It’s useful because it’s ubiquitous. Everything that can take in music files supports it.

Is MP3-encoded audio of the best possible quality? No, of course not. But for most people it’s Good Enough, especially if you do most of your listening in a noisy environment. MP3s are to lossless formats what CD was to vinyl for so many years.

They might end up having to pay more money than exists on the planet at that rate.

Usually when a company says something like that (doesn’t matter what they’re trying to peddle or what the statement was about), what they actually mean is that they were on the wrong side of morality, common sense, and/or the law.

The thing is, would they make the connection? Some people aren’t very good at linking up cause and effect where the link isn’t practically screaming in their face.

As someone who finds that most “dark mode” offerings aren’t dark enough, I don’t understand how they can tolerate it either. I suspect it’s rather like spicy food: given enough exposure, you don’t notice it’s spicy (or bright) until reaching a level far above what people who aren’t exposed to it on a constant basis would think was acceptable.

They’re just not letting their eyes get dark-adapted in the first place. They can’t see anything but the phone screen, but they also don’t care.

My bet would be, convenient and intrusive. The two are not mutually exclusive—in fact, they very frequently go together.

Well, yeah, but obeying robots.txt is only a courtesy in the first place, so you can’t guarantee it’ll catch only LLM-related crawlers and no others, although it may lower the false positive rate.

And this specifically target AI training web crawlers.

There’s no way to distinguish between an AI training crawler and any other crawler. Per https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/ :

“This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it’s targetting crawlers that scrape data for LLM’s - but really, like the plants it is named after, it’ll eat just about anything that finds it’s way inside.”

Emphasis mine. Even the person who coded this thing knows that it can’t tell what a given crawler’s purpose is. They’re just willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater in this case, and mess with legitimate crawlers in order to bog down the ones gathering data for LLM training.

(In general, there is no way to tell for certain what is requesting a webpage. The User-Agent header that (usually) arrives with an HTTP(S) request isn’t regulated and can contain any arbitrary string. Crawlers habitually claim to be old versions of Firefox, and there isn’t much the server can do to identify what they actually are.)

Japan often continues to use tech beyond the point other developed countries consider it obsolete (their government only recently transitioned away from floppy discs). It wouldn’t surprise me if Sony was manufacturing the Mini- formats in small quantities for the Japanese market only.

There’s a subset of Americans who are rather like ostriches: heads so deeply buried in the sand that they forget anything exists outside their immediate surroundings. Reminding them that the rest of the world is out there rarely has any positive results, however.

One of two things is the case:

1. The numbers are in the paper, and the person who wrote the article could have transcribed them but is too lazy.

2. The numbers are not in the paper, in which case I would class the article as inflammatory and irresponsible.

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Do I trust the journalist? Not in the sense you mean, but I expect them to act responsibly and make a minimum effort.

Missing from the article: actual amounts of PFAS found in the bands, what percentage of it can be absorbed through skin contact, how that compares to other sources the average person might run into, and how much you have to absorb before biological damage emerges out of the statistical noise. The information may be in the original paper, but I’m disinclined to search for it there. Without those numbers, this is meaningless.

The purpose of a locked boot system is privacy.

No. Once you strip away all the rhetoric, the purpose of a locked boot system is control (over who or what can boot the system).

Current secure boot implementations are like a door lock installed by someone else, which you are not allowed to replace and that may or may not allow you to cut your own duplicate keys for it. You have no control whatsoever over who the people who installed the lock may have given keys to, and if it turns out that the lock has a fundamental design flaw that means it can’t do its job properly, well, sucks to be you. You can’t even guarantee that the lock won’t morph into a new shape randomly or under the control of the installer, invalidating your existing keys in the process.

Rooting a device is a tradeoff. An unreliable door lock that you don’t entirely control may be better than none, but if you know you’re leaving the door unlocked, you also know you need to take other precautions to safeguard what’s inside (or simply not leave anything of value there in the first place).

The ideal would be a locked boot system that is installed by the user and is fully under their control, but I have yet to encounter one.

It isn’t in their best interests to threaten the loony Christian sects that are one of the right wing’s favourite brainwashing tools. Members of those sects rely on authority figures to “interpret” the Bible for them instead of actually paying attention to its content, but if you try to take it away from them, they’ll throw a fit like a toddler does when you take away a toy they’ve been ignoring. Restricting access to the Bible in the present day would make religious brainwashing more difficult and create more people who actually think for themselves, which is anathema to bad governments like Texas’.

That can be weaponized, though. US government publications are public domain. So is the Bible. We’d at least get to watch members of the Texas government tie themselves into knots worthy of a game of Twister as they try to argue that those texts are harmful on a porn site but not anywhere else.

That only leaves “is a mess”, though. You need at least one more word, possibly “Google” or “everything” (depending on your level of cynicism).

I don’t get why people rush to the next replica platform that will go down the exact same path of overstimulating you / mentally harming you.

I think they get used to the level of stimulation and now feel “wrong” without it. It takes a certain self-awareness to realize that it would be healthier to recalibrate your expectations. (I don’t think Pixelfed is a comparatively harmful platform at the moment anyway, although I suppose it could someday become one.)

On a related note, what happens when the number of different CMS’s exceeds the number of devs?

You mean they haven’t already?

It’s disturbing that I kinda miss the pre-USB days when, if the cable matched the port physically, it also matched the port in terms of capabilities (unless someone was doing something deliberately stupid). At least that meant you knew right away whether you had the right cable or not.