AI ‘Bloat’ in browser blowing up CPU and drains battery

Slashdot tells us that a new “AI-bloat feature” of Firefox 141 blows up CPU and energy usage referring a neowin.net article that luckily offers an easy solution: disabling it. Here’s how:

you can disable them through the browser’s advanced settings. Head to about:config in a new tab, accept the risk warning, and use the search bar to find the controls. To kill the AI chatbot feature, search for browser.ml.chat.enabled and set it to false. To stop smart tab grouping, search for browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled and set it to false.

Stop GNOME Software Background

To avoid GNOME Software from running in the background, you can take several approaches based on the solutions discussed in the context.

One effective method is to disable the autostart entry for GNOME Software. This can be done by copying the file /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-software-service.desktop to ~/.config/autostart and adding X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false at the end of the file. This prevents the process from starting upon boot, which can free up significant memory.

Additionally, you can turn off background downloads by using the command gsettings set org.gnome.software download-updates false. This setting can also be adjusted through the preferences GUI of GNOME Software.

If you prefer a more direct approach, you can use terminal commands to stop the GNOME Software process. Run ps -el | grep gnome-software to check if it is running, and then use the command killall gnome-software to stop it.

Another method involves disabling the GNOME Software service by removing the autostart file located at /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-software-service.desktop.

Lastly, you can configure your network connection to “metered” which might help in preventing GNOME Software from running in the background.

By implementing these methods, you can effectively prevent GNOME Software from running in the background and reduce its impact on system resources.

The fastest USB

The fastest USB key are not normal memory sticks but SD cards of a decent class with an USB-C 3.1 adapter

This is the suggestion from Davide Depau, found running several benchmarks with EtchDroid

SD cards are made to put them in cameras and it’s not uncommon to get 300 MB/s write even with a phone.

The slower ones do 100 MB/s on average

Whereas I haven’t found a way to get consistently fast USB sticks. The more expensive ones are generally better but not always. On average, flash drives do not do more than 70 MB/s and after a while they drop even slower when they run out of cache. So do SD cards, but they generally have bigger caches and hardly fill it up with the ISO of arch

Also, in the last 10 years I have noticed (empirically) a substantial improvement in the durability of SD cards. 10 years ago half of even branded SD cards would die on me, now even the ones from the fucking sub-brand on Amazon are OK

Telegram emoji list with codes and descriptions – K3A

After almost 2 years of using Telegram, I finally discovered that it is possible to enter emoji using its name after “:” character. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any complete list of available emojis anywhere, so I had to dig deep into the Telegram desktop source code to generate it. It was far more complicated than

Code changes and relevant files are available in this repo: https://github.com/k3a/telegram-emoji-list.

Source: Telegram emoji list with codes and descriptions – K3A