I work peripheral to data science. I am starting to think the defense is never to be a hole in the data. AI is incredible at filling in missing data.

What you want to do is poison the data about you. AI is absolutely terrible at weeding out bad or especially intentionally misleading data. You can even protect others if you do it right.

Funny, that is the opposite take that Cory has had recently. His argument has basically morphed to the opinion that, while individual action is cool, this stuff pretty much can only be defeated by collective action. You can’t shop (or hack) your way out of living in the surveillance state. If everyone else is being surveiled, you get pulled in by association.

I don’t quite agree, and think we will always have to exercise some individual choice to protect ourselves. I am not sure that disabling a radio is enough though, if every other car on the road is covered in cameras and streaming data constantly.

Dynamo lighting has gotten really efficient. It wouldn’t be cheap, but would be so cool to make a fully human-powered Linux bike. https://www.bikeradar.com/advice/buyers-guides/bike-dynamos

You dont need to transport thermal batteries. Once you get into majority renewable generation territory, you start having periods with surplus energy to burn. Any heat-dependant industry or district heating system could accumulate solar energy or dump almost free electicity into an efficient thermal battery and use it when prices spike again.

Yeah, thermal batteries are great mainly just when you actually want heat. Think district heating or industrial processes. Trying tk drive a turbine with it to do other work loses you an order of magnitude in efficiency.

With the notable exception of Obama, every US President since 1993 has been born in the 1940s. Thats over 3 decades with presidents born at almost the same time (most in the same year).

seems a bit dangerous though to risk for a browser with so small market share

They should have built it in years ago, but called it “web security filtering” or something and included only a basic security blocklist, but left it easy to add other lists.

This is the point everyone misses. Hes not asking for more medical research to be done, hes asking for the standards for approval to be lowered or eliminated.

Yes, good guess. I do expect everyone to raise prices owing to the cost of ram and other hardware.

If you are willing to have all your accounts linkable by the signup email, you dont need a temp or relay email service at all. Just sign up for a single random email address somewhere that lets you do it anonymously.

I am happy with addy.io and havnt had any issues. You could maintain a few providers - throw in ddg and mozillas services - so you can try from lots of domains I guess.

My vps is operated by an EU company, running on hardware in Montreal, powered entirely by Quebec’s abundant hydroelectric grid. EU Canada all the way.

Are you a native french speaker? Maybe you heard it differently from me, but while I am all for nuance, lets not sanewash people and take them at their word.

I use plenty of software where the developers are not primarily focused on security, but his line of reasoning sounds just plain dangerous for an OS developer. Maybe he phrased it bad, but that would be up to him to clarify and we shouldnt do that for him.

I usually treat them by using an extremely well established library where someone else has spent the requisite years crying over every stupid edge case of csv reading. Rolling your own csv reader is a bit like encryption. Until someone hands you a file that rejects all sanity and you start fking with regex. Lol.

The delimiter isn’t really the issue. Its that there are lots and lots of weird edge cases that break reading csvs. If you use commas, at minimum, you need to escape commas in the data, or quote strings that might contain commas… But now you have to deal with the possibility of a quote character or your escape character in the data.

Then you have the fact that csvs can be written with so many different character encodings, mangling special characters where they occur.

Aaand then you have all the issues that come with lack of metadata - good formats will at least tell you the type of data in each column so you dont have to guess them.

Lets see, its also really annoying to include any binary data in a csv, theres no redundancy or parity checks to catch currupted data, and they arent compressed so you need to tack on compression if you want efficient storage, but that means you always have to read the whole csv file for any task.

Oh, that brings me to the joys of modern columnar formats where you can read selected columns super fast without reading the whole file.

Oh god, I really kept going there. Sorry. Its been a year.

It was some sort of weird database frontend the contractor used. It was very limited.

Honestly, dont take anyones recommendation. It takes 10 minutes to create a bootable USB for a Linux distro once you get the hang of it. Try a handful of different “easy” distros and desktops on a Saturday morning and pick one that seems to work well on your computer and that you find you like. What you find intuitive isnt necessarily good for another, etc. A little time invested in shopping will pay off later (which is true for a lot of things).

I’m not a fan, but thats extreme. The Ubuntu desktop will boot to the DE on half a gig of ram, and can open basic desktop apps with 1 or 2. Its the websites, containered apps, and more complex applications that Ubuntu is worried about UX disappointment from naive users (which is their segment). Windows 11 requires many times that just to get to a desktop and open a text file in notepad. They are not the same.

All of the default software that comes with the Ubuntu desktop will run reasonably well with 2Gb. Its the websites and electon apps (i.e., websites) that will make it swap. That and modern users that want to keep dozens of programs or websites open -which users 10 or 20 years ago may have known not to do.

Which is exactly what Ubuntu is doing. The desktop and even most native desktop applications that come with it will run just fine with 1 or 2GB of ram. If you used it like a 90s computer for 90s computer tasks, it will work fine.

In practice, however, users will open a web browser to some “modern” websites or a couple electron apps and have a very bad experience.

P.s. in the above quagmire, the only solution is choose to keep only the most important un-clean column per csv, and make it the last column in the file so you have predictable columns. If you need more, then write separate csvs. Computers are stupid.