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Made the switch to Aegis a little while back. I like it a lot.

I tried this exact scenario and didn’t see any difference in load times. I’m using an ad blocker and it’s definitely sluggish, but switching to a Chrome user agent made no difference.

“Meng did nothing wrong, let her go with a quiet whisper not to come back”

That was absolutely not my read on it here. It’s describing a realpolitik situation where Canada is on shaky legal grounds since they are not a signatory to a foreign embargo, and thus overreach their strict legal obligations to please an ally. The suggestion of letting Meng go isn’t about her being right or wrong; it’s about what’s the savviest move Canada could have made here that would have neither pissed off China nor the U.S.

Simply refusing to act on behest of the Trump Administration and giving plausible deniability why isn’t defying them. It’s a neutral political move. The consequence of not doing so is what we’ve since experienced: deteriorating relations with a major foreign power with no gains in return with the ally we tried to suck up to.

the rest was just tooting China’s horn

Is that what we’re calling reporting on facts that don’t completely feed the “China bad” narrative, now?

Linux users truly are the vegans of the tech world.

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That counterpart, according to Ortis, briefed him about a “storefront” that was being created to attract criminal targets to an online encryption service. A storefront, said Ortis, is a fake business or entity, either online or bricks-and-mortar, set up by police or intelligence agencies.

The plan was to have criminals use the storefront — an online end-to-end encryption service called Tutanota — to allow authorities to collect intelligence about them.

Wait, WHAT?

The state of public transport in Montreal makes me so angry. This city used to be an examplar of public transit.

The same happens to Chinese app stores on Android phones. Just companies trying to throw up obstacles for their competition.

Between this and antivirus software flagging cracked software, I wish security apps would focus on security instead of weaponizing consumer trust.

Better to brush after getting up to remove any bacteria and plaque buildup. And then right before bed, floss+brush.

I tried having a conversation with ChatGPT. It’s annoyingly predictable. Imagine the most boring, chronically helpful therapist who is always brimming with obvious advice, and that’s what you get.

I get that people are lonely, but we’re still much closer to ELIZA than Her.

Yes you can, with one caveat.

According to Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis, compelling, comprehensible input is sufficient to acquire a language. That means input that you find interesting and that keeps you engaged, and which you can understand at least in part. That evolving sweet spot can indeed take you from complete newbie to fluency without ever speaking.

In my experience, though, being able to speak with other native speakers is a huge source of motivation and creates its own compelling input. So I wouldn’t discount that.

I personally know someone who went from no English to being able to converse just by watching The Simpsons.

Yeah, it just sucks.

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I’ve seen people with diabetes unable to quit sugar even though it’s killing them, and THAT sounds like hard drugs to me.

There’s a form of recency bias at play. We tend to compare recent middling movies with the ones we remember from the past, which tend to be the exceptions. But trust me, there were some very shitty blockbusters in prior decades as well.

Give it a decade or two, and people will remember the '20s as a decade of amazing blockbusters. I mean, heck, we had Barbie and Oppenheimer in theaters at the same time just a few weeks ago. The fact these two movies were released the same weekend is gonna blow people’s minds in twenty years.

It also reminds me of crypto. Lots of people made money from it, but the reason why the technology persists has more to do with the perceived potential of it rather than its actual usefulness today.

There are a lot of challenges with AI (or, more accurately, LLMs) that may or may not be inherent to the technology. And if issues cannot be solved, we may end up with a flawed technology that, we are told, is just about to finally mature enough for mainstream use. Just like crypto.

To be fair, though, AI already has some very clear use cases, while crypto is still mostly looking for a problem to fix.

Just to add to this… When I first saw the trailer, I became completely obsessed with the film. I visited the website and read a bunch of short stories on there about the world of the Matrix.

And besides all that, when I finally sat down in theaters and watched Neo take the red pill, I had absolutely no clue what was happening. Their marketing material 100% avoided even spoiling the very premise of the film. All they did was build a mystery.

Johnny Depp was a toxic boyfriend and a chronic substance abuser. So was Heard, but the fact she’s a dumpster fire of a human being doesn’t make Depp a saint despite what the internet tried to tell you.

Just two shitty human beings who made each other miserable.