Mozilla’s recent blog posts explicitly highlight that they are investing in ads for short-term revenue growth. So when they go on to remove the ToS statement about not selling user data, that suggests to me that their strategy is in fact to collect and sell user data.

Perhaps they aren’t doing that yet, but signs are pointing in that direction. So that does make me reluctant to share any data with them.

Ads make everything worse. Block them without hesitation or remorse.

and yet somehow google made it worse. Not only are there more ads than ever before, but now it’s also a panopticon.

Repeat yourself? Why?

I’m confused.

Are you suggesting that this particular type of CP should be acceptable? (And suddenly “but I used AI” becomes a popular defence.)

I’ve been using OsmAnd for years, and offline maps has always been one of their main things.

Something bizarre is happening to media organizations that use ‘clicks’ as a core metric.

As someone who has taught many children how to use excel, the new AI features make using it easier but teaching and learning harder. A lot of stuff now happens automagically, and that makes it harder to see the reasons and structures and language of how it is meant to work. So doing basic stuff is now trivially easy, but learning to become competent enough to do more creative and advanced stuff is more difficult.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll check out Rnote sometime soon.

(As I said, I do like the writing & drawing features of xournal++; and so I’ve been doing a bit of basic file / folder organising with that already; but it certainly isn’t as easily browseable as OneNote.)

Part of my point is that a lot of everyday rules do break down at large scale. Like, ‘drink water’ is good advice - but a person can still die from drinking too much water. And having a few people go for a walk through a forest is nice, but having a million people go for a walk through a forest is bad. And using a couple of quotes from different sources to write an article for a website is good; but using thousands of quotes in an automated method doesn’t really feel like the same thing any more.

That’s what I’m saying. A person can’t physically read billions of books, or do the statistical work to put them together to create a new piece of work from them. And since a person cannot do that, no law or existing rule currently takes that possibility into account. So I don’t think we can really say that a person is ‘allowed to’ do that. Rather, it’s just an undefined area. A person simply cannot physically do it, and so the rules don’t have to consider it. On the other hand, computer systems can now do it. And so rather than pointing to old laws, we have to decide as a society whether we think that’s something we are ok with.

I don’t know what the ‘best’ answer is, but I do think we should at least stop to think about it carefully; because there are some clear downsides that need to be considered - and probably a lot of effects that aren’t as obvious which should also be considered!

Do you know someone who’s read a billion books and can write a new (trashy) book in 5 mins?

I’m very interested in OneNote alternatives. I’ve been using OneNote for longer than I’ve disliked Microsoft… and I still think it’s a good app. Pretty much the only thing I don’t like about OneNote is the increasingly close integration with Windows accounts. I’d rather my notes were not scanned and uploaded and processed by a US mega-corp…

Anyway, people keep suggesting stuff like Joplin. But that isn’t even vaguely close to OneNote in terms of stylus and inking. For me, inking is the main core feature. And so in terms of alternatives, xournal++ is a closer fit. (xournal++ has essentially no organisational structure for notes; but it is really great for inking.)

What I’d really like is basically the organisational structure of Joplin (or whatever other alternative) + the inking power of xournal++. And ideally being able to import my vast amounts of handwritten OneNote work! – But that last bit is probably too much to ask.

It’s like Moore’s law. The number of bytes for a basic app doubles every 2.5 years.

When I was young, we’d get a few different games games on a single 1.4 Mb floppy disk. The games were simpler, sure, but exactly the same games now would be far bigger in bytes.

The Orange Box 2; featuring Half Life 3, Team Fortress 3, and Portal 3.

Seems like the person wants to learn something, but with zero effort. (i.e. won’t read the article; and certainly won’t look for additional context or information.) So maybe it would be better to post the question into an AI chatbot. You can just ask whatever question, and get some plausible but possibly-bullshit answer; then feel good for satisfying your curiosity.

For sure. I’ve been looking for a solid OneNote replacement for a few years now. Inking is the only major barrier.

I really like OneNote, and I’ve been using it for more than 10 years. But in recent years, my dislike for Microsoft has grown to the point where I feel I need to stop using all their products.

Right now I’m using xournal++ a lot. It has really excellent drawing functionality; but zero organisational functions. (I’m organising my xournal notes using just file names and folder structure.)

What I really want is integrated xournal support with Obsidian, or Joplin. In Joplin, I’ve tried inserting a pdf into my notes, and telling Joplin to open the pdf by launching xournal++. That sort of works; but the viewing of the pdf in Joplin shows a window-within-a-window; and the creating of new notes is fiddly; so I decided it wasn’t quite good enough.

One must be careful with this kind of reasoning, because often the time is not a cost - but actually a valuable part of the experience in its own right. Walking to the corner store is slower than driving - but can be a worthwhile experience for its own sake - as it give a bit of time for quiet reflection, and light exercise, and fresh air. Depending on your tastes, a similar thing could be said about doing some maintenance work on your bike vs paying someone to do it for you.

Getting too bogged down in time vs money can potentially lead to miscalculations and stress. Is it better to give someone a quick blowjob for a bit of extra cash so that you can pay someone to vacuum your house? Perhaps the calculation is not really one-dimensional.

For me, simply spending less time thinking about money is worth quite a bit of ‘wasted’ money & time; because I value the headspace that would otherwise be consumed by that!

For what it’s worth, I was using linux for a full 2 years before I worked out whether or not I had wayland. – Because it just doesn’t matter for normal everyday use. And I’ve never even heard of ‘gamescope’.

The technobabble that you’re concerned about is only relevant to people who are interested in looking into the details of how things work. Its a bit like talking about the Windows registry, or the many settings you can change with ‘group policy’, or NTFS, or comparing versions directX. For most people, that stuff just doesn’t matter - even if it is a core part of how the system works.

Right, but in the context of social media feeds, “algorithm” always refers to an algorithm for personalised content.

Apparently it doesn’t use a personalised algorithm. So I’d say the first one.