MostlyHarmless@MostlyHarmless@thecanadian.social

Firefox for iOS has gotten a native ad blocker, with a fixed list based on EasyList. Better than nothing, but falling short of what a standalone solution offers: aside from the lack of customization, Firefox’s blocker doesn’t block ads in web search engines or the ones on the browser’s own homepage — Mozilla’s bread...

BoredOS is an x86_64, FOSS operating system, with extensive documentation and GPLv3 license. It was created from scratch and already has a graphical interface.

All major LLM providers will be required, by the AI Act of the European Union, to add watermarks to the generated content, including text. Anthropic, owner of Claude, explained its method: Large language models like Claude work by generating one word at a time. Each time the model decides on the next word, it...

Another victim of the AI bubble: Mico, Microsoft Copilot’s mascot that looks like a blob of semen. According to the company, it’s been demoted from Copilot Voice and now only shows up in Copilot Learn Live. (What are Copilot Voice and Copilot Learn Live? Your guess is as good as mine.) Mico’s near-demise is part of...

Many fictional stories unfold over long journeys. This site puts some of them, from books and movies — Moby Dick, The odyssey and The motorcycle diaries, for example — on a real, interactive map.

A collection of amazing open source projects built by Brazilian developers. It’s missing our own projects, right? Tip from Renan (the Brazilian guy who develops our projects).

Sometimes I get bitten by the free software bug. I’ve followed the consumer tech industry for decades, and immersed in that universe, it’s hard not to grow disillusioned with its monopolies, questionable practices, and normalized abuses. Although disdain for big tech is more fashionable these days, we’re far from...

Android has picked up that iPhone feature of tapping two phones together to share files and contacts via AirDrop. (In Google’s case, obviously, it’s through Quick Share.) The only downside is that the rollout is uneven. Already available on the Pixel 6 and later, “coming soon” for the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, Fold 8,...

The Gnome Shell user interface has mostly seen minor refinements and quality of life updates in recent cycles, but on the design side we’ve explored a lot of longer-term things we’d like to do. Some of these we have relatively complete plans for, others are more vague ideas that need more research and prototyping....

Of the many oddities that a beginner has in macOS, the way to install applications is one of the most curious. Just drag the icon anywhere, preferably the /Applications directory. Installers (*.dmg files) usually open windows in the Finder with instructions. Marcin Wichary collected a handful of them to analyze the...

In a post on the Windows Latest blog, Abhijith M B warns that Windows 11’s weather app uses up to 1.2 GB of memory (RAM). That’s a lot, indeed. To put that excess in perspective, he compares it to macOS, whose equivalent app uses on average 20% of what Windows does. Even more than the Windows app, I was surprised to...