I use Beyond Compare to sync files from my laptop to my NAS which is a QNAP (my laptop is Linux Mint). It is incredibly slow, to the point that it is driving me crazy. Admittedly, I have lots of large files on my laptop that I move around frequently, so that may just be how it is. I do have my laptop setup to sync to my phone with Syncthing, and it seems like my phone is always up-to-date and in sync with my laptop. But of course it is syncing in, I guess, "real time" as opposed to a Beyond Compare backup which does everything only when I tell it to when lots of changes have already been made at the end of the day. Is it possible to install Syncthing on QNAP? Perhaps that would make things a bit faster, although I've always had a hell of a time trying to install something that isn't a proprietary app from their store. Anyway, any suggestions are welcome.

EDIT: Plugging into ethernet instead of syncing over wi-fi helps speed things up a bit, but not as much as I would like.

February 17, 2024 marks the entry into force of a landmark piece of European Union (EU) legislation, affecting European users who create and disseminate online content as well as tech companies who act as “intermediaries” on the Internet.

A 4 min 1080p30fps video taken with my phone camera is 518MB, While a 12 min 1080p30fps video ripped from youtube is 341MB, both are using mp4 h.264 as codec and the youtube one isnt of lower quality, so why this big difference?

of note:

The 404 team DIYs as much as possible. They pay for hosting through Ghost and set up litigation insurance, for example, but everyone makes their own art for stories instead of paying for agency photos. (The reporters are also the merch models). Everyone works from home, so they don’t have an office and don’t plan on getting one anytime soon. The team communicates through a free Slack channel. Koebler mails out merchandise from his garage in Los Angeles. Every month, the team meets (virtually) to decide how much they can pay themselves. (The number changes each month, but everyone gets paid the same amount.)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/10105454

• Gen Z's nostalgia for the early 2000s is sparking a revival of landline phones, seen as a retro-chic escape from the digital age.

• Influenced by '90s and 2000s TV shows, young adults like Nicole Randone and Sam Casper embrace landlines for their vintage appeal.

• Urban Outfitters capitalizes on Gen Z's love for nostalgia by selling retro items like landline phones alongside fashion trends from the '90s and 2000s.

There's also more example videos on the technical report

Personal take: If they didn't say how the videos on the page were created, I genuinely think that several of the AI generated videos could be passed off as being made with a camera or CGI (though there's probably still inconsistencies when looking hard enough).

This failure example is quite amusing.

Dude, where's my self-driving car?

A good look at The Verge about the history of false claims made by the Silicon Valley hype machine around self-driving cars:

"In 2015, the then-lead of Google’s self-driving car project Chris Urmson said one of his goals in developing a fully driverless vehicle was to make sure that his 11-year-old son would never need a driver’s license.

"The subtext was that in five years, when Urmson’s son turned 16, self-driving cars would be so ubiquitous, and the technology would be so superior to human driving, that his teenage son would have no need nor desire to learn to drive himself.

"Well, it’s 2024, and Urmson’s son is now 20 years old. Any bets on whether he got that driver’s license?"

https://www.theverge.com/24065447/self-driving-car-autonomous-tesla-gm-baidu

@technology #cars #technology #cars #urbanism #UrbanPlanning

Public code repositories like Github are currently being beset by a flood of LLM-generated contributions. It’s becoming a bit of a problem and is one of the facets of the Great Flood the web is currently experiencing.

What does it look like when we are able to use LLMs to handle the flood of contributions? What happens when we’re able to screen and adopt PRs effectively with little to no human intervention?

I use the Voice audiobook app to listen to my DRM-free books. In this app, there’s a configuration setting for auto-rewind. If you pause the book, when you resume, it will rewind by X seconds. I didn’t like that feature, I wanted the amount of seconds to rewind to be based on how long it has been since I’ve paused. So if I resume within a minute, no rewind; within 5 minutes, 10 second rewind; more than that would be 30 seconds.

I can do this because I’m part of a small percentage of people who can clone a repo for an Android app, modify it, rebuild it and push it to my phone. But I don’t want this power to be constrained to a priesthood who know the secret language of coding. I want everyone to be able to do stuff like that.

Imagine a world in which, as I use a specific piece of software, I can request modifications to its behaviour to an LLM-augmented system. That system will pull the open source code, make the necessary modifications (following the project’s contribution guidelines), build it and reload it on my device. Then I can use it and test it, and fix any problems that come along. That modification can then be uploaded to my own repo and made publicly available for anyone else who wants it, or it could even be pushed as a PR to the original system who could scan it for usefulness, alignment, UX, etc., modify it if needed, and then merge it to the main branch.

This wonderful world of personal and communal computing would be unimaginable in a closed source world. No closed source system will accept an external AI to come in and read/modify it at will. This is why open source is more important than ever.

We need to build a Software Commons so that we can give everyone the ability to adapt their digital lives to their liking. So that these intimate, private devices to which we entrust most of our attention, these things which have great effects on our cognitive and emotional functions, remain ours in a real sense. And the way that we do this is to create the tools and processes to allow anyone to make modifications to their software by simply expressing that intent.

And what does communal software development look like? Let’s explore the space of social consensus mechanisms so we can find those that drive the creation of software which promote culture, connection, compassion and empathy.

I want to see the promise of community made by the 90’s web survive the FAANG+ Megacorp Baronies and flourish into a great digital metropolis. The web can still get free to be weird, we just have to make it happen together.

Open RAN gets a boost to fight Huawei’s global cellular lead.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11820406

Do not use 2 letter country TLDs!

I'm running Windows 10.

I have absolutely no idea what is going on. Task Manager doesn't show anything useful, I killed processes that might be it with no effect. Is there any way whatsoever for me to learn what is causing this and remove it? I ran a Windows Defender scan and nothing showed up.