It’s Japan, I’m sure somebody is planning to.

That’s one of the things, but it’s also adding a dedicated sidebar for AI. That’s the sort of thing that should just be an extension, there’s absolutely no reason at all why that needs to be something built into the browser.

Developers should be providing alt text themselves, but in cases where they aren’t having a local image recognition model running to provide a description isn’t terrible as long as it’s either 100% local or completely opt-in.

The dedicated sidebar on the other hand feels very much like a cheap attempt to cash in on the AI fad.

That’s a shame. If you can convince them to use TypeScript that would be for the best, otherwise good luck, you’re going to need it. I can’t say you couldn’t pay me to write JavaScript, but I can say what I would demand to do it is way more than anyone would be willing to pay.

Been running Windows 10 on my gaming desktop for a while now and refusing to “upgrade” to 11 because of how much worse it was. Going to be doing a hardware refresh in a couple months and when I do I’m installing Linux. Thanks to Valve and a few major open source projects Linux gaming has finally reached a point where I can tell MS to fuck off with their enshitification.

Of course I thought the same with JavaScript but was forced to learn it last year

Use TypeScript. It’s still built on a giant steaming pile of shit but at least if you’re careful most of your own code can be reasonably correct.

Pretty sure the only thing I wouldn’t object to AI being used for in Firefox would be ad blocking. Surely they’re going to use this for that right?

…

Right?

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Shit.

More like Firefox users are surprised to find out some journalist thinks they’re unhappy with “privacy tweaks” they hadn’t even noticed.

Yeah that entire article basically agreed with everything I said. Technically broadcast TV does have some limitations enforced by the FCC (because it uses radio to transmit) even to this day, but broadcast TV is basically dead. I actually thought they had shut those stations down a few years ago, but I guess they’re still around. Regardless there are absolutely no government regulations that control what’s shown on cable and streaming services. 100% of censorship that occurs there is a business decision by the TV Networks and has absolutely nothing to do with the government.

You can, most networks just decide not to. Broadcast TV (which hasn’t really existed for I think more than a decade now) had restrictions about swearing (and other content) enforced by the FCC as it used a public good (RF bands). Cable TV (and now streaming services) are and pretty much have always been unregulated.

TV Networks, being companies trying to make money, opt to self censor so as to appeal to the largest number of viewers, but that isn’t anything to do with the government, it’s 100% a business decision.

Very much this. I have never switched employers and not received a sizable salary bump in the process. This isn’t quite “don’t threaten me with a good time” territory, but it’s not far removed from it.

There’s no regulation, we can and do say fuck without any problem. Some people prefer not to swear either for personal, social, or religious reasons. They chose to self censor not because they had to but because they wanted to. You’re reading an awful fucking lot into a random ass image some anonymous user posted in a comment.

Ah yes, the Blyatbox. I guess we’re going back to cold war era Russia where all their stuff is just worse blatantly reverse engineered copies of stuff from other countries. Makes sense, Putin for some reason has really had a hard-on for recreating cold war era Russia.

I can confirm Samsung appliances are complete trash. Every single one I’ve owned has either died or had a non-replaceable part fail within a couple years. We had a Samsung fridge at one point and one of the door switches failed. No big deal right, easy to replace? No, apparently Samsung used some kind of custom switch instead of the bog standard cherry contact switch that basically everything and everyone has used for decades, and it’s no longer being manufactured.

It’s important to distinguish between lossy and lossless algorithms. What was specifically requested in this case is a lossless algorithm which means that you must be able to perfectly reassemble the original input given only the compressed output. It must be an exact match, not a close match, but absolutely identical.

Lossless algorithms rely generally on two tricks. The first is removing common data. If for instance some format always includes some set of bytes in the same location you can remove them from the compressed data and rely on the decompression algorithm to know it needs to reinsert them. From a signal theory perspective those bytes represent noise as they don’t convey meaningful data (they’re not signal in other words).

The second trick is substituting shorter sequences for common longer ones. For instance if you can identify many long sequences of data that occur in multiple places you can create a lookup index and replace each of those long sequences with the shorter index key. The catch is that you obviously can’t do this with every possible sequence of bytes unless the data is highly regular and you can use a standardized index that doesn’t need to be included in the compressed data. Depending on how poorly you do in selecting the sequences to add to your index, or how unpredictable the data to be compressed is you can even end up taking up more space than the original once you account for the extra storage of the index.

From a theory perspective everything is classified as either signal or noise. Signal has meaning and is highly resistant to compression. Noise does not convey meaning and is typically easy to compress (because you can often just throw it away, either because you can recreate it from nothing as in the case of boilerplate byte sequences, or because it’s redundant data that can be reconstructed from compressed signal).

Take for instance a worst case scenario for compression, a long sequence of random uniformly distributed bytes (perhaps as a one time pad). There’s no boilerplate to remove, and no redundant data to remove, there is in effect no noise in the data only signal. Your only options for compression would be to construct a lookup index, but if the data is highly uniform it’s likely there are no long sequences of repeated bytes. It’s highly likely that you can create no index that would save any significant amount of space. This is in effect nearly impossible to compress.

Modern compression relies on the fact that most data formats are in fact highly predictable with lots of trimmable noise by way of redundant boilerplate, and common often repeated sequences, or in the case of lossy encodings even signal that can be discarded in favor of approximations that are largely indistinguishable from the original.

I feel like Google is trying to speedrun killing their search service. It was already significantly shittier lately just because of all the sponsored bullshit and SEO spam, but this rush to cash in on the AI fad has really destroyed the last utility it had.

They did, but then Elon insisted they add a virtual neuralink into it and now the neural network is braindead.

GPLv3, make it really radioactive to them.

The implication of a 200 to 1 algorithm would be that the data they’re collecting is almost entirely noise. Specifically that 99.5% of all the data is noise. In theory if they had sufficient processing in the implant they could filter the data down before transmission thus reducing the bandwidth usage by 99.5%. It seems like it would be fairly trivial to prove that any such 200 to 1 compression algorithm would be indistinguishable in function from a noise filter on the raw data.

It’s not quite the same situation, but this should show some of the issues with this: https://matt.might.net/articles/why-infinite-or-guaranteed-file-compression-is-impossible/

Honestly the short 5 year from original release till EOL thing really fucking annoys me, but it’s literally every phone on the market. I’ve looked, it’s impossible to find a phone that doesn’t force you to replace it every few years unless you go to a plain dumb phone that only supports voice calls and maybe basic SMS with no apps. That’s just a nonstarter in this day and age.

Even alternative Android firmware like GrapheneOS and /e/OS are dependent on the stock firmware releases by the phone manufacturer so when the manufacturer goes EOL and stops releasing updates your alternative installs also are effectively EOL.

The only solution to this problem I’ve seen that seems like it has a chance is Linux Phone OS, but it still has several problems that make it unusable for most people (biggest one probably being that it provides absolutely terrible battery life).

Technically you’re correct, but it’s effectively the same thing since I’ve literally never used NFC for anything besides contactless payment and initial phone setup when migrating from an older Android phone to a newer one. For most people NFC is synonymous with contactless payment.