Mourners can now speak to an #AI version of the dead. But will that help with grief? Selina Sykes reports. FRANCE24's Monte Francis speaks to Tomasz Hollanek, Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge about the benefits, risks and future developments of AI clones. #death#bereavement#mentalhealth#tech
A quick smartphone comparison! https://somegadgetguy.com/b/465
Pixel 8a vs OnePlus 12R! These might be the best two mid-ranger phones in the USA right now!
I've got an #iPad / #OSINT puzzle, and I could use any suggestions anybody has to throw out there.
Back in 2022 in the middle of the pandemic a medical provider in NYC sent my uncle an iPad to attend a virtual appointment on.
I'm trying to figure out how to return it to them, or barring that, to factory reset it so that it can be returned to service as a useful device rather than a nearly brand-new iPad needing to be recycled.
This has proven to be... difficult. #Apple#tech#hacking
1/3
Has Spotify’s loyal user base given it the confidence to raise its prices for the second time in a year?
According to research firm Antenna, Spotify’s listeners are the least likely to cancel among any of the major video or audio streaming services in the U.S., with its growth and cancellation rates “much, much better” than its peers, reports @bloomberg.
While overall subscriber growth is slowing across all streaming services, last year Spotify managed to produce its best year of user growth and second-best year of subscriber growth. Can it sustain that and keep its subscriber base engaged at its new prices?
Today, I revamped my blog theme ( https://it-notes.dragas.net ) and moved it to @OpenBSDAms VPS, powered by httpd.
BunnyNet stands as the CDN upfront, can we still consider it hosted on OpenBSD? 🤔
Samsung is facing a labor strike for the first time ever. Apple is union busting. The FCC cancelled its affordable internet program. AI is all the rage with investors, but no one is using it.
Android trackers are FINALLY here! And, we should chat announcements at Computex!
There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization — the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish — is the future. It’s a powerful concept that’s been kicking around for a long time, but now it feels closer to reality than ever before. You’ve heard us talk about it a lot on Decoder: the core idea is that no single company — or individual billionaire — can amass too much power and control over our social networks and the conversations that happen on them.
There are quite some reasons that leave me very cautious about Bluesky, one being for sure the fact there's one commercial entity currently backing this service / protocol, especially one that has risen from the same ecosystem that caused a lot of the trouble we do experience with current social media platforms. But, I've then and now been at odds with ActivityPub as a protocol, which gets worse the more I dig into it, and from that perspective, it seems the AT crowd gets a lot of things right, considered a lot of things that don't just seem obvious at least in the 2010s but actually surprising to see them missing from ActivityPub, a spec that has been established at roughly the same time: Full account portability (the idea of comparing personal data, conversations, comments, posts, ... to a github repository which "of course" you want to easily be able to take, backup, move around, ... seems both stunning and painfully trivial), support of custom domains for users (which Tumblr has already been supporting for years now), distributed curation and moderation (because most obviously community structures will be different to server or domain structures and not necessarily live on one instance exclusively) - in a way I really do hope they "show don't tell" by submitting that protocol to some standardization body anytime soon. Maybe this, too, could provide a good option for the "open" fediverse to counter the problems that might arise the very moment platforms like Meta / Threads fully embrace ActivityPub. (I also found it rather interesting to listen to what she had to say about why Meta might be more into ActivityPub than AT - being "server-centric" rather than "user-centric" - but that might just be a loose end of things.)
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I ask this relatively regularly because I want to keep an eye on the landscape.
I'm a software engineer with a PhD in international criminal law. I am on the lookout for (open source?) projects that are useful to human rights researchers/activists/defenders. I am hoping to contribute as a volunteer software engineer.
If you know of a project like this, please get in touch. If you don't, please boost if you'd like!
I ordered these LITERALLY a YEAR AGO to the day, and they JUST ARRIVED!
Apple stalled the Google location tracker network for as long as they could, but now we FINALLY have some competition for AirTags!