Gay and transgender people are the only cases I've heard of people being accepted as refugees from the United States in Canada

Canada and some European countries have accepted refugees from the US but from what I've read it's incredibly rare and requires and extraordinary amount of proof that your life is under threat and you have no other choice than to move to those countries.

Well how is it un-typical?

Aren't there a lot of split units in Europe? Here I just needed an IR blaster to make my AC(s) "smart".

And do what? Sentiment analysis on the conversation you were having?

Remember semantically aware models are still fairly new and even they lack the context for a particular field of text. That's something even the new fancy LLMs struggle with.

Unnecessary when there's way better targeted models trained on years of data that people willingly send as part of everyday smartphone use.

If you use android google grabs your GPS data regardless, you have to root and disable it.

Apple does the same thing but they didn't have their pants occupied by third-party network's fingers like google did until the pixel came out.

Google maps is basically a beacon for AdMob to target you nearly perfectly.

Also using "fine location" in any app grabs the nearby wifi list and sends it to Google/apple if it's not cached.

Also most ad providers these days have made deals with major networks that let them tell what tower your IMEI pinged off of.

It's why google tried to push android/ad IDs, way less info for the networks to advertise over, and it also put the tracking in their hands instead.

Libreoffice has a database engine and frontend that's pretty applicable to Microsoft Access

guix and/or nix

Both are functional package managers and manage dependency trees better than flatpak IMO (also the package description languages mean you can manipulate the package definitions at install time much easier)

If you can't find a package in guix/nix then it behooves you to use flatpak

I used to work for a mobile advertiser, and we installed hella bloatware on phones.

This idea was floated a couple times but was deemed not very effective cause you'd have to store and process hours and hours of audio data that didn't tell us much more than just having a week or so of GPS data, your Facebook profile, and your phone IMEI.

It's pretty easy to see if you're near a Popeyes and what other IMEIs are connecting to the same tower, extrapolate that to you being near your wife and you and your wife thinking about shit on the Popeyes menu.

Boom targeted ad/video for fried chicken.

The rest is general tech paranoia leading to Apophenia.

There's no microphones or cameras, it's just the already gigantic mountain of data anyone who uses a smartphone is constantly broadcasting getting ground through the big data machine that has been the pillar of all tech since the last recession.

The level that waymo operates requires an insane level of digital space mapping.

Considering san Francisco is the most 3d scanned city on the planet I'm not surprised the expansion is happening at the rate it is.

Biggest problem to open source health adoption has been the extreme unwillingness to form an international standards group around diagnoses and labeling.

Closest we have is the WHO with ICD but for some fucking inane reason it's only used reliably by the second and third world. (Ironically this means most African countries have freakishly good digital MAR interop when they can afford to put in a system that uses those standards.)

If you enjoy this sort of stuff make sure to support the Kiwix Project which like 90% of these commercial offshoots are based off of.

I'm reminded of that AI-written book that misidentified poisonous mushrooms.

I wish philosophy was taught a bit more seriously.

An exploration on the philosophical concepts of simulacra and eidolons would probably change the way a lot of people view LLMs and other generative AI.

Would it be better to replace Gemini with a local model run through ollama or something?

The problem is that the road between creating a piece of software that does something well, and then creating simplification layers on top of it is typically much longer than just "edit a config file" and "here's a readme".

You need extra documentation, config gating and workflow, warnings, UI/UX work etc.

I know there are Linux elitists but kind of expecting that much extra work for what is still at it's core mostly volunteer software seems like it's own form of elitism.

Isn't a purposeful weakening of the dollar his entire "mar-a-lago accord" strategy?

Some additional nice things about guix:

Everything is guile. The system definition, the service definitions for shepherd, everything.

Shepherd is hands down the best init program I've ever used. It's just incredibly simplistic but because it just runs the guile definition you give it, you can do some incredibly complex things that systemd etc. can do as well.

The OS documentation is built into the distro, with "info guix" you get reams of configuration information for the distro without ever needing to look it up online.

About a year and a half.

To be honest it's not "easy" to use. The guiding principle behind mainline packages is that everything has to be built from source, so most somewhat unpopular things are missing from the mainline channels.

To use it like any other distro you're going to need to learn how to write packages fairly quickly. Luckily the main draw of guix is the entire OS being based on guile so once you get a little under your belt you can just read the specs from other channels to see how a package is written.

Took me maybe a week to start writing guix packages.

There's also The toybox

Guix because I love the idea behind Nix but Nixlang is the most painful language I've ever had to type out.