LocalSend. It’s exactly like Apple Airdrop

This may be super-nitpicky (and I lose LocalSend and use it a lot), but there is one difference between LocalSend and Airdrop. LocalSend requires network connectivity (and requires the devices to be on the same network), whereas Airdrop can work without any network connection (using Bluetooth).

I recently discovered that he believes it’s theft if you watch one of his videos with an adblocker. Just out of spite, sometimes I put one of his videos on in the background (muted) with an adblocker.

Yeah during the reddit exodus, people were recommending to overwrite your comment with garbage before deleting it. This (probably) forces them to restore your comment from backup. But realistically they were always going to harvest the comments stored in backup anyway, so I don’t think it caused them any more work.

If anything, this probably just makes reddit’s/SO’s partnership more valuable because your comments are now exclusive to reddit’s/SO’s backend, and other companies can’t scrape it.

Reminds me a little of the old Jonathan Shapiro research OSes (Coyotos, EROS, CapROS), though toned down a little bit. The EROS family was about eliminating the filesystem entirely at the OS level since you can simulate files with capabilities anyway. Serenum seems to be toning that down a little and effectively having file- or directory-level capabilities, which I think is sensible if you’re going to have a capability-based OS, since they end up being a bit more user-visible as an OS.

He’s got the same problem every research OS has: zero software. He’s probably smart to ditch the idea of hardware entirely and just fix on one hardware platform.

I wish him luck selling his computer systems, but I doubt he’s going to do very well. What would a customer do with one of these? Edit files? And then…edit them again? I guess you can show off how inconvenient it is to edit things due to its security.

I just mean it’s a bit optimistic to try and fund this by selling it. I understand he doesn’t have a research grant, but it’s clearly just a research OS.

You just don’t appreciate how prestigious it is to get a degree from Example U.

I feel like the answer is recycling deposits somehow. I’ve seen attempts at them here and there, but I guess we haven’t quite figured out the details yet. I guess electronics are a bit trickier to set up a deposit system for than pop cans. Even the places that do have electronics deposits, often you have to drive to a special recycling centre out past the airport that’s open 3 hours in the middle of the day, only for them to tell you that everything’s glued together so they can’t really separate out the parts they need and most of it will probably end up just going to the landfill anyway.

But theoretically, if we could get a serious deposit system that allowed for recycling to be profitable and gave manufacturers and incentive for making their stuff easier to take apart and recycling (and hence easier to repair), that would be pretty sweet.

I’m guessing childless adults are significantly less than that. Just thinking about my kids and all of their book readers, barking animal toys, light-up fairy wands, I have a bad feeling they may be bringing up that average.

Though the nice thing about kids’ electronics is they never get obsoleted. A light-up fairy wand is just as fun in 2074 as it is in 2024. So they just get cycled through the 2nd hand mommy communities until they break. It was $40 new, you buy it “mostly undamaged” for $20, hope your kid doesn’t scratch it too badly so you can sell it a couple years down the line for $10 or so.

The bad thing about kids’ electronics is it’s that for new stuff, it’s really impossible to tell how long it’s going to last. Could be 20 years, could be 20 minutes.

Sure! We can insure that for you! Oh we just noticed that our InsureLink service isn’t connecting to your car. So I’ll just need you to sign this waiver saying that you’re declining the InsureLink Safety discount. Just sign right here. It’s just saying that we cannot offer you all of our insurance services, just like if you get in an accident or something and we can’t remotely verify what you were doing at the time, we can’t help you. Great! And without the Safety discount your premiums will go up by only 372.50 a month.

The threat resides in the chips’ data memory-dependent prefetcher

Well that sounds extremely familiar. Nice to see the spirit of Spectre is still living on. The holy grail of speculation without any timing attack leaks is still eluding us, I guess.

I was saying Boo-urns.

I feel like this should be required reading for a lot of Linux users. That article is a couple years old now, but I think is even more true now than it was when it was written. Having a middleman (package maintainer) between the user and the software developer is a tremendous benefit. Maintainers enforce quality, and if you bypass them, you’re going to end up with Linux as the Google Play Store (doubly so if you try and fool yourself into thinking it won’t happen because “Linux is different”)

Linux is the only platform to get native WebGL, too!

It’s in Proverbs 11:20

The C++ developers are an abomination to the Lord,
But the Rustaceans in their Rust-based OSes are His delight.

Totally agreed. I never used Twitter. I tried in earnest to use Mastodon for a couple years, because I wanted it to to succeed, just kind of ideologically.

Eventually I realized that the whole concept of “microblogging” is just fundamentally awful. (At least for me)

It’s true. And people try to jump on to similar things. “It’s just like how email works!”, or “It’s just like how international phone calls work!”

Yeah, nobody has any clue how those two things work, either.

The search term is censored by DuckDuckGo in Korea. Even robots apparently think it’s going to be an IoT buttplug.

That’s Saturday night in North American time zones. Just a heads up in case you’re planning a boys’ night out a couple hundred billion years in advance, maybe move it to Friday night in case the world ends Saturday night.

Scraping is legal

Have you been following any of the court battles involving LLMs lately?

The New York Times suing OpenAI. Getty Images suing Stability AI. Sarah Silverman and George R.R. Martin suing OpenAI.

All of those cases involve data that has been scraped. (In the latter two cases, the memoir/novels were scraped from excerpts and archives found online).

It’s too late to say with complete certainty that it’s all legal (the appeal processes haven’t all been finished yet), but at this point it looks like using scraped and copyrighted data in training LLMs is legal. Even if it’s going to turn out not to be legal, it’s very clear that nobody’s shying away from doing it, because we have the courts showing as a statement of fact that it’s been happening for years.

Everything you’ve written is just fantasy. We have a lot of reality which contradicts it. Every LLM company has been primarily relying upon scraping data (which we know to completely legal) and has been incorporated copyrighted and scraped data in its data sets (which is still legally a grey area, but is happening anyway).

Out of curiosity, did you use it as a daily driver? A friend of mine tried it out briefly, and it was pretty cool, but the lack of applications meant we couldn’t really do anything with it (other than marvel at how cool it was). Did it eventually get applications developed for them? Like did they have an office suite?

Has reddit not already been scraped? With all of that information exposed bare on the public Internet for decades, and apparently so valuable, I find it hard to believe that everybody’s just been sitting there twiddling their thumbs, saying “boy I sure hope they decide to sell us that data one day so that we don’t have to force an intern to scrape it for us”.