This is a FAQ for end users, about a feature in software running on end users' computers.

It is absolutely doublespeak to call it "local". Are we supposed to invent an entirely new term now to distinguish between remote and local? Please do not accept this usage. It will make meaningful communication much harder.

Edit: I mean seriously, by this token OpenAI, Google, Facebook, etc. could call their servers "locally hosted". It is an utterly meaningless term if you accept this usage.

If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter”

Then that would also be an oxymoron.

Local is the opposite of remote. This is a remote server. Remote servers are not local. This is not a matter of interpretation.

Why does local mean local? I'm not sure I understand your question.

I'm disappointed that the improved performance seems to be tied to AI upscaling. Given how much more powerful the PS5 Pro is supposed to be, I was hoping we'd just get Graphics Mode at 60fps, with no post-processing fudgery.

It's been several years now, and I've seen several generations of AI upscaling (DLSS and FSR). I remain unimpressed with the concept on the whole. Just give me native resolution with decent antialiasing. Please. I'll take a clean 1080 of 1440 image over weird 4K AI artifacts any day.

I still think the original performance mode was much, much worse than it needed to be on the original PS5 hardware. They made some strange decisions with postprocessing. There's no technical reason it needed to be so blurry. It's not even a matter of resolution; it looks bad even at 1080p.

"Locally hosted" means it's running on the local host. In this case, that would mean on the same computer running Firefox.

Calling something that is only accessible over the internet "locally hosted" is outrageous doublespeak.

Orbit currently uses a version of Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) that is locally hosted on Mozilla’s Google Cloud Platform instance.

Hmm.

>locally hosted

>Google Cloud

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

So probably there will be some systems other than Linux that do use Rust

There's one called Redox that is entirely written in Rust. Still in fairly early stages, though. https://www.redox-os.org/

Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?

The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.

(she’s part husky)

Does that mean that instead of crying murder, she only cries manslaughter?

In theory, phones would be cheaper if they had longer shelf life.

Similarly, we don't need new cars every year, but the beast must be fed, right? Right?!

We're comparing it to gen 1 to emphasize how far it is from being competitive.

Not really new; this has been the case with all the Tensor chips. I kind of assumed Google was going to step up their game at some point, but I don't think Samsung can produce chips on par with TSMC. Google is switching to TSMC for next year's Tensor 5, so maybe we'll see a big jump then.

That said, I don't think it's a deal-breaker. I'm running a Pixel 7 and it's "fine". The Pixel 6 had bad throttling/overheating problems, but the 7 and 8 are better. We'll see what the Big Problem is with the 9 series. There's always something.

Was there some medical reason for this? Seems too extensive to have been done for surgery.

Please, you need to be more specific. Android has half a dozen distinctly different share menus, and there are distinctly different reasons why each one is garbage.

Installing Linux after Windows should be fine without disconnecting drives.

The reverse is troublesome. Microsoft's installer is all too happy to shit on your drives, even the ones you're not using for installation. But Linux installers are much more friendly to dual-booting and all kinds of complex setups.

Or about a quarter of a single Super Smash Bros fanfic.

That's like 10-20 adult novels. Respect.

Now that you mention it, yeah, I wonder if they haven't updated recently.

Isn't the 7950X3D the best at basically everything? I mean, disregarding value per dollar, it's still better than any of the other Ryzens for gaming, isn't it?

https://www.logicalincrements.com/ is a good starting point.

If you want to beat the PS5 Pro in terms of raw performance, you'll probably want to look at the "great" tier and higher. It's hard to say now since we don't have any real-world benchmarks to go by.

$700 seems like a lot for a PS5 Pro, but if it's really as powerful as they claim then it will still compare well to PCs under $1k.

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashurbanipal#Ashurbanipal_in_popular_culture

https://www.ancientpages.com/2021/06/21/ashurbanipal-last-great-ruler-of-assyria-and-his-famous-well-organized-library/

Copyleft licenses require that derivative works maintain that same license. Not all the Creative Commons licenses are copyleft. CC-BY only requires that attribution be given in the derivative work. That's the one YouTube offers as an option for uploads.

If you want your video to be copylefted, you should use one of the SA (share-alike) licenses. See https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/

Same on macOS. Apple has "case-sensitive HFS+" as an option for UNIX compatibility (or at least they used to) but actually running a system on it is a bad idea in general.

I don't understand why they have a dozen other settings when of course I always want it to be outstanding.

Then again, that dress does sound tempting...

I agree completely.

I understand the motivation here — apps that lack location permission shouldn't be able to get backdoor access to your location via your camera roll. That makes sense, because you know damn well every spyware social media company would be doing that if they could.

But the reverse is also true: apps that legitimately need to read photos and access all their metadata shouldn't need to be granted full location access.

I have a different Boox product, the low-end Poke Lite (I think version 4?).

Pros:

• E-paper display is easy on the eyes
• Customizable backlight temperature and brightness
• Runs arbitrary Android apps
• Battery for days
• Can install open-source reading apps like Librera
• Still receiving software updates after a few years

Cons:

• Only runs Android 11
• Installing Google Play requires jumping through some weird hoops, because it's not Google certified. I recommend using F-Droid instead, or using a throwaway google account to avoid this security liability.
• Built-in apps kind of suck in general
• Home screen strongly pushes their own ecosystem, shoving regular Android apps into a different section
• Most apps look like ass on a B&W display
• Most apps look like ass on a 4:3 display (not applicable to the Palma)
• The various display refresh modes are unintuitive

The newer models, from what I understand, use faster-refreshing display tech, and some even support color.

This is why I refuse to buy e-books with DRM. Amazon should have no say in how, where, or when I read my books.

ebooks.com has a searchable DRM-free section, so that's my go-to: https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/drm-free

For anything not available without DRM, I will pirate it without a second thought.

Yeah, I had to disconnect all my SATA HDs to stop the Windows installer from shitting all over them.

I'd be worried about Windows updates doing the same thing now, after the the recent glitch that broke bootloaders.

My first thought was "that's insane", but when you put it that way, it seems less insane than driving a car.

Normalize golf carts! I guess?! 🤷

F-Droid link for the lazy: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.junkfood.seal/

Definitely going to check this out. I've been using yt-dlp via command line in Termux but that experience is less than ideal.

Ideally it would just show us the nominal charging rate, as negotiated via the USB power delivery protocol. The OS has this information, but last I checked it was impossible to directly access from userspace. Apps like AccuBattery just monitor the battery usage over time to estimate it.

It was bought out and cleaned up a few years ago. It's legit again now, though I don't think it'll ever really recover from that fiasco.

the camera will ding you for distracted driving

Oh of course, it's the camera doing this. The camera is the bad guy. Not the people who designed, approved, and implemented this. Totally not their fault. Not their responsibility. They are powerless against the might of the camera that they designed, approved, paid for, and implemented.

The sane response to this would be "oh shit, we'd better fix that". Instead they blame the tech.

Totally agree. Their product line was an absolute mess back then. Their current lineup is getting a little bloated too. I don't know why they bother having two laptop product lines anymore when they are so similar.

Apple tried to allow clones, but ran into the same problem because the clone makers could make cheaper machines by slapping together parts.

Yeah, this is exactly what happened, although some of the clone brands were perfectly high-quality (Power Computing in particular made great machines, usually the fastest on the market). In the Mac community at the time, a lot of people (myself included) wished Apple would just exit the hardware business and focus on what they were good at: software.

Then Steve Jobs came back and did exactly the opposite of that. First order of business was to kill cloning. Then came the iPod.

To be fair, the next generation of Power Macs after that were about half the price of the previous gen.

I've never been in such a situation, so I'm genuinely curious how this plays out. Can they really say this after all the paperwork has been signed? Isn't this something they should have checked before selling him the car or approving the loan? Is this actually his problem or is he getting bullied by the lender?

Most of Apple's history, actually.

Macs have a reputation for being expensive because people compare the cheapest Mac to the cheapest PC, or to a custom-built PC. That's reasonable if the cheapest PC meets your needs or if you're into building your own PC, but if you compare a similarly-equipped name-brand PC, the numbers shift a LOT.

From the G3-G5 era ('97-2006) through most of the Intel era (2006-2020), if you went to Dell or HP and configured a machine to match Apple's specs as closely as possible, you'd find the Macs were almost never much more expensive, and often cheaper. I say this as someone who routinely did such comparisons as part of their job. There were some notable exceptions, like most of the Intel MacBook Air models (they ranged from "okay" to "so bad it feels like a personal insult"), but that was never the rule. Even in the early-mid 90s, while Apple's own hardware was grossly overpriced, you could by Mac clones for much cheaper (clones were licensed third-parties who made Macs, and they were far and away the best value in the pre-G3 PowerPC era).

Macs also historically have a lower total cost of ownership, factoring in lifespan (cheap PCs fail frequently), support costs, etc. One of the most recent and extensive analyses of this I know if comes from IBM. See https://www.computerworld.com/article/1666267/ibm-mac-users-are-happier-and-more-productive.html

Toward the tail end of the Intel era, let's say around 2016-2020, Apple put out some real garbage. e.g. butterfly keyboards and the aforementioned craptastic Airs. But historically those are the exceptions, not the rule.

As for the "does more", well, that's debatable. Considering this is using Apple's 90s logo, I think it's pretty fair. Compare System 7 (released in '91) to Windows 3.1 (released in '92), and there is no contest. Windows was shit. This was generally true up until the 2000s, when the first few versions of OS X were half-baked and Apple was only just exiting its "beleaguered" period, and the mainstream press kept ringing the death knell. Windows lagged behind its competition by at least a few years up until Microsoft successfully killed or sufficiently hampered all that competition. I don't think you can make an honest argument in favor of Windows compared to any of its contemporaries in the 90s (e.g. Macintosh, OS/2, BeOS) that doesn't boil down to "we're used to it" or "we're locked in".

Chromium itself will. Other Chromium-based browser vendors have confirmed that they will maintain v2 support for as long as they can. So perhaps try something like Vivaldi. I haven't tried PWAs in Vivaldi myself, but it supports them according to the docs.

Sure, why not?

Passwords have been leaked from many companies you'd expect to have decent security policies. I have no visibility into that, so I would not assume competence across an arbitrary number of sites. God only knows how many of the services I use store my password in plaintext, or improperly hashed.

I couldn't possibly remember all my passphrases unless I reused them everywhere, which would leave me with an arbitrary number of centralized vulnerabilities, under the responsibility of people who don't give a shit.

I like the "magic mushroom" theory.

I won't say I believe it. But I like it.

We’ve always safeguarded your data with an integrated stack of world-class secure infrastructure and technology, delivering end-to-end protection in a way that only Google can

This is weaselly even by marketing standards. Most of Google's services are still not end-to-end encrypted, and none of them were until recently. Oh, but they said "end-to-end protection", which means absolutely nothing, so I guess it's not technically a bald-faced lie.

Anyway, aside from their attempt to rewrite history, it sounds a lot like Apple's promise with their secure and verifiable AI servers. Google's blog post references Project Oak, which I'm not intimately familiar with.

I'm still skeptical of these supposedly-private cloud platforms, but I have a lot of reading to do if I want to develop an informed opinion.