Orbit currently uses a version of Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) that is locally hosted on Mozilla’s Google Cloud Platform instance.

Hmm.

>locally hosted

>Google Cloud

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?

The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.

Same on macOS. Apple has “case-sensitive HFS+” as an option for UNIX compatibility (or at least they used to) but actually running a system on it is a bad idea in general.

What part of this is misinformation, exactly? Seems pretty well-supported.

Haven’t heard of Hiren’s BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it’s still around!

I don’t understand why they have a dozen other settings when of course I always want it to be outstanding.

Then again, that dress does sound tempting…

I keep seeing this claim, but never with any independent verification or technical explanation.

What exactly is listening to you? How? When?

Android and iOS both make it visible to the user when an app accesses the microphone, and they require that the user grant microphone permission to the app. It’s not supposed to be possible for apps to surreptitiously record you. This would require exploiting an unpatched security vulnerability and would surely violate the App Store and Play Store policies.

If you can prove this is happening, then please do so. Both Apple and Google have a vested interest in stopping this; they do not want their competitors to have this data, and they would be happy to smack down a clear violation of policy.

I agree completely.

I understand the motivation here — apps that lack location permission shouldn’t be able to get backdoor access to your location via your camera roll. That makes sense, because you know damn well every spyware social media company would be doing that if they could.

But the reverse is also true: apps that legitimately need to read photos and access all their metadata shouldn’t need to be granted full location access.

For sure. It’ll never be enforced completely, but it gives teeth to go after some big offenders.

When you claim a game from Amazon, is tied to an active subscription, or can you download it and install it later regardless of subscription status?

It’s worth mentioning that with a large generational gap, the newer low-end CPU will often outperform the older high-end. An i3-1115G4 (11th gen) should outperform an i7-4790 (4th gen), at least in single-core performance. And it’ll do it while using a lot less power.

The linked article focuses on Mastodon. I’d be interested to hear more about how this relates to Lemmy in your experience.

Yep, totally agree. Borg supports encryption, so I have the backup encrypted locally, independently of my end-to-end encrypted cloud service. I guess I could store it on a non-e2ee cloud drive and save a little money, but I prefer to keep it simple with an “E2EE or bust” mentality, even for data that’s already encrypted.

For anyone who finds Borg intimidating, take a look at Vorta, an easy-to-use GUI frontend: https://github.com/borgbase/vorta

Ah, that makes sense! I probably should have split my /home off to its own subvolume. I’ll add that my list of things to think about next time I hop distros or rebuild (which I’m considering once again, because I have Plasma envy).

And yes, snapshots should NOT be treated as backups. A real backup saves your butt if your drive dies, while a snapshot goes down with that ship. I should really set up a better backup system, but for now I just periodically use Borg to back up to an external HD, and then copy that into an encrypted cloud drive.

I love btrfs+snapper. I have automatic snapshots taken before and after every apt install, so if anything ever goes belly-up, no problem, I just roll back.

It’s a little weird sometimes when I’m running out of disk space, so I delete some big downloads and…I get no disk space back, because those files still exist in old snapshots! I suspect there’s some way to finetune it to ignore certain directories (like ~/Downloads) in snapshots but I haven’t taken the time to dig into it. Anyway, it’s not a huge problem because the automatic snapshots are limited to a certain number, so they eventually get bumped out (or I can delete them manually if needed).

I haven’t tried bcachefs yet. Perhaps on my next build.

Or S08E11 if you’re going by Wikipedia’s numbering scheme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_season_8

I had a moment at the start of the episode where I thought I had pulled up the wrong season. It felt like I’d seen it before, especially with the outdated subject matter. Not many people care about NFTs anymore. Not many people ever really did. And they didn’t even bother to create any context for why this was happening 1000 years in the future (unlike in, say, the global warming episode).

I didn’t hate it, but it seemed odd. Perhaps this was originally intended for a much earlier release? Wasn’t this originally presented as a single season split into two releases? Now they’re officially called season 11 and season 12 on Hulu.

Mozilla says they use a third-party OHTTP intermediary. In the blog post linked above, they name Fastly as their partner. So it’s not as bad as Mozilla + Mozilla-wearing-funny-glasses.

Personally, I still think this is the wrong approach to privacy, even though I’ve used Fakespot on my own many times over the years. Largely because I don’t think any of this needs to be built into a web browser.

I would prefer my web browser to minimize information leakage by default, to the greatest degree that it can while still remaining useful as a web browser. Mozilla keeps adding bloat to Firefox, and bloat always comes at a cost. I’d much prefer these to be browser extensions that people can download if they want them, rather than built in by default. The baseline Firefox should be lean. Less “stuff” = smaller attack surface. Simplicity is best.

I mean, the Fakespot browser extension has existed for a long time, and I’ve never seriously considered installing it. I’d much rather just take an extra three seconds to load their web site and paste in a URL than have it constantly monitoring my activity and doing god-knows-what with it. That way I have better knowledge and control of what is happening with my data. Even if I trust their intentions, I don’t implicitly trust their competence (all software has bugs) and I don’t trust that they will never go rogue in the future.

And also, I just don’t find this claim all that compelling in principle:

By processing the data jointly across two independent parties, they ensure neither party holds the information required to reveal sensitive information about someone.

I mean…sure. That’s fair. Buuuuuut handing half the data to your “partner” doesn’t give me a whole lot of confidence. Especially since literally nobody reads all of the privacy policies they are subject to. See:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/reading-the-privacy-policies-you-encounter-in-a-year-would-take-76-work-days/253851/

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2012/04/19/150905465/to-read-all-those-web-privacy-policies-just-take-a-month-off-work

https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/you-need-a-whole-workweek-every-month-to-read-privacy-policiesand-thats-bad-news

Minimizing privacy policies should be a high-priority goal for any organization that claims to value privacy.

Furthermore, how many additional parties have access (legally or otherwise) to both Mozilla and Fastly? 🤷

Looking over the Fastfox.js config, it looks like most settings fall into one of three categories:

1. Subjective appearance of speed or responsiveness (perhaps at the expense of objectively-measurable load times)
2. Experimental options that don’t apply to all hardware or OSes (e.g. GPU acceleration)
3. Settings that optimize performance at the expense of memory, CPU, or network usage (e.g. cache sizes and connection limits)

I don’t see anything that makes me think Mozilla’s defaults are unreasonable. It’s not like Mozilla is leaving performance on the table, but rather that they chose a different compromise here and there, and use highly-compatible defaults. That said, it does seem like there is room for individual users to improve on the defaults — particularly if they have fast internet connections and lots of RAM.

For example:

// [NOTE] Lowering the interval will increase responsiveness
// but also increase the total load time.
user_pref(“content.notify.interval”, 100000); // (.10s); default=120000 (.12s)

This seems very much like a judgment call and I guess Firefox’s defaults would actually have better objective load times and better benchmark scores. That doesn’t mean it’s objectively better, but it seems reasonable, at least.

// PREF: GPU-accelerated Canvas2D
// Use gpu-canvas instead of to skia-canvas.
// [WARNING] May cause issues on some Windows machines using integrated GPUs [2] [3]

// [NOTE] Higher values will use more memory.

Again, the defaults seem to make sense. Perhaps Mozilla could add an optimization wizard to detect appropriate settings for your hardware, and let the user select options like “maximize speed” vs “maximize memory efficiency”. These are not one-size-fits-all settings.

Fastfox also disables a lot of prefetching options, which…seems counter to the goal of improving speed. Not really sure what to make of that.

Yes. Homomorphic encryption is for data processing, not data storage.