Hopefully it will remain the “Trump era” and not the “first Trump era”. This is my main worry right now.

This is why sideloading addons is so important. They’ve recently removed the bypass-paywalls-clean addon too.

On the desktop version you can easily sideload addons but on the mobile version they forbid this :(

The question is always: What do you want to use it for?

When raspberry started the landscape was very difficult. Small computer boards were expensive, now there’s the N100 if you need a tiny cheap computer. Microcontrollers were really dumb and unconnected, now there’s the ESP32 which has WiFi and Bluetooth and decent performance. Right in the middle of this wide spectrum is the raspberry pi and its clones.

This is a very different situation than in the introduction era where PCs were heavy and expensive and microcontrollers were dumb. There was a much wider niche for the raspberry then. For a small server I would now get a $100 N100 from aliexpress. For embedded electronics I would grab a $10 ESP32. Only in the middle is the raspberry pi, but the problem is, it’s only in the middle in terms of performance, not price. A raspberry pi with case, PSU, storage etc costs more than a decked out N100, while actually being slower.

The only remaining usecase I see for a pi 5 would be an electronics project where you need some more compute than a microcontroller can provide, like some machine vision project. Otherwise:

• Do you want to make some electronics IoT thingy: Get an ESP32
• Do you want a small light computer or server: Get an N100

They do refurbish stuff that’s dunking in the ocean though, like the fairings (which do also contain active parts).

Also the dragon spacecraft. It lands in the sea and gets reused.

Charles Bolden once remarked that the congress would have shut down the Apollo program if they lost vehicles at the rate spacex does now.

Well, yes. But it was really a show of force towards the soviets and anything that could be construed as ‘failure’ would be sensitive. And it was all public money so things were very political and optics mattered. Society was also hugely different in the 60s.

Also in the years before mercury a lot of stuff went boom, of course. Apollo was built upon those failures.

I have a feeling that for SpaceX the opposite is true. Every time they shoot something up it’s press coverage, even if it blows up. As long as they’re not blowing up people they don’t get the boeing effect.

Consider the first flight. They decided to launch it without a flame deflector or a deluge system. They thought that it would be OK based on a hot test of the superheavy at half thrust. I don’t think any other rocket company would have made the same decision. Even if the concrete slabs didn’t shatter into a thousand pieces, the reflected shock wave would have been damaging enough to the engine compartment. They predictably lifted off with several failed and failing engines.

Yeah that was indeed very stupid. Agreed. Especially for the environment. They were right to get flak for that.

If this afterthought feels like a conspiracy theory, remember the time when Musk made a change to starship after Tim Dodd (earlyastronaut) asked him a question on the same? Or the time when someone on Twitter asked Musk why they didn’t start two raptor engines and then shutoff the underperforming one during Starship’s flip maneuver at landing? They do this now. Afterthoughts are evidently not a rare thing at SpaceX.

Could be yes… But don’t forget, it is their money. They’re clearly rushing to market and cutting corners, but as long as they don’t blow up people or property, it’s kinda their problem. And it has worked for them with Falcon 9.

I do agree they are kinda cowboys but they do also have a point in some ways: Field testing is better than theory. I’d rather step into a rocket that has flown 30 times than one that has never flown before but a whole team of scientists think things will be fine.

But yeah you still need theory and they could do a better job at that, I do agree there.

Yes I was just writing that, I would love to see more integrations that can talk against ollama.

One thing I’d love to see in Firefox is a way to offload the translation engine to my local ollama server. This way I can get much better translations but still have everything private.

If you had a visual disability you would certainly think otherwise.

It’s not really ‘reusable’ like this though :) But this is how SpaceX iterate of course. I’m sure they’ll learn from this and fix it for next time.

Or maybe Affinity Designer? I bought that a few years ago for Mac and it was really good.

I don’t think it will.

Microsoft’s endgame is being the lord and master of AI. AI thrives on knowing more data about the user. What good is an assistant if it doesn’t know your habits, your wishes and desires, your schedule and your attitude towards each person in your life?

This is not really a feature primarily aimed at helping the user directly (even though it’s currently marketed as such), but to have the AI build up a repository of knowledge about you. Which is hopefully used locally only. For now this seems to be the case, but knowing Microsoft, once they have established themselves as the leading product they will start monetising it in every way possible.

Of course I’m very unhappy with this too. I’d like to have an AI assistant. But it has to be FOSS, and owned and operated by me. I don’t trust microsoft in any way. I’m already playing around with ollama, RAG scripting etc. It won’t be as good as simply signing up to OpenAI, Google or Microsoft but at least it will be mine.

Yeah that pattern is called “Pentile” or RGBG. Very annoying indeed on screens where you look right up to the pixels. And it reduces the number of subpixels by 1/3 so the resolution really suffers.

The PSVR1 had a real RGB panel but sadly the PSVR2 moved to pentile.

• Inside-out tracking so you don’t need expensive lighthouses
• Wireless connection

Yep this is one of the reasons I kept deleting my account even before the whole spez drama.

Too bad they don’t do OpenPGP like Yubikeys do. I still need that even more (much more!) than Fido2. Sites are so slow adopting Fido2.

I don’t use it for email but I use it for SSH and my password manager (“pass”). And yes I know SSH can use Fido2 natively as well but there’s many embedded SSH daemons that don’t support that yet.

Luckily Yubico is still around but I’m betting on them going down the drain (subscription models etc) soon because they were taken over by a venture capital firm :(

Even all the telemetry?

I really hate dealing with group policies (and I work in enterprise endpoint management, I prefer more modern management). AD/Group policies can only be updated on site or VPN, and they’re only really instructions for registry settings anyway.

But I’ll try that out. I don’t have a windows server though, nor do I want one. But I guess I could use gpedit.

I have LTSC 2021 officially (MSDN) and I have to say I’m not very impressed. You still can’t turn off the telemetry crap. There is still a windows store. There’s a bit less bundled scamware but beside that it’s a bit overrated IMO.

Yeah that slogan really captured very well the intentions at the world economic forum.

I know it’s not what they officially stated but it really captured (they since walked it back and said it only was meant to “describe emerging trends”) the intentions of what happens when they all come to Davos and divide the world between them.

But I don’t believe “as a service” models are more sustainable. They will just enable more rent-seeking behaviour meaning we will get even less for our money. The incentive to deliver will be even lower as they will get paid anyhow.

I didn’t think it was super creepy but I thought the voice was so overly enthusiastic and overacted and soooo sugary. bleh.

This won’t work for me unless that can be customised and toned down a lot.

The audio from the AI also seemed to cut out a lot during the demo. So it does appear like no shenanigans to me.