This is the clearest sign to me that Apple has jumped the shark.

Apple has a long history of waiting until they could do something right rather than rushing to market with some fad. And here they are tripping over themselves to ship something that is obviously half-baked (at best). There’s no vision, there’s no attention to detail, there’s no careful UX design. It’s just “oh shit we need AI right?”

Or perhaps you do not understand how Discord is commonly used.

People join dozens of servers. Maybe one for every game they play, every TV show they watch, every podcast they listen to. Everything has a Discord.

Even small Discord servers have many channels. Bigger ones will have dozens or hundreds of channels.

Some servers have millions of users. Most of the servers I’m in have thousands.

Many channels are default for all users in the server.

Not sure what the mathematical average is, but this is certainly common at least, and any alternative that can’t handle this is no alternative at all.

If we’re talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.

I’m not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don’t think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.

I set up their accounts

Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I’ll bet you’re going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That’s fine for your family, but it’s hardly going to scale.

The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that’s what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.

Matrix is notorious for its poor performance with large/numerous groups. They keep claiming to improve it, but it’s still bad.

I mean, it’s great that it works for you, but be honest: isn’t your tolerance for technological friction a bit higher than the average bear’s? People complain that Mastodon is too hard, and Matrix is ten times worse to sign up for and use.

I hate to say it, but Matrix is never going to be mainstream. Its UX is bad and it seems like it’s too bloated to fix. If I tried to get people to move from Discord to Matrix, they’d never take me seriously again. It was hard enough getting people to move from Facebook Messenger to Signal.

Also interested in this. The ideal solution would stream to a private server for storage in real-time, with access control so you can grant trusted individuals access.

This would allow retention of evidence in a scenario where your phone is seized/destroyed/lost or you are detained, and would give you (and whoever you choose to grant access) the ability to control distribution, unlike a livestream to Twitch or YouTube or whatever.

FOSS projects are often labors of love.

Nobody who isn’t completely deranged loves marketing.

SEO (search engine optimization) has dominated search results for almost as long as search engines have existed. The entire field of SEO is about gaming the system at the expense of users, and often also at the expense of search platforms.

The audience for an author’s gripping life story in every goddamn recipe was never humans, either. That was just for Google’s algorithm.

Slop is not new. It’s just more automated now. There are two new problems for users, though:

1. Google no longer gives a shit. They used to play the cat-and-mouse game, and while their victories were never long-lasting, at least their defeats were not permanent. (Remember ExpertsExchange? It took years before Google brought down the hammer on that. More recently, think of how many results you’ve seen from Pinterest, Forbes, or Medium, and think of how few of those deserved even a second of your time.)
2. Companies that still do give a shit face a much more rapid exploitation cycle. The cats are still plain ol’ cats, but the mice are now Borg.

Well I’m sorry, but most PDF distillers since the 90s have come with OCR software that can extract text from the images and store it in a way that preserves the layout AND the meaning

The accuracy rate of even the best OCR software is far, far too low for a wide array of potential use cases.

Let’s say I have an archive of a few thousand scientific papers. These are neatly formatted digital documents, not even scanned images (though “scanned images” would be within scope of this task and should not be ignored). Even for that, there’s nothing out there that can produce reliably accurate results. Everything requires painstaking validation and correction if you really care about accuracy.

Even ArXiv can’t do a perfect job of this. They launched their “beta” HTML converter a couple years ago. Improving accuracy and reliability is an ongoing challenge. And that’s with the help or LaTeX source material! It would naturally be much, much harder if they had to rely solely on the PDFs generated from that LaTeX. See: https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessible_HTML.html

As for solving this problem with “AI”…uh…well, it’s not like “OCR” and “AI” are mutually exclusive terms. OCR tools have been using neural networks for a very long time already, it just wasn’t a buzzword back then so nobody called it “AI”. However, in the current landscape of “AI” in 2025, “accuracy” is usually just a happy accident. It doesn’t need to be that way, and I’m sure the folks behind commercial and open-source OCR tools are hard at work implementing new technology in a way that Doesn’t Suck.

I’ve played around with various VL models and they still seem to be in the “proof of concept” phase.

I’ve been using cryptpad.fr (the “flagship instance” of CryptPad) for years. It’s…fine. Really, it’s fine. I’m not thrilled with the experience, but it is functional and I’m not aware of any viable alternatives that are end-to-end encrypted.

It’s based on OnlyOffice, which is basically a heavyweight web-first Microsoft Office clone. Set your expectations accordingly.

No mobile apps, and the web UI is not optimized for mobile. I mean, it works, but does using the desktop MS Office UI on a smartphone sound like fun to you?

Performance is tolerable but if you’re used to Google Sheets, it’s a big downgrade. Some of this is just the necessary overhead involved in an end-to-end encrypted cloud service. Some of it is because, again, this is a heavyweight desktop UI running in a web browser. It’s functional, but it’s not fast and it’s not pretty.

I don’t see how it could possibly be unintentional. It’s too bizarre.

For instance, Mozilla said it may have removed blanket claims that it never sells user data because the legal definition of “sale of data” is now “broad and evolving,” Mozilla’s blog post stated.

Uh huh.

The company pointed to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) as an example of why the language was changed, noting that the CCPA defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”

Yes. That’s what “sale of data” means. Everybody understood that. That’s exactly what we don’t want you to do.

I wonder if the “never will” part is legally binding. Most companies bend over backwards to avoid making future-looking guarantees like that.

Question for those in the know: does it make sense to use LibreWolf if you don’t want to operate in private browsing by default? In my primary browser, I want my logins and settings and browser history to persist.

I’ve always heard that as one of the big differentiating features of LibreWolf, but I’ve never really played around with it. Can you change those settings, and if you do, is it any different from stock Firefox at that point?

Hmm. According to Wikipedia you are correct, and the original SEQUEL was simply renamed to SQL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History

I’m not sure how much that original SEQUEL/SQL has in common with later publicly-available SQL implementations. I never personally worked with SEQUEL but I was under the impression it was more of a spiritual predecessor to SQL than a direct ancestor. But I trust Wikipedia more than I trust my my memory here, so I guess I was wrong.

Something like that, yes. More info at https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/431329/what-is-the-correct-pronunciation-of-sqlite with links to videos of Richard Hipp (creator of SQLite) pronouncing it.

I actually couldn’t find a section on pronunciation in the official FAQ, though I think it was there in the past. Still, they do use phrases such as “an SQLite database”, indicating that “SQLite” starts with a vowel sound.

SQL is not traditionally pronounced like “sequel”. Sequel was a whole different language.

Official pronunciation for MySQL, SQLite, and PostgreSQL all pronounce each letter.

But “sequel” is probably more common at this point and some of them include it as an alternate pronunciation now.

Yes, his name is Headmaster Gandalf.

DNS over HTTPS. It allows encrypted DNS lookup with a URL, which allows for url-based customizations not possible with traditional DNS lookups (e.g. the server could have /ads or /trackers endpoints so you can choose what to block).

DNS Over TLS (DoT) is similar, but it doesn’t use URLs, just IP addresses like generic DNS. Both are encrypted.

No love for cvs?