we launched Mwmbl, the open source, non-profit search engine, on Boxing Day 2021

Oh and it’s nonamerican too? Definitely going to try this out.

“Boomer mode”

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/

It’s good, but not comparable to Premiere or Resolve. I’d compare it to Vegas maybe.

Fabianism

I really, REALLY wish the Affinity suite would work on Linux. They are the only ones even remotely comparable to Adobe.

It wouldn’t take much; they had multiple breaches and other problems last fall, seemingly due to very avoidable reasons.

How is it possible that it draws 100W at idle? What is it even doing?

After using Proton for a couple years I’ve come around to the POV that private email is a dead end. There was not a single occasion where the sender or recipient of any email was also using encryption. If I want encrypted comms I use Signal. Instead of Pass I went back to using Bitwarden.

The combination of AI, crypto wallet and CEO’s pro-MAGA comments (all within six months or so!) are why I quit Proton. They’ve completely lost the plot. I just want a reliable email service and file storage.

https://proton.me/blog/proton-scribe-writing-assistant

Pretty rich coming from Proton, who shoved a LLM into their mail client mere months ago.

“I don’t like it when people find out what I really think”

What a coincidence, Trump’s loyalty purge email was titled “A fork in the road” https://www.opm.gov/fork

It seems very reckless to have studdingsails out in those conditions… Bad seamanship.

Other than myself I only know one other person who has quit Facebook over this, so I very much doubt that advertisers will stay away. It took a lot more for them to leave Twitter, even after Elon told them to fuck off and sued them for not advertising on his platform.

Hell Nvidia’s stock plummeted as well, which makes no sense at all, considering Deepseek needs the same hardware as ChatGPT.

Common wisdom said that these models need CUDA to run properly, and DeepSeek doesn’t.

Well, it does make sense in that the time during which we have AGI would be pretty short because AGI would soon go beyond human-level intelligence. With that said, LLMs are certainly not going to get there, assuming AGI is even possible at all.

JFC, this is terrifying:

The view of young people and TikTok users is particularly frightening at fundamental scientific findings.

For example, only 71 percent of those under 29 years old agree that vaccines have helped save millions of lives. Among TikTok users, the approval is even lower with 69 percent. More than 20 percent of young people, and around a quarter of all TikTok users, even openly doubt this decades-long insight.

Young people and the population as a whole seem to be shockingly agreed on the issue of climate change alone: only 64 percent of respondents and 67 percent of young people agree that climate change is caused by human activities. Among TikTok users, it is only a little more than half.

And the corona pandemic also remains a source of conspiracy theories. A quarter of the total population agrees with the statement that the pandemic was deliberately created by governments or elites in order to be able to control the population more. This dangerous narrative seems to be particularly widespread on TikTok: there, almost 44 percent of users agree with it.

Ed continues to bat 1000.