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Technology bouncing 1 year ago 83%
Raspberry Pi availability is visibly improving after years of shortages arstechnica.com

I've been shocked by how expensive (though also powerful) these pis have gotten.

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Technology mikeymike 1 year ago 75%
The excellent Arc browser is now available for anyone to download www.theverge.com

Interesting new browser that's become pretty popular lately

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Technology bouncing 1 year ago 50%
Sam Altman’s Worldcoin token to launch Monday www.semafor.com

> The token has been controversial in Silicon Valley for its ambitious and unorthodox approach to trying to solve two vexing problems: Online identity authentication and income inequality.

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Technology bouncing 1 year ago 60%
GPT-4 and ChatGPT study shows LLMs are getting dumber www.theregister.com

I'm inclined to agree in general. GPT has actually gotten worse over time. For one it's just way too locked down now. But I also have noticed a decline in overall quality of responses, especially for technical stuff. It used to translate between programming languages quite well, and that's been more broken lately. I'm wondering if they purged a bunch of copyrighted material from it and that's why it got dumber.

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Technology The_iceman_cometh 1 year ago 100%
Google’s head of AR software quits, citing “unstable commitment and vision” arstechnica.com

In other words, he doesn't trust Google not to randomly kill projects.

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Technology bouncing 1 year ago 50%
EU gives its blessing to reopen data pipelines to the US www.theregister.com

> The EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF) is the third attempt between the trading bloc and the US to iron out privacy kinks in the flow of data about their citizens. This latest agreement marks the EU's determination that "the United States ensures an adequate level of protection – comparable to that of the European Union – for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies under the new framework," the Commission said in a statement. > > Key to today's decision [PDF] was an October executive order signed by US President Joe Biden that the Commission said adds new safeguards that address the problems raised with the second attempt at a transatlantic data agreement, Privacy Shield.

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Technology bouncing 1 year ago 50%
JRE Pixel Fold teardown shows Google cutting corners all over the place https://www.androidpolice.com/pixel-fold-teardown/

TL/DR: Google used flimsier parts that are more likely to break over time (aluminum over stainless steel, etc).

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Technology The_iceman_cometh 1 year ago 100%
Android phone hits 24GB of RAM, as much as a 13-inch MacBook Pro arstechnica.com

Meanwhile my iPhone 12 Mini is doing great with 4 gigs.

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Technology bouncing 1 year ago 100%
Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads www.semafor.com

This has probably been pointed out before, but it's not like Twitter is *hard to build*, especially for a company like Facebo—I mean, "Meta." What's hard is content moderation and community building.

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Technology BobPenguin 1 year ago 100%
AMD's AI chips could match Nvidia's offerings, software firm [MosaicML] says www.reuters.com

This article was mostly fluff but I haven't seen much ml talk. I do wish nvidia had more competition, though I somewhat doubt AMD will offer it soon. Having competive performance in PyTorch is a good start.

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Technology nodester 1 year ago 100%
Twitter has started blocking unregistered users www.theverge.com

The Twitter shitshow continues.

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Technology The_iceman_cometh 1 year ago 100%
Here Comes Euclid, the Telescope That Will Search for Dark Energy www.wired.com

[Bypass Paywall Here](https://archive.ph/Y3dEJ)

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Technology bouncing 1 year ago 100%
Proton launches open-source password manager https://proton.me/blog/proton-pass-launch

One of the features seems to be a "hide my email" feature, akin to Apple's [hide my email](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210425) or [Fastmail's masked email feature](https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Masked-Email). Having used both of those, I would say one downside is that occasionally, a site will *detect* that I used the Apple one, which is strange because it's just an iCloud email address. Perhaps they're looking for a specific pattern. I haven't yet seen the Fastmail one blocked. One concern with the Proton one is that it seems like its masked emails are all at passmail.com. I've already found some sites block protonmail, so they'll surely block passmail like they do Mailinator and other sites. That could be a limitation that's less likely to affect Fastmail's service.

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Technology bouncing 1 year ago 100%
Torrent of image-based phishing emails are harder to detect and more convincing arstechnica.com

It does seem like sooner or later, if someone is able to build a reliable AI model of my face and voice, they could even phish my own relatives by video call. Seems like a Philip K. Dick novel—objective reality is something you could only see around you, while the machine would be completely untrustworthy.

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Technology bouncing 1 year ago 100%
Kagi raises $670K https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round

Kagi is a paid search engine. Instead of getting ads, you just pay for the privilege of using it. I've been using it for a while and overall I think _for most searches_ it's better than Google. It isn't necessarily that the content is always better (sometimes it isn't) but the signal is far easier to find through the noise.

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Technology bouncing 1 year ago 100%
On Native Mac Apps https://reinventedsoftware.com/blog/2023/06/24/on-native-mac-apps/

Keaton Brandt writing in response to [Elegy for the Native Mac App](https://medium.com/source-and-buggy/elegy-for-the-native-mac-app-39ee92cc37ba) (which is arguably a eulogy).

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Technology bouncing 1 year ago 100%
XML is the future www.bitecode.dev

Despite the headline, this isn't about xml.

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Technology nitrofuel 1 year ago 100%
LastPass users locked out (again) with infinite 2FA loop www.bleepingcomputer.com

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/lastpass-users-furious-after-being-locked-out-due-to-mfa-resets/

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Technology bouncing 1 year ago 100%
Password Managers: How to be secure but not wiped out in an emergency

Lately I've been increasingly worried about corrupted payloads of even open source password managers. Password managers are among the world's biggest honeypots. Maybe you trust the coders of the password manager. Maybe it's Open Source. But do you trust all of its upstream dependencies? And all their CI build processes? And each of their developers' security? That's part of why I won't use an Electron-based password manager like BitWarden: there's no Electron app with a minimal dependency graph. Even Electron itself could easily fall victim if someone important in the development pipeline is compromised... And besides, Electron sucks anyway. So, one way I can mitigate against the possibility of a malicious payload being delivered on password manager update is to not put all my eggs in one basket. For example, where I can, I authenticate with a Yubikey (if only by TOTP on Yubico Authenticator). Then my password isn't enough. But where do I store the recovery codes? Ugh: in the password manager. I've been thinking on this for a while, and I haven't really found a perfect solution that provides me a way to store secrets without also being too reliant on one party's software. If I rely heavily on the password manager, that puts too much trust in it. If I rely more on a hardware token, that's too risky in case of loss of theft. What's a security-aware nerd to do?

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Technology bouncing 1 year ago 100%
On the Need for an AI Public Option - Schneier on Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/06/on-the-need-for-an-ai-public-option.html

Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders on AI and the public good: > Silicon Valley has produced no small number of moral disappointments. Google retired its “don’t be evil” pledge before firing its star ethicist. Self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk bought Twitter in order to censor political speech, retaliate against journalists, and ease access to the platform for Russian and Chinese propagandists. Facebook lied about how it enabled Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and paid a public relations firm to blame Google and George Soros instead. Schneier and Sanders mention that China and Europe have publicly funded AI (though China's seems designed to further state goals and is done through cronies), and that the US could publicly fund AI that's accountable to the public while also a starting place for future startups. I'm not necessarily sold, but it is an interesting proposal.

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