“Don’t protect yourself or others, even peacefully. You’re obstructing the oppression.”

Has anyone here actually read the article? As far as I can tell, facial recognition is being increased in availability, but it was already in use.

Every police force in the country will be able to use live facial recognition vans, with the number of vans set to rise from ten to 50.

It’s also worth noting that in the UK for a very long time now any data that is not E2EE can be seized by the government from companies without the consent of their users if a warrant is issued. That’s obviously bad but nothing new.

It sounds like what’s actually new here is that the police is becoming more centralised and organised. Instead of a lot of smaller departments in local areas with lack of expertise, more centralised organisations will do the policing.

The article covers some pros and cons from different people’s perspectives.

• There might end up being more policing in cities and less in rural areas.
• There might be some downsizing of policies forces
• Police forces may be less accountable as they grow.
• Police forces believe they will be better equipped to tackle cybercrime.

Overall, to me, this seems like a generally negative move. I don’t want the police to spy on people, and I want them to be more knowledgeable about their local area and more accountable to their people. It does look like there might be more surveillance, and that’s bad too.

Please read don’t take headlines for granted.

Just binged the whole thing and it’s pretty funny, though a bit objectifying.

When you log into Windows with a Microsoft account, your recovery key is often automatically uploaded to Microsoft’s servers as a backup in case you forget your password. Legally, this means Microsoft owns the key and must surrender it under the U.S. CLOUD Act.

I find that really quite shocking, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Given the legal and technical risks, the advice for business travelers is clear: do not carry data.

The US really is a hostile surveillance state.

It’s not certain this is true, but it’s somewhat likely. At least, that’s what I’m getting from the Wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_(tortoise)

She was not kept as a pet by Darwin, but she may have been collected by him on a journey, then kept at a museum(?)

My friends keep telling me to get Instagram so they can send me memes.

No, thanks.

Yeah, that’s why I’d like them to build more social housing.

The lifecycle of social housing projects like these, as I understand them, is meant to be that you continue to build them, and as the old ones reach the end of their lifetime (around 60 years?) you demolish them and move the people into the new ones.

In practice, most places are not continuously building them as they should, so many of them are reaching the end of their lives without a plan for where to move people afterwards. This shows a lack of foresight and long-term planning.

Of course, politics are a fickle thing so the latest government can choose to decide that actually, poor people should be punished for the failures of the system and long-term initiatives fail.

For me I found out when I wanted them to fix something and they refused to honour the warranty because of the blown fuse.

As far as I know, this is illegal, btw. They have to prove that the error you are reporting is caused by user action. If your battery craps out, they can’t blame it on you rooting your phone.

Can I have the, uh, 2010 sketching timelapse video with a Nightcore anime song playing in the background.

Samsung has been blowing fuses in your phone when you root since at least 2015. I know because it happened to me. Never bought one again after that.

Social housing typically doesn’t look as good as high-end apartments, but it doesn’t have to look terrible. Here’s some pretty neat looking social housing in south Paris.

It’s kind of the China Town of Paris.

It’s right next to an accessible tram station, has green spaces and social areas spread around, a couple of malls with great independent restaurants right next door. There are cycle lanes all around the place.

If you’re curious, here it is on Google Maps

I’d live here. I only wish there were more neighbourhoods like this.

This is obvious. It’s literally trained off of English-speaking people’s online comments / posts and designed to give the most likely answer to a question.

I’ve been to Worcestershire (pronounced wooster-sher) recently.

Sadly, this is the latest news out of there.

https://goodlawproject.org/reforms-new-transphobic-ban-in-worcestershire/

Return of the Obra Dinn deaths be like:

Agreed, but recommended specs are >4GB RAM which should be achievable even with a really old secondhand computer or SBC like a Raspberry Pi.

Been using it for about 7 months.

After about 2 months I decided to completely move away from Google Photos and now I only use Immich.

This was a big move for me. I have over 90 000 photos and 1000 videos totalling over 200GB.

The performance is great even on spinning rust, though I am running it on a Ryzen 2700X and 32GB RAM. That said it’s only when the machine learning background tasks take off that that CPU horsepower is used. You really don’t need that much. The recommended specs are fairly small.

Since I first installed it, they’ve added an auto-OCR feature which is a godsend. I can search my entire library for text on a screenshot and it works really well.

Weirdly, the missing feature that really pissed me off on Google Photos and got me to move over was the lack of the ability to search for images not currently in any album. The search functionality is much better on Immich.

I think the only feature I’m missing from Google Photos is the non-destructive editor, and that’s coming real soon (the PR is already merged as of last week).

Fake. ChatGPT always answers in 20 lines of text for no reason.

Micron: “But guuyyyyyyys… What about the money? We could be making so much more money!”

So… apart from everything?

I wish I was bored, rather than worrying about the next atrocity.

For second hand, user-to-user sales via EBay and Vinted are the cheapest, but it takes more effort and you could get scammed.

I’ve bought a few devices second hand at a second hand electronics shop. In the UK, this could be CeX, for example. With many of these you’ll get a limited warranty, and you can walk into a shop and ask to look at the phone and ask questions. You can ask if it is locked and return it if you can’t use it.