I had Virgin Media broadband when I was a student from roughly 2013-2016. It was cheap because they were the only ISP at the time that didn’t bundle a phone line. It was unreliable, never hit advertised speeds and was throttled to all hell. The first time I called to cancel it, I discovered that their cancellation hotline (the only way to cancel) was offline for the entire day due to a ‘network upgrade’.

Recently a Virgin media salesperson came to my house to promote their new fiber network and when I told him I had been a customer for 3 years and thought the service was terrible he said he didn’t want to hear about it.

I wish them a very happy bankruptcy.

Trusted computing was never about security, it’s a way to take ownership of computers away from users and give it to computer manufacturers and Microsoft. It’s also not a good security model.

The usefulness of alphafold had been grossly overstated by science media. The structures it generates are mostly nonsense, they typically can’t generate molecular dynamics simulation trajectories with the correct physical properties, which makes them not useful for drug discovery. in computational biology today you’ll most often find them in use as a starting point for structure refinement or as one of many sources of data for some integrative method. Again, not useless, and an improvement over previous structure prediction algorithms, but they didn’t ‘solve protein folding’ or anything, like Google might have you believe. I don’t put much stock in Nobel prizes, I mean, they gave one to Henry Kissinger.

Google also released alphafold 3 under a strict non commercial license, which severely limited its usefulness for both commercial and academic work, the latter of which all but requires using more permissive licenses. I assume Google wanted to monetize a commercial version of it at some point.

I’ve been using Openfold 3 in some work I’ve been doing recently, and while the software is a bit undercooked, it does produce structures similar to alphafold 3 without any of Google’s bullshit. So I wouldn’t worry too much about this announcement. The protein folding will continue with or without them

has Mozilla considered spending their limited resources working on their web browser

The article mentions it briefly but sheep farming really has devastated the ecology of the Yorkshire dales.

my mum bought a fairphone 3 about 5 years ago and is extremely happy with it, so far she’s gone through one usb-c port and one battery. it looks and feels exactly like a normal phone but it pops open with just 4 screws. helping her fix it has taught me that phone manufacturers could make repairable phones easily and they all just choose not to

people were saying this about millennials as well. in fact, James Flynn (for whom the Flynn effect is named) literally said that teenagers in 2009 were dumber than teenagers 30 years ago. call me when there’s a consensus from neuroscientists about this. for that matter, call me when standardised testing is a useful measure of intelligence

I looked in stoat’s issue tracker and there is an issue asking for video chat which is 5 years old and still open. Safe to say it’s a dead project.

spotify pays me half a cent per stream, the profit margins for them must be fucking insane. and the music sounds like shit. I’d much rather people pirate it than support these leeches

if you want to support artists you like, buy the music, ideally on bandcamp. if you do have to steam it, Deezer at the very least won’t vandalize the audio

PewDiePie is the most basic kind of cryptofascist hiding behind a veil of edgy humour and he should not be welcome in the open source community

the browser itself doesn’t matter. Google have had 10 years to do what they want with the specs for html, CSS and JavaScript, to define everything from browser extension APIs to the http protocol itself. they have won. not only have they spent a decade architecting the web in a way that mostly benefits them, they have made those specifications so bloated and complicated that nobody can develop a competitor from scratch. it took years to undo the damage wrought by ie6’s stagnation but this is different. this shit can’t be undone. it’s fucked forever

in my opinion the market is too segmented. Facebook took Oculus and refocused them onto standalone vr instead of pcvr, and secluded away a bunch of releases as Oculus exclusives. psvr is in a similar state. there isn’t enough vr software being made to support two separate walled gardens plus steamvr. in their rush to establish a vr monopoly, Facebook killed it. that’s my opinion

I’ll be hanging onto my vive cosmos for occasional games of beat saber but I think vr at this point has become an expensive novelty

just a few years away bro just a few more years just give us £500k for a new quantum computer bro just a few more years

alphafold had set the field of protein folding back a decade

I’m probably not going to pay $10 a year with additional fees to have my music on a website unless a lot of people are already using it

I love this book! it’s long but dense, it’s trashy but it’s also high art, it’s tragic but it’s also inspirational. I’m glad Dumas was paid by the word, because it means he wrote as much. You should check out the musketeers books if you haven’t already, I think Count is a stronger book but they’re all written in the same engrossing style.

the number of people willing to bat for this on Lemmy is truly disturbing. what do they think these ai models are trained on?

I understand that this is a big loss for the emulation community, but as someone who did a bit of romhacking during COVID, I found their moderation to be terrible and arbitrary.

because they’re not a vigilante justice organisation they just want the media to talk about it

it’s the only way they can get the news to engage with it