kbal

Paid and freeware but either way non-free, unfortunately.

I wouldn’t be willing to disable my vpn for the nyt so thanks for confirming that it wouldn’t have made a difference. It appears that they now block everyone who doesn’t let javascript freely do whatever it wants to fingerprint you or whatever. I’ll not miss them too much.

I’m shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren’t superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they’re not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they’ll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they’ll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn’t phrased exactly the right way they’ll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They’ll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it’s quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don’t really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren’t funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they’re almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you’ve got writer’s block or something.

Makes sense to me. AI bullshit generators may be worse than useless for most of the things people try to do with them, but they might just be the perfect tool for rationalizing the systematic looting of formerly productive companies by private equity.

It looks about as cursed as the average Disney remake

The trick is to use a text editor with a fixed-width font.

This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs

T  o  I
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F  h  r
u  e  n
t     e
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Sucks if you’re in France. For the rest of us it should be interesting to see which of these VPN providers choose to comply by geo-blocking France, which choose to cut any ties they have with France and otherwise ignore the order, and which to abandon their mission and become agents of censorship on behalf of France.

People still care about Starfield in 2025? I thought everyone went back to Skyrim a year ago.

I like my women the way I like my passwords: Long, cryptic, and full of entropy.

It might. If some day they don’t control the browser, whoever does control it might be hesitant to build in features that are only there to spy on users for Google. Cookies do at least have some other uses.

ACE sure did go downhill since they released Ace Stream.

That’s technically within your legal rights I guess, just like (depending what the fine print says) it’s within their rights to throttle all your traffic one way or another to a low speed including the stuff you actually need to go faster. The places that always have low speeds for everyone are like that because they’re designed to cater to people who don’t give a shit about what their fair share might be and just want to max out their connection. Those services are fine for torrenting, useless for everything else. Windscribe isn’t one of those but it could become one if enough of its users think like you and insist on it.

Hopefully they’ll set a soft 2TB limit or something before they do that, though.

Them calling it “unlimited” when there’s a limit is wrong, but so is using all of the available upload bandwidth 100% of the time on a cheap home VPN service when you consider the current market prices for data transfer. Mine’s limited to 2Mbps. Seems fair for $7/month or whatever it is.

Edit: Oh right it was 2Mbps. I spent 20 minutes surveying datacentre prices around the world to come up with that number, but bandwidth prices vary widely and might’ve changed by now.

Just needs a slight tweak to be a little less historically inaccurate: Nobody has ever been “hunted for sport” by a Zoroastrian.

Those things were great. You could make a phone call from almost anywhere without having to carry around a radio tracking device all the time.

Port forwarding lets you connect with other hosts peer-to-peer which a VPN would otherwise block if both sides are behind one. For torrents you’d get more peers (which doesn’t matter if you’re just downloading the latest and most popular stuff) and be able to seed more effectively.

The requirement for port forwarding narrows that down to AirVPN and Windscribe, which is an unfortunately small set of choices.

The Pirate Bay is perfectly fine for that sort of thing.

Welcome to 2014