• 1 Post
  • 32 Comments
Joined 1Y ago
cake
Cake day: Jul 04, 2023

help-circle
rss

What would be the point? Reddit doesn’t make any content. They’re just a platform. If they go ahead and paywall subs, those subs are going to have a tiny potential subscriber base. Therefore, they will be less attractive to post to (smaller audience, fewer upvotes etc).

About the only place I can maybe see it working is AskHistorians. And you pay the Historians to answer the questions. Which would of course reduce the amount Reddit takes from the paywall. Doesn’t seem worth it, to me.

Even then, I think the Historians would rather reply in a new free sub with wider readership than take $20 for putting in three hours of work responding to something. They do it because they’re passionate. Not for money.


This works for us:
Step one: Keep your instance civil. No tolerance for horrible people (racists/bigots etc).
Step two: Maintain a vibrant local set of communities free from nastiness.
Step three: Let your users engage with the noise of the fediverse as much or as little as they desire.

We don’t bother with telling our users who or what they can access, and don’t immediately ban visitors based on their home instance. Will that scale to millions of users? Probably not. But that’s a problem for future Nath - maybe.


The biggest problem I see with this is the scenario where calls are recorded. They’re recorded in case we hit a “he said, she said” scenario. If some issue were to be escalated as far as a courtroom, the value of the recording to the business is greatly diminished.

Even if the words the call agent gets are 100% verbatim, a lawyer can easily argue that a significant percentage of the message is in tone of voice. If that’s lost and the agent misses a nuance of the customer’s intent, they’ll have a solid case against the business.


I did phones in a different century, so I don’t know whether this would fly today. But, my go-to for someone like this was “ok, I think I see the problem here. Shall we go ahead and fix it or do you need to do more yelling first?

I can’t remember that line ever not shutting them down instantly. I never took it personally, whatever they had going on they were never angry at me personally.

Then again, I do remember firing a couple of customers (“we don’t want your business any more etc”) after I later became a manager and people were abusive to staff. So you could be right, also.



The author has a MacBook and has discovered that the new Apple Silicon is terrible for games. Particularly 32-bit games. It turns out Valve hasn’t re-made these 10-20 year old games to compensate for Apple’s hardware compatibility changes.

Somehow, that’s Valve’s fault and a sign that they’re going down the drain.


It isn’t a monopoly though. Even ignoring the Blizzards, Epics and GOGs of the web, any developer can host their game on their own Web site and market it completely independently of Steam and keep 100% of their takings.

The monopoly on storefront argument holds water in mobile land where side-loading a game is not possible/easy. In the world of computers though, I don’t think the same standard applies.


I actually love Civ IV, myself. I’m sure Leonard Nemoy is a huge part of why.


We have big red magnets representing blocked to put on the board. We have to speak about every single blocker every stand up and what the team’s path forward is to unblock the thing. If it’s waiting for vendor, then that’s all we can do. If the ball is in our court for any blockers, and its still there tomorrow without a really good reason, there is hell to pay.


Choice recommends the Sennheiser HD range (HD 300, HD560S & HD 599). The 560S won out with quality of sound and bang-for-buck.

Their Headphones study actually surprised me, I rock a pair of Jabra Elite Active 3’s as my daily, and Choice really hated the sound quality. I’m obviously no audiophile, as I love my Jabras. They also didn’t love the Sony wh-1000xm range, which was the biggest surprise as they’re by far the most popular headphones I see among my colleagues.


What sort of headphones are you looking for? Over-ear? Buds? Bluetooth? Bone Conducting?


Australia has Choice. It is funded and independent by being a paid/subscriber service, though being a member is not expensive. Choice is pretty well-known, as when a product wins a recommendation it is prestigious. Therefore, the manufacturers will proudly put a Choice logo on their ads to assure consumers that their product is good.

I can’t see Choice going away, as it’s a very good service and by far the most trusted source for unbiased reviews in Australia.



I think it makes a huge difference which 2-letter country. I have a couple of .au domains, and I am not stressing about that.


This is a sad revelation. This sudo implementation wasn’t going to make much difference to me immediately anyway, as I assume sudo won’t be in Windows Server until v2025. But still: I was hoping it would work like *nix with a sudoers file or something similar.


I like it! I think I’ll tinker with this on my workstation, potentially even my dev environment. It isn’t suitable for my present issue though, as gsudo is not in the SOE. Also, from that little demo thingy, it appears to pop up a UAC prompt the first time it executes. I need to be non-interactive.


That’s where I started, of course - but you can’t combine -verb with -credential. It’s a silly limitation that seems to make sense to Microsoft. What you can do is configure a savecred which you can call with RunAs, but you then need to update that saved credential every time the password changes.

I do have a $Credential object that has been pulled out of the password safe that has elevation permissions, but can’t seem to apply it non-interactively or without being in an elevated session. This appears to be by design. Not that I intended my comment to turn into a support question. 😀


I was Googling like mad just this week on how to execute a cmdlet as Admin from within a script that isn’t running with elevated privileges. The results all basically came back with some variation of “just run the script as Admin”.

This is the right way to do it. I’m glad it’s coming.


At that point, the OS will be 10 years old, and was a free upgrade for anyone running Windows 7 or later. It’s plausible to not have paid a cent for your OS for 15+ years by 2025.

If you’ve bought a new computer with Windows since 2021, you’ll have v11 anyway and won’t be affected.

Frankly I have to hand it to Microsoft - they’ve been generous with OS support. The pessimist/pragmatist part of me puts it down to upgrading old OS’s to combat their reputation as being the cause of worms/viruses going mental on the Internet over the past decade or so. So it isn’t like they haven’t had ulterior motives.

But yeah, I can’t really fault them for this one.


Funny you should say this. I have a 2012 Retina Macbook Pro, and yes it is running Windows or Linux with all the latest updates. However, Apple stopped supporting it in 2020. It’s too old for MacOS updates.

I’ve even seen a guide that will allow me to hack past the normal BIOS restrictions/allow me to put Windows 11 on it.


I hope it isn't anything too serious. Get well soon, Woz.
fedilink

For as long as Telegram has existed (a little over 10 years now), there has been a concerted effort to discredit it. Because of a game I played 10 years ago, I was on Telegram from its first month. A quick walk through that history:

  1. The guy who started Telegram was born in Russia, but he hasn’t lived there in almost a decade.
  2. He made his initial fortune making Russia’s Facebook. The Russian Government wanted backdoors into VK, and details on users. He refused to comply and was basically pushed out.
  3. He went to UAE, where he has lived ever since. It is here that he focussed on Telegram.
  4. Again, he refused to hand user details to the Russian Government, and the disinformation campaign began. The Russian Government has tried to block Telegram but has not been successful.
  5. There have been several posts over the years criticising Telegram, saying that it isn’t Open Source and that its encryption algorithm is prone to vulnerabilities, yet nobody has ever succeeded in breaking its encryption.
  6. Telegram is now more popular than Facebook Messenger.

As to the criticisms around End-to-End encryption:

  • Chats don’t have E2E by default, but you can turn it on.
  • Telegram is the most feature rich messenger app - bar none. It is very easy to use, and I have a family chat going with over 1,000 photos in it and no hint of it costing money.
  • Telegram still tells governments to pound sand. They step in on the really bad stuff, but for channels that are bad/spammers, but for the most part, they leave the users be.

I’d be quick to leave if Telegram gave me reason to, but it doesn’t. Its status as not-quite a big player keeps them innovating, and its founder’s attitudes leave me tentatively trusting that he’s going to do the right thing.


I feel like the overlap of people smart enough to install F-droid and dumb enough to install a dodgy adware app has to be pretty small.


Reddit wasn’t much bigger than this when I first used it. This feels a lot like Reddit in those days. It was a nicer place than today’s Reddit.


I’d be surprised if Reddit hasn’t recovered and grown past its size at the point of the exodus. Only about 60,000 came here. 60k isn’t even a big sub.

I read somewhere that they were 2% smaller in July. We are no threat to Reddit.


As an admin on a Lemmy instance, I don’t like this idea. If I were to be personally, criminally held responsible for something one of our users put on the web…

Well, let’s just say I’d be getting out of the Lemmy admin game. So would everyone else.


When I say “It’s on my radar”, it means “yes, I am going to do this, but wait your turn”.

There is also “As discussed” meaning “We spoke about this already, but I need this as proof”


They’re getting rare, though. Certainly no longer the standard video connector they were 10 years ago.

They can certainly be found, but I don’t know how long for.


I’m good with this. A big part of the appeal of Lemmy - and of Reddit around 2009-2014 is that it’s under the radar. Not quite a secret club that’s full of people and not companies trying to sell stuff.

Lemmy is in its infancy. It is not at all prepared for 100 million users taking the Fediverse mainstream.


Hmm. I’ve always had premium so never looked into ReVanced. I knew it existed, but didn’t realise it might be useful for more than just bypassing ads.

Most of these should be regular settings. I want several of them. My biggest bugbear is shorts. But I also want to be rid of those little popup things and the overlay cards at the end of a video.


I doubt I’ll ever be in this position. But, I can assure you that double-crossing a Russian Mafia gang is not on my bucket list.


By the minute made lots more sense in the days before the Web. You’d go online, send/receive your email and log off. Maybe you’d download the weather report also.

That might be the only time you went online all day. 5 minutes tops. That’s how about half the ISP users used the Internet in the early 90’s.


Prometheus. Stole fire and gave it to humanity. Then in return was tied down and had to go through the same torture day after day for 30,000 years.