I looked up the Open Technology Fund on Wikipedia and it has no relation to the CIA. well, except that its parent agency (Radio Free Asia) is part of the US government like the CIA is. they don’t seem to work together at all, and they’re under the purview of two different branches of government

besides, as other commenters have said, they’re open source and they’ve been audited. anyone can build the client themselves (with any potential backdoors removed) and set up their own server. would the CIA allow for that?

nothing better than Signal

Signal was developed with financial backing by the CIA, so do with that information what you will.

source?

NPR News is probably what you’re looking for. sports and celebrity stuff is relegated to the Culture section, which is its own separate thing (although there are a couple of music stories that seem to have been misplaced). here is the RSS feed for the News section: https://feeds.npr.org/1001/rss.xml

to spite entropy

he absolutely carried Stargate Atlantis, it was weird to see him in Aquaman

Aquaman. the visual effects were ridiculous, the characters were one-dimensional, the soundtrack was…something, and the overall tone was that of a testosterone firehose to the face. i said the eight deadly words about halfway through, and i was thoroughly bored out of my mind despite action scene after action scene after action scene…the only reason why i didn’t just get up and leave was because i was watching with a group

oddly specific objection aside, where podcasting really shines is fiction. it’s the modern version of the radio drama. fiction podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale and Find Us Alive have narratives that are tailor-made for episodic audio and would not work in any other medium. a good fiction podcast is truly wonderful to listen to

they are so much more than that. Builder for example has a full tree view of your project, instant compiling (well, instant in the sense that the compile button is always accessible and you don’t have to leave the application to do it), live preview for markup languages, Git integration, unit tests, profiling, and several other things I can’t remember right now. so no, an IDE is an entirely different beast from a text editor

the ones I build. I have to admit the Switch is really fun, but at the end of the day it’s just another DRM machine. I’d rather have a rig sitting somewhere that I built to my exact specifications, that I can connect to from wherever, and that will run whatever I want

doesn’t the Bible specifically warn about people like Trump?

For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.

— 2 Timothy 3:2–5, English Standard Version

on the other hand, there could be an enemy of my enemy situation, because everyone in the Middle East hates Israel (and for good reason too: not only is Israel run by genocidal fucks, but they stole everyone’s land). it’s not impossible that Jordan, Egypt, and neighboring countries would gang up on Israel.

it’s just a lot of Israelis seem to see all gazans as hamas now, which is problematic genocidal

fixed it for you

opt-in analytics! servers running Synapse can choose to send a bit of analytics information like number of users, but it’s opt-in so the number is potentially even higher

i’m not informed much either, but here’s what i gather; it’s centralized around the proprietary Snap Store and you can’t run your own Snap repositories, Snap apps take ages to start up, and each Snap app is mounted as a separate partition (???). there’s a whole bunch of technical issues that go over my head too, and Snaps have seen so little adoption that Canonical basically had to twist the arms of flavor maintainers to drop Flatpak support and support Snap out of the box. it’s evidently so bad even Ubuntu’s official flavors wouldn’t support it until Canonical forced them to

yes. it only surfaces citations that may back up the content better, an editor still has to read the source and approve the change

Wikipedian here - AI on Wikipedia is actually nothing new. we’ve had a machine learning model identify malicious edits since 2017, and Cluebot (an ML-powered anti-vandalism bot) has been around for even longer than that.

even so, this is pretty exciting. from what i gather, this is a transformer model turned on its side; instead of taking textual data and transforming it, it checks to see if two pieces of textual data could reasonably be transformations of each other. used responsibly, this could really help knock out those ^[1] and ^[2] tags en masse

it’s in the name: generative pre-trained transformer. the one thing ChatGPT and GPT-3/3.5/4 are truly good at is transforming data. it can restructure paragraphs to have a different flow, take class notes and make flashcards out of them (that’s how i use ChatGPT), or even take non-textual data and potentially present it in textual format if trained right

even the monitors are “smart” now. have you seen Samsung’s latest computer monitors?

that’s true. it’s not super in-depth, but it’s a pretty good introduction in my opinion