurry images instead of vector maps and satellite, but it looks like it's detailed now. Previously I think Google had to comply with some protectionist policy that South Korea had in place so that people would use South Korean maps, or something like that.
https://archive.ph/i3X1L
I am interested in a PC drawing tablet but know nothing about them. I've heard past generations of them are perfectly fine and it's not necessary to get a new one. What are desirable features and signs of quality I should be looking for? Why did you choose yours and how do you feel about it now?
>Yesterday, the Winamp source code, build tools, and associated libraries for the Windows app were published on GitHub, allowing anyone to provide bug fixes and new features to the iconic media player. > >However, its license prohibits the distribution of modified software created through the release of this source code. https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp
TLDW: There is no expectation of privacy when using your phone re: calls, messages, even your location. Hackers can gain access to it all and prevent these from getting to your phone without you even knowing it. Use internet-based apps for messages, 2fa and calls like signal, telegram, WhatsApp etc (not endorsing any, just giving examples). The location hack is NOT based on gps so disabling it doesn’t protect you either. You’ll have to leave your phone behind, or power it off to be safe.
technology
!technology@hexbear.netOn the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
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