Every time I visit my family in Wales Google tries to take me away from the perfectly reliable A55 and onto some ungodly assemblage of extremely narrow country roads and tenuous mountain passes. Sometimes it offers them to me but I’ve caught it secretly changing my precalculated route without my input. Unfortunately I’ve tried several alternatives (various osm apps, here wego) and the only real alternative is Waze… which is owned by Google. We are nothing but cattle to them. I think Google is trying to kill me.

If the standard of ML talks at conferences I’ve attended is anything to go by then a top machine learning conference is functionally a daycare for the most annoying people you’ve ever met

If the ban is intended to stop children from feeling pressured to dress in a way that conforms to their family’s religion, why does it only target islam and not extend to other religious garments or accessories (e.g. kippah, turban, crucifix)?

The Yorkshire dales is my third favourite national park. It’s fantastic, particularly if you like caves and gills

I don’t actively develop websites in WordPress anymore but I do have several legacy WordPress sites still running, and I gotta say, WordPress has really lost the plot. The updated post editor is just awful, the php side of things is as much of a mess as it ever was, and it seems to be like mullenweg didn’t really know what to do with wordpress.com or Tumblr for that matter.

I am not sure about fern but kzgst and veritasium were both slop long before AI existed. The former had posted a lot of flashy but poorly-researched junk videos and has been a mouthpiece of the bill and Melinda gates Foundation for some time. The latter has done the game but took money from waymo to basically make a big waymo ad.

This but unironically

As a recovering physicist, the jargon we come up with is absolutely terrible. In lieu of that we name things after people, or multiple people, or sometimes a composite name of jargon and people, which seems to me worst of all.

Trusted computing was never about security, it’s a way to take ownership of computers away from users and give it to computer manufacturers and Microsoft. It’s also not a good security model.

Maybe we can eat North sea oil instead

The usefulness of alphafold had been grossly overstated by science media. The structures it generates are mostly nonsense, they typically can’t generate molecular dynamics simulation trajectories with the correct physical properties, which makes them not useful for drug discovery. in computational biology today you’ll most often find them in use as a starting point for structure refinement or as one of many sources of data for some integrative method. Again, not useless, and an improvement over previous structure prediction algorithms, but they didn’t ‘solve protein folding’ or anything, like Google might have you believe. I don’t put much stock in Nobel prizes, I mean, they gave one to Henry Kissinger.

Google also released alphafold 3 under a strict non commercial license, which severely limited its usefulness for both commercial and academic work, the latter of which all but requires using more permissive licenses. I assume Google wanted to monetize a commercial version of it at some point.

I’ve been using Openfold 3 in some work I’ve been doing recently, and while the software is a bit undercooked, it does produce structures similar to alphafold 3 without any of Google’s bullshit. So I wouldn’t worry too much about this announcement. The protein folding will continue with or without them

I have a Shure SM58 on a stand running though a focusrite scarlett and akg k371s. I got the the mic and interface used on eBay. I previously used a behringer xm8500 and a behringer usb audio interface which honestly gets you most of the way there in terms of audio quality. The headphones have a replaceable cable via mini XLR, which is the failure point on most wired headphones.

I’ve never had audio problems on Linux, these days everything uses a generic driver.

has Mozilla considered spending their limited resources working on their web browser

I had to discontinue Linux builds of my game on Steam because the game engine I’m using has a very buggy and unfinished Linux runtime. I’m not happy about it because I wanted native support, but ironically proton is a better user expertise

A small handful of my burned CDs from 20 years ago are unbearable and as far as I can tell, none of my pressed CDs are. I’m sure they’ll rot eventually but I think your average cd is quite robust. Still, there’s no excuse not to have backups!

I think the top500 is harmful to the hpc community because it encourages people to build huge, mostly homogenous hpc facilities instead of a network of smaller, heterogenous hpc facilities

I can’t recommend emby because their business practices are pretty scummy. After accepting open source contributions for years, they went closed-source in 2018 and took all those contributions with them (they had a CLA). The very next update, they added hardware acceleration and locked it behind a paywall. They had a pretty big ‘security incident’ a few years ago, which probably would have been averted if they were still open source, as users in the community flagged it as an issue long before the devs took action.

Every day from 2021-2025. The UX is already great I just found it very unstable and buggy

When Gnome 3 first came out, it was comically unusable, but now a lot of the big issues have been fixed and I find it only mildly idiosyncratic. I like the KDE user experience more but I also think KDE is much buggier. I switched to gnome last year after getting tired of dealing with my desktop freezing/crashing and it’s been pretty smooth sailing. My main complaints are:

• Switching applications instead of windows on alt-tab (has any computer user ever wanted this?)
• Modal dialogues have window decorations that inexplicably move the parent window when dragged
• Typing in Files starts searching instead of navigating to a file/directory with the typed name
• Opening an archive extracts it automatically instead of looking inside

The default gnome applications are also quite inferior to their KDE counterparts (Dolphin is leagues ahead of Files, Kate is much better than Gnome’s text editor). But I guess you could install dolphin on gnome if you really wanted, so I won’t hold that against the DE itself.

My former boss at an engineering firm had to do an MBA to climb the ladder. He said the secret to success was just to stop thinking rationally