I appreciate your feedback. Moving more local is definitely a goal. I buy a lot of specialized books which I can’t find at small bookshops so I tend to gravitate to larger companies.
All that being said, I’m going to downvote your comment because I can find no credible sources that supports your claim that Amazon owns Barnes & Nobel. I’d be happy to change my mind if you provide sources, but I dislike misinformation.
I’ve been able to successfully degoogle, and recently came to terms that I need to deamazon too. It’s going to take quite a while. I’m a prime subscriber and use AWS.
I’m looking into Barnes and Nobel for future book purchases. I recently did a larger purchase online directly from the vendor instead of purchasing through Amazon. I plan to do more of that.
What’s been frustrating has been the small things. I needed a pill splitter, so I stopped at Walmart on the way home from work, dealt with some crowd and retraced my steps around the pharmacy a few times before I found it, then had to deal with self checkout. This would have been quicker and wasted less of my time to use Amazon. That’s going to be the hardest kind of benefit to give up.
AWS I’ll probably start migrating this summer. I’m planning to switch to Backblaze for cloud storage. I still need to look into an alternative registrar, and ideally very cheap static web hosting. I also need to find providers that have good ansible support since I use that for all my local and remote configuration.
It took years for me to get off Google. I worry it’s going to take even longer to give up Amazon, but yeah it’s time.
I do this with my home network using FastMail. You can create App specific passwords for each service you add email notification support for. This means you don’t risk compromising your full accounts passwords. You can also put constraints on each app password, such as limiting it only to sending emails but not reading email or looking at your contacts and files. This is nice in case any of my passwords are leaked.
My ask here is for System76 to use a popular and shared tool by many Linux distributions to do firmware updates (fwupd) instead of rolling their own solution only installed by default on PopOS.
I’m not sure if a Dell still offers Linux support out of the box, but you can still easily install firmware updates on multiple Linux distributions using fwupd.
I’m going to piggyback off your comment to take a moment to complain about System76 computers, which I own and enjoy. That being said I wanted to run Fedora instead of PopOS.
It’s super frustrating to me that many of my old computers could automatically do firmware updates using fwupd, but to update System76 laptops I have to install from a copr repo their system firmware update service.
The funny thing is they do appear to support fwupd, I assume they just aren’t maintaining it.
A Linux laptop for Linux people, but they’ve managed to set it up where you don’t get the best experience unless you’re running PopOS. It’s little frustrations like this that make me want to go back to a Del laptop for my next computer.
This feels a lot like the common “millennials can’t do X anymore” that we used to see all the time.
I switched careers recently from software engineering to teaching. Young people are fine.
Some things have changed. Those with no previous experience need a little help understanding file systems and moving files around, something they didn’t really have to do on iPads and Chromebooks.
Besides that students pick things up quickly. Find it as interesting and exciting as we did and often impress me by using more advanced features than we discuss in class.
Yes, they try to use AI. I usually explain to them that AI can likely do all their assignments in our classes not because AI is a good programmer but because these are introductory classes where the assignments are simple.
So far AI still can’t produce a perfect assignment for the students. And an easy way to tell they’re using AI is to see if their code is formatted too well. Most beginners will screw up indention somewhere in their programs. So what do I do if they use AI and then ask me for help (because AI didn’t do exactly what they wanted)? I tell them to let AI fix it. They end up having to rewrite so much before I help them that asking AI isn’t worth it to begin with.
Anyway, to summarize kids are still learning to code, still improving, and there’s going to be a lot of talented junior engineers graduating.
Same, the builtin sync between devices using WebDAV was the critical feature for me choosing Joplin over Obsidian.
Email, as a suite of protocols, was designed long before we thought deeply about encryption. In 2025, you can count on email encryption in transit and encryption at rest from providers, although try to verify it. E2EE like Proton and Tuta offer is severely limited. I was recently looking up if Proton and Tuta were even compatible with each other in terms of PGP encryption. I could find no confirmation that they are.
If you use Proton and you email another Proton user it’ll be encrypted with PGP. Otherwise your email is sent unencrypted, and email you receive is unencrypted, then Proton stores it on their server encrypted. All of this paragraph applies to Tuta as well.
You can get most of the same benefits from other providers by downloading your email locally and deleting off the mail servers. The benefit of regular email servers is open standards and compatibility with your preferred mail and calendar applications.
I use Fastmail and love it. I know many people mention using burner addressed with a custom domain, but I prefer generating a burner email with a FastMail domain for signing up to websites. Using my own domain would make it easier to identify me.
I use FastMail as well. I actually went from FastMail to Proton, and then back to FastMail.
I configure a lot of my home networking equipment and servers to send me emails for things like installing software updates, reboots, and any possible security issues. I couldn’t make that work with Proton not supporting any standard mail protocols (I know about Bridge, but it requires a GUI, and I didn’t want to use a third party program).
I hope there’s pushback on this. They mention prices can change as often as 10 seconds. Meaning you can add something to your cart and by the time you check out the price has gone up. That seems like false advertising. Will the store associates have a way to override the cost if we make a fuss and ask them to price match the items to the cost when we added them to our carts?
It feels like this is another area where technology is advancing faster than our consumer protection laws. I suppose another thing to write your local representatives about. I’d hope legislation protecting a family grocery shopping would be an easy win for politicians and bipartisan.
I expected more from the article. I accept it’s supposed to be a high level overview but even keeping that in mind they made some odd choices with how the article is organized. coreboot is first mentioned in the section about bootloaders after discussing systemd-boot and GRUB. That’s out of place given the article is trying to organize itself by having each section be in chronological order. I worry this can confuse people new to these concepts.
I’m a fan of what this company is doing and even own one of their laptops, but this article feels lazy. Given that they’re one of the few companies that provide an open source UEFI implementation out of the box I’d be interested in reading a well written article about the process and their experiences using it, but this article certainly isn’t it.
I haven’t tried setting up IMAP directly in mutt for a decade, so maybe Neomutt has made improvements, but it was often laggy to the point of being unusable.
I’d suggest people look into using mbsync (author mentions it at the bottom of the blog post as an update) as an external tool to sync mail via IMAP, or if you’re really committed to Gmail you can give lieer a try. It integrates well with Gmail’s labels and syncs them with a notmuch database. I stopped using Gmail years ago and switched to Fastmail. There’s an equivalent program to lieer called mujmap that works with Fastmail. I’ve been using it for over a year and works great.
Good
To your point, when you look at both crypto and AI I see a common theme. They both need a lot of computation, call it super computing. Nvidia makes products that provide a lot of compute. Until Nvidia’s competitors catch up I think they’ll do fine as more applications that require a lot of computation are found.
Basically, I think of Nvidia as a super computer company. When I think of them this way their position makes more sense.
I buy those canisters of pizza dough at the grocery store. Make a simple sauce by warning canned tomato sauce, adding a little olive oil, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, and just a pinch of red pepper flakes. I spread the dough thin, add some olive oil and bake. After the doughs baked on its own for 5-6 minutes I add the sauce, spread spinach around and depending on the time of year some basil leaves from my herb garden, then top with mozzarella cheese. Continue baking until the cheese is melted.
Simple and refreshing.
Using Napster was one of those defining childhood memories for me. I was in junior high when it came out and I remember hearing about it through rumors at school. It was one of my early memories, realizing that computers could be used for interesting things and not just office work.
Those were the days, spending 20 minutes downloading a 3 minute song over dialup.
I wonder if all these companies rolling out AI before it’s ready will have a widespread impact on how people perceive AI. If you learn early on that AI answers can’t be trusted will people be less likely to use it, even if it improves to a useful point?
I’d also be interested in learning about IRC servers that were more social and less technology driven.
I’ve found for the last 3-4 years I haven’t had to fall back to Google. DDG results have been good enough I can use it full time.
The research paper looks well written but I couldn’t find any information on if this paper is going to be published in a reputable journal and peer reviewed. I have little faith in private businesses who profit from AI providing an unbiased view of how AI works. I think the first question I’d like answered is did Anthropic’s marketing department review the paper and did they offer any corrections or feedback? We’ve all heard the stories about the tobacco industry paying for papers to be written about the benefits of smoking and refuting health concerns.