I wonder if the “never will” part is legally binding. Most companies bend over backwards to avoid making future-looking guarantees like that.

Question for those in the know: does it make sense to use LibreWolf if you don’t want to operate in private browsing by default? In my primary browser, I want my logins and settings and browser history to persist.

I’ve always heard that as one of the big differentiating features of LibreWolf, but I’ve never really played around with it. Can you change those settings, and if you do, is it any different from stock Firefox at that point?

Hmm. According to Wikipedia you are correct, and the original SEQUEL was simply renamed to SQL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History

I’m not sure how much that original SEQUEL/SQL has in common with later publicly-available SQL implementations. I never personally worked with SEQUEL but I was under the impression it was more of a spiritual predecessor to SQL than a direct ancestor. But I trust Wikipedia more than I trust my my memory here, so I guess I was wrong.

Something like that, yes. More info at https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/431329/what-is-the-correct-pronunciation-of-sqlite with links to videos of Richard Hipp (creator of SQLite) pronouncing it.

I actually couldn’t find a section on pronunciation in the official FAQ, though I think it was there in the past. Still, they do use phrases such as “an SQLite database”, indicating that “SQLite” starts with a vowel sound.

SQL is not traditionally pronounced like “sequel”. Sequel was a whole different language.

Official pronunciation for MySQL, SQLite, and PostgreSQL all pronounce each letter.

But “sequel” is probably more common at this point and some of them include it as an alternate pronunciation now.

Yes, his name is Headmaster Gandalf.

I used that briefly 10+ years ago when I got a Fire Stick for like $5. I even installed it on one of my phones back then, since they had a lot of app giveaways and I was dumb.

It was basically “Google Play but worse”. Like the Epic Games Store is to Steam.

DNS over HTTPS. It allows encrypted DNS lookup with a URL, which allows for url-based customizations not possible with traditional DNS lookups (e.g. the server could have /ads or /trackers endpoints so you can choose what to block).

DNS Over TLS (DoT) is similar, but it doesn’t use URLs, just IP addresses like generic DNS. Both are encrypted.

No love for cvs?

The experience of installing and updating GPU drivers can be very different across different distros. Especially if you use secure boot. This was such a pain point for me on Tumbleweed that I just pinned my kernel.

37% used is no problem.

Don’t sweat it until you’re at 80-90%.

Once users have given up on comfortable single-handed use, the only limiting factor is pocket size.

For me, that means once it passes about 65mm in width, I might as well jump to ~80mm in width, which is huge even by today’s standards. 70mm wide phones are just the worst of both worlds to me.

I want a small phone, but there hasn’t been a serious option in over 10 years. The Xperia Z3 Compact was the last good “small” Android phone that was actually small enough to justify its existence. That was 2014.

Edit: Also, I suspect with bezels being so small now, the frame would need to be even smaller to avoid accidental edge presses with one-handed operation.

I don’t see any mention of whether this uses local models or cloud models. I’m not interested in sending anything I care about it into the cloud.

But any 50 watt chip will get absolutely destroyed by a 500 watt gpu

If you are memory-bound (and since OP’s talking about 192GB, it’s pretty safe to assume they are), then it’s hard to make a direct comparison here.

You’d need 8 high-end consumer GPUs to get 192GB. Not only is that insanely expensive to buy and run, but you won’t even be able to support it on a standard residential electrical circuit, or any consumer-level motherboard. Even 4 GPUs (which would be great for 70B models) would cost more than a Mac.

The speed advantage you get from discrete GPUs rapidly disappears as your memory requirements exceed VRAM capacity. Partial offloading to GPU is better than nothing, but if we’re talking about standard PC hardware, it’s not going to be as fast as Apple Silicon for anything that requires a lot of memory.

This might change in the near future as AMD and Intel catch up to Apple Silicon in terms of memory bandwidth and integrated NPU performance. Then you can sidestep the Apple tax, and perhaps you will be able to pair a discrete GPU and get a meaningful performance boost even with larger models.

This will be highly platform-dependent, and also dependent on your threat model.

On PC laptops, you should probably enable Secure Boot (if it’s not enabled by default), and password-protect your BIOS. On Macs you can disable booting from external media (I think that’s even the default now, but not totally sure). You should definitely enable full-disk encryption – that’s FileVault on Mac and Bitlocker on Windows.

On Apple devices, you can enable USB Restricted Mode, which will protect against some attacks with USB cables or devices.

Apple devices also have lockdown mode, which restricts or disables a whole bunch of functionality in an effort to reduce your attack surface against a variety of sophisticated attacks.

If you’re worried about hardware hacks, then on a laptop you’d want to apply some tamper-evident stickers or something similar, so if an evil maid opens it up and tampers with the hardware, at least you’ll know something fishy happened, so you can go drop your laptop in an active volcano or something.

If you use any external devices, like a keyboard, mouse, hard drive, whatever…well…how paranoid are you? I’m going to be honest: there is a near 0% chance I would even notice if someone replaced my charging cables or peripheral cables with malicious ones. I wouldn’t even notice if someone plugged in a USB keylogger between my desktop PC and my keyboard, because I only look at the back of my PC once in a blue moon. Digital security begins with physical security.

On the software side, make sure you’re the only one with admin rights, and ideally you shouldn’t even log into admin accounts on a day-to-day basis.

Mathematicians: “First time?”

Even today I don’t know how to share files to or from my Android phone as easily as I can with AirDrop. Bluetooth sharing is slow as balls and requires setup. Is Quick Share better now, or is it just a new name for the same old feature? I haven’t tested it recently myself.

AirDrop operates over wi-fi with autodiscovery over local networks. No account or pairing required.

Why? This cannot possibly have any legal weight. Some adults look young. Some kids look old. The very idea is broken from the outset.

I can’t tell if this is incompetence or malice.

Thanks for the info. I was not aware that Bluesky had public, shareable block lists. That is indeed a great feature.

For anyone else like me who was not aware, I found this site with an index of a lot of public block lists: https://blueskydirectory.com/lists . I was not able to load some of them, but others did load successfully. Maybe some were deleted or are not public? I’m not sure.

I’ve never been heavily invested in microblogging, so my first-hand experience is limited and mostly academic. I have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, though. I would not have realized this feature was available in Bluesky if you hadn’t mentioned it and I didn’t find that index site in a web search. It doesn’t seem easily discoverable within Bluesky’s own UI.

Edit: I agree, of course, that there is a larger systemic problem at the society level. I recently read this excellent piece (very long but worth it!) that talks a bit about how that relates to social media: https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/ . Here’s a relevant excerpt:

If this truly is the case—if the only way to improve our public internet is to convert all humans one by one to a state of greater enlightenment—then a full retreat into the bushes is the only reasonable course.

But it isn’t the case. Because yes, the existence of dipshits is indeed unfixable, but building arrays of Dipshit Accelerators that allow a small number of bad actors to build destructive empires defended by Dipshit Armies is a choice. The refusal to genuinely remodel that machinery when its harms first appear is another choice. Mega-platform executives, themselves frequently dipshits, who make these choices, lie about them to governments and ordinary people, and refuse to materially alter them.

Do you think this is a systemic problem, or just the happenstance of today? Is there something about Bluesky’s architecture or governance that makes it more resilient against that (particularly in the long term)? Or will they have all the same problems as they gain more users and enable more federation with other servers?