Have you ever called a place and got the annoying automated answering voice? Have you ever sent an email to someone and got a boilerplate response? How did that make you feel?

Words aren’t math. They are how humans communicate. When you read/hear them, knowing they didn’t come from a human, they’re hollow.

It’s the facade of communication, because you’re not actually communicating to a human being. You’re using voice commands to control a computer. Asking an AI a question and getting a response is functionally no different than entering 2+2 in a calculator and getting 4 when you hit =.

If we get to a point humanity no longer recognizes or cares about that difference, we’ll be in an extremely dark place.

There’s this extremely cringe “museum” that OpenAI effectively paid for where they have all these AI exhibits, and one of them involves a phone you can pick up and talk to an AI generated Mr Rogers. This was done without the knowledge or consent of Fred Roger’s widow or family. They took his voice and his words, contorted and strung them up with software, and made them dance.

The man that spent decades teaching and entertaining children with puppets had now been turned into one, without his consent.

The women behind this place goes around trying to sell AI to museum professionals in the form of seminars and such. She had the audacity to say “When I’m feeling down, I just pick up the phone, and let Mr Rogers cheer me up.” to a room full of museum professionals whose entire job is to honestly interpret and represent history and the dead, and the never, ever, put words in their mouth.

She got chewed apart in the QandA. It was glorious.

What are you even talking about? The story is about the use of AI to recreate a dead person and create a fake interview.

There’s really no reason to go scrambling for an alternative, it’s a temporary problem.

Fennec being a version behind for over a month because the dev was absent wouldn’t normally be that big a deal if not for the vulnerability being discovered.

You’re about to get ripped to shreds for daring to suggest the odds of anything actually happening to someone on a recently discontinued operating system are not dramatically higher as long as the user has basic use cases and basic tech literacy.

The article doesn’t need to explicitly state that, because it’s a simple comparison to make.

its not an issue unless you have a 20 year old computer.

Plenty of computers have been made without TPMs in the last 10 years, as well as built by people who have no need for one, or else they simply disabled it.

The article states;

Without Secure Boot or a TPM, though, installing these upgrades in place is more difficult. Trying to run an upgrade install from within Windows just means the system will yell at you about the things your PC is missing. Booting from a USB drive that has been doctored to overlook the requirements will help you do a clean install, but it will delete all your existing files and apps.

If you’re running into this problem and still want to try an upgrade install, there’s one more workaround you can try.

Download an ISO for the version of Windows 11 you want to install, and then either make a USB install drive or simply mount the ISO file in Windows by double-clicking it.

Open a Command Prompt window as Administrator and navigate to whatever drive letter the Windows install media is using. Usually that will be D: or E:, depending on what drives you have installed in your system; type the drive letter and colon into the command prompt window and press Enter.

Type setup.exe /product server

That is objectively not much different than the majority of Linux installs in terms of what you’re having to do just for an upgrade. That’s the point the person above was making. You can’t click a button, you have downloaded an image, mount it, and run through a setup.

You want to talk “smug”, yet you’re the one being triggered enough by seeing Linux mentioned in a perfectly valid comparison to the point you have to hop on your soapbox about “why Linux has a bad reputation”.

And feel like an idiot when Windows 10 support inevitably gets extended in a year anyway.

Honestly, just wait a little bit, both Fennec and Mull will get it sorted soon and you’ll see an update. If the vulnerability is worrying you that much, I’d honestly just download the standard Firefox APK for the time being and use it while waiting on Mull to update on fdroid. It likely won’t be more than a couple days.

The only reason the Fennec devs haven’t announced this is that they’ve been moving but they’re basically working on the same things to get it back on F Droid.

Cool.

But I’m not adding another method of updating apps just for the browser. F-Droid is where my non-play store apps live and update from, and I’d like to keep it that way.

Yep, it’s this. Annoying change, but from what I was reading, perfectly solvable with a little time. Unfortunately the dev was moving house, so they fell a version behind at the worst possible moment, but they’re aware of the issue. I’m not too concerned.

Had it not been for FDroid’s warning, I wouldn’t have even realized Fennec was a version behind (now 2). Normally it’s not that big a deal.

You’re running the server from the Steam deck?

Because even without Flatpak, there’s plenty of other package for different distros that are easy or easier than flatpak. You don’t have to go all the way to a docker.

It’s probably best to do it eventually but it doesn’t have to be today.

Not to mention its birth. It’s the best example I can think of for how open source is supposed to work: it started as Emby, the Emby devs tried to close it off for profit, and the community fork became Jellyfin, which I’d argue has more than outgrown Emby.

You barely even hear about it anymore, it’s only ever Plex or Jellyfin.

It’s funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won’t catch on because “federation is too hard to understand” when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model

Because you don’t need to understand email to use it.

There have been decades of software and user interface advancements that have made the usage of email extremely simple and straightforward.

People also inherently grasp the idea of it because they understand the real world concept of mail.

Email is also one way. You aren’t sending mail to and receiving mail from everyone at once, or reading mail one person sent to another and interjecting. You’re just sending something to an address, not CC’ing literally everyone all the time.

Email also doesn’t have any confusion around which mailboxes are allowed to speak to each other.

The fediverse is nowhere near that simple or intuitive.

Particularly Lemmy because Lemmy admins have fundamentally broken the idea of federation with defederation. It generally doesn’t matter what email you use or what email the receiver uses, baring more niche services. It does actually matter what instance you’re on.

We try to sell people on this comparison, try to explain to them that it’s simple, but it’s really a half-truth at best, or a lie at worst.

When you joined reddit, you know for a fact you’re seeing everything, and the same thing as everyone else. The same posts, the same comments, the same vote counts. A simple, shared, unfiltered experience of everything was the default, and then you shaped it yourself.

That’s not the case with the fediverse. There’s no simple default. You have to build it yourself.

Find me any charitable, non-profit, or community organization that wouldn’t call the cops if someone was breaking into their networking closet to install data harvesting hardware.

Because he literally broke into a server room and installed hardware to harvest this data.

There’s no world where any organization, for profit or otherwise, would tolerate that. Even your local library would call the damn cops if you tried that.

Can we be honest about this, please?

Aaron Swartz went into a secure networking closet and left a computer there to covertly pull data from the server over many days without permission from anyone, which is absolutely not the same thing as scraping public data from the internet.

He was a hero that didn’t deserve what happened, but it’s patently dishonest to ignore that he was effectively breaking and entering, plus installing a data harvesting device in the server room, which any organization in the world would rightfully identity as hostile behavior. Even your local library would call the cops if you tried to do that.

What they’ve done in the past has earned them trust, but it is irrelevant to what they intend to do in the future. Bitwarden is growing company, not the scrappy little open source app they once were.

In 2022, a private equity firm injected 100m into Bitwarden. From that point forward, users are rightfully going to scrutinize any action they take because it’s 2024 and the tech space is a hellscape of enshitification and acquisitions, thanks in part to VC money. We’ve seen this story play out too many times to assume there’s nothing to worry about.

So yes, people are going to be suspicious. That’s not irrational.

It’s the difference between a theme park and a casino. Both are legitimate forms of entertainment for many people, and both do need income to maintain their operations.

One of them charges for entry and then you enjoy the park, only paying for additional but ultimately optional things like merchandise or food. The fun ends when you decide to leave or the park closes.

The other is designed so you have to spend small amounts consistently, and it is designed in incredibly manipulative fashion, literally employing tactics that trigger addictive responses. The fun ends when you run out of money to spend, therefore compelling you to keep spending.

The people designing the theme park are designing something entertaining, the people designing the casino are perfecting a skinner box.

One is more deserving of income than the other.