I guess this device needed to connect to some remotely hosted server that enabled its functionality. And the company was losing money and hoping that sales would eventually pick up enough to make them profitable. But their latest investor decided not to put any more money in, and the company ran out of cash and can’t pay its bills anymore.

The entrepreneur thought he could get more investor cash and ran the business in such a way that it would fall off a cliff if he didn’t. And… He failed to secure more financing.

I have mixed feelings about products like this… If the device somehow needed to host an entire internet’s worth of data to function, it certainly wouldn’t have cost only $800. But when you buy a product that depends on the ongoing viability of the seller, you’re in a position of caveat emptor - You better vet them out yourself, especially if they’re new.

Hopefully the founders feel some emotional attachment to their product and the trust bestowed upon them by their unknowing customers, and release whatever on the back end makes the thing work so that motivated customers could reactivate their devices somehow.

Hah, I installed Postiz just yesterday, interesting to see this thread. It’s like buffer or one of the other paid tools to schedule your social media posts and track engagement. Of course, of particular interest to our community, Postiz is self hosted.

It doesn’t have as many features yet as the major SaaS businesses, but the software is looking good and quite usable right now. I’m sure the more people who use it and support the developer, the more this tool can grow.

For example you can plug in your OpenAI API key and get an LLM chat interface inside the software while writing social posts. But I don’t think it learns your style or creates posts using any kind of system prompt yet unless you type it in each time.

Another thing I couldn’t figure out so far is how to limit which social media channels individual users can see. For example my business has several different units and there’s a different marketing team on each unit, so they shouldn’t be able to post into other channels.

If you’re in the business of needing to post regularly on a lot of channels I think postiz is worth checking out.

The buyer of chrome could make bing the default search engine and re-enable whatever broke Ublock origin (the ad blocker)

They could also cripple gapps and gmail a bit. It would also be harder for google to unilaterally develop new web standards.

That would no doubt consternate a few at Google and knee cap them forcing web shit down our throats that only improves their ad business.

Me too but here’s one useful function:

Perhaps you are aware there is an ongoing event, say for example a football game, or an election, or an outage of your email service provider. You go to one of these “scream into the void” social sites, search on the topic, and learn what people are saying about it. Maybe someone knows what’s really going on, maybe some of those people have some interesting insights and you engage with them, not unlike you and I are engaging right now. Others can observe, perhaps contribute, and after the event has concluded, everyone goes their own way. Hopefully in the end the interactions are beneficial for all.

There was only one, we’re all still copying from him or her.

Where’s this yhwh library, can I install it with pip? Seems like it could have potential for some of my projects.

I’ve never really spent much time with uv, I’ll give it a try. It seems like it takes a few steps out of the process and some guesswork too.

Python developer here. Venv is good, venv is life. Every single project I create starts with

python3 -m venv venv

source venv/bin/activate

pip3 install {everything I need}

pip3 freeze > requirements.txt

Now write code!

Don’t forget to update your requirements.txt using pip3 freeze again anytime you add a new library with pip.

If you installed a lot of packages before starting to develop with virtual environments, some libraries will be in your OS python install and won’t be reflected in pip freeze and won’t get into your venv. This is the root of all evil. First of all, don’t do that. Second, you can force libraries to install into your venv despite them also being in your system by installing like so:

pip3 install --ignore-installed mypackage

If you don’t change between Linux and windows most libraries will just work between systems, but if you have problems on another system, just recreate the whole venv structure

rm -rf venv (…make a new venv, activate it) pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Once you get the hang of this you can make Python behave without a lot of hassle.

This is a case where a strength can also be a weakness.

And if you work for a company that supports causes you don’t agree with… Move on.

I could lend out my old computer with old games installed to somebody else to use, right?

What if instead i lend my hard drive, is it still the same thing? Or what if I lend out my remote access screen sharing password to my old PC. Still the same?

Maybe the legal workaround is to game the system here a bit - forget downloading executables which feels a lot like pirating and just lend access to a system that is legally running the original license.

You are correct. Later drives sometimes had a cable select dip switch/pin or different ports on the motherboard.

Naturally

I sure hope there is some mechanism to compensate content creators because without traffic, there will be no new articles.

Meh, your phone probably is. Also likely whatever else you use for connecting to the internet in the west too.a that irony isn’t lost on the local but we’ll educated in china, they just use a VPN. Those who aren’t educated, well, they just don’t know what’s out there.

There is a Russian captcha solver bot called xevil that costs under $100 (I think, last time I looked) that has been able to solve nearly all captchas for years. You just have to supply it with relatively expensive proxy IP addresses because Google rate limits solve attempts.

So the title of this article has been true for a long long time. Capatchas are absolutely useless except against poor or uninformed script kiddies.

Huh, you’re right. I didn’t know about that. From Wikipedia:

The Chinese startup claims to have the miniature device in the pilot testing stage. Unveiled in January 2024, it is allegedly generating 100 microwatts of power and a voltage of 3V and has a lifetime of 50 years without any need for charging or maintenance.

Wonder if it microwaves your balls when it’s in your pocket too.

Either way we can dream of a future where we never have to plug in to charge again.

Soon as we can figure out micro nuclear reactors it may actually work that way!

I for one would be fine going back to the ini files of win 3.1

Yeah, if they are healthy companies they could snag some market share from one of Google’s products.

Easier to kill them early.

Whack-a-mole. Once banned, a scammer will just sign up with someone else’s ID.

I mean, that’s kinda what they are pros at already, right?