Julian Stecklina

336 Followers
186 Following
207 Posts
Does low-level systems hacking for food. #x86 #riscv #rust #haskell #cpp #nixos 🌍🇪🇺🇩🇪🇷🇴🇪🇸🇺🇦 | @blitzclone on Twitter
Bloghttps://x86.lol/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=profiles
Matrixhttps://matrix.to/#/@blitz:chat.x86.lol

#Microsoft is clearly becoming desperate due to low adoption rates of #Copilot.

Apparently, Microsoft is now pushing Copilot to all #Microsoft365 personal subscribers and calling it a "subscription price increase". Only when you decide to cancel your subscription are you presented with the option to switch to "Microsoft 365 Personal Classic" without Copilot (and nearly the old price). The classic plan is not presented as an option unless you try to cancel your subscription.

This is a classic scammy trick: Modify the existing plan and add the feature no one wants and hide the old plan from view. Presto, now you have an insane adoption rate you can present to investors as a great success.

I personally don't use Microsoft subscription services, so I don't know if they tried this bullshit in the EU, but if they did, they're asking for trouble. They got sued in Australia over this already: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/microsoft-in-court-for-allegedly-misleading-millions-of-australians-over-microsoft-365-subscriptions "Microsoft in court for allegedly misleading millions of Australians over Microsoft 365 subscriptions"

EDIT: It seems that at least in some areas/situations the "classic" non-AI version is actually even more expensive. This isn't exactly making the situation any better of course.

Microsoft in court for allegedly misleading millions of Australians over Microsoft 365 subscriptions

The ACCC has commenced proceedings in the Federal Court against Microsoft Australia and its US-based parent company Microsoft Corporation for allegedly misleading approximately 2.7 million Australian customers when communicating subscription options and price increases, after it integrated its AI assistant, Copilot, into Microsoft 365 plans.

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission

It's done! #chatcontrol is officially off the table after the danish EU council presidency drops it for good. It's a small but important victory!

Thanks again to @chatcontrol for coordinating grassroots interventions, and everyone else, especially on the fediverse, for joining efforts to fundamentally preserve end-to-end encryption 💜 Also to @Mer__edith and @signalapp for their strong end-to-end encryption work and stances.

Of course, vigilance remains important.

https://www.euractiv.com/news/danish-presidency-backs-away-from-chat-control/

@afilina Works fine as a daily driver these days and it's always shocking to go back to Google on other people's systems. 😅
@afilina I can recommend kagi.com
Barcelona is the first city in the world to endorse the UN Open Source Principles | Info Barcelona | Barcelona City Council

Projects such as Decidim have made the city an international role model in democratic digital innovation.

https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga has just reached 3000 stars on github.
What is it ? a hand-on tutorial to learn processor design with FPGAs.
In a couple of evenings, you will create a full-fledged Risc-V.
Why would I want to do that ? Why not !!
The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe

https://techtrenches.substack.com/p/the-great-software-quality-collapse

"We've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news."
The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe

The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM.

From the Trenches
My wife is currently documenting our challenges with having a baby with hip dysplasia. This is surprisingly common, yet took us by surprise. Check it out here: https://www.instagram.com/hip_dysplasia_eu?igsh=eWtzOG5pc3F0Y3d3
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We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/germany-chat-control.pdf
@jgalowicz @bluca The creepy dancing AI children next to the boat are a bit much. PS. I already wrote about cross compiling in this scenario: https://x86.lol/generic/2024/09/21/cross-compile-riscv.html
Immutable Systems: Cross-Compiling for RISC-V using Nix Flakes

In my last post, we built whole disk images for embedded systems using Nix. This approach is well suited for RISC-V or ARM systems, but you probably don’t have a powerful build box for this architecture. You wouldn’t want to build a Linux kernel for hours on a RISC-V single-board computer praying that you don’t run out of RAM…

x86.lol