I still use DDG as my “daily driver” (I know there are better options for privacy and avoiding big tech, but I haven’t yet found anything independent that is good enough for me to switch to full time yet). I bookmarked Stract a while back, and it proved useful a few months back when Microsoft had an outage that took down Bing and by extension, Duck Duck Go. I do like Stract, their index seems to be enough larger than MoJeek (another independent search with their own index) that it gives me better results.

Stract might not be as open as I’d like, but it’s nice to have as an option, and I’m never going to complain about having more search providers with independent indexes.

As long as they don’t remove my ability to still have a separate search field beside the address bar, I’ll still be happy. I know it has probably been a decade since Chrome merged the search and address bars (and Firefox followed), but IMO it makes the experience of both searching and typing addresses worse, in exchange for a at best mildly cleaner UI.

I’ve been using Syncthing-Fork (on F-Droid) for the extra features it has. I wonder if that developer will be able to continue.

While I’m not the person you replied to and don’t know what their argument would be, I’ll take a shot at giving my own answer. In many cases when people post examples of AI giving unhelpful or bad information, there’s often someone who runs off to their favorite LLM to see if it gives a better result, and it usually does, so it gets treated like user error for using the wrong LLM or not wording the prompt properly. When in other examples that person’s favorite LLM which gave the correct answer this time, is the bad example hallucinating or mixing unrelated concepts, and other people are in the comments promoting other LLMs that gave them a good reply this time. None of the LLMs are actually trustworthy consistently enough to be trusted alone, and you won’t really know what answer is trustworthy unless you ask several LLMs and then go research the topic on your own anyway to figure out which answer is the most correct. It’s a valid point that ChatGPT got the answer more right than Gemini this time, but it’s somewhat useless to know that because other times ChatGPT is the one hallucinating wildly, and Gemini has the right answer, but since they’ve all been wrong before who do you trust.

LLMs are like asking an arrogant person who thinks they know everything, who rather than admitting what they don’t know, will pull an answer out of their butt, and while it might be a logical answer, it isn’t based in reality, and may still be wildly wrong. If you already mostly know the answer, maybe asking the arrogant person works, because you already know enough to know if they are speaking from their actual knowledge or making up an answer, but if you don’t already have knowledge on a topic, you won’t know whether the arrogant person is giving useful information or not.

I have had someone tell me that they’d rather live in an economic system “like we have in America” where people have a chance at rags to riches, than a system “like Germany, where the social safety net means the average person doesn’t have a chance at making it big.”

If anyone ever tells you wealthy people are intelligent, don’t believe them.

This is correct, and along side the Rust development, they also started work on a web renderer, in Rust, called Servo that at one point was considered as a possible future replacement for the Gecko engine. Around the time Rust transitioned to the Rust foundation, Servo was also pretty much abandoned by Mozilla, moved to the Linux Foundation in 2020 and then Linux Foundation Europe in 2023 where it is finally getting some steady development again. There is also some recent progress on building a browser based on Servo, although it will probably be some time before it’s ready for daily use.

Yeah, 2019 had a reboot with David Harbor as Hellboy.

So more like Judas and Goliath then?

I’ll be impressed when you that down to a subatomic size so you can fuck a solid block of steel because your penis fits in the space between the atoms.

I want to like this, but some of that mocap animation looks really off. Especially in those scenes with the idol and where indie is slamming down that stone. Looks like the mocap actor was holding back and that the idol weighs less than it should. It’s probably going to be okay, but after the excellent mocap work in games like God of War, where the animation really conveys a sense of weight, and in comparison to the Indiana Jones films this looks a bit floaty and like Indie is pulling his punches.

Chromium is to the modern internet what Internet Explorer was in the mid 2000s. It’s not as stagnant (thankfully), but as far as market share and giving one oversized tech giant arguably too much power over the internet, we’ve basically come full circle.

I felt like Nova’s not being special was what made it special. It was the closest to stock android while having a bunch of little tweaks here and there that allowed for more custom setups.

I didn’t say it was the exact same, but to the victims the difference isn’t very meaningful, much like victims of murder and manslaughter are still dead whether we make a distinction or not. It’s meaningful for prosecution purposes - at least in the case if manslaughter and murder because it’s taking intent into account. It’s also a bit easier to accidentally kill someone than it is to accidentally have sex with a minor.

Probably one of those weirdos who knows the specific term for paedophiles who are into teens rather than younger children and tries to use it as if it’s a meaningful distinction.

I had a nicer Acer monitor that I replaced with a similar Samsung model about a year ago. I still kinda miss the Acer. Both were 32" curved LCD and 1440p. The Acer had a much more uniform curve to it, and the Samsung has a bunch of firmware issues that sometimes can only be worked around by unplugging it and power cycling it that way. The only reason I “upgraded” was the Samsung had better support for PS5 and scaling 4K inputs down to the native 1440p without artifacts.

Why would you want another year of their software for free? This is their second screw up (apparently they sent out a bad update that affected some Debian and RHEL machines a couple years ago). I’d be transitioning to a competitor at the first opportunity. It seems they aren’t testing releases before pushing them out to customers, which is about as crazy to me as running alpha software on a production system.

I’m sure you have reasons, and this isn’t really meant to be directed at you personally, it’s just boggling to me that the IT sector as a whole hasn’t looked at this situation and collectively said “fuck that.”

Yeah, but can we get Sony to re-release Morbius in theaters one more time?

No way that’s the real reason, the real reason is taxes. So many California millionaires move to Texas for the low tax, only to realize once they’re there that it’s a shitty state with a barely-functioning power grid. Unfortunately it never seems to click for most of them that the low taxes is a big part of why they don’t have a competent state government.

Turns out Gandalf’s iconic line is just his strategy when playing Smash or Pass.

I feel like a lot of what made the Bioshock games good was Ken Levine’s social commentary. And while we’ve had Bioshock games that he didn’t write or direct, and it would be silly to argue that he is the only one capable of writing a good Bioshock story, I do think he understands that it’s more important to say something with a game, than just churn out another title within the same world.

Rapture wasn’t just a dark underwater city, it was a Libertarian utopia, with all the exploitation and unchecked capitalism that would come from that. Columbia was a Christian Nationalist utopia, with the cultish brainwashing, revisionist history, and racism that is common in that worldview. I hope the team in charge of the new games understands that the series is more than the locations, and the “Big Daddies” and “Little Sisters.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’d love more Bioshock (if it’s good), but I’m glad we’re also getting Judas from Levine’s new studio, because I have a feeling it’s going to feel more like Bioshock than whatever the next official Bioshock game ends up being.