- > Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams
... 1000 plays in a year?
We're taking a handful of people (Close friends? A proud mother? The artist themselves?) listening a few times a week.
If an artist has no following, and creates music that listeners consider substitutable for AI slop or low-effort shovelware, then they are hobbyists with no reasonable right to renumeration?
- Outside of work, I'm a very sporadic coder. On some side-projects where I'm using Actions, I'll have an inspired few days of progress followed by completely idle weeks/months/quarters.
Losing free Actions doesn't particularly bother me, and I have no issue with paying what is most likely a negligible amount, but I don't really want to have a credit card on file which could be charged some unbounded amount if somebody gets into my account. I've shut down my personal AWS for similar reasons.
Is there any way of me just loading up a one-time $20? That will probably last well into 2027, and give me the peace of mind that I can just let it run. If my account's compromised, or I misconfigure something that goes wild, I am perfectly happy to write off that amount and have my incredibly-low-stakes toy projects fail to build.
- This legislation left it entirely up to the service providers to determine implementation, and so far they don't seem particularly motivated to disrupt my usage by asking me to prove my age.
My suspicion is that fairly simple heuristics of age estimation, combined with social graph inspection, are probably enough to completely disrupt the network effects of "social media" for kids, and achieve the stated objectives well enough that I never have to.
Maybe it turns out that I'm wrong, but why even risk it? If the true policy goal is extending mass-surveillance, why waste so much political capital on such a round-about approach which might yield nothing, or even set back your existing capabilities.
MyID (myid.gov.au) already exists, and could easily have been mandated, or "recommended", or even offered as a means of age verification now. But it wasn't.
- Australia is a Five Eyes country, with carte blanche access to data that the incumbent social media companies freely share with all the acronym deep-state authorities.
Could you elaborate further on how preventing a sizeable proportion of its citizens from communicating through these established spy-nets, causing them to disperse out to unpredictable alternatives they might not be able to control, increases mass surveillance?
- So far I haven't been KYCd by anything.
Aside from YouTube I don't particularly engage with any of these often, but my Google, Facebook, Discord, Twitter, Bluesky, (current) Reddit, Slack, Telegram accounts all seem to be BAU without new requirements.
If the 80% of us currently holding unambiguously-over-16 accounts are exempt, and it only affects future over-16 users as they're onboarded, then it is a very blunt and very slow form of data harvesting which won't yield useful results until years/decades after all of the relevant decision-makers have moved on, retired and/or died. So this seems unlikely?
- > Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?
Set up your preferred self-hosted web interface (OpenWebUI or whatever, I haven't looked into this for a while), point it at ollama, and then configure it in Firefox:
browser.ml.chat.provider = http://localhost:3000/
At home I point this at Kagi Assistant, at work I point it to our internal GenAI platform's chat endpoint.
- I recently moved away from pass after a decade or so.
Two main reasons:
1. This laptop up was set up with flatpak versions of all GUI applications, including Firefox, and the browser plugin just doesn't work. I persisted with the work-around of `pass -c <path>` from the run command prompt for a while to paste into the browser, but its not ideal.
2. I realised that the Android app was archived. There's at least one fork, but who knows how that will be maintained going forward. https://github.com/android-password-store/Android-Password-S...
For now I'm content with hosting vaultwarden and using various Bitwarden clients.
- This pre-election BBC summary - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy343z53l1o - pretty clearly spells out what has eventuated, describing it as a "central campaign pledge":
> Trump has made tariffs a central campaign pledge in order to protect US industry. He has proposed new 10-20% tariffs on most imported foreign goods, and much higher ones on those from China.
- I've pulled the trigger.
When Pebble died I decided that I'd rather less smart and more battery than more smart and less battery, so I got a Withings watch and have been reasonably happy since.
But this looks really good now and I'm happy to support it even if it doesn't win over my wrist space.
Hopefully they sort out Health Connect support on the Pebble Android app by January so that I can at least sync steps between watches if I'm switching between them.
- > The latest Daikin indoor units have a built-in WiFi module which only allows control through their cloud infrastructure.
Which ones?
My Alira X from a couple of years ago is currently talking directly to Home Assistant over WiFi. For a year or so I've been unable to update firmware without losing the functionality, but it looks like the community has a fix pending verification: https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/99251
I have another old unit that I'll have to replace eventually, and ideally it could be Daikin and would work natively without involving external hardware.
- > The AI Free tier gives you unlimited code completion and access to local AI models
Looking forward to giving this a try.
Work provides me with tooling and requires that I stick to approved AI tools, and my hobby-coding alone is just not important or regular enough to justify a paid subscription.
It's been a little annoying that I can have ollama running locally, enable ollama and configure it in my IDE, but still (seemingly?) not be able to make use of it without activating a paid AI Assistant license.
It makes perfect sense that cloud models would require payment, and that JetBrains would make some margin on that.
But I'm already paying for an IDE whose headline features have recently been so AI-focused, and if I'm also providing the compute, then I should really be able to use those features.
- > The only viable business model for a web browser, the one that literally all major browsers use, is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default. Even Kagi makes its own Orion web browser, for exactly this reason.
The only viable business model ... while the incumbent (IE, now Chrome) is allowed to give the product away for free in service of some other predatory agenda.
- Yes. Since the 'Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018' which I was directly quoting from, and explicitly prohibits systemic backdoors.
That blog's own reference points this out:
> Regular use of encryption as electronic protection, such as online banking or shopping, is not of primary concern in the Act. To reinforce this, the Act includes safeguards between government and industry, such as restricting backdoors and decryption capabilities, preventing the creation of systemic weaknesses, and accessing communication without proper jurisdiction, warrants, or authorisations.
So I can only assume that the author is either too lazy to bother reading their own reference in full (let alone researching the topic of their blog), or is being knowingly dishonest.
- Australian law explicitly prohibits requests that have someone "implement or build a systemic weaknesses, or a systemic vulnerability, into a form of electronic protection" - including any request to "implement or build a new decryption capability", anything which would "render systematic methods of authentication or encryption less effective", anything aimed at one person but could "jeopardise the security or any information held by another person", anything which "creates a material risk that otherwise secure information can be accessed by an unauthorised third party".
This UK request as reported would not be legal in Australia.
- Do you honestly feel tricked that a gameplay mechanic which transparently asks you to record 50-100MB videos of a point-of-interest and upload it to their servers in exchange for an (often paid/premium) in-game reward was a form of data collection?
I don't think I've done any in PoGo (so I know it's very optional), but I've done plenty in Ingress, and I honestly don't see how it's possible to be surprised that it was contributing to something like this? It is hardly an intuitively native standalone gameplay mechanic in either game.
- They've seemed very focused on their AI assistant recently, so I'm happy to see a useful new search feature.
Happy to see that custom bangs work (eg a discourse forum I visit), but eventually I'd like to specify how far along the path to "snap".
I'd like my @javadoc to hit `site:docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/23/docs/api/` instead of the current `site:docs.oracle.com`.
- Ten years ago when Siri/Google/Alexa were launching, I really wouldn't have expected that 2024 voice assistants would be mere egg timers, and frustrating ones at that - requiring considered phrasing and regular repeating/cancelling/yelling to trick it into doing what you want.
A 10x near future isn't inconceivable, but neither is one where we look back and laugh at how hyped we got at that early-20s version of language models.
- > TV ... supported [itself] just fine using zero tracking on the advertising they ran
... by hijacking our audio-visual attention with deliberately obnoxious ad content for a third of each hour of our down-time.
> newspapers and magazines supported themselves just fine using zero tracking on the advertising they ran
..., in addition to their primarily revenue stream which was the money that customers paid for a copy of the newspaper or magazine.
Is there an established name for this LLMism?
I don't need a "Reality Check" or a "Hard Truth". The thought can be concluded without this performative honesty nonsense or the emotive hyperbole.
This probably grates me more than any other.