Andreas

Is this like when they made the kilogram some function of the speed of light instead of the weight of a metal ball in a French museum?

If you’re comparing stock Android against stock iOS, Apple has more privacy protections against tracking because of App Tracking Transparency.

I have two phones as daily drivers, one Android and one iPhone. Compared to Android, the iPhone is very restrictive and locked down. Adblockers don’t work and you’re forced to use whatever iOS interface it throws at you. Buttons and gestures move around with every update. There’s no way to view and manage internal files, no sideloading, lots of options that are just not accessible to normal users.

The positive side is that iPhones are very optimized and I can get similar performance to my Android phone despite the iPhone being older and having worse specs. The closed ecosystem also has its benefits, because it makes data very hard to get out, so I use the iPhone as a device to sandbox all the Meta crap that I’m forced to use.

It should be pointed out that the author of this article had a private meeting with Meta regarding Threads and signed a NDA. He is also the head of a company that receives funding based on the popularity of the Mastodon software. There may or may not be deals we don’t know about, but he is certainly not an unbiased party.

Meta’s business is monitoring and using online social networks to manipulate human behavior. Their massive userbase will cause Threads content and users to dominate instances that federate with them. It’s more than just “no like”.

This one is probably either small enough to fly under Disney’s radar or has already been shut down. Disney successfully copyrighted one Club Penguin revival project for using the art assets and logo, even though the code was completely rewritten. Maybe this is the one?

There is either no chance of that getting off the ground or the project you are talking about has already shut down. The Club Penguin IP is owned by Disney who aggressively copystrikes Club Penguin revivals.

Nah, that one can be left hidden. It’s a rambling and whiny mess with e-begging at the end. The Ploum.net article describing Embrace, Extend, Extinguish in practice with Google/XMPP and Microsoft/DOC file formats is the strongest argument against allowing corporations into open software communities.

It will continue to work if you’re the only user on your Teddit instance. Teddit (and Libreddit, and any of the Reddit alternative frontends) use the Reddit API un-authenticated and after July 1st, they will be rate-limited to 10 requests per minute. The limit is enough for the activity of one logged-out user but it will break the proxy instances that allow many users to combine their traffic under one IP.

It’s great that they’re going back to traditional, self-hosted forums instead of corporate social media for support and discussions, but damn, I don’t miss having to manage hundreds of accounts with unique logins for each forum. I understand that they want more control over forum moderation and the Fediverse’s “anyone can post there” system makes it troublesome. It would be great if there was more widespread adoption of decentralized, “one login to access everything” systems.

CSCareerQuestions with this exact URL, please. I searched for this name on the programming.dev instance and was led to this comment that suggests ask_experienced_devs is a replacement for CSCQ, but /r/CSCQ had a different focus from /r/experienceddevs. Junior developers and interns were also allowed to contribute to CSCQ and the discussions were specifically focused on finding work in the CS industry, while ask_experienced_devs implies that any kind of question directed at senior devs is allowed.

CSMajors (discussion for CS undergrads) and an EngineeringResumes (rate my resume) equivalent would also be great to see.

The article or the thread? The article is just a list of who’s demanding payment from Twitter and how much Twitter owes each company. The thread explains why Twitter has a confusing system of multiple offices and a brand new expensive building (that they are not paying rent on).

USB-A is one-sided, unlike USB-C, so you can’t do direct data transfers between two devices with USB-A ports. It’s much slower too. Electronic waste is not ideal but it has to happen for a large-scale hardware upgrade. I try to reduce it by recycling my USB-A bricks and cables.

I also cannot understand why, unless you use Apple devices exclusively, you would be happy that one company’s series of devices has to use a completely unique charging system from every other device in the world. I don’t care if Lightning is better when it’s proprietary. If Apple “sticks two fingers up” and doesn’t integrate USB-C charging into the iPhone 15, I won’t be buying another device from them, because I’m tired of having to carry two different cables around - one USB-C for my laptop, Android phone, power bank, speaker and other devices, and one Lightning charger for nothing else but the damn iPhone.

Seeing the community get destroyed is hard, but seeing the whole company the community relies on being taken over by someone who doesn’t care about is okay?! These unpaid janitors seriously need to re-evaluate their priorities.

I am not American so I can’t claim to know about the causes of homelessness there, but I think this is because the homeless can generally be sorted into two categories. One is, as you mentioned, the people who unfortunately encountered financial trouble and lost their home. These people are legally homeless but usually invisible, because they move in with their friends and family or live in their car. They are generally able to financially provide for themselves and will eventually have a home again. Society is very empathetic to this group and there is a lot of support for them, but they’re not what people think of when homelessness is discussed.

The public perception of homelessness is the second type of visible and persistently homeless people, the ones you see on the streets. They suffer from mental disorders and drug addiction, so they lack a support network, cannot provide for themselves normally and will often turn to crime to survive. It’s not unexpected that people see this group as “assaults people in public”, “attracts crime”, “leaves trash and needles around” and lose empathy for them. Now I’m not an expert on this issue and this categorization is obviously a generalization, but it helps to understand why people hold certain perspectives in this debate.

Read the article, the problem isn’t their online activities but the wifi attracting them to cluster outside the library building. The residents don’t want the homeless hanging around outside the library and turning off the wifi would reduce their incentive to be there.

PiHole, Adguard Home and the like can’t block ads on smart TVs? Or is it something like the TV refusing to start if it contacts the ad server and doesn’t get a response?

Oh that would be reasonable then, a 2 day on-site work hybrid schedule with 40 minutes of commute and no overtime certainly isn’t something I would complain about (unlike my current workplace, lol). I assumed the commute was much longer and also read the comment incorrectly because I read it as the new workplace was pushing for fully on-site work as well.

Thanks for the information. I set up a Matrix instance with a friend before and noticed it had significantly more resource usage than expected of a little chat client, then someone else explained that Matrix was trying to discover all of the other nodes on the network so I assumed it was true. What causes so many state changes to be generated?

Anyone can scrape data and corporations are already doing it. But data scraping is considered a legal gray zone and companies can be prevented from accessing data that they are not legally authorized to use, which is why companies like OpenAI retrieve their training data from data dumps and don’t just run web crawlers across the entire internet. A publicly announced platform with an appropriate clause in its Terms of Service can grant Meta the legal ownership of all data from the fediverse that arrives on their platform.

Matrix’s client UX is improving a lot, there is the Cinny client that mirrors Discord’s layout perfectly. The issue with Matrix is its protocol, which faces scaling issues because each instance joining the network is supposed to replicate the entire Matrix network, which will make it difficult for small hobbyists to add instances without crumbling under the load when the network gets too big. There is another Discord-like alternative, Revolt which is self-hostable and uses its own protocol but doesn’t have federation yet.