• 1 Post
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: September 27th, 2023
  • hersh@literature.cafeOPtoLinux@lemmy.ml•How can I get OpenCL to work on Debian Bookworm with an AMD 7900 XTX?
    2·
    5 months ago

    Ah, somehow I didn’t see 18 there and only looked at 17. Thanks!

    I tried pulling just the one package from the sid repo, but that created a cascade of dependencies, including all of llvm. I was able to get those files installed but not able to get clinfo to succeed. I also tried installing llvm-19 from the repo at https://apt.llvm.org/, with similar results. clinfo didn’t throw the fatal errors anymore, but it didn’t work, either. It still reported Number of devices 0 and OpenCL-based tools crashed anyway. Not with the same error, but with something generic about not finding a device or possibly having corrupt drivers.

    Should I bite the bullet and do a full ugprade to sid, or is there some way to this more precisely that won’t muck up Bookworm?

  • hersh@literature.cafetoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•DuckDuckGo now has an AI prompt available in beta, and I can already see it on my devices. Does it affect privacy? If so, what alternatives do we have?
    5·
    6 months ago

    If you click the Chat button on a DDG search page, it says:

    DuckDuckGo AI Chat is a private AI-powered chat service that currently supports OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and Anthropic’s Claude chat models.

    So at minimum they are sharing data with one additional third party, either OpenAI or Anthropic depending on which model you choose.

    OpenAI and Anthropic have similar terms and conditions for enterprise customers. They are not completely transparent and any given enterprise could have their own custom license terms, but my understanding is that they generally will not store queries or use them for training purposes. You’d better seek clarification from DDG. I was not able to find information on this in DDG’s privacy policy.

    Obviously, this is not legal advice, and I do not speak for any of these companies. This is just my understanding based on the last time I looked over the OpenAI and Anthropic privacy policies, which was a few months ago.

  • hersh@literature.cafetoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•*deleted by creator*
    6·
    8 months ago

    Yeah, I wouldn’t be too confident in Facebook’s implementation, and I certainly don’t believe that their interests are aligned with their users’.

    That said, it seems like we’re reaching a turning point for big tech, where having access to private user data becomes more of a liability than an asset. Having access to the data means that they will be required by law to provide that data to governments in various circumstances. They might have other legal obligations in how they handle, store, and process that data. All of this comes with costs in terms of person-hours and infrastructure. Google specifically cited this is a reason they are moving Android location history on-device; they don’t want to deal with law enforcement constantly asking them to spy on people. It’s not because they give a shit about user privacy; it’s because they’re tired of providing law enforcement with free labor.

    I suspect it also helps them comply with some of the recent privacy protection laws in the EU, though I’m not 100% sure on that. Again, this is a liability issue for them, not a user-privacy issue.

    Also, how much valuable information were they getting from private messages in the first place? Considering how much people willingly put out in the open, and how much can be inferred simply by the metadata they still have access to (e.g. the social graph), it seems likely that the actual message data was largely redundant or superfluous. Facebook is certainly in position to measure this objectively.

    The social graph is powerful, and if you really care about privacy, you need to worry about it. If you’re a journalist, whistleblower, or political dissident, you absolutely do not want Facebook (and by extension governments) to know who you talk you or when. It doesn’t matter if they don’t know what you’re saying; the association alone is enough to blow your cover.

    The metadata problem is common to a lot of platforms. Even Signal cannot use E2EE for metadata; they need to know who you’re communicating with in order to deliver your messages to them. Signal doesn’t retain that metadata, but ultimately you need to take their word on that.

  • hersh@literature.cafetoLinux@lemmy.ml•KDE 6 Megarelease - Release Candidate 1
    8·
    9 months ago

    This is correct, albeit not universal.

    KDE has a predefined schedule for “release candidates”, which includes RC2 later this month. So “RC1” is clearly not going to be the final version. See: https://community.kde.org/Schedules/February_2024_MegaRelease

    This is at least somewhat common. In fact, it’s the same way the Linux kernel development cycle works. They have 7 release candidates, released on a weekly basis between the beta period and final release. See: https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

    In the world of proprietary corporate software, I more often see release candidates presented as potentially final; i.e. literal candidates for release. The idea of scheduling multiple RCs in advance doesn’t make sense in that context, since each one is intended to be the last (with fingers crossed).

    It’s kind of splitting hairs, honestly, and I suspect this distinction has more to do with the transparency of open-source projects than anything else. Apple, for example, may indeed have a schedule for multiple macOS RCs right from the start and simply choose not to share that information. They present every “release candidate” as being potentially the final version (and indeed, the final version will be the same build as the final RC), but in practice there’s always more than one. Also, Apple is hardly an ideal example to follow, since they’ve apparently never even heard of semantic version numbering. Major compatibility-breaking changes are often introduced in minor point releases. It’s infuriating. But I digress.

  • hersh@literature.cafetoDeGoogle Yourself@lemmy.ml•Kagi doubles down on paid Brave partnership despite losing at least 0.5% of users in 1 day. And invoking Godwin's Law
    64·
    9 months ago

    As a Kagi subscriber, I’ve been very happy with their transparency in general. The feedback site is open to the public and Vlad and other staff members regularly engage in conversation about possible future features, limitations, and even business decisions in the Discord. It’s been refreshing.

    …which makes the response to this issue all the more frustrating and disappointing.

    I think Vlad’s comments in the original feedback thread were fair enough, but then later, in the Discord, I saw a lot of “let’s move this to a private chat”. They even changed their General channel to “slow mode” to prevent live conversations as this topic became hot. Now I see they were also deleting threads?! Ugh. That’s not transparent at all. Not what I expected based on my previous experience with Kagi.

  • hersh@literature.cafetoLinux@lemmy.ml•Is anyone using awk?
    241·
    9 months ago

    All the time. Not always by choice!

    A lot of my work involves writing scripts for systems I do not control, using as light a touch as is realistically possible. I know for a fact Python is NOT installed on many of my targets, and it doesn’t make sense to push out a whole Python environment of my own for something as trivial as string manipulation.

    awk is super powerful, but IMHO not powerful enough to justify its complexity, relative to other languages. If you have the freedom to use Python, then I suggest using that for anything advanced. Python skills will serve you better in a wider variety of use cases.