It will get reduced. It was already reduced from $219 billion to $25 billion. It will get cut down or thrown out in appeal, but even if it was $25 billion, they made way more than that in profit specifically due to misleading people on privacy all these years. And this won’t stop them from doing it in the future, it’s just a cost of doing business for these companies not anything that’s enough to change behavior.

I have one from Evatek, (Taiwanese company) that was less expensive but has lasted for my home PC and work laptop dock, but it seems they are no longer making anything, not sure if they finally died off or what, but even the photo on the Amazon page of the device I have shows different branding (Greathtek) though the particular one I have is out of stock. Not sure if Greathtek, which seems to be a Chinese company, bought their KVM product business or what but seems that’s all they make and the company seems to be deeply connected with Amazon somehow. So I’m definitely not convinced the quality will have transfered over.

I’ve been getting exe’s and such since I’ve been using the tech for a decade or more, though it does seem to be more common lately. I only wish sonarr would have an option to automatically blacklist and search. But at least now it does have an option to fail the download before even attempting to import it.

Even ignoring all of the functional issues with LLMs/“AI” related to their design to never admit to not knowing and preferring to make stuff up instead (hallucinate), I have an ethical qualms about the way they are trained. Two primary issues are that they aggressively scrape data from sources that explicitly do not consent to sharing their work and the data centers which have made hardware impossibly expensive for everyone but them and are so impactful to our underfunded electrical grids that they cause brown outs that keep people from heating their homes among other things, cause major spikes that cause house fires and destroy home appliances, and create an excuse to generate power using the worst polluting generators that we had finally gotten shut down to slow climate change (personally I’m tired of the wildfires and extreme storms from climate change).

So, I personally consider it extremely unethical to use the technology for that and several other reasons which are hard to touch on exhaustively in a post like this.

Pay for the unbranded version, or set it up and replace the image with whatever you want. It’s open source and is trivial just to replace the image. I see it with different images all the time on other sites. Name and other branding is a little more work to replace, but can be done and that’s what the paid version provides.

Sure, it’s no change for self hosters currently, but it’s one more step in moving towards a more closed platform overall. I do hope more FOSS client apps end up getting made sometime soon. I’ve been using Keyguard on Android for some time, which means the recent several breaking changes in the Bitwarden apps to the Vaultwarden backend haven’t hit me as hard, but I do still use the official apps for my laptop and desktop and Keyguard isnt fully FOSS, of course. I’d love to see some forks or brand new apps one of these days that are actually fully FOSS for both mobile and browsers. I’ve thought about doing some myself, but I have too many other projects and I also don’t have a MAC or want to pay the fees to make an iPhone version. And I abandoned my Android Developer account when they started the identity nonsense, so none of my apps are on the official store anymore and Fdroid and similar may not be viable soon, so it would only really be for myself and a few others who use alternate Android OS’s.

Sucks that it requires a Reddit account which I’ve long since abandoned along with most other social media after most embraced harmful policies and hate speech in addition to the profit-seeking through tracking. But I suppose that’s how corporate blobs support eachother.

I don’t like the idea of a third party doing MitM type intercepts. I want control over anything that sees my unencrypted data whether it’s web services or chat services, etc. So for me the VPS is worth it. But I do also use my VPS for some other services that use apps or other APIs that don’t allow for presenting the Pangolin/SSO login step, and aren’t too risky to have a bit exposed rather than the responsiveness and battery cost of the separate VPN connection. One day I need to find a better way to handle those but for now it’s fine.

I use VPS’s for things that need to be more internet facing as well as Pangolin for then connecting to a few of my home based services securely. IMHO, it’s not as good for things that require storing lots of data like video, though, since storage costs have exploded. And any private data I prefer to only have on servers I own, not a VPS. Only encrypted backups of critical data go to online storage.

I use netcup for most things though I still have one server on Hetzner that I haven’t migrated. Hetzner’s prices went up and server responsiveness went down, so I started moving away, though I also still have the storage box server there for backups as well as the one VPS.

Yeah, exactly…large. Bigger than the phone, definitely not going to fit inside the phone.

…on purpose. The current administration and companies that control most politicians, are heavily funded by or invested in the oil industry.

It’s not just the spike, but the battery is supplying more power than the adapter for sometime extended periods of time. It would take an expensive, or very large, capacitor bank to hold enough power to accomplish that for very power intensive apps. Capacitors are good at charging and discharging quickly and lasting many more cycles than a battery, but no where near the capacity.

What you really need to know is exactly how much power the battery can provide and adjust the power supply to be able to supply that on demand and just enough capacitor capacity to smooth out the initial spike until the power supply gets the power up. I haven’t done the research to know the exact amounts, but I have a lot of experience with electrical and electronics in general, both professionally and amateur. So I could probably build it if o knew the exact specs.

That or adjust the phone firmware to limit the processor and GPU speeds, but that’s only possible on some phones that have code available and a way to root it without some hardware switch killing the phone permanently.

Yeah, a symptom of late stage capitalism that large companies no longer compete by improving their product or service, but by manipulating the regulatory environment and/or competition, through collusion, legal attacks, or acquisition. It’s much less risky of an investment for larger companies post-mass-consolidation.

Yeah and it’s not that I’m blaming the workers, far from it. The issue is the contractors create such strick timelines and quotas so they can pay them as little as possible that they don’t have time to do any of the stuff that government workers did have time for a couple of decades ago. If the companies are going to hold homeowners responsible for so many nitpicky things so they can charge them more, then they better hold themselves as responsible and do the full job that we pay for through taxes and garbage bills.

Then they better freaking make the garbage contractors do the rest of their job, not just the pickups, but also keeping things tidy. They make and leave behind such a mess. When they used to be government employees they were actually “sanitation workers” and responsible for more than just collection, or at least would clean up the messes they made and were sure to fully empty the bins every time.

I’m not going to subscribe to read the article, but I’d be willing to bet they’ll just replace then with another, just as bad company like other cities have done. Flock will likely eventually buy up those companies and rename themselves once the media loses interest. That’s how it usually goes.

Yeah, but it’s nothing new. VCs have been used for nefarious purposes for ages. For example, there are documentaries about how they’re often used by competing companies to buy up a company that’s foundering (sometimes due to the actions of said competitors), split off a few valuable assets to give to the competing company, and dump the rest onto taxpayers to deal with in bankruptcy.

So, sure, these are another example of how the VC process is being used nefariously against the original purpose of such organizations, but they aren’t small exceptions to the rule. The system was always designed to do these nefarious things under the guise of “investment”. Without an overhaul so that these organizations are legally required to show how they use their money so that both investors and the public are able to see it, it’s not corruption of a process, it’s standard use of a process designed, in part, to mask corruption.

Yeah, “AI” is not intelligent enough to even come close to being able to recognize a problematic situation. Just like smart glasses have people doing a lot of the work behind what the glasses recognize or airport xray scanners have a person likely in another country looking at your fully naked bodies to indicate to the security people to let you go or do further patdowns. None of that kind of stuff is automated. Software developers to design that are way too expensive in the short term than hiring actual people at very low pay.

There are good use cases for swap. I work with very performance sensitive memory hogging applications that tend to process in bursts as incoming batched data arrives. We also have a lot of required background “security” applications.

Having the idle applications move out to swap so that a significant amount of free RAM to allow for the active, real-time applications to expand into is a major boon. RAM is expensive now, so it’s become even more critical to not waste it.

But even in self-hosting at home I take advantage of it since I have a limited number of servers with limited RAM and a bunch of applications and/or docker containers running, many of which don’t need to be active at all times, but if they were all active, would have trouble with the limited RAM. Swap allows for inactive applications to free up RAM for the active ones and leave enough available at all times to allow an application to quickly spin up new jobs.

Anyway, sure, for a simple desktop computer without a bunch of junk background applications running for “security” or whatever, and an overabundance of RAM installed, it’s probably not useful. But for high performance, memory hungry applications with lots of background stuff running, it can be a big help.

That said, there are use cases where the opposite is useful and using a RAM drive is better than writing to disk for cache and temporary logs when you have enough RAM. My opnsense router for instance uses a RAM drive to store cache and logs (logs are mirrored to the NAS for long term storage, so just the local copy is lost on reboot). That system has enough RAM and I’d rather reduce disk wear, and I don’t plan to add too many other applications to that server that it would run low.

That sucks. It was one of the few GUIs that did a good job with most aspects of Docker Swarm. I knew it was heading in a shitty direction, but I was hoping something else would come along to fill the gap in the mean time.