You made the dreadful mistake of saying something positive about LLMs. We shall now proceed to downvote you accordingly.

Point taken. Thank you for the reminder. I was probably being harsh. Appreciate the feedback.

Man, I luckily upgraded to 64GB (when MSFS 2024 said “that’s preferred”) before all this.

In a personal context, agreed. In a business context, I completely disagree. Analysts, finance, operations etc all have much more complex requirements.

Google Sheets is competing with Excel. Proton Sheets is competing with Google Sheets. So Proton Sheets is competing with Excel.

I used Word as a comparative example to say that parts of the office/docs suite are easy to compete with (there’s only so may things a word processor can do), while others (like Google Sheets or Excel, whichever order you prefer) is incredibly difficult to compete with; a formatting error on import of a Word doc is acceptable. An unsupported formula ruins the entire thing.

Agreed. The EU ain’t perfect, but I’d take it over any alternative.

Does if have FILTER, array formulas, spill zones, MAP, data tables, query engines, SQL engine etc etc?

To compete with Word: Easy. To compete with Excel: Very, very difficult (pretty much only Google Sheets have managed).

Fortunately I live in a country where the government can (broadly) be trusted.

I thin Zig actually stands out pretty well from the pack. You sound maybe a little jealous or something?

The build system was basically a black box until 0.14.

The Zig core team is pretty chill and pretty united around strong engineering ethos. And tbf their own compiler is pretty performant and produces similar level quality code. The argument that compiler dev is hard falls fairly flat when they are succeeding in developing their own compiler.

I hope to Darwin social media ends up requiring ID. I believe it would do wonders for democratic discourse. It was only last week, a number of large US right-wing accounts were revealed to be driven from outside the US. Is it healthy for democracies that so many people pay heed to foreign actors?

If you write an op-ed for a newspaper, the newspaper need to identify you as there is an editor who is responsible for what gets written in the paper. This ensures there’s someone who can stand to account for any libellous statements.

With social media we immediately reneged on this and allowed them to wash their hands; “we are just a channel” is a pretty bleak statement to make when the discourse on social media destroys the lives of minorities, encourages suicide, undermines our democracy with AI and troll farm bots.

And we can do this is a privacy preserving way - of course the social media companies feeds the opposite narrative because they don’t want to implicated in the piles of shit they shovel on top of our democracy.

If social media was required to ensure they could tie an account to a real person, which they needn’t reveal unless forced to by a court order, we would know that we were engaging with a real opinion, not something coughed up by a Putin-run AI bot or a Chinese troll farm.

The system required isn’t that complex.

A social media

• a social media company is opening a new account.
• it sends the person opening the account to any of the multitude of ways we can already verify identity online.
• the person is identified and issued an identity token, which gets sent to the social media company.
• the social media company says “great, this person is real and we can, if required by a court order, work with the identity company to reveal who this person is is”. Right now, all the social media company has is a token.
• the account is opened.

In a system likes this, the identity company doesn’t know who the person is; that sits with the social media company.

Nor does the identity service know which account is actually posting for this real person, all they know is they verified someone as part of an account opening process.

Social media should be treated like the press - make them accountable for what gets posted and allow them to place this accountability on a real person by labelling posts “op-eds” if, and only if, they know who is doing the posting.

We are letting large, anonymous money-men ruin our democracy behind the veil of “free discourse”. It’s not free to the many people who gets harmed by it.

I second XFS for large files.

Tape is still a thing: Ultrion tapes store up to 40 TB. But the devices to read and write them are not priced for mortals.

They’re not doing anything that’s violating licenses. I’m happy there’s different options. Having paid support is pretty cool if you’re a school or never ran Linux before. Other users will choose other distros. We should be happy, not tear into each other.

A variant of “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.

Not if you trust your data to a company that makes money from selling said data to advertising companies.

What did people expect handing all their personal information to Google?

Ugh, there’s a Google search I’m happy not to do.

The EU has instigated the Payment Service Directive 2 (the previous one being PSD1). This requires that all EU banks over a certain size provide APIs to access transactions and other data.

However banks are required to set strict requirements to use their APIs, including requiring lots of knowledge and a documented approval chain that pertains to each user. In practice this means only other big companies have access and most have solved it by buying the “access account and transaction data” service from a third party company.

GoCardless is one such company. They previously had a developer tier that you could sign up to, which would provide you an access token that you then provided to Actual Budget so they could access your accounts on your behalf.

GoCardless have however limited what their free developer accounts can do, which means Actua Budget can no longer get real time access to your acccohnt data.