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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Enhanced Visual Search in Photos allows you to search for photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately matches places in your photos to a global index Apple maintains on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, and use an OHTTP relay that hides [your] IP address. This prevents Apple from learning about the information in your photos. You can turn off Enhanced Visual Search at any time on your iOS or iPadOS device by going to Settings > Apps > Photos. On Mac, open Photos and go to Settings > General.

    Apple did explain the technology in a technical paper published on October 24, 2024, around the time that Enhanced Visual Search is believed to have debuted. A local machine-learning model analyzes photos to look for a “region of interest” that may depict a landmark. If the AI model finds a likely match, it calculates a vector embedding – an array of numbers – representing that portion of the image.

    So it’s local. And encrypted. How is this really news? Am I missing something?


  • I’m Canadian now but kept my Hungarian SIM, still paying it to this day after seven years. It’s 9EUR/mo for some paltry amount of data, but mostly just using it for online services that require a Hungarian or European phone number for MFA. I just bought extra data that counted as EU wide roaming data when I last visited.

    However the options for my wife were very limited as a non-EU traveller. I think it was €30 or something for ~5GB of data usable in Hungary only and limited to ten days (we stayed for 14) and added as an eSIM with the help of an app/website. It was not transferable to other EU member states, and this was one of the best deals we could find that did not require us to go to a physical store location. This included us checking offers for prepaid SIMs from the major providers (Vodafone / -Mobil / Yettel)








  • Wigs are a very specialized industry. I had a friend whos husband immigrated to Canada via Express entry being a wig maker specializing in natural, hair based wigs, that’s how high in demand the profession is. The guy was supplying multiple province’s patients with wigs.

    I’d imagine that such a business would not have to stay open for long hours during the day or even multiple days per week due to most orders actually coming in through phone from healthcare providers or those affected.

    Where I live, we have a helium balloon party store nearby. It’s open two hours a day from 10:00-noon, except on Saturday it’s 10:00-13:00. The guy’s business is booming, you can see people lining up for their orders and picking them up during that window. The store is so specialized but affordable compared to their big box competitors like party city etc, it’s hard to beat.