Do SSDs do that automatically in the background, or is all the data I’m not actively refreshing gradually rotting away?

The problem is that USB flash drives don’t keep their data intact for very long when they’re powered down. It lasts long enough for everyday use, but not even as long as a hard disk for archival.

USB sticks and SSDs are no good for long-term storage. The data on them degrades rapidly if they’re not powered up. Spinning disks last longer. So your process would be better done with those.

Huh? USB is a connector, not an archival format.

It’s a shame their capacity lags so far behind current hard drives. And not many drives for these discs are still made, so what are the chances of them becoming unreadable just because no one has equipment to read them?

$20 per month would be enough to discourage me. It’s another relatively costly computer-related subscription and I already feel like I’m losing a battle to keep those minimal. There would have to be some very clear benefits for that price.

Every device I have just has a couple of blue ones and a couple of black ones, perhaps some orange ones and some USB-C ports, and good luck figuring out what they all can do. No symbols anywhere.

Shed a tear, if you wish, for Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Jenson Huang, whose fortune (on paper) fell by almost $10 billion that day.

Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.

I suspect it’s not an optimization to make every post you see interesting. For one thing, we tend to find intermittent rewards more fascinating and addictive than reliable ones. For another, if you have to scroll further you’ll see more ads. But if you make it too boring people won’t scroll at all. So the algorithm probably tries to make it just interesting enough to keep people scrolling, but no more.

A feature that has been shown to actively put people off your product. But in the end these companies would rather have investors than users, and it’s the investors they’re marketing to.

I’m in the same position. I prefer free software but there is none that does what Affinity does. If it goes subscription-only and they shut down the bought versions, it will have to be piracy time.

Are they? When they bought it they explicitly promised that they would not change the licensing. And no one believed them. Affinity was the only true competitor to Adobe products with equivalent functionality for a reasonable one-off payment instead of an extortionate subscription. I was so happy to find it - software that actually feels good to buy and use, Of course they’re going to ruin it.

If that happens, no point making anything, since your stuff will get stolen anyway

From a capitalist’s point of view, yes, but we need a society that enables people to act from other incentives than making money. And there are plenty of other reasons to make things.

Ooh, I spy more snark!

They’re looking for something open-source. Draw.io’s readme says:

License

The source code authored by us in this repo is licensed under a modified Apache v2 license. This project is not an open source project as a result.

I haven’t been through the license to see what its restrictions are, but there must be a reason they give this warning.

Hey, I’m a geek and I take offense at that.

Macs look appealing, but they’re so expensive that I’ve been working with computers for decades but never felt I could afford one. Not a useful one anyway. The power efficiency is attractive but you have to spend so much to get past 8GB RAM and 256GB storage, which is like a PC from 10 years ago. Every time I consider it I end up back with Linux and/or Windows just because of the upfront cost. And because Apple sell to people who are willing to pay high prices, the software, accessories and support for Mac is also more expensive.

Yes, small things could quickly put ordinary people off Linux with the current state of software. I’m involved in running an organization that needs to submit reports regularly to the government using their online forms. Unfortunately the forms are PDFs that only seem to work in recent versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Any other software results in a more or less broken form. I haven’t yet found anything in Linux (even on Wine) that handles these forms properly. So sometimes I have to use Windows.

For me there are still enough benefits to using Linux that I continue with it as my main OS, but for most people they’d quickly get annoyed by obstacles like this. Of course the government shouldn’t be using one company’s proprietary format that only runs on commercial OSes for their forms, but that’s the way it is for now.

I’m interested in this but not very familiar. Are the limitations to do with brittleness (not surviving minor edits) and the need for text to be long enough for statistical effects to become visible?

Maybe this will become a major driver for the improvement of AI watermarking and detection techniques. If AI companies want to continue sucking up the whole internet to train their models on, they’ll have to be able to filter out the AI-generated content.