“Anonymous has decided to enforce the Judge's order since you and your sycophant staff ignore lawful orders that go against your fascist plans,” a defacement message posted to GlobalX’s website reads.

Link to a Reddit post by an activist I know.

But to summarise, Amendment NC21 to the Data Use and Access Bill would require sex to be defined as "sex at birth" for all identity verification requests.

This includes people who have changed their sex legally, which will now be separately catalogued.

This means that all kinds of people, including (potential) employers, landlords, government staff etc. will be able to look up these details about you.

This amendment will be voted on on the 7th of May, so if you're in the UK please badger your MP to vote against it (template email in the Reddit post)

I got tired of Google shoving AI down my throat in yet another place in my phone.

I'm surprised it even gave me the choice to "report and block".

... in the context of the 2010 Equalities Act.

Personal note:

This is a dangerous precedent that is already being used to justify banning trans women from women's bathrooms, and will likely allow male police / security to manhandle women to ascertain their gender. It will also put trans women at a further disadvantage for getting jobs, as if there wasn't enough stigma as is.

Get ready for the genital inspectors, more transpotting (like with that non-trans lady in the Olympics) and an increased amount of abuse of trans people.

Disclaimer: Not sure if there are other smaller ones in other parts of Gaza.

The good news is that people all over the UK are planning to protest this Wednesday on the 26th.

https://dpac.uk.net/2025/03/welfarenotwarfare-list-of-local-actions/

If you live in the UK, show your support by showing up or spreading the word to people who can!

Introduction

Why does Google insist on making it's assistant situation so bad?

In theory, assistant should be the best it's ever been. It's better at "understanding" what I ask for, and yet it less capable than ever to do so.

This post is a rant about my experience using modern assistants on Android, and why, while I used to use these features actively in the mid-to-late-2010s, I now don't even bother with them.

The task

Back in the late 2010s, I used to be able to hold the home button and ask the Google Assistant to create an event based on this email. It would grab the context from my screen, and do exactly that. This has been impossible, as far as I can tell, to do for years now.

Trying to find the "right" assistant

At some point, my phone stopped responding to "OK Google". I still don't know why it won't work.

Holding down the Home bar (the home button went the way of the dodo) brings up an assistant-style UI, but it's dumb as bricks and only Googles the web. Useless.

So, I installed Gemini. I asked it to perform a basic task. It responded "in live mode, I cannot do that". Asking it how I can get it to create me a calendar event, it could not answer the question. Saying instead to open my calendar app and create a new event. I know how to use a calendar. I want it to justify its existence by providing more value than a Google search. It was ultimately unable to answer the question.

Searching the internet, apparently both of the ways I had been using assistant features were the wrong way to do it. You have to hold down the power button, that's how to launch the proper one. My internal response was:

No, that's for the power menu. I don't want to dedicate it to Assistant.

Well, apparently, that's the only way to do it now, so there I go sacrificing another convenience turning it on.

Pulling teeth with Gemini

So I ask this power-menu-version of Gemini to do the same simple task. I tried 4 separate times.

First, it created a random event "Meeting with a client" on a completely different day (what?).

Second time it just crashed with an error.

The third time, it asked me which email to use, giving me a list, but that list did not contain the email I was interested in. I asked it to find the Royal Mail one. No success.

So, quite clearly, it wasn't using screen content.

I rephrased the question: "Please create an event from the content on my screen". It replied "Sure, when's this for?"

I shouldn't have to tell you. That's the point. It's right there.

Conclusion

There are too many damn assistant versions, and they are all bad. I can't even imagine what it's like to also have Bixby in the mix as a Samsung user. (Feel free to let me know below.)

It seems like none of them are able to pull context from what you are doing anymore, and you'll spend more time fiddling and googling how to make them work than it would take for you to do the task yourself.

In some ways, assistants have gotten worst than almost 10 years ago, despite billions in investments.

As a little bonus, the internet is filled with AI slop that makes finding out real facts, real studies from real people harder than ever.

I write this all mostly to blow off steam, as this stuff has been frustrating me for years now. Let me know what your experience has been like below, I could use some camaraderie.

I distinctly remember the right (including trolls on Lemmy) arguing that US citizens shouldn't vote in democrats, as they would perpetuate the genocide while Trump would end it.

I suppose they were right, he wants to expedite it by helping Israel with it directly.

(I've also posted this here on reddit to increase reach)

BigKaka's AGC9.2.14 V14 GCam mod, available here, now supports photosphere, all onboard cameras, and all modern V9 camera features on Pixel 9 series of phones. No need for a config (tested on my Pixel 9 Pro).

Previous GCam mods (I tried quite a few) either:

• Weren't based on more recent GCam versions, so were missing features
• Had working Photosphere but none of the other features worked
• Only the main camera worked.
• It just plain crashed on start.

To remind everyone, Photosphere was taken off from the Pixel 8-series onwards. While there were workarounds for Pixel 8-series users, Pixel 9 users have been stuck without it since launch.

As a big fan of the feature, I'm glad I can now use it again without having to switch between camera apps to take normal pictures or worrying about crashes.

Background

I have had the same Kingston DataTraveller DTSE9 since around 2010, when I was still in school. I've carried it on my keychain for at least 12 years and it still works, its "the old reliable".

That said, it's slow. Very slow. I use it mostly as a boot USB for Linux / Windows, so I need several sticks with decent random read speed, and decent write speed for when I update them.

My criteria were:

• All-metal construction for durability, including the keychain loop
• Sits well on a keychain next to keys
• Reasonable speed, including random reads.

Testing method

I evaluated the sticks in two ways.

I ran CrystalDiskMark with 256 MiB (x5) configuration.

I also measured the angle at which the USB stick sits on a keyring. I found that several of them could not sit perpendicular to a keyring it because of their geometry, which makes it difficult to comfortably use them next to keys.

At the datum of 0 degrees, the key sits perpendicular to the keyring.

Results

The competitors

Here are the 6 main competitors in this space I bought.

All transfer units are in MB/s.

Some additional notes:

• The Samsung Bar had really sharp corners. You might need to file them down like I did.
• Corsair GTX: the 128GB version is no longer available and the lowest capacity is 256GB. It's more of a portable SSD in the form of a USB stick, which makes it really fast, but it's bulkier than a normal USB stick, though not by much. Often it takes up more than one USB port because it's wide. It's still very good and I recommend it.

Other devices

Some related products I own but don't qualify for this comparison but are offered up here for context.

Here's why they don't qualify.

• Crucial P3 Plus: It's an NVME SSD. Can be made portable with a good enclosure, but too bulky for what I'm looking for.

• Samsung 860 Evo: It's a SATA SSD, definitely not the right form factor.

• Sandisk Ultra Curve: I bought this thinking it was made out of metal, but it was not. It's fairly flimsy plastic.

• Kingston DTSE9 16GB: This is my old stick. The old reliable. No longer sold, but I've tested its successor.

• Samsung SD Card: It's a 2016 MicroSD card connected to my PC via a MicroSD-SD adapter and a USB card reader. I included this as a meme.

Conclusion

There are no clear winners in this fight.

• The Corsair GTX is the fastest in all categories by a country mile, but has a larger form-factor than other entries and higher price. Very good, but not for everyone.
• Samsung Bar has the fastest random writes, and decent performance in other metrics for its USB stick form factor, but sits awful on a keychain due to the angled hole.
• The Integral Arc 3 has solid random performance, but worst sequential performance than the rest.
• Sandisk Ultra Luxe gets the best overall balance of performance, but does not sit on the keychain super well.
• The two Kingston's perform effectively the same, with the Micro being much more compact. That said, that can be a disadvantage on a keyring if there are adjacent items.
• All competitors (bar the GTX) had similar random reads.

For me, I'd say the right choice is either the Kingston DTSE9G3. It's a nice upgrade over my old DTSE9 and sits nicely next to it's grandfather. If I needed any random writes though, for copying lots of small documents like code files, I'd pick the Integral Arc 3.

This is a short how-to on how to set custom values for LapSharp sharpening in Handbrake.

Not sure if this is the right place to post this. I would have historically posted it to a dedicated sub-reddit on Reddit, but I can't stand the owners of that website nowadays.

This is all original work, but I may myself repost this as a blog post at some point to try to improve reach if this gets burried.

Why?

I like Handbrake's LapSharp sharpening, but I found I wanted something in between the Stronger and Very Strong presets, which have a big jump between them, for a movie I was encoding. Therefore, I was trying to find out how to use the "Custom" value in the drop-down to get something in between the two.

I am not an expert in video encoding nor a command line wizard, so I prefer to use Handbrake over FFMPEG for most encoding tasks.

Finding out how

A general search around the internet, a skim through the documentation and questions to the prominent AI tools of today gave me no (or incorrect) answers on how to set these values.

It was only with some extra digging through the handbrake forums that I found people posting their logs for an unrelated problems that I noticed that Handbrake logs the following when you encode with LapSharp:

[09:01:35]  * video track
[09:01:35]    + decoder: h264 8-bit (yuv420p)
[09:01:35]    + filters
[09:01:35]      + Framerate Shaper (mode=0)
[09:01:35]        + frame rate: same as source (around 23.976 fps)
[09:01:35]      + Crop and Scale (width=1920:height=1040:crop-top=20:crop-bottom=20:crop-left=0:crop-right=0)
[09:01:35]        + source: 1920 * 1080, crop (20/20/0/0): 1920 * 1040, scale: 1920 * 1040
[09:01:35]      + Sharpen (lapsharp) (y-strength=1.1:y-kernel=isolog:cb-strength=0.55:cb-kernel=isolog)

Sure enough, pasting this string into the Custom textbox when the Custom preset is selected gave me equivalent results to the Very Strong preset.

Looking through the source code of Handbrake, I found the function that converts presets to values. It's written in C, which is not my forte, but we can see a bunch of if statements that pick values based on the Preset (Ultra-light, Light, Medium etc.) and the Tune (None, Film, Grain etc.). Comparing with my log, we can determine that In the code strength[0] is y-strength and strength[1] is cb-strength. Kernel is picked purely based on Tune value, and seems to always match between y-kernal and cb-kernal.

else if (!strcasecmp(preset, "stronger"))
{
    strength[0] = 0.5;  strength[1] = 0.25;
}
else if (!strcasecmp(preset, "verystrong"))
{
    strength[0] = 1.1;  strength[1] = 0.55;
}

Here's a chart of values for Grain Tune:

Ok, but how do I use it?

If you want to go between Presets values, simply interpolate (pick values between) two presets. For example, with Grain Tune, We can see from the code that

Stronger is y-strength=0.5:y-kernel=isolog:cb-strength=0.25:cb-kernel=isolog

Very strong is y-strength=1.1:y-kernel=isolog:cb-strength=0.55:cb-kernel=isolog

So, the mid-point between the two is y-strength=0.8:y-kernel=isolog:cb-strength=0.4:cb-kernel=isolog

Then, simply copy-paste this into your Custom textbox:

Conclusion

The approach above seems to work for me in the few cases where I need a bit more control than the presets afford. I recommend playing around a bit with the values yourselves and letting me know how you get on!