The Affinity suite is not an Adobe product.

I’ve used it most extensively for non-professional projects, where if I wasn’t using this kind of tooling to write tests they would simply not be written. That means no tickets to close either. That said, I am aware that the AI is almost always at best testing for regression (I have had it correctly realise my logic is incorrect and write tests that catch it, but that is by no means reliable) Part of the “hand holding” I mentioned involves making sure it has sufficient coverage of use cases and edge cases, and that what it expects to be the correct is actually correct according to intent.

I essentially use the AI to generate a variety of scenarios and complementary test data, then further evaluating it’s validity and expanding from there.

I most often just get it straight up misunderstanding how the test framework itself works, but I’ve definitely had it make strange decisions like that. I’m a little convinced that the only reason I put up with it for unit tests is because I would probably not write them otherwise haha.

I think its most useful as an (often wrong) line completer than anything else. It can take in an entire file and just try and figure out the rest of what you are currently writing. Its context window simply isn’t big enough to understand an entire project.

That and unit tests. Since unit tests are by design isolated, small, and unconcerned with the larger project AI has at least a fighting change of competently producing them. That still takes significant hand holding though.

C’mon, that’s what PR’s, RCs, and betas are for

It’s important to note that this is them moving in-development branches/features “behind closed doors”, not making Android closed source. Whenever a feature is ready they then merge it publicly. I know this community tends to be filled with purists, many of whom are well informed and reasoned, but I’m actually totally fine with this change. This kind of structure isn’t crazy uncommon, and I imagine it’s mainly an effort to stop tech journalists analysing random in-progress features for an article. Personally, I wouldn’t want to develop code with that kind of pressure.

I will be dead and buried in the ground before I call nginx “engine x”

Verizon sold Tumblr to WordPress in 2019

DKIM makes it much more difficult to spoof email addresses, assuming your email client actually supports them.

Checking various emails I’ve received from @google.com addresses, they have DKIM set up and gmail is validating using it.

You’re mostly right. Newer devices won’t share their entire app list by default, at compile time you need to enumerate every app you want to query for, or add what are essentially a list of intent filters (which are like “I want to talk to apps that take this kind of message and payload”). There is still a permission that lets you list all apps like you were able to on pre API 30 devices, but Google makes it pretty difficult to get onto the app store in that state.

You can still send intents as much as you like though (as long as you know the recipient), since they’re the basis for all inter-process communication.

My point is more that an app developer can’t and doesn’t need to use the play store to get the list of apps you have on your phone. This requirement to have the play store almost certainly isn’t malicious and I disagree with the notion that apps shouldn’t be able to use what is essentially system infrastructure to improve their apps. That said, given this is an app targeting the fediverse, it would have been nice for the developer to have made a universal APK build that didn’t require the Play Store.

If this error message is actually talking about Google Play, not Google Play Services, I would bet that it is because it employs Dynamic Feature Modules; something which can only be delivered over the Play Store infrastructure. They’re pretty common in modern Android development since they can substantially improve the user experience for users with Google Play enabled (which is most of them).

Also, I am aware this is being pedantic, but Android just straight up already has an API to get every installed app on your device and interact with it, even on a de-googled phone.

Social media is not a good replacement for real life community (look through my comment history and you’ll see me expressing exactly that repeatedly), but we can’t be oblivious to the fact that for many children their only connection to fellow queer people may be online. If you live in a small town or community where there are no other openly queer people, or if your school, peers, and parents are hostile to queer people you won’t have much choice in where you find community.

Are you Australian? That just feels like kind of a US centric lens to analyze this through, though you’re right that loss of community is a byproduct.

Like, I’m not exactly happy with the Albanese government, but I would say that most negative LGBTQ things they have said or done have been cowardly attempts to avoid drama from the Liberals, not active bigotry

I briefly worked for a company who worked on household power technology. Their product would attempt to predict energy prices, weather patterns, and usage to sell your excess energy at peak prices. Like discussed in the article, this company collected usage data and controlled the sale of energy back to the grid centrally. They did this because it meant they could better train their prediction models and run them on more powerful hardware. The controllers would have needed internet connectivity anyway to query energy prices, and putting the prediction on device would have just made them more expensive and worse. Even when I worked there (back in 2015 I think), they were already very aware of the threat vectors discussed by this article and took some measures to prevent it.

In my opinion they were (/are, still exist) a responsible company run by competent people. They did not collect the data out of “greed”, and I strongly suspect that the people in these comments implying that the data is collected to be sold have never actually worked in the industry and have very little idea of the specific value of energy usage data. I can’t really speak authoritatively for other companies, but I would guess that, like the one I worked for, their products are internet connected simply because it improves the product. For example, people expect things to be controllable or viewable from an app from anywhere, and that requires internet connectivity.

You definitely need approval to publish on the Play Store. It’s just more basic

From a quick Google, it seems like Mullenweg is a complete jackass

Mozilla’s next largest source of revenue is subscriptions and advertising (source 2021 financial report), by a wide margin. That “useless shit” is their other revenue, and they’re investing in it because they know they need to diversify revenue to fund Firefox. You’re suggesting they kill it because it’s not their core (unprofitable) business?

Thank you Emma, genuinely 🩷

Not a man. My pronouns are in my username. Even you can connect the dots here.

How much computing power do you think it takes to approximately recognise a predefined word or phrase? They do that locally, on device, and then stream whatever audio follows to more powerful computers in AWS (the cloud). To get ahead of whatever conspiratorial crap you’re about to say next, Alexa devices are not powerful enough to transcribe arbitrary speech.

Again, to repeat, people smarter than you and me have analysed the network traffic from Alexa devices and independently verified that it is not streaming audio (or transcripts) unless it has heard something close (i.e close enough such that the fairly primative audio processing (which is primitive because it’s cheap, not for conspiracy reasons) recognises it) to the wake word. I have also observed this, albeit with less rigorous methodology. You can check this yourself, why don’t you do that and verify for yourself whether this conspiracy holds up?