• 3 Posts
  • 109 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I think it’d be less creepy if there was an easily accessible public dashboard displaying this telemetry. E.g. like counters showing how many people hide the bookmark bar. If you can instantly see what data your browser is sending in an easily digestible format (ie not a dump of JSON in a submenu), it’s easier to gain a quick understanding of the benefits vs minimal privacy tradeoffs.

    But it really depends on trust: trust that they’re not collecting more than they claim, and trust that the data is properly anonymized. Mozilla has lost that trust.






  • Why are you assuming that it is? Maybe it’s because I’m not a religious person, but I don’t see anything morally wrong with sex work. Whether someone is doing it against their will is a separate issue, but that’s not an assumption I’d make without other evidence.

    If you really are coming at this issue from a religious point of view, then there’s no point getting into a discussion here since I’m not going to change your mind on that (nor do I care to; believe what you want). Otherwise, I’m curious what your actual arguments might be.




  • It’s not just the tankie stuff. Tbf this place at times feels like the far left version of 4chan, and I say that as a very left person. Reddit’s upvote system has always had an issue with brigading/dog piling leading to hostile discussions and echo chambers. In Lemmy, the issue is worse because it feels like most of the people who were drawn here are deeply tied to that culture from Reddit. By contrast, Reddit has a lot more young and innocent people to soften things.

    I quit/deleted my Reddit account many years ago, before Lemmy’s rise in popularity. I just come here every once in a while because I like decentralized/fediverse stuff, but the Reddit formula really does turn me off. I can’t imagine the average person having the stomach for this brand of internet discussions, regardless of political leaning. It’s quite hostile and combative.



  • Also the Android TV app is AWESOME!

    What do you run Android TV on? Raspberry Pi? My cheapo solution has been to use an old Android phone that supports DP alt mode (USB-C to HDMI adapter) combined with a USB hub + generic air mouse/remote + customized launcher.

    It actually works surprisingly well. I installed FCast on it, so it even works like a Chromecast. If I’m watching a video on my phone using Grayjay, I can just cast it to the phone and it will start playing automatically. The only thing stopping it from being perfect is that it can’t turn the TV on automatically. As a plus, since the phone has a battery, it’s always powered on so I don’t have to wait for stuff to boot, and it uses relatively little power.

    … but overall it’s janky and finicky, and the OEM bloatware is probably spying on me, so I’ve been looking for alternatives that can match the good parts of this setup.

    I don’t like Raspberry Pis for this because they’re overpriced. I have a couple that I could use for this, but I’m hoping to find a cheaper solution, and one that I can recommend to friends/family when they ask. (the Android phone I’m using cost me a total of $15 on ebay)


  • For that side of reddit, you’re right.

    But for the uniquely useful side of reddit, federation won’t help. If I post a question like “how do I get this obscure game to run well on this obscure Linux distro?”, nobody is going to repost that for me, and if I don’t maximize the amount of eyeballs on it, it’s unlikely I’ll get an answer. My best choice is to post it on reddit, either in /r/linux_gaming or in the specific game’s subreddit.

    I assume that most users who post anything at all on reddit do it to ask questions like that.


  • The reddit concept of subreddits also doesn’t work well with federation IMO (at least no Lemmy’s implementation).

    Want to talk about video games? Well, there’s no /r/games, instead there are bunch of different /c/games on different servers with varying amounts of activity. You basically gotta make the “pick a server” decision again whenever you post something. If you make the wrong choice, your post might not get seen by anyone, and even if you post to the biggest sub, you’ll be missing out on eyeballs from people on other servers who aren’t subscribed to that instance for whatever reason.

    For example, lemmy.ml/c/linux_gaming and lemmy.world/c/linux_gaming have around the same number of subscribers. Should I post to both? Maybe the same people subscribe to both, so that’s pointless? Or maybe I’ll miss out on a lot of discussion if I post only to one? There’s no way for me to know.

    For me, it makes Lemmy less useful than reddit for asking really niche questions and getting useful answers. For posting comments on whatever pops up in my feed though, it works great.

    I don’t have any good solutions to this, and I’m sure it has been considered already. When I first joined, I remembered seeing people bring this same issue up, but it doesn’t seem like it went anywhere? (Or maybe it did?)


  • As a software engineer who started programming when he was 11, I get what you mean about “ladder climbers” feeling alien (my elitist term for them is “9-to-5ers” or “pedestrians”).

    However, I think this question is dumb at least so far as it won’t work to weed out the people you think it will. I don’t read fiction often, and the only scifi books I remember reading are Dune and Prey, but that’s very out of character for me. It’s pretty much luck that I read those, and more a factor of me just being an old fart (I’m almost 30, and that’s a lot of time to stumble upon at least one scifi book). Ask me this question a few years earlier and I’d draw a blank.

    Both were good books, but nothing that would consider a “favorite”. Dune is memorable to me just because it very clearly was based on Lawrence of Arabia, which I found neat. As for Prey, I only vaguely remember something about killer nanomachines, and that it was a fun read.

    But if you’re specifically looking to hire someone you can talk scifi novels with, then it’s a very good question (as long as you’re mature enough to hire someone who says their favorite book is one that you hate).



  • Literally nothing. A corporation, especially a publicly traded one like that, can’t do much but maximize (ideally long-term, but usually short-term) shareholder returns.

    The Activision-Microsoft merger is a good recent example of this. During the anti trust trial, the CEO of Activision literally came out and said that he believes it’s a bad idea that will be bad for the industry and bad for the company in the long term, using the impact of consolidation in Hollywood as an example, but he has to side with the board. He’s basically legally obligated to.

    I’m not saying it’s unjust or a bad system (and I’m definitely not trying to paint Bobby Kotick as a good guy), I just want to point out that corporations are very simple in their purpose, and nobody should be expecting anything more from them. If you’re disappointed that Google made this 180, that’s on you for falling in love with a corporation. They’re useful tools for producing goods and services, but terrible as a political tool for democracy.

    But for some reason, it became popular to fetishize tech companies, and that spawned megalomaniacs like Elon, Zuckerberg, Horowitz, Thiel, etc who feel like they should be the supreme rulers of our civilization.



  • While it’s true we’re a very litigious country, it’s also a meme that blows the reality out of proportion. In my circle of friends and family, the only lawsuits have been insurance related (car accidents, etc), or financial stuff (sued by a corporation for not paying a debt, suing employer for unpaid wages, etc). All of that is pretty standard stuff.

    I’ve never met or heard of anyone near my circle who has sued another person over some personal issue/grievance. If you run over someone’s foot with a shopping cart at the supermarket, you’re more likely to get into a fist fight (or a shoot out) than a lawsuit.

    waste of time and money

    Well, the legal system here is relatively efficient, and if you do decide to take someone to court and win, there’s a good chance it’ll be worth it. If anything, the large number of lawsuits is a testament to how well the legal system works. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t use it so often.

    You can bring a stupid frivolous lawsuit intended to waste everyone’s time and money, but those can get dismissed quickly.