I don’t like so called smartphones (flashy devices to mine your data and other reasons) but my regular no touchscreen phone’s microphone is no longer working as it should, making conversations difficult....
I find they’re a pain to use and I only have one out of social pressure, and privacy or not I’m constantly confused on why they’re so popular.
I just use a throwaway account and have the rule of not putting in any data that I don’t want to be read - which is barely anything any way because I do all my computing on my Linux laptop. I figure if they’re collecting location data and recording me then they’re just associating it with “random guy x” because I’ve never given it anything else. I should look in to one of the de-Googled Android distributions but I have so little interest and energy in anything to do with it, if it could be made totally private I would still rarely use it.
You’re not the first person I’ve heard who said that so there must be something there. That’s not my experience however, I find that Reddit makes me angry these days, getting annoyed at all the low-effort, inconsiderate posting. Having a debate on Reddit is impossible I find because saying something that goes slightly against the hive-mind you’ll you’ll be passive-aggressively downvoted, which has a chilling effect on what people say. I like that Beehaw doesn’t have downvotes, especially on local communities. On Beehaw/Lemmy someone might argue with you but that’s at least better I think than the knee-jerk downvote-to-oblivion you get on Reddit.
It’s true that a lot of people are more similar here than on Reddit. I’d argue that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The one-size-fits-all social network for everybody approach I think doesn’t work, it’s more natural to choose a group you fit in to and feel comfortable with (which is how things were on old style forums and message boards). What ever happens to Lemmy/Beehaw in the future, the main thing I hope for is to have plenty of choice of smaller forums which is what’s been lacking in the last decade or so.
Beehaw is a quieter experience than most because it has narrower federation, but you do tend to get a better signal to noise ratio since you miss the spammier instances - I like it.
Beehaw also doesn’t federate downvotes which I think is an improvement.
Only issue is I recently opened another account because theyre leaving lemmy eventually and currently my posts dont federate and all my subscriptions are pending.
Nothing’s concrete yet. I have accounts on several instances for their various advantages, but Beehaw is what I’ve settled on as my main “default” for now. The Subscribe Pending is a bug, I don’t think it affects your posts federating so they’re separate issues if that’s the case.
Posting from a Beehaw account I think does have a psychological effect on me that causes me to naturally tone things down a bit. I think it’s been good for me.
When making a post on Lemmy, it automatically does searches for similar existing posts. On Reddit you often have the issue of people asking the same questions over and over, this feature should definitely help reduce that!
I kind of feel the main issue on Reddit is people who just don’t care and would happily post and upvote irrelevant crap anyway. I don’t understand the mentality.
I don’t think they would do it if they expected that would be the outcome, that’s my scepticism. I think the more likely outcome is that it will turn in to Fediverse by Meta™ in people’s minds.
For power users, I recommend to use a plugin like NoScript though, to block Google/CookieLaw’s hidden JS spyware on the site (they’re on 2/3th of the web tho).
Is proprietary software any easier than that though? Don’t you have to put in much more time removing all the spyware and bloat they put in and then spend all your time perpetually fighting against forced updates and applications being installed without your permission?
Whereas with Fedora my experience is more or less install it and forget it.
The “it’s easier” argument for proprietary software I think died at least 15 years ago.
Admittedly I do have the bias of experience which could blind me to the difficulties, when I phrased my first two sentences as questions they were genuine questions. Between work and personal life I must’ve installed Linux in some form at least 200 times over the last 20 years, so I’m not most users.
I’ve also not used Windows in many years, the last I think was when I had to use Windows 7 for work about 10 years ago and I found it extremely difficult to get it to do what I want. If it’s improved then it’s improved.
On the other hand a novice user can ask somebody to install Linux for them, what about that? That’s what my non-techy parents have done, and it’s easier for them to use Linux (they say so) and easier for me to provide technical support for them.
Or could it be that it might bother them but they just keep quiet and put up with it, assume that it’s part of owning a computer and feel powerless to change anything?
The real power for btrfs for me is incremental backups; you can take a snapshot of your home partition and send it to a backup device, then you can take a second snapshot a week later and just send the differences between them. I do my weekly backups like this. You can keep many multiple snapshots to roll back if needs be since only the differences between snapshots take up space. This is the tutorial that got me started.
I suppose it depends on how much stuff you have, doing a full back up of my home every week is too time consuming to be practical but takes a couple of minutes with this method.
Keeping multiple past snapshots is overkill for me but I do it because I can, more-or-less. It would be useful if I accidentally delete a file and only remember it months later.
Completely agree. Now my hot take for this thread:
If governments some time in the 90s had decided from the start to ban computer hardware from being sold with pre-installed software then we wouldn’t have this problem. If everyone had to install their own operating system from scratch, which like you say isn’t hard if it’s taught, it would have killed the mystery around computing and people would feel ownership over their computers and computing.
Given the importance of computers in our time, isn’t it only proportionally justified to spend an enormous amount of time and dedication in teaching it properly?
I was playing a degree of devil’s advocacy there because I was interested in how the person I replied to would respond.
I don’t think it needs to be as intensive as that, I think a small amount of education would go a long way. Like teaching school classes how to install an operating system on a blank machine as a basic entry point - that would do wonders for gaining a basic appreciation for ownership over computing.
My thought on that is if you generate multiple images through a random number generator and find one that’s interesting or aesthetically pleasing, then you are the creator since selecting it, while low effort, is the creative process.
Essentially yes, I would give the person using AI to generate an original image the credit as the image’s creator. I’m willing to bet that anything “good” AI generates is a result of many attempts and refinements and a human selecting the best result, and to me that makes it a human-driven creative process using a tool, the same as using a random number generator.
I’m deliberately not saying “copyrightable” because I don’t personally believe that digital files should be copyrightable (since recognising a copyright of a number is insanity), but it should be copyrightable in a society that recognises number copyrights.
Been on several interrail trips and would consider doing it again. Do check the prices and any extra charges for what you want to do first, to make sure it’s really your best option. But travelling around Europe by rail is fantastic.
Interesting video, makes a lot of sense. Just a couple of things to add:
In the old days of forums it’s worth remembering that people on the internet had more in common with each other than they do today - i.e. generally they were people who were in to computers.
What really gets me down these days is the extremely low-effort of posting everywhere you go. I think that partly comes from the impersonal nature of online communication. Nobody knows who anyone is any more.
I agree it would be better to go back to independent message boards but it’s a shame there’s no “call to action” - it would be nice but how do we get people to do it? This is a popular YouTube channel, it would be great if it started some kind of ball rolling.
I get that, I live in the south of my country too, but only the US feels entitled enough to say “the south” and expect the whole world to know where they are.
I remember being told off by a moderator in the 90s for not writing full-sentence replies. You can’t even imagine that today. Of course back then, as the video touches on, if you didn’t like the culture or policies of a forum you just moved to another one, there were no cries of “censorship” because you choose where you want to be.
But I think that makes a good point, in the past people could choose whether they wanted to go on a forum for serious discussion, or a different forum for more casual low-effort posting. These days all these different “posting cultures” are forced to be together and end up annoying each other.
It’s probably the same kind of culture clash that the original video talks about. I’ve got to admit it is something that can rile me up probably more than it rationally deserves to, if I let it (and I’m sure others too).
Very anecdotal but I’ve asked my normie friends about Threads and they think it was hardly ever a thing. It may be 100 million active users but that’s still a small percentage of the population it’s available to, and given it’s for profit that might not even be enough to sustain it. With Mastodon and Lemmy it’s quality over quantity, I’m happy to be smaller, just hope we can keep Threads out if they last long enough to get around to federating.
I recently stumbled across this superb little word processor, and I’m just blown away by how good it for being made by one dude for free. It’s like a slimmed down version of Scrivener or Papyrus, with a wonderfully simple and easy to use interface....
I’m only going by what the website says, if I click “how to install”: wavemaker.co.uk/blog/how-to-install-a-pwa/ there’s no mention here of it working with Firefox or relevant instructions (same as in the FAQ), and if I go to wavemaker.cards there’s no obvious way of installing it and it’s heavily promoting Google Drive.
I’m also not sure it’s FOSS, this page makes reference to “Open sourcing the code for the older versions” which seems half-hearted at best and I’ve not found any code yet.
Even if I’m wrong about all of the above I’m still put-off by the Google-centric focus of it all.
It started as a dislike of Windows 98 for me, extremely unreliable and buggy OS. I didn’t switch immediately but that was what got me looking for the alternatives, having fully made the switch around the time of Windows XP. Windows only seems to have got worse since then, stories of advertising, forced updates, etc., I’m glad I never had to deal with that.
Even if there’s no good remote out there (I’ve not looked into it either) I would argue that the drawbacks of not having a remote are vastly less serious than the drawbacks of using one of these “smart” devices.
Question about phones: Am I overreacting?
I don’t like so called smartphones (flashy devices to mine your data and other reasons) but my regular no touchscreen phone’s microphone is no longer working as it should, making conversations difficult....
Worst person in tech 2023 - semi final (mastodon.online)
Is Beehaw federating with Threads?
I’m out of the loop. Are we federating with Threads or not?...
what is your favorite lemmy instance?
ngl I may prefer lemm.ee, just saying
underappreciated feature of Lemmy: automatic title search when making a post
When making a post on Lemmy, it automatically does searches for similar existing posts. On Reddit you often have the issue of people asking the same questions over and over, this feature should definitely help reduce that!
Threads testing mastodon integration (www.threads.net)
It also smells nice... (pawb.social)
What random good thing happened to you this year?
What do you use for movie recommendations?
And a bit of a follow up question because I want to complain a bit, why does it feel like most movie recommendation websites suck?
Vivaldi Is Available on Flathub – Brno Hat (enblog.eischmann.cz)
Anti-ULEZ extremists blow up a ULEZ camera using an IED (news.met.police.uk)
Car-brains now actually blowing things up in suburban England, with the tacit support of Tory MPs.
HP misreads room, awkwardly brags about its “less hated” printers (arstechnica.com)
What is a privacy friendly application that you'd love to have, but no one has developed yet?
TC on open source evangelists (lemmy.ml)
[email protected] - Oh my gosh I just figured it out....
What's with all these hip filesystems and how are they different?
You know, ZFS, ButterFS (btrfs…its actually “better” right?), and I’m sure more....
Whats your such opinion (discuss.tchncs.de)
FOSS Games are actually pretty good! (rldane.space)
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/6819337...
An AI Singer-Songwriter Just Debuted Her Original Song—And The Responses Are Just Brutal (www.comicsands.com)
AI singer-songwriter ‘Anna Indiana’ debuted her first single ‘Betrayed by this Town’ on X, formerly Twitter—and listeners were not too impressed.
Should AI images be copyrightable?
I’ve heard arguments for both sides and i think it’s more complicated then simply yes or no. what do you guys think?
How is Interrail?
Thinking about going with interrail, Im from Romania. Anyone went aleady? stories, tips to share?
Reddit updates look after rough 6 months and ahead of reported IPO (arstechnica.com)
The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What? (yewtu.be)
Threads Is Coming to the EU in December (www.macrumors.com)
Wavemaker Novel Planning and Writing Software - One of the most impressive creative writing apps I've tried, and it's free! (wavemaker.co.uk)
I recently stumbled across this superb little word processor, and I’m just blown away by how good it for being made by one dude for free. It’s like a slimmed down version of Scrivener or Papyrus, with a wonderfully simple and easy to use interface....
what caused you to get into Linux?
What caused you to get into it, are you an evangel and are you obsessed?
Amazon is now automatically playing fullscreen video ads on Fire TV (9to5google.com)
Selecting the New Face of openSUSE is Underway (news.opensuse.org)
The openSUSE community’s logo contest submission phase is now complete and voting for the logos has begun....