sab

sab, 9 months ago

I'm sure a decent chunk of the people lined up on the tracks are shareholders shouting at him to keep the trolley running at all costs.

sab, 9 months ago

Saving the bats from dog infestation.

sab, 9 months ago

Similar experiences on the Fairphone 3. MicroG is fantastic - everything you unfortunately need from Google services, but in a way that maintains your privacy.

At least on the Fairphone 3, downloading an apk for the Google camera app turned out to be a lifesaver though - the open source camera applications were unfortunately not capable of producing as good pictures, which is very important to me. :)

sab, 9 months ago

You can install your own launcher - I prefer the KISS launcher, which is great at getting out of your way and just do exactly what you want it to do as efficiently as possible.

sab, 9 months ago

It's by far the worst part of the project. Any time you have a problem - however minimal - you have to search specifically in the community forum because there's just no way in hell including /e/OS in the search terms is going to help you find anything useful at all.

sab, 9 months ago

Of course you can search for just "eos" alone, but when trying to troubleshoot specific issues it gets much more complicated. Believe me, I've been there.

Such as this issue, which I eventually found a solution to on the e/OS/ forums:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=eos+camera+quality+%22fairphone+3%22&t=ffab&ia=web
The results have very little to do with /e/.

sab, 9 months ago

I'm loving my Fairphone 3! Upgraded the camera modules to the 3+ camera, and changed the charging port once after water damage. Also used /e/ for a while, but back to stock now.

The improved camera of the Fairphone 5 looks tempting (also OLED), but can't justify upgrading when my Fairphone 3 ia still perfectly fine. I guess it'll have to wait until 5G becomes an absolute necessity and I'm left with no choice. :)

sab, 9 months ago

And you can also overwrite it and install stock Fairphone Android, it's pretty easy.

sab, 9 months ago

In the city I live in 4G/3G is actually a little spotty already, while 5G is working great. But I think that's just Italian infrastructure rather than the old networks being phased out already...

sab, 9 months ago

Yes. I guess at best it's technically the truth because the masters of war tend to sit safely miles from the front lines plotting death and destruction; the don't literally "march" on earth.

There is no fighting in the war room.

sab, 9 months ago

To borrow a couple of lines written for the UK in the 60s:

Think the time is right for palace revolution
But where I live the game to play is compromise solution

Biden is a well meaning old man whittling away at the problems the best he can within the rules of the system. The problem is that the system has been rigged against working people for at least 40 years now; some people feel the problems go deeper than what you can solve by being by the book and doing politics as usual.

sab, 9 months ago

The only news here is that it's in the news.

sab, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

The last thing I want is an option for this. My gosh, imagine the amount of options you would end up with if every single design choice was turned into an option. Who in the world would like that many options.

I'm happy to just have a design team work on whatever they think looks better and works best for the user experience, and implement it after some rounds of public review and testing. This looks neat enough to me - slightly less cluttered than what my current Nautilus window looks like while maintaining the same functionality.

sab, 10 months ago

Would be hilarious if they took legal action.

sab, 10 months ago

A luxury bunker is so wonderfully late stage capitalism.

sab, 10 months ago

There is the very promising @Interledger Foundation, which aims to produce a defederated "open and inclusive payments network that puts humanity first". It could eventually prove useful for money flow on federated platforms.

I'm intuitively critical of all online financial services like this one, but then you realize it was not only funded by the Mozilla Foundation and Creative Commons, but it's actively support by the w3 consortium. Furthermore, it doesn't use blockchain.

sab, 10 months ago

I'm very happy with Nextcloud notes.

I'm using it with Obsidian on my computer though, so not entirely open source all the way, but there's plenty of good open source markdown editors out there.

sab, 10 months ago

You should be able to follow it at @LemmyWorld, but I'm not sure how the interaction between Lemmy and Mastodon works for following users. They haven't posted anything yet of course, so for now it'll look empty.

If you want to follow the account without being logged in to the fediverse at all, a good option is the RSS feed. :)

sab, 9 months ago

I didn't realize the @-link redirects you to the external site from Lemmy. The correct URL for you guys over there should be /u/[email protected], which means that /u/[email protected] should be the correct path for Lemmy users. :)

sab, 9 months ago

Oh dangit - you're right. It seems not being able to follow users is a feature, not a bug in Lemmy, with the advice of the developer being to use Mastodon or kbin instead if you wish to do so. There's a new issue open about it though, so hopefully they'll give in to popular demand.

Sorry for my misinformation! Since I don't have an account over there I just assumed the follow button would appear once signed in. :/

sab, 10 months ago

You can self host it as well. This is just a restriction of the online service - the problem being that most people are not going to self-host their conference calls.

sab, 10 months ago

Kbin is pretty good for this. Every magazine has two tabs: one for microblogs, and one for threads. The administrator of the magazine can choose relevant hashtags, and all federated posts from the fediverse containing the hashtags will show up in the microblog section. People end up in kbin communities just by making themselves discoverable with hashtags, they don't even need to know what kbin is.

There are, as far as I can tell, two problems:

1. There's no combined view showing both posts and microblog. As a consequence, the microblog is often neglected.
2. Federation doesn't work well - you only see these posts if you're viewing it from the same kbin instance as the one you're visiting from. In effect it's basically only useful for kbin.social at the moment.

Still, both of these things seem like they could be resolved, and it's a very neat solution. :)

sab, 10 months ago

Ah, the trolley solution.

sab, 10 months ago

I guess there's also a democratic argument here - the judicial branch is not accountable to the people directly but merely to the laws stemming from the people, so a deontological approach to upholding these laws is basically the basis of their democratic legitimacy. When they start making consequentialist or utilitarianist arguments it basically means they're engaged in judicial activism, which is often seen as a bad thing - that's not what the role of judges is traditionally supposed to be.

For the other branches it's much more complicated, as they're supposed to represent the people more directly. They don't choose their moral code - the public does when it votes for them.

I just got home, it's Friday night here and I'm a little drunk, so I don't know if that makes sense haha. It's an interesting question.

sab, 10 months ago

I will never understand why it's so freaking hard to deal with bike thieves. Should be the easiest thing in the world to catch these people red-handed and make it so that stealing bikes was actually associated with risks. If law enforcement wanted to actually improve the quality of life in cities, it would be an obvious place to start.

sab, 10 months ago

After all it's a slippery slope to doing cocaine, which is a slippery slope to amphetamines, which is a slippery slope to stealing bikes. They take problem by the roots.

sab, 10 months ago

I don't think increased sentences is necessarily where the shoe is pressing, but rather enforcement in general. Right now the risk of getting caught stealing a bike is next to zero, and it's basically an industry. It's not primarily poor people who need to steal to afford food, it's organized groups travelling around stuffing bikes into vans.

sab, 10 months ago

Out of curiosity, except obviously people who don't use Windows, who would it be the wrong choice for?

sab, 10 months ago

This copypasta has done so much more to inform people about GNU than any somewhat reasonable piece of writing could ever have done.

sab, 10 months ago

Ooof.

Well, interesting to know. Thanks!

sab, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

At least on my phone I could swipe the notification a bit to the left to reveal the cog, "disable notifications", and disable the "standard" category of notifications.

In other news, there's no way in hell I'm installing the full app. People texting me there will just have to wait until I'm by a computer.

sab, 10 months ago

What keeps this from being blocked by the service providers like any other third party app?

sab, 10 months ago

At least for third party WhatsApp clients, they have tended to go down by not only seizing to work, but with WhatsApp temporarily blocking any account connecting from them.

I'm curious if there's a solution not so much for convenience on android, but it would be a game changer for Linux phones where WhatsApp and Facebook messager is not available at all except in the web interfaces. :)

sab, 10 months ago

That's something I never really appreciated before. In Europe of course we mostly consume media produced in our own language or in English, but it's completely normal to watch (and for broadcasters to air) shows from all over Europe, either dubbed or with subtitles depending on the country. Subtitles being the only tolerable way of course.

If a show started airing in French or German with subtitled on US television this would be a huge deal?

sab, 10 months ago

Your market at home is also much greater than what any European country could ever dream of. Spain has some occasional hits in Latin America (La Casa de Papel was huge everywhere), but they don't have anything comparable to the American industry.

But for sure, the international market is huge - how terrified Hollywood is of offending China is solid evidence of that. :)

sab, 10 months ago

True, I remember Squid Game was huge in the US. Did people watch it with subtitles?

sab, 10 months ago

I think in animated shows it's fine. Classic Disney movies often have fantastic translations, and it makes it fun to meet people around Europe because we all know the same songs but in different languages.

sab, 10 months ago

"e.g." is short for "exempli gratia", which is latin for "for example".

It hasn't been announced that they're getting rid of it, but it's a good example of what Reddit could do to fuck up.

sab, 10 months ago

Looks smooth and I can see a lot of good things about this, but I also hope it doesn't slowly shift Pixelfed away from being an image sharing site. I really don't want my feed over there cluttered up with other things than photography and occasional traditional art - polls and text posts is just not what I'm there for.

Still, I'm sure they've thought about that, and there's some great potential for art groups. :)

sab, 10 months ago

I just saw this response. Our telephone poles are safe - text posts will be groups only.

sab, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush. If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.

Genetic engineering is enabling us to harvest monocultures that completely fuck up the ecosystem, in the long run not only underlining important dynamics such as species needed for polluting plants, but also the very soil on which they grow.

It's been a while since I read Brave New World, but that also didn't stand out to me as the most central part of his critique to me. In my reading it was about how modern society was going to turn us into essentially pacified consumer slaves going from one artificial hormonal kick to the other, which seems to be what social media is for these days.

Things that seem like short term good ideas, and certainly great business ideas, might fuck things up big time in the long run. That's why it's useful to have some people doing the one things humans are good at - thinking creatively - involved in processes of change, and not just leave it to the short term interests of capital.

sab, 10 months ago

Well, Fox News, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Twitter were a fresh twist. I guess all good scifi mirrors history in one way or another, just taken to the extreme with help of technology. :)

sab, 10 months ago

The brilliant thing in Brave New World was that it didn't at any point make it obvious that people were miserable slaves - they could leave any time they wanted, and lived a life of bliss. Still, as a reader, you end up feeling like you'd rather take the place of the savage than any of the characters living in the hypercommercial utopia. At least that's how I felt.

sab, 10 months ago

I was referring more to the plot of brain-dead cable and social media algorithms fuelling the death of democracy. But you're right, it's probably been written many times - I'm not very knowledgeable of sci-fi, and there's a lot of brilliant work out there. :)

sab, 10 months ago

I mean, it's a challenging hypothesis to prove. I might just be pessimistic.

I think there is some reason for valid concern though. The New York Times memoriam for Clifford Nass is an interesting and somewhat worrying read.

Dr. Nass found that people who multitasked less frequently were actually better at it than those who did it frequently. He argued that heavy multitasking shortened attention spans and the ability to concentrate.

Maybe more practically, it's just hard to argue America wouldn't be in a better place right now if it wasn't for Fox News and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica.

sab, 10 months ago

I guess it makes people stupid all in the same way, while they used to be stupid all in their own unique ways. The morons have organized, synchronized, and become weaponised.

Somehow I feel like they're also dumber though - if everyone's an idiot in their own way at least they're original.