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I can’t type right to save my life. If I want Boost it’ll either come up “Voist” or “Boat” depending on whether I tap or glide. (And switching to a private keyboard has made this more of an uphill battle for me.)
You’ve got me dead to rights about forgetting where things are (besides the home screen), which is why I’m glad my launcher of choice has things organized not just in the Apps drawer, but in folders within them.
I appreciate the insight though. Not everybody’s workflow is going to be the same, and needing X apps at a certain distance will affect different people different ways.
I’m not really a fan of “clean” and “minimalist” launchers when they get to the point of impeding my productivity. And keeping a curated list can tap into muscle memory, improving speed further.
For example:
I’ve got 13 apps I can launch with a single tap, 13 more one extra swipe away (unless you count the swipe into my app drawer, which would bring it up to ~32 more).
Just something to keep in mind when looking for a launcher: you might want to find your definition of fast. If KISS works for you, all the more power to you. But I lament the lack of FOSS launchers that are more Nova-esque.
Correct. This is one article that goes over a multi-hop VPN that’s sort of relevant regarding how you, as somebody in the middle of this process, would not see what is being relayed even if you’re closer to the end-user.
(Obviously this isn’t quite as far as Tor goes, but at least it explores the principle.)
All you need is a web browser running Snowflake to help people connect to Tor!
In the US there are several laws about providing abortions to women. If one such group existed on Discord, it could be used by legal, extralegal, and extremist interests to target those women.
Trans people just aren’t official targets of legal discrimination…
…Well, not across every US state.
…Not yet, at least.
That phrase is more often used as a post-hoc justification for harm, or to gloat, than as a legitimate warning.
I bring up “the email incident” because it’s a reminder that Proton may record stuff that’s not encrypted, which includes the vast majority of emails.
And it’s not to say that you wouldn’t trust it with one individual service, but whether it’s wise to trust it with so many services at once, from a security, privacy, and even monetary perspective.
Not every concern is FUD, and I think you’ll start seeing diminishing returns every time you repeat it.
There’s a lot of metadata Proton passes around, and two of their oldest flagship products (email and VPN) require you to put a lot of trust in one company. For email, you trust them to encrypt them without snooping. For VPN, you trust them to not collect logs about where you’re going.
And in the former case, they were compelled to give up at least a little data in the not-so-distant past.
Bundles in general are not great…
Companies and businesses benefit from the bundling bias, which usually is an indication that consumers are losing out. By creating bundled packages that people do not fully take advantage of, businesses are getting more money than they usually would and reap a greater profit.
And that’s before we factor in whether it’ll keep people from searching out alternatives thanks to convenience:
The successful deployment of a platform expansion strategy requires leveraging a customer group (composed primarily of end consumers) from one interaction to another, which would entail multiple contractual and technical tactics that differ in their degree of interference with customer choice. The more coercive these tactics are, the more they will resemble the effect that tying and bundling practices have on consumer behavior and thus the more likely to trigger competition law scrutiny.
Companies like Apple also keep people in their ecosystem by offering nice things upfront and then introducing sunk cost issues.
Gatekeeping valid criticism with ad hominem does nothing. I’ve already suggested multiple positive ways SN can make money, and it’s by offering value rather than selling subscriptions to editors they didn’t make and don’t maintain.
Thankfully I don’t need to show my contributions to open-source to prove myself to you, because I’m sure at that point you’d just shift the goalposts to some other arbitrary thing.
AFAIK there’s nothing to stop you from learning to code
I learned to self host. I learned to hack the extensions so they’d work when the SN company broke them.
But sure, it’s my fault for not learning enough. How dare I expect to take someone else’s code and just run it (ie, the thing they’re doing with their editors)
I understand the need for Standard Notes to make money, but I believe that offering the convenience and security of hosting is a good way to do this, not by selling subscriptions for self-hosted users to access extensions that are mostly wrappers for someone else’s work. Especially the editors:
- Standard Notes shouldn’t sell a subscription for me to use a thin wrapper for someone else’s markdown editor on something I host on my own server.
- Or a wrapper for someone else’s WYSIWYG HTML editor project that hasn’t been updated since 2021.
- Or a wrapper for someone else’s spreadsheet app.
(This is also probably why so many Standard Notes editors look out of place next to each other; they were made by totally different people at different times.)
I’ve been decreasingly enthused about Standard Notes since I started self hosting it.
- First, it was a little weird that the biggest draw of their premium subscription was not their cloud but extensions, which were mostly made by third parties and needed only a static site to host. But I could host my own extensions so this was no big deal.
- Then they made it harder to host and install your own extensions, making you have to select them one at a time instead of pointing to a single place.
- Then they started moving functionality like folders into extensions.
- More recently, a bug appeared where the logged in account would start trying to sync with the default instance instead of the one you initially entered, on both desktop and mobile apps.
- And possibly the last straw for me, they discontinued synching self-hosted instances on their web app, without warning.
And I haven’t been particularly thrilled with the idea of putting all my privacy needs under a single banner either. Email isn’t secure. You need to put a ton of trust in your VPN provider. I don’t think either of those services should be provided by the same company…
ETA: When did Standard Notes add AI generated pictures to their homepage? They don’t look good.
They posted a reason, but unfortunately the reason was it was getting abused.
But I did discover something: the list of alternative servers, which might not have been very up-to-date anyway, has vanished from their servers sometime after February.
Mozilla isn’t having a good time fighting on behalf of users privacy. They recently bought an AI company with private data, and now their new Mozillafied privacy policy still says they can sell it to advertisers.
The jury is still out about whether they can send your Monitor data to their ad-sale subsidiary.
Sounds like you have too stable of a temperament to be a Lemmy server admin to me. Just wait until I tell you what I know about the guy who built a server just to downvote someone else on here, the one platform where downvotes don’t matter.
spoiler
This is not a bit. I found someone who did that.
I don’t like how privacy is becoming more of a binary. If the choices really become “either let the phone turn into a beacon or stuff it in a Faraday bag” then that’s one hell of a choice isn’t it?
And hypothetically, if phones were always capable of doing this to some degree and we just weren’t informed somehow, then they’re finally rolling that functionality out because it’s become culturally normalized. Which frightens me more, frankly.
Disney’s fighting AI by using the 4D chess method of figuring out how to use it in their movies
Something that appears more human is more likely to elicit them sending their private data. And that data is then sold, obviously without consent, and used however the buyers feel.
Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data…
– Vladimir Prelovac, CEO of Kagi AI and Search
Remember Replika, the AI chatbot that sexually harassed minors and SA victims, and (allegedly) repeated the contents of other people’s messages verbatim?
It might not be as mind-rotting as TikTok but it’s not good.
True with the first part, I dropped “in China” because that’s not a helpful qualifier. I was thinking of how the FreedomPhone was using Umidigi hardware, but that never made it into my post.
Besides, Pine itself (which is pretty good) is based in Hong Kong and manufactures phones in China.
I had no idea about Fair… That’s pretty funny. They say they pay their workers extra, but not directly where the workers are. I read about their “European design” first
Disclaimer: my opinion
AI seems like a bit of a nothing burger in terms of interesting stories. We have stories, sure, but it’s still just generative trained things.
The biggest quantum computing story I saw was about iMessage implementing it, which was also a gateway to discovering Signal already had.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37571919
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39453660
(Signal’s response to iMessage)
https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/111975543824684264
I probably have no business with this question because I don’t use MacOS (much), but I’ve noticed a few things.
Updates
Updates are free, but because they only support so many years of hardware, you’ll have to eventually replace your old Mac with a new one.
Security updates are actually really important.
“Eventually” probably means a Mac will continue getting 6-7 years of support after it’s produced, not when you buy it. And Apple tends to sell models for a while.
Example: if you buy a brand new 2021 MacBook Pro, expect 3 years of support.
Macs introduced between 2009 and 2015 could expect to receive seven or eight years of macOS updates—that is, new major versions with new features, like Ventura or Sonoma—plus another two years of security-only updates that fix vulnerabilities and keep Safari up to date. Macs released in 2016 and 2017 are only receiving about six years’ worth of macOS updates, plus another two years of security updates. That’s about a two-year drop, compared to most Macs released between 2009 and 2013.
Apps and stores
MacOS users do get more free first-party (Apple-made) apps with more accolades than typical Windows users do. But the third party landscape has less selection and more price tags than Windows alternatives; a smaller platform means there will be fewer developers, after all.
The App Store on MacOS works similarly to the Windows (or really any other) one. That means apps can be free, paid, have monthly subscriptions, or be removed by either Apple or the developer at any time, for almost any reason, with probably no recourse for you.
Apple has been super scummy about their iOS app store, but their desktop app store is totally optional and thus not as scummy.
Open Source
The open source community is actually pretty decent about porting their software to MacOS. It’s popular for developers
LibreOffice does work on Macs.
As does VirtualBox for emulation. There are probably better emulation solutions for Macs, but I haven’t recently looked… Parallels used to be a big deal, and Windows compatibility has always been important to some extent.
This might be stretching the definition of “common” and “torrenting,” but BitTorrent created BitTorrent Sync with similar tech for personal file synchronization. It was later rebranded Resilio and still exists today.
An open-source alternative that works in a similar fashion, SyncThing, also exists.
Tor is Firefox, why are you calling it “a shit-quality browser” while defending Mozilla so hard