For electricity generation: Solar across the UK was about 5% in last year, while Wind was about 29% and Nuclear 13.9%, and hydro 1.3% - so 49.2% of electricity generation over the last 12 months was carbon neutral.

That’s a huge success story - still a long way to go, particularly as that does not include Gas burned in homes, but the UK is moving in the right direction. And Scotland is a huge source of Wind & Hydro power for the whole country.

So even if the barriers to solar in your home are still high, the grid is getting cleaner and cleaner every year. There are also community projects installing wind generators which you can join/invest in if you do want to try and get a slice of cleaner energy and solar is not realistic.

Edit: Source on UK electricity generation: https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/historical Good data on UK electricity generation

As people have said, you can add Jellyfin as a service to start with windows regardless of users being logged in.

No one seems to have said how to do this.

The easiest way is to use the NSSM open source tool - it stands for “Non Sucking Service Manager” and it gives a GUI route to create services, as well as some useful reliability and fall back functions.

It can also be used from the command line if you prefer but regardless it’s probably the easiest way without faffing around with powershell or command line and in built windows tools (which do suck).

Edit. The official website is NSSM.cc and it includes guidance on how to use it. There are also plenty of guides online if you search “how to create a windows service”.

Edit2: the easiest way is to use the Jellyfin windows installer itself but the documentation is pretty vague on that and gives a warning about ffmpeg config. It should work but using NSSM will give you more direct control. I think the installer uses NSSM anyway.

AI is a marketing term at the moment, and it’s all orne big financial speculative bubble. Just look at Nvidia and how it’s share price is so divorced from reality.

LLMs can bd uaeful tools and have value in themselves. The problem is the hype and misuse of the term AI to promise the earth. Also the big tech companies rushing to push tools that are not yet fit for purpose.

Any tool which “hallucinates” - I.e. Is error strewn and lies - is fit for nothing. It’s just a curio and these general tools are going AI and LLMs a bad reputation. But well designed and trained LLMs targeted at specific tasks are useful.

“Time to switch to uBlock Lite or another ad blocker”

No. Time to switch to Firefox or derivative such as Librewolf.

The metaverse a resounding failure, Facebook has latched on to the AI hype train in hopes of making the company relevant. They’re basically put of ideas on how to feed the beast of “forever growth” the markets demand.

That’s rather simplifying history and not the main reason Netscape failed.

Netscape lost because Microsoft used it’s dominant monopoly position to bundle Internet Explorer with windows. By 1999 the writing was already on the wall - IE had already overtaken Netscape market share and was growing rapidly.

The Mozilla project and code base change was a gamble to try and fix the problems. When Microsoft released IE6 2001 they didn’t bother releasing another major version for 6 years as they were so dominant.

So while the code base change was arguably mishandled, at worst it accelerated the decline. Instead the whole story is a poster child for how monopoloes can be used to destroy competition. The anti trust actions in the US and EU came too late for Netscape.

Ironically Microsoft was the receiving end of the same treatment when Google started pushing Chrome via it’s own monopoly in search. They made a better product than the incumbent but they pushed it hard via their website that everyone uses.

Genuinely, nothing so far.

I’ve tinkered with it but I basically don’t trust it. For example I don’t trust it to summarise documents or articles accurately, every time I don’t trust it to perform a full and comprehensive search and I don’t trust it not to provide me false or inaccurate information.

LLMs have potential to be useful tools, but what’s been released is half baked and rushed to market as part of the current bubble.

Why would I use tools that inherently “hallucinate” - I. E. are error strewn? I don’t want to fact check the output of an LLM.

This is in many ways the same as not relying on Wikipedia for information. It’s a good quick summary but you have to take everything with a pinch of salt and go to primary sources. I’ve seen Wikipedia be wildly inaccurate about topics I know in depth, and I’ve seen AI do the same.

So pass until the quality goes up. I don’t see that happening in the near future as the focus seems to be monetisation, not fixing the broken products. Sure, I’ll tinker occasionally and see how it’s getting on but this stuff is basically not fit for purpose yet.

As the saying goes, all that glitters is not gold. AI is superficially impressive but once you scratch the surface and have to actually rely on it then it’s just not fit for purpose beyond a curio for me.

That is a good point. I have moved to Proton mail but I keep my Gmail account as a backup and it’s part of my still used Google account. Can’t see myself ever shutting it down completely just in case, as much as I avoid Google as much as possible now.

Control+Shift+H or you can find the link to it in the history menu in the main Firefox menu. Or at the bottom of the history menu from the history button if you add it to your toolbar. Or in the Library section if you use that menu/button.

The sidebar is a cut down overview.

Same for bookmarks, the full bookmark screen has more depth and features than the sidebar.

There’s a detailed history window? The sidebar isn’t it; just a quick overview. Control+Shift+H for the full history screen. It’s also in the menus under history, at the bottom. Like the full bookmark window is control+shift+B and linked at the bottom of the bookmarks menu.

There is no market, or not much of one. This whole thing is a huge speculative bubble, a bit like crypto. The core idea of crypto long term make some sense but the speculative value does not. The core idea of LLMs (we are no where near true AI) makes some sense but it is half baked technology. It hadn’t even reached maturity and enshittification has set in.

OpenAI doesn’t have a realistic business plan. It has a griftet who is riding a wave of nonsense in the tech markets.

No one is making profit because no one has found a truly profitable use with what’s available now. Even places which have potential utility (like healthcare) are dominated by focused companies working in limited scenarios.

I pay for my email (Proton) password manager (last pass), and VPN (nordvpn).

I’d say subs that maintain your privacy and security are well worth it - there is no such thing as a free lunch and instead the tech giants are dining out at the expense of users.

Googles ad monopoly needs to be torn apart. Because YouTube premium prices may actually represent what it really costs to maintain video sites like YouTube, but Google have managed to destroy all competition with the free model and now there is no one realistically able to compete on content or price.

There are plenty of options for personal computers; you have to make the choice to go private and personal.

I built my own desktop, which remains very common and is relatively easy to do. I have Linux and Windows on it, and use Linux nearly 100% as I agree I don’t like ads etc. I use a Firefox with ad blockers and don’t get ads; I use lots of open source software even to access services like Youtube (Free tube).

There are also even linux laptops, and the Frame.Work laptop which is fully modular and bring your own OS.

There are open source OS for phones.

You’re right about the corporatisation of the internet and services, but it remains up to users to vote with their feet and chose to take back their privacy and person computing.

Linux is at 4% of desktop users in recent months - that is many millions of people actively choosing to exist in a space where they control their personal computers. People don’t need to remove computers, just chose to set them up to be what they want them to be.

As others have said, gaming is thriving - AAA and bloated incumbants are not doing well but the indie sector is thriving.

VR is not on the verge of collapse, but it is growing slowly as we still have not reached the right price point for a mobile high powered headset. Apple made a big play for the future of VR with its Apple Vision Pro but that was not a short term play; that was laying the ground works for trying to control or shape a market that is still probably at least 5 if not 10 years away from something that will provide high quality VR, untethefed from a. PC.

AI meanwhile is a bubble. We are not in an age of AI, we are in an age of algorithms - they will and are useful but will not meet the hype or hyperbole being banded about. Expect that market to pop and probably with spectacular damage to some companies.

Other computing hardware is not really stagnating - we are going through a generational transition period. AMD is pushing Zen 5 and Intel it’s 14th gen, and all the chip makers are desperately trying to get on the AI band wagon. People are not upgrading because they don’t see the need - there aren’t compelling software reasons to upgrade yet (AI is certainly not compelling consumers to buy new systems). They will emerge eventually.

The lack of any landmark PC AAA games is likely holding back demand for consumer graphics cards, and we’re seeing similar issues with consoles. The games industry has certainly been here many times before. There is no Cyberpunk 2077 coming up - instead we’ve had flops like Star Wars Outlaws, or underperformers like Starfield. But look at the biggest game of last year - Baldurs Gate 3 came from a small studio and was a megahit.

I don’t see doom and gloom, just the usual ups and downs of the tech industry. We happen to be in a transition period, and also being distracted by the AI bubble and people realising it is a crock of shit. But technology continues to progress.

After being forced to standardise to usb c and be responsible for some of the e-waste it produces, apple has finally relented.

They fought tooth and nail against the EU regulations to force charging standards. I don’t care if they up sell cables to some people; most people will reuse what they have and thats the whole point of the regulations.

Regulation works.

Probably a pixelation joke too for nudity that the kids won’t get but the adults will.

Maybe he broke terms of service with the streaming companies but they should be pursuing him in civil courts. This feels like abuse of the criminal justice system to retrieve money for companies that were negligent in how they were running their streaming businesses.

This guy produced music and he alsp streamed the music even if it was bots at industrial scale. He seemingly met the criteria needed to get money from the streamers. I’m not a lawyer at all but on cursory look at the definition and elements of wire fraud, I guessing this will hinge on whether this was a “material deception” - but he produced actual music and he streamed it, so is it?

Also i wonder whether it can be proven that the intent was to “defraud” rather than take advantage / game a system.

It feels like the tax payer is bearing the cost of prosecuting someone for a dispute between a person and the multi billion dollar music industry.

Also the music industry trying to paint this as theft of money from other artists is a bullshit - the streaming fees are supposedly divided out proportionately from overall streaming. He caused more streaming so the pot was bigger, and he took a proportionate share of that bigger pot. And any disproportionate sharing reflects the shitty practice’s of the streamers and the big music rights holders who are essentially monopolies squeezing out the smaller competitors from the system.

The article is a bit vague on the pros and cons of reflective LCD screens.

It seems to be pros that it has a good refresh rate, can be used without a backlight so is good outdoors and indoors in a bright room, and maybe better for your eyes due to the lack of the backlight/blue spectrum light. It also may offer better colour depth than e-ink currently.

The cons are not clearly addressed but presumably battery life is worse than e-ink but better than a backlit display such as OLED or AMOLED, that colours are still not as good as other LCDs even if better than e-ink, and it seems cost (although that may be due to the small market at present).

Also there is no obvious innovation noted in the article so its not clear what has changed about these displays? It sounds more like some small companies are just using the displays in a new way to try and mimick paper. But maybe thats wrong or will change?

Maybe this would compete with e-ink if cost comes down. The battery benefit of e-ink with a static image is one of its big benefits, to the point that its being used for shelf labels in supermarkets. E-ink isn’t going anywhere but good to have more choices in the tablet space.

This is badly written and ignorant article. Fat32 supports up to 16Tb partition size (depending on cluster size - 2Tb -16Tb).

Its microsoft’s windows tools that arbitrarily only allow users to create 32Gb partitions, and it is this that is being changed. This is not a change to Fat32, this is a change to windows. 3rd party tools on Windows and other systems like Linux have long offered more options for partition size.

That its taken to 2024 for Microsoft to fix the command line tool (and still not fix the GUI tools) is ridiculous.

Firefox will support Manifest v3. However Mozilla will be implementing Manifest 3 differently so the routes Ublock and other extensions use to maintain privacy and block ads will still be available. Firefox will support both the original route and the new limited option Google is forcing on Chromium.

Googles implementation deliberately locks out extensions by removing something called WebRequest, supposedly for security reasons but almost certainly actually for commercial reasons as they are not a neutral party. Google is a major ad and data broker.

Apple will apparently also be adopting the same approach for Safari as Mozilla is for Firefox.