Daemon Silverstein

Isn’t a file browser needed for browsing the saved documents and spreadsheets?

Not to mention that office suites (such as WPS, OpenOffice and LibreOffice) will inevitably pop up a file browser when the “Open” or “Save” buttons/menu items are clicked.

/r/unexpectedfactorial

I’m a 10+ (cumulative) yr. experience dev. While I never used The GitHub Copilot specifically, I’ve been using LLMs (as well as AI image generators) on a daily basis, mostly for non-dev things, such as analyzing my human-written poetry in order to get insights for my own writing. And I already did the same for codes I wrote, asking for LLMs to “Analyze and comment” my code, for the sake of insights. There were moments when I asked it for code snippets, and almost every code snippet it generated was indeed working or just needing few fixes.

They’ve been becoming good at this, but not enough to really replace my own coding and analysis. Instead, they’re becoming really better for poetry (maybe because their training data is mostly books and poetry works) and sentiment analysis. I use many LLMs simultaneously in order to compare them:

• Free version of Google Gemini is becoming lazy (short answers, superficial analysis, problems with keeping context, drafts aren’t so diverse as they were before, among other problems)
• free version of ChatGPT is a bit better (can keep contexts, can issue detailed answers) but not enough (it does hallucinate sometimes: good for surrealist poetry but bad for code and other technical matters when precision and coherence matters)
• Claude is laughable hypersensitive and self-censoring to certain words independently of contexts (got a code or text that remotely mentions the word “explode” as in PHP’s explode function? “Sorry, can’t comment on texts alluding to dangerous practices such as involving explosives”, I mean, WHAT?!?!)
• Bing Copilot got web searching, but it has a context limit of 5 messages, so, only usable for quick and short things.
• Same about Bing Copilot goes for Perplexity
• Mixtral is very hallucination-prone (i.e. does not properly cohere)
• LLama has been the best of all (via DDG’s “AI Chat” feature), although it sometimes glitches (i.e. starts to output repeated strings ad æternum)

As you see, I tried almost all of them. In summary, while it’s good to have such tools, they should never replace human intelligence… Or, at least, they shouldn’t…

Problem is, dev companies generally focus on “efficiency” over “efficacy”, wishing the shortest deadlines while wishing some perfection. Very understandable demands, but humans are humans, not robots. We need our time to deliver, we need to cautiously walk through all the steps needed to finally deploy something (especially big things), or it’ll become XGH programming (Extreme Go Horse). And machines can’t do that so perfectly, yet. For now, LLM for development is XGH: really fast, but far from coherent about the big picture (be it a platform, a module, a website, etc).

In Brazil, there are regional variations and word/phrasing variations as well.

Formally:

• “Você ligou para o número errado” (you called the wrong number)
• “Você discou o número errado” (you dialed for the wrong number )
• “Você está ligando para o número errado” (we call it the “gerúndio”, something like “-ing”, as in “You’re calling the wrong number”)

Informally/casually:

• “Discou errado, irmão” / “Discou errado, mano” / “Discou errado, cara” / “Discou errado, mermão” (“dialed wrongly, bro”, with “bro” variations across Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (the latter being the latter variation))
• “Tu ligasse errado, visse” (some Brazilian northeast states, something like “Thou calledsth wrongly, see?”)
• “Né aqui não, moço” (Minas Gerais, something like “It’s not here, boy”)

There are lots of other variations and I’m not really aware of all of them.

Also, the way I answer depends a lot on multiple factors such as: my emotional state (wrath? Sad? Okay? Excitedly happy (rarely)?), my current pace (rushing? Chilling?), among others. Generally, “Não é aqui não” (the Minas Gerais variation without the ending “moço” and a fully spelled “Não é” instead of “Né”, because I’m originally from interior of São Paulo state but highly culturally influenced by a part of the family from Minas Gerais).

On my laptop, Brave for non-“personal” things (such as fediverse, SoundCloud, AI tools, daily browsing, etc) and Firefox for “personal” things (such as WhatsApp Web, LinkedIn, accessing local govt. services, etc). On my smartphone, Firefox for everything (I disabled the native Chrome).

I’ve been using Brave in a daily basis because it’s well integrated with adblocking tools, especially considering the ongoing strife regarding Chromium’s Manifest V2 support, where Brave nicely stands keeping its Manifest V2 support independently of what Google wishes or not.

Firefox is also good, but I noticed that, for me, it has been slightly heavier than Brave. So I use it parallel to Brave, for things I don’t need to use often. For mobile, it’s awesome, as it is one of the few browsers that support extensions, so I use Firefox for Android, together with adblocking extensions.

null

“The system can listen to conversations”.

What a timely coincidence! Patent got published basically at the same time Meta’s, Google’s and Microsoft’s “Active Listening” got public as well. 🤔

As a programmer, I see lots of null characters going on (AA is the base64’s starting sequence for 00s).

Regarding privacy, PGP is far better than out-of-the-shelf IM-embedded encryption, if used correctly. Alice uses Bob’s public key to send him a message, and he uses his private key to read it. He uses Alice’s public key to send her a message, and she uses her private key to read it. No one can eavesdrop, neither governments, nor corporations, nor crackers, no one except for Alice and Bob. I don’t get why someone would complain about “usability”, for me, it’s perfectly usable. Commercially available “E2EEs” (even Telegram’s) aren’t trustworthy, as the company can easily embed a third-party public key (owned by themselves) so they can read the supposedly “end-to-end encrypted” messages, like a “master key” for anyone’s mailboxes, just like PGP itself has the possibility to encipher the message to multiple recipients (e.g. if Alice needs to send a message to both Bob and Charlie, she uses both Bob’s and Charlie’s public keys; Bob can use his own private key (he won’t need Charlie’s private key) to read, while Charlie can use his own private key to do the same).

You didn’t specify which problem or which thing that broke. However (and based on my previous experiences on that matter), one could face a problem regarding package PGP/GPG signatures upon trying to update. This is because archlinux-keyring is not being updated before the signature checking. That said, a better approach is to always update archlinux-keyring (sudo pacman -S --needed archlinux-keyring) before anything else (sudo pacman -Syu). This way, you guarantee to be up-to-date with developer signatures, needed for pacman to check the validity for every package to be updated/installed. There’s also a pacman-key command, but I never had to use that.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever” (1984 - George Orwell).

Apparently VPNs are also not allowed to access it but I dunno how that would even work

That’s the point: they can’t. However, based by the judge’s inquiry, the VPN apps are to be removed from app marketplaces, every single one of them. He asked Google and Apple to remove VPN apps altogether. This extrapolates the boundary of “blocking X”, because VPNs aren’t solely used for “bypassing ISP blocking”, VPNs are also used to link two or more devices into the same LAN over ther Internet, but this will be affected as soon as these apps vanish from Brazilian marketplaces.

There is something that most news articles aren’t paying attention to: the judge requested Google and Apple to remove VPN apps from their marketplaces. Not just apply fines to those who dare to use VPNs in order to access X, but removing the VPNs altogether. I mean, I use OpenVPN Client for making a LAN to connect my smartphone and my laptop together (so, for example, I can use KDE Connect between a smartphone over mobile network and a laptop over cable internet). I don’t even have an X account, but a decision focused on that platform is extending its reaches beyond the intended target, affecting those who use VPN for professional and technical purposes.

Simultaneously, a Brazilian judge is threatening Musk. The judge even seized the Starlink’s local accounts (https://g1.globo.com/politica/blog/valdo-cruz/post/2024/08/29/na-falta-de-representante-da-x-no-brasil-stf-bloqueou-recursos-financeiros-da-starlink-de-elon-musk.ghtml) in order to enforce fines against Musk. I’m not entering the merit of the matter, but it’s curious the pattern.

A mix between the last one and the previous. The key error should be set in order to indicate the presence of an error, while status and code represents, respectively, the error numerical code and the error type, while the error message is supposed to be concatenated to an human-friendly error text.

PGP/GPG encryption. It works with any IM, social network, anything (at least if the platform/program/app/medium allows for sufficiently lengthy messages so to carry the encrypted payload). There are some IMs that bring PGP/GPG natively, as well as extensions for existing IMs that also adds PGP/GPG feature, but PGP/GPG doesn’t need to be native to the app to convey encrypted messages, it’s a base64 text. It’s really an E2EE.

And a record for degrees of burning (if surviving), when inevitably meeting the upper layers of atmosphere (especially ionosphere) at supersonic speeds (due to gravitation acceleration as well the current speed of ISS being 7659 meters per second / 17133 miles per hour). Ah, you’d need to find a way to lose horizontal speed in order to fall vertically (orbiting is falling both horizontally and vertically while never actually reaching the ground, at least while the orbiting thing maintains its orbit with subtle periodic adjustments through RCS/ionic thrusters).

I still have Reddit account (since 2012) and I was never been banned there… Because I barely use it. In few days, I’ve been using Lemmy (and Mastodon) more than I ever used Reddit in years, because I value and like decentralized and open platforms.

As long as it didn’t pollute the fedi timeline with ads, AI slop and partnered posts, that’d be OK to me… (If someone worrying about our posts/comments being used by AIs, it’s already happening even for those instances that does not federate with Threads; Proofs? Once I searched for my own username and I got surprised on how my fediverse posts are spread all across the results through federated instances that I never heard about, so if my fedi content shows on Google, it’s certainly being fed to some AI datasets)

or they can keep using their old Windows 10 install without security updates.

Sure they can… It’s just a matter of clicking “Stay on Windows [old version] for now” on those ever-occurring popups (while Microsoft kindly offers this button to be clicked)