What on earth is this abomination of a website? My locale is Greek and I'm presented with an auto-translated page in which most sentences don't make any sense. And I don't think it's AI slop, it's too bad to be even that. It feels more like google translate from a decade ago, translating everything word by word. FFS, go to fiverr and hire an actual human that knows how to translate stuff.
Oh, and of course you're presenting greek text, as awful as it is, but didn't think to check if the font you're using supports greek at all.
I'm sure it's the same for lots of other languages. sigh
1. there is no longer a market for certain sorts of software, whether due to market dominance (Word), or the likely market size being too small to bother with.
2. FOSS has dropped into Code Reuse Mode*, & getting out of that is going to require motivated individuals to build their own, entirely new versions. LibreOffice is Good Enough for most users, so why go to all the effort of starting from ground level when a fork & reskin will do?
one would hope that FOSS would lead to having cool, alternate approaches to particular use problems (as in the old days, when there were myriad word processors on the market — XyWrite, WordPerfect, WriteNow, Word, etc., etc.), but Good Enough means that attention can be put on more interesting problems. what we're left with is a mediocre mass of applications.
*which is why nearly every alternate OS ends up feeling like Linux with missing programs & weird commands, so why not just use Linux? we're going to be stuck in a rut for a long time to come.
> FOSS has dropped into Code Reuse Mode, & getting out of that is going to require motivated individuals to build their own, entirely new versions
I don't necessarily disagree that there are some issues in the ecosystem, but I don't think that's the problem. For starters, I don't think anyone is* forking LibreOffice and throwing on a layer of paint? And when I need a word processor, I personally prefer AbiWord, which is its own thing.
In particular,
> which is why nearly every alternate OS ends up feeling like Linux with missing programs & weird commands, so why not just use Linux? we're going to be stuck in a rut for a long time to come.
This feels backwards. Alternatives tend to present a similar interface without* sharing code. In fact, even just on Linux I'd argue we have a rather lot of (re)implementations of the same things: Consider that we are in a position where Debian is shipping GNU coreutils, Ubuntu replaced them with a rust version (uutils), and Alpine has been happily shipping busybox for years (AFAIK, as long as it's existed).
Wordperfect still exists and can be purchased. It's part of a suite that includes Quattro Pro, the spreadsheet program that fought Lotus 1-2-3. WordPerfect has special features for law firms.
WriteNow is gone, but Nisus Writer is still around, too.
Can you point me to the directive/regulation that states that? I am in the EU and I'm not aware of any such thing. I have two cars that are 2006-2008 models and I am not planning on replacing them.
There are EU-wide mandatory air quality standards that get stricter as time passes and that are being enforced through low emissions zones which practically make diesel cars illegal. This may not be the case in your country yet but it will arrive with time.
Regarding driving aids, some cities in my European country are looking to make them mandatory in the city centre.
Overall this is being done to keep poor people from driving.
My nearly 30-year-old Range Rover is fully ULEZ compliant nearly everywhere in Europe except Paris, because it can run on propane which only really emits water and warm carbon dioxide when it burns - no "smog", no NOx, no HC, no CO, none of that.
Annoyingly in post-Brexit Britain I need to wait two years until is *is* 30 years old to drive in ULEZ zones. It was fine until Brexit kicked in - yet another Conservative disasterpiece.
You're right, but mp3 is still even more widely supported. It is also good enough, most people can't tell the difference between original files and around 128kbps ABR mp3 files, let alone higher bitrates. And there are huge personal libraries of mp3 files out there that are not going away.
That said, I don't see the use of this tool. It's a proprietary tool that does basic things for which free tools (in every sense of the word) have existed for a long time now.
Some of us never did. Well, it's XMMs in my case, but that's besides the point. A complete music library with stuff that I actually like only takes a very part of my storage. It's even possible to carry everything on my phone these days.
I keep hearing horror stories about online music platforms, from disappearing content, to AI slop and I'm so glad I never jumped on that.
If I am looking at a web page that shows me my own API keys for a service in plain text, and I accidentally click the Gemini button while viewing that page, is there a chance that someone in six months time might ask Gemini for an API key for that service and have mine returned to them?
I'd love to get a confident answer to that question.
The parent comment has a point. A layperson (or at least many people not read into this topic) isn't going to read the language in that privacy policy and come to the conclusion that "any private web page you ask Gemini about will be dumped into our training data". The text on Google's privacy page could absolutely be made more explicit.
I'm sceptical a layperson will understand or care what it means that their data will be used in training. If you are concerned about such things this heavily implies you don't want to share your data. Just don't agree to the terms and move on.
Plenty of people put their content behind paywalls, but apparently, someone who puts theirs behind a free loginwall is a bridge too far? I'm not sure I understand the outrage.
I can't stand Bluesky, but I have an account on it. What the fuck is the big deal?
Getting ~340M people to agree on anything is too hard, and now a good chunk of us seem to think the government can’t do anything productive at all. IMO, it would be nice to have an in between layer to do bigger things.
Ok, sorry for the poor writing. I mean states could form informal groups with likeminded states. So, the northeast could all pass the same law, the pacific coast, Texas and friends, wherever else.
Expecting laws to instead propagate from neighbor to neighbor as I accidentally suggested—this wasn’t what I meant to suggest, but in defense of the idea:
> At some point it makes more sense to pass such a law at the federal level since we end up there eventually either way.
I do think there still could be some value. Laws could propagate across states that are more receptive to them, and then people can see if they work or not. Porting Masshealth to the whole country at once seems to have been a little bumpy. If it has instead been rolled out to the rest of New England, NY, then down to Pennsylvania… might have gone a little smoother.
Probably not? I didn’t play it but I don’t think anybody would target a postapocalyptic fiction setting as a goal.
More like: look at the EU, extrapolate how it would look after a little more unification, and then take advantage of the fact that we’re made up of small states already that can group ourselves up as fits. Germany and France seem all-right, so we should organize ourselves into Germany and France size units.
Who says you have to have 340 million people agree? Congress's approval rating hovers around 20% for years and years— they haven't been interested in the will of the people for a long time.
The US would make a lot more sense if it split up between two or three different countries. There's a lot of stuff in US politics which people feel strongest about but are absolutely mutually exclusive.
I think it's going to happen one way or another and the most peaceful way to do it would be sooner rather than later.
We’re better as one country, we just need a France or Germany sized organizational unit that can do interesting projects but is still small enough to be agile.
Not a great line of argument. Vast parts of the US are not food secure and are "basically propped up by" a conservative bread basket. Large portions of the agricultural industry are not economically viable without illegal immigrants. Much of the defense industry and military is populated by conservatives. Such examples are as numerous as they are irrelevant to sensible discussions of policy.
It seems relevant to the chain of comments they were responding to. They are disagreeing with the comment that says multiple states might want to split up the country now, by pointing out that some of them might not be economically viable if they did.
You’ve come up with more reasons not to split up the country, by pointing out some ways the other parts of the country might have trouble.
I think (correct me if I’m wrong) you disagree with the partisan jab at the end, not the actual line of argument.
You can take it as another data point. Here's another one: it works for me on Firefox/Android too. It might imply that the issue is probably not with that specific combination but something else. Maybe disabled cookies? Just an idea.
Oh, and of course you're presenting greek text, as awful as it is, but didn't think to check if the font you're using supports greek at all.
I'm sure it's the same for lots of other languages. sigh
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