The elephant in the room, of course, is that this is literally only a problem in the United States. Everywhere else in the world, folks are totally fine using messaging apps. WhatsApp is pretty popular worldwide, and there are regional favorites too. But, the point is, it’s only in the States that people seem to be against this idea. The answer for why is very much up for debate, but the conversation is, at this point, just getting exhausting.
Can confirm, as a Brit. We probably would have a sardonic explanation for why only people in the States are against using other messengers too…
The real issue here is that people in the US are tied to using SMS for real-time chat groups when so many better (and private, and well known) alternatives exist. Thankfully, in Europe, nobody so far as I know ever really uses SMS anymore – whether for single or group chats.
For example, if I type out a sentence and decide I want to add asterisks around a word for emphasis, why does Gboard replace the space between the previous word and the emphasized word instead of just adding the new character? Is this added functionality for something I just don’t understand?...
It’s like people standing in line at the supermarket instead of using the scan-it-yourself-and-self-checkout app. Why???
Some people like the human connection. Some are lonely. Some find the machines stressful.
Look, I’m a consummate checkout-machine-user and always go for that option, much as I always swipe my keyboard, but still, I get it. I actually think it’s a shame that ordinary parts of our human experience that used to be mediated by humans are increasingly dwindling.
now i’m comfortable with openboard, and keeping an eye on florisboard
Sadly, the swiping options on these ones are useless or nonexistent. I find only gboard tolerable for this form of text input now, which is really crap. Swype was king. Long live Swype.
However, the amount of mining is not dependent on the amount of transactions.
Entertain my ignorance on this for a second, but isn’t there some sort of dependence here? Like not a strictly casual dependence, but if transactions were, say, to magically halve for a few days, would that not affect the mining required and thus the total energy expenditure of the mining?
(Obviously the limit case would show this to be true, in that in the absence of any transactions at all, mining would cease. But I’m after something a bit more clearly casually related, somewhat like supply and demand in the marketplace – consumption of beef driving more supply and more methane, e.g.)
I see. But in the limit case where just everybody decided BTC is nonsense and stopped transacting entirely, while mining could continue, eventually it would die out, right?
So in a sense, do transactions not drive the need for mining? If that’s the case, the connection isn’t directly casual so much as one of complicity. Does that make sense or am I still barking up the wrong tree with this way of thinking?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but so long as you root with Magisk and configure the denylist, installing the SafetyNet Fix and changing the Props if you need to spoof a device ID, then you’ll always be able to use Google Pay/contactless, regardless of whether on Lineage or another custom ROM.
It’s a strange post in general. Someone’s substack, written in some generic faux-journalist style, with one source for the main claim (“a Redditor”), who isn’t linked to. Don’t know why it’s being shared here.
I came across everyday topic on Techlore Discussions about free and open source keyboards for Android and discovered this little gem. It is FlorisBoard, a virtual keyboard for Android which respects privacy of the user. I can sigh with relief and finish my search for that singular keyboard for typing stuff on the go....
This is my problem with every keyboard (FOSS or otherwise) since Swype finished. Gboard is the best of the bunch now but I’m loath to use it. I have tried Floris and Open (a fork of it which has swiping) and others, and they are all painful on this front.
True by the letter but not really by practice. PC is synonymous with a computer running Windows, or Linux at a push. I don’t know whether that’s because of Microsoft’s early market dominance or because Apple enjoys marketing itself as a totally different entity, or some combination of the two. But yeah, usage determines meaning more than what the individual words mean in a more literal sense.
But I suppose if you’re buying Apple you’re probably going to buy a new device every year anyway. Never understood the mentality personally.
My cousin gets the new iPhone every single year, and he was up for it at midnight as well, I don’t understand why because it’s not better in any noticeable sense then it was last year, it’s got a good screen and a nice camera but so did the model 3 years ago. Apple customers are just weird.
I think you’re basing your general estimation of the Apple customer on the iPhone customer a bit too heavily. E.g., I have never had an iPhone and wouldn’t ever consider buying one, considering how locked down and overpriced it is, and how competitive Android is as an alternative OS.
Meanwhile, I’ve been on MacOS for something like 7 or so years and cannot look back, for everyday computing needs. I have to use Windows occasionally on work machines and I cannot emphasise enough how much of an absolute chore it is. Endless errors, inconsistent UX, slow (even on good hardware), etc. It is by contrast just a painful experience at this point.
And one of the reasons people buy MacBooks, myself included, is to have longevity, not to refresh it after a year (that’s insane). It’s a false economy buying a Windows laptop for most people, because you absolutely do need to upgrade sooner rather than later. My partner has a MacBook bought in 2014 and it still handles everyday tasks very well.
The reason I gave up on MP3’s and subscribed to Spotify was because Spotify was easy. I’ve been listening “Iron Maiden - Empire of the Clouds” song every day and like a week ago, its removed. This was the last straw for me. Right now I’m trying to find “Stremio” of the music world. Can someone assist?...
What’s the bitrate gonna be on ViMusic though – is it whatever is on actual YouTube video uploads? I imagine that would be very lossy. I could be wrong. If it was ~320kbps I’d be all over it. That’s what I’m looking for really. Short of my current solution, which is Soulseek > cloud service storage > CloudBeats (Android app) for stuff I want decent quality of, and Spotify adfree using XManager for discovery and lower quality listening.
This is snobbish and elitist. The evidence of this thread alone is that people who interact with this instance or use Lemmy generally also use Whatsapp. For many, it is convenient, relatively secure and private, and free. It engrained itself as the default communications platform in many countries, and Meta ownership doesn’t have any tangible impact on its use for anybody, so far as I can tell. The “people are stupid” line is just ignorant bollocks.
My naive understanding would be: a passkey replaces a password for an individual login; a biometric authentication replaces a password for the vault that stores individual login passwords.
Indeed that does seem like the sort of mistake that someone who made the largest purchase of thier life after staying up alll night playing Elden Ring would make
Hey, playing Elden Ring takes some skill and dedication. Did you see the build he put on Twitter that time? It was hilariously stupid. In fairness, maybe he was playing all night with it just to get past very basic foes.
Don’t you feel that WhatsApp is sufficiently insulated from the normal practices of Facebook/Meta/the Zuckerverse though?
Perhaps it’s my naivety, but I’ve never really seen the point of them owning WhatsApp, especially since it integrated e2e encryption and has fought the EU to keep it. From an end-user perspective, it’s just a pretty polished, widely used (and thus useful), and decently private/secure messaging application. I could see the appeal of moving to a Signal, Session, etc., except for their relatively low uptake among the general public where I am.
I have not found another launcher that has the swipe up and down on home screen icons to open other apps
Do you mean using folder icons as app list covers, so that a tap opens the app and a swipe opens the folder? If so, Action Launcher does that (if I’m not mistaken it was the first to do so, and it’s swipe up or down). Neo Launcher also has it (swipe up only).
The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s...
Watched Louis Rossman today, and he’s part of the team behind a new app for watching online video content - not just youtube, but nebula, peertube, twitch and more....
It is an interesting project, not sure where it goes. The title is deeply misleading though. The features of ReVanced make YouTube so much better, whereas this project doesn’t seem to be about making YouTube better so much as circumnavigating YouTube for the comment boxes and as your hub to creators. They seem to be doing different things.
So I’ve been using youtube ad blockers since pretty much when ad blocker extensions were first available. Lately though I’ve been getting hit more and more with these messages that YT was sending out every 5 or so videos telling me that adblockers aren’t allowed. No problem, just gotta wait 5 seconds to x it out and then...
in the end, you’re leeching off a service you enjoy.
I don’t think that’s a fair or true statement.
For one thing, the “service” here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it’s a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access of what is going on in society. So it’s not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.
For another, blocking ads is not merely refusal to pay a fee of some kind. Advertisements are cognitively intrusive, designed to affect your willpower and decision-making, used to track and control your behaviour, compromise your digital safety, and turn you into a product for companies to whom you do not give your consent for the opportunity to be exploited. Blocking that system of “payment” is not simply prudent but right, and the choice between paying a monetary fee or being so exploited is not a fair choice at all.
So mediums with advertising should not be allowed to seek monetary payment? Only mediums without advertising should do so?
Not quite sure how you got to the point you did there. There are different ways to advertise – billboards and TV/radio adverts, e.g., while often odious, are something you can more easily divert your attention from and which are not tracking devices or the product of turning you personally into an item for sale. I dislike them and would prefer a world without them but I don’t think their being attached to organisations in and of itself ought to deprive those organisations of income.
I’m not understanding your logic here.
That is apparent.
For me it’s pretty simple. There is a product - would you like to pay for it?
This is called “begging the question” as a response to me – I’ve called into question exactly both your premise and conclusion, for reasons you’ve not actually engaged with, and then you’ve re-asserted them. You have assumed what you’ve set out to prove.
(1) it is not simply a product (or service – you’ve changed tune there), for the reasons I’ve already outlined. Its use and availability is not analogous to something you can pick off the shelf or pay a tradesperson to do for you. (2) therefore, the question of paying for it (and how) demands different kinds of answer. In the country I’m from, e.g., healthcare is a right and not paid for, neither is early-years education up to 18, and so on. Both are “products” or “services” in some sense of the term, but to speak of payment here is complex and the answer doesn’t simply carry over from thinking about normal products/services.
I feel that all the scary words you can add to a paragraph about advertising based revenue for digital mediums is just your tool to justify your behavior of sticking it to the man.
This can only be a disingenuous response, surely? Rather than engage with the criticism of the nature of modern internet advertising and how corporations use it to affect people, you’ll just summarise it as “scary words”.
I’m being completely serious and I’m interested to understand more about what you mean.
It doesn’t strike me that way when you also write things like this:
you’re equating it to something like healthcare and education.
“equating” sets up a straw man. Such a tactic gives me the impression you think of this as some sort of battle that you want to win rather than a good-faith discussion.
What I had written was not an equating – and I think you should have or indeed did see that – only a comparison to show that something’s being describable as a product or service “in some sense” does not mean it is the sort of thing we pay for in a traditional way. This contradicts the central inference of your argument.
The answer to how I would actually characterise the “service” of YouTube is already in the first comment, so I’ll just quote it again:
For one thing, the “service” here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it’s a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access [to] what is going on in society. So it’s not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.
I stand by that; YouTube has a near monopoly over that media form, and if you require access to information and essentially a key plank of the online public square, then you need to go through it. I regard it as a (positive rather than negative) right that we do all have – not to use YouTube specifically but for information, opinion, discourse, politics and more to be available to us all. As it happens, YouTube is a key platform for the arrangement of all these things. Twitter also is/was, which is why Musk’s buyout was in principle concerning, and then in practice very shit once he created a two tier system of access to and impact on that public space.
That said, it might be worth looking into Stremio and Debride. I’ve been seeing that pop up lately and it’s mostly torrent based.
Just a correction on this point. With a debrid service, it’s not actually torrent-based – not in the sense that at any point you’d be utilising any p2p traffic/mechanisms. It relies on torrenting activity in a different sense, in that what you download is encrypted DDL files from the debrid provider’s central cache, whose origin is in torrents. And if there’s no files meeting your search query stored already in the cache, but which are available through public trackers, then you’d request the service downloads the torrent to its cache. So at no point are you accessing peers. Worth noting that afaik, this is all for public trackers, not private.
I’m a bit astonished how often I see this kind of thread, even here. It’s like when people complain about FOSS apps charging subscriptions or standalone fees. How many times does it have to be pointed out that piracy as an activity does not define piracy as a movement or a collective?
I’m certain this simplistic “piracy = not paying for stuff” take can only come from a kind of ignorant individualism, one that lacks any structural analysis of why, when, and for what content people turn to piracy (and why, when, etc, they stop).
He would have been better off not talking about harm directly but the ability to cause harm; he actually used that wording in an earlier comment in this chain. (Basically strawmanned himself lol.)
Because as a standalone argument for encryption, it’s fairly sound – hey, the ability of somebody to cause harm via encrypted messaging channels is the selfsame ability to do good [/prevent spying/protect privacy, whistleblowers/etc], and since the good outweighs the bad, we have to protect the ability to cause harm (sadly).
The problem is it’s still disanalogous – the ability to cause harm via LLM use is not the selfsame ability to do good (or to do otherwise what you want). My LLM’s refusing to tell me how to make a bomb has no impact on its ability to tell me how to make a pasta bake.
Yup that’s my one issue, otherwise I’d swap in a heartbeat. You can do it through nextcloud servers but not any free one so far as I can see. Wouldn’t know where to start with a paid alternative.
Edit: Podverse, also FOSS, has a sync feature as part of their subscription. It’s $18/year. Haven’t used it to know how well it works, but much cheaper than Pocket Casts anyway (and a 3 month free trial it seems). It’s on F-Droid.
I was recently unable to find a particular journal article I wanted to read that was referenced in something else I was reading. I only could find an abstract on Google Scholar, and nothing at all on Z-lib. I was able to get a full copy by just emailing the author at her university (I guess its true that most of them will give...
Considering the version you were given by the author could be watermarked in some way, and they could get into shit from a publisher if you uploaded it for mass retrieval, you ought not to do this without their express permission. It’s different if you had downloaded the article from a journal/database yourself, or if it was some other version (like an unformatted manuscript).
Potentially, I suppose. But then most people who want a pirated copy of an article are probably looking for something with at least the right pagination – makes citation easier. So it depends on how much effort you’re willing to give to that endeavour haha. Anything is better than nothing in a pinch though.
I think that very much depends on what sort of article/chapter, what publisher, and what the nature of the copy the author has is (e.g. preprint, journal published version download, unpublished Word manuscript, etc.) It’s hard to make any true generalisations here.
Speaking as a total ignorant from a coding perspective. But I guess that wouldn’t be the hard part, considering that most of Duolinguo is just boxes and text inputs. How difficult it is to create a database of competent linguists with an efficient training who can progressively enhance your understanding of languages?
+1 for LT. The guy that runs it certainly has an open source ethos. The German one despite being a “Complete” series is frustratingly very incomplete, but that aside it was a useful way into the language. The word order explanations were particularly good. Everything is always free and the project as a whole is expanding with the help of volunteers and donations. It’s a good thing to be a part of.
Just a pointless comparison really, based on very particular use cases and tastes, taking all the objectivity out of “objectively better”.
I would never use an iPhone for a daily device. But for some people it clearly makes the most sense.
Me, I have to block ads at the system level (so I root), I like custom ROMs, sideloading, pirating, tweaking, changing how my phone works and how I work with my phone. On any of those grounds, an iPhone makes zero sense. But most people don’t care about any of that, and nor should they really.
9to5Google: iMessage for Android doesn't matter, just use good apps (9to5google.com)
Here's your first look at Private Space, Android's answer to Samsung's Secure Folder (www.androidpolice.com)
This is why your phone doesn't have a matte display - GSMArena.com news (www.gsmarena.com)
There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works (www.theverge.com)
Why does Gboard replace spaces with characters I add between words?
For example, if I type out a sentence and decide I want to add asterisks around a word for emphasis, why does Gboard replace the space between the previous word and the emphasized word instead of just adding the new character? Is this added functionality for something I just don’t understand?...
Each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages (www.tomshardware.com)
LineageOS is currently installed on 1.5 million Android devices (9to5google.com)
YouTube limits Video Viewing for Ad blocker Users (samrome58.substack.com)
FlorisBoard | FOSS keyboard that respects your privacy (florisboard.org)
I came across everyday topic on Techlore Discussions about free and open source keyboards for Android and discovered this little gem. It is FlorisBoard, a virtual keyboard for Android which respects privacy of the user. I can sigh with relief and finish my search for that singular keyboard for typing stuff on the go....
Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB on a PC (www.theregister.com)
Ways to pirate music as convenient as Spotify?
The reason I gave up on MP3’s and subscribed to Spotify was because Spotify was easy. I’ve been listening “Iron Maiden - Empire of the Clouds” song every day and like a week ago, its removed. This was the last straw for me. Right now I’m trying to find “Stremio” of the music world. Can someone assist?...
WhatsApp head confirms ads in the messaging app are still in the works (www.theverge.com)
Peertube's moment might come soon
cross-posted from: feddit.de/post/5294605...
Bitwarden begins adding passkey support to its password manager - The Verge (www.theverge.com)
Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank (www.theverge.com)
Nova Launcher Search gets better with more app integrations (www.androidpolice.com)
Twitter's lost 13% of its daily users and its rebrand has failed (www.bigtechnology.com)
The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s...
A better Revanced (grayjay.app)
Watched Louis Rossman today, and he’s part of the team behind a new app for watching online video content - not just youtube, but nebula, peertube, twitch and more....
I totally forgot how terrible a non-ad-free YouTube experience is
So I’ve been using youtube ad blockers since pretty much when ad blocker extensions were first available. Lately though I’ve been getting hit more and more with these messages that YT was sending out every 5 or so videos telling me that adblockers aren’t allowed. No problem, just gotta wait 5 seconds to x it out and then...
Can someone explain the benefits of Usenet to a long-time torrent-er?
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/6240929...
What's up with people on the piracy subreddit always talking about how they pay for stuff. your on a piracy community and they talk about purchasing digital goods? I don't get it. New piracy gen ?
Mozilla.ai is a new startup and community funded with 30M from Mozilla that aims to build trustworthy and open-source AI ecosystem (mozilla.ai)
Google Podcasts to be shut down in favor of YouTube Music (blog.youtube)
Where to post Academic Articles (libranet.de) en-us
I was recently unable to find a particular journal article I wanted to read that was referenced in something else I was reading. I only could find an abstract on Google Scholar, and nothing at all on Z-lib. I was able to get a full copy by just emailing the author at her university (I guess its true that most of them will give...
How hard is it to build an open source alternative to Duolinguo?
Speaking as a total ignorant from a coding perspective. But I guess that wouldn’t be the hard part, considering that most of Duolinguo is just boxes and text inputs. How difficult it is to create a database of competent linguists with an efficient training who can progressively enhance your understanding of languages?
Android: Obectively Better (pettite.win)
What is favourite File manager app and why ?
Some years back I was a mixplorer user, then switched to solid explorer for some time and now I’m using Material Files....
Piracy friendly Mastodon instance?
Looking for the equivalent of dbzer0 for Mastodon