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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Kethal@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldBe careful.
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    2 days ago

    It seemed odd to me that a Web site could write to or read from the clipboard without the user approving it. That would be a pretty obvious security and privacy issue. From what I gather, on Chrome sites can write to the clipboard without approval, but they need approval to read. On Firefox and others any access requires permission. Thus this exploit seems limited to Chrome users.

    @SkaveRat pointed out that it doesn’t require permission, only interaction. So likely there’s a button that’s clicked that writes to the clipboard, and most browsers are susceptible to this.


  • I had an old computer and Linux is all that I installed. Not everyone is going to have an extra computer to do that with. However, this computer is more than 10 years old. It was quite good at the time, but it’s junk compared to modern ones. Yet, it is more responsive than my very nice modern laptop that’s running Windows 10. It’s not going to beat a new computer in a race to solve a computational model, but for streaming, browsing, and day-to-day stuff, the lack of bloat means things open quickly and UI elements respond immediately. There is probably a fair number of people with computers they think are useless that would actually work very well with Linux.



  • There’s always some post in here saying for people to use Linux. I find an admonishment to be pretty hollow, so I’ll share my recent experience installing a Linux distribution rather than simply saying it’s something people should do.

    I installed one of the many Debian variants. Getting the installation media is certainly going to be a challenge for casual users. Otherwise, it was easy. It walked through the steps. It was different from installing windows, but I felt it was no more difficult. I am well versed in this stuff, but I feel like nothing in the installation process would be a problem for a casual computer user.

    It offered several desktops programs at the login screen. This could likely throw off a lot of people. However, if you just logged in and ignored that you might never even know there were different options. The default was KDE. Everything worked. Nothing needed to be tweaked. This is in starck contrast to Windows, where once you get past installation, you need to get rid of a ton of crap it throws at you. The Windows 10 start menu is an unbelievable collection of weird boxes and shit and the task bar is similarly full of junk. The KDE start menu is just a menu. The task bar has your tasks. There’s nothing to do.

    I did try Cinnamon too. I prefer the simplicity. I don’t think casual users are going to care.

    Overall, I think for casual users, it’s actually easier to set up and use than Windows. Getting installation media prepared is not something most people are going to readily do, but I think it’s the same with Windows. They have the advantage there of having manufacturors install it. Otherwise, whatever issues there have been installing Linux distributions in the past aren’t there now. Conversely, installing and especially the configuration after installation is much harder on Windows than it used to be. If you’re slightly tech savvy, give Linux a try.







  • I haven’t used this in a bit so I thought I’d check it. They somewhat recently updated the desktop program and nothing works at all now. It appears to be just Edge pretending to be another program. It’s literally just a browser, so surround sound doesn’t work now.

    It’s a weird thing for them to do. Why would anyone download a copy of edge that can only watch Netflix? You’d just use a browser.




  • Google is genuinely bad now. I switched to Ecosia which is just Bing with a simpler front end and they use their profits to plant trees. I don’t think Ecosia is particularly special though. Duck Duck Go, Bing whatever, they’re all better than Google.

    Whenever I set up a new computer then search for something, I’m always surprised at first seeing the awful layout and quality of the search results before I realize that I haven’t changed the default search from Google. It’s awful now. Seriously, how are people using it?

    My new favorite way to search is perplexity.ai. It’s an AI search tool that summarizes the loads of crap out there so you don’t need to read through the junk that people write. It provides sources, unlike using ChatGPT, which is incredibly valuable. All AIs make shit up, so having links to double check it is a must. Unlike Bing Chat, or whatever Microsoft calls it this week, you can ask follow up questions to home in on what you want.



  • I just bought a new laptop for a family member. It wasn’t very expensive, but hardware now is generally amazing. It has Windows 11. My 12 year old laptop running Windows 7 is faster for most tasks, despite far inferior hardware. Plus search actually works in 7, it’s better organized, it doesn’t come with a ton of junk you need to disable or remove (good god the default start menu on 10 is a mess), and it doesn’t look like they designed the UI over the weekend. I kept waiting for the typical MS move of fixing the dumb crap they added, but with 11 it’s clear that they’re doubling down.



  • Kethal@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzanswer = sum(n) / len(n)
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    2 months ago

    Seeing your comment I wondered how someone publishing in Nature could have possibly left out the use of statistics for prediction. That would be a wild oversight that only someone with little knowledge of the topic would make, and surely not something that the editors of Nature would miss. Upon clicking the link I see that they mentioned it in the very first sentence and apparently ignore it if someone happens to call the prediction model a machine learning model. Using statistical models for prediction has been used since the start of the field, and renaming things that have been used for decades as “machine learning” doesn’t suddenly make them not statistics.

    Artificial neural networks are statistical models, with numerous statistical approaches associated with their use, development and interpretation.