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Joined 1Y ago
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Cake day: Jun 16, 2023

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Thats pretty reasonable. I’m sure there are a ton of orphan accounts just lingering out there. Including accounts that other people may like to have.

All of these companies are tightening their belts. Those interest rates going up are sure making companies reassess their business models.


This is incredibly impressive. The level of talent here is humbling.
fedilink

You cherry picked one line of my post and didn’t address the entire context or intent of it. Im not defending companies or businesses using discord as a drop in replacement for forums or support pages. Imo that’s a mis use of the tech.

I think that’s stupid.

But discord isn’t designed for that. It’s a chat app (voice and text). I don’t want my chats with friends publicly searchable on the internet. That’s dumb. Having my emails publically searchable on the internet is dumb too.

If a company started using Signal or Whatsapp for support, would you be clamoring for all signal and Whatsapp messages to be searchable on the internet?

That doesn’t make any sense. You seem more upset that companies are misusing Discord than mad at Discord.



They are called pavement princesses and mall crawlers.

Lifted trucks and jeeps that have never even seen a gravel road


Ironically pedestrian crumple zone requirements mean biggers hoods.


Then apply that logic to Facebook and relax.

Everyone is losing their minds over this.


My hot take:

Biden has been the best President we’ve had in 30 years.

He’s exactly who we needed when we got him. He got us out of Afghanistan. As much as a debacle as it was, he not Trump and not Obama pulled us out. His deft handling of the Ukrainian conflict where he used soft-power and influence to let the EU and NATO members come to decision to enact the super harsh sanctions themselves. Knowing that if the US pressed, they’d resist. It had to be their decision. He’s continued to say and do all of the right things. His attempt to forgive student loans his huge. Some of the measures worked even if all of them didn’t. He got the most meaningful infrastructure bill passed that I’ve ever witness. Neither Trump nor Obama could make it happen and Biden did it with a split Congress That infrastructure bill was also the most meaningful environment legislation that we’ve ever had That bill also paves the way for significant investment in our broad-band across the country Passed the Safer Communities Act …actual gun related legislation since the Brady bill. Again, with a split congress. Gave us our first public defender SCOTUS justice. This might not seem like a big deal but I think its pretty significant given the amount of case law that exists that, so far, hasn’t had a public defenders ‘say’ in it.

I could go on but I gotta go eat dinner.

People want to shit on Biden, but I actually like him. He’s not perfect, but he’s been insanely effective given everything he walked in to. Including him diligently and quietly rebolstering the executive branches that were gutted and had people leaving in droves in the last admin. Eg the Department of State. He’s assigned quality folks into key roles and its making a difference.

I voted for him without hesitation because well, the alternative was terrifying, but I was not expecting much from him at all. He’s surprised me.

edit: I literally can’t figure out how to make this a list. Sorry for the wordblob.


100% but I believe these are typically locked down to one domain, and in this case its not.

At least thats how I understand it. So I guess the article is a little misleading in that sense, but the net effect is the same. You have carte blanche access to the web, via android system webview, thats acting as a de-facto out-of-band browser. So its misconfigured or not locked down, which means you can use it effectively as a “hidden” browser.


A dev recently discovered a browser built into the settings (for any google app that lets you edit settings). From there you can bypass parental controls or enterprise restrictions. This is a pretty exciting "extra feature", Google!
fedilink

BeyondPod

I’ve been using it for years. I have the paid version of it.

I’m sure I barely use any of the features. At the end of the day it lets me download my podcasts and prunes them as I listen (as I’ve configure it).

I feel like I need to buy it again to give the dev some money.


As crappy as googles results seem to have gotten over the last year, anytime I try to set my browser default search to anything else, I end up irritated and going back to Google for 50% of my searches(maybe even more ). Bing is fairly decent, but if the goal is privacy…

The alternative search engines just always lack the context–ehich presumably google has from me by pilfering my information for the last 2 decades.



That’s a really solid point. I guess it depends on the phone. The low end Android market probably isn’t holding up as well as the high end or iphones.

My pixels seem to last as long as it takes for me to pay them off before they just black screen and brick themselves. I had 3 pixel threes, since two replaces under warranty and the last one died a few weeks outside.

Meanwhile my wifes iphone was just fine. She only changed because her dad got the latest and greatest and handed down this last-year model to her. So I could see batteries being an issue over time.


Yep, and while working from home should never be in lieu of actual child care, cutting out 2-3 hours of commute time in each side and being able to help at lunch is HUGE.

Even if you still put your kids in daycare, you would still spend more time with them and it’d be less stressful if you were working from home. You can get a daycare close to your house vs on the way to work/near work.


I gained weight working from home :(

Even a boring day at the office with little “extra” walking had me close to 10k steps.

I can go for a 2 mile walk everyday I work from home and barely get 8k it seems.

Plus ironically I eat more garbage. When I was at the office there were decent healthy options like salads and stuff. At home…it’s way to easy to grab a box of wheat thins and eat the whole thing.


It's like they are trying to irritate people into canceling their accounts. Imo, *this* one might actually be worse than the account sharing and cause people to quit. As soon as you have people messing around with their subscription version, it's all too easy to just say "nah, I actually don't want this anymore".
fedilink

All programs should tell you where they store config files
I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can't tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.
fedilink

It feels like this fight is 5-7 years late. I am glad the EU actually tries to regulate on behalf of the consumer vs what the US has been doing lately(almost nothing), but the EU does it in a ham-handed way half the time.

I don’t necessarily want a user replaceable battery on my phone. I prefer it not be chonky and I prefer it to be water and dust proof. All of those features impact me sooo much more than being able to change the battery.

Also batteries have come so far this past decade it almost seems like a non issue.



I think I’d feel less overwhelmed if these games had hand-holding features. I recall Fable and Fable2 having some features that basically highlighted the route for you or hinted at which way you should go.

I get that open world is supposed to let you explore freely but if you are doing a specific task…help me get there!

I’ve started and stopped Witcher 3 3x. I just couldn’t get into it. I realized I kept getting stuck and not able to figure out where I was supposed to go. I got frustrated and gave up.


I used it to help a friend with a cover letter for a job. I pasted in what my friend had written and asked if it could make it sound better. It literally just made up stuff to make it sound better.


He’s not asking how to spot it. He’s asking who gets to be the ultimate arbiter of fakeness?

Even reputable news sources make mistakes. Sometimes their sources give bad information. Maybe they reported in good faith, but with bad information?

What happens when they work around it by JAQ-ing off. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions


People keep posting that, but where that specific example breaks down is that xmpp requires network effects to work. You need your friends to use the same system and it’s more person to person interaction.

They have a lot more leverage because if you want to talk to your friend, then you have to use their setup.

Link aggregators, forums, reddit, and lemmy/kbin work differently. Your friends use them but you probably don’t interact directly.

It’s about the community.

And I’m not really sure how Meta changes that. They are creating a thing for their Instagram users (using activitypub protocol??) and they are planning on allowing people to move their mastodon accounts over to their thing. Their thing that doesn’t federate. It’s a walled garden.

Those people, if they move, are required to follow Facebooks terms of service. Well no shit? You just moved to Facebook.

What’s being forced on anyone?

If they “enhance” the protocol and attract people to their service…then what? You can’t stop people from using a different service. Tildes could take off and pull people from the fediverse. Tildes could offer a service to import your account. How does that impact the rest of the fediverse??

Just keep using this. Build your community and carry on.


Why does everything need to be free searchable on the internet?

Call me crazy but I don’t want my group chats publicly available on the internet. Discord feels… private. I know they have access to all the data, but it’s not like a public website, forum, or even an open irc chatroom. It’s my walled garden to chat with friends, stream games, game chat, post dumb memes, etc.

That’s like saying signal is cancer to free and open internet. Or hell, email because it’s not indexed and searchable?

I don’t get the sentiment.


Yea, I don’t have a problem with a company, whose service I use, try to sell additional services or create a paid tier that basically pays for me to use it for free.

I like discord. The name change hubbub was…a nothing burger. If people want to pay for extra emojis or whatever for their server…cool? How does that impact me?



It’s also incredibly important to note that they are making this explicitly opt-in. So none of that ‘dark pattern’ mumbo jumbo with the tyranny of the default–where companies opt you in and most users dont realize they have to opt-out.

All in all they are going about this the right way it seems. The devil will be in the de-identifying technical details imo.


All the drama and pisspoor management by spez aside, ultimately the way I used reddit is through RiF. To me, that’s reddit. I can’t stand their official app and their official website is horrendous.

They forced my app to close down so I guess that’s that.

I stopped using RiF and consequently reddit in protest. I held out hope this was a shitty negotiation tactic by Reddit and they’d eventually back off somewhat. But they’ve tripled down on it.

This forced me to reevaluate my relationship with the platform and I decided to check out Lemmy kbin and mastodon. I also checked out some old forums I frequented before reddit took over.

I reinstalled a newsreader and set up RSS feeds for my favorite things.

Basically, I’m realizing I don’t need reddit as much as I thought I did. I actually have enjoyed the fediverse,beehaw in particular, more. I never used Twitter but mastodon has really great content and engagement as well.

I’m not saying I’d never go back to Reddit. I probably would if RiF somehow survived, but reddits lost its luster for me and I don’t trust it anymore. So why waste time actively participating there so I can have the rug pulled from under me again?

Reddit may not see a mass exodus like Digg or Myspace, but it’s been poisoned and over time the rot will set in and it will fester. This will be the moment people point to as the turning point.


"We won’t be collecting your saved passwords, passkeys, usernames, and any URLs associated with your items. Your private information is just that – private. All event data will be de-identified and processed in aggregate before it’s used for analysis. " It sounds like they plan on releasing the technical details in the coming days/weeks. I'm curious how its de-identified and processed.
fedilink

The “right to be forgotten” rules are, with all due respect to the EU regulators, pretty shortsighted.

I think the initial “right to be forgotten” lawsuit that Google faced from that Spanish guy-- where he claimed bankruptcy years prior. People( potential lenders?) kept finding that information online through google searches. He sued to have Google remove those sites from the index. He won and the Spanish Judge told Google they had to remove those results from searches.

But it didn’t change that the information was still on each site. Those sites, the ones that actually held the information didn’t get sued, just Google.

It also opened the door for oppressive governments covering up human rights abuses or hide other information they dont want widely available.

Google appealed and won: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49808208

I also want to point out that this Spanish guy’s situation is very different from “posting publicly on social media”. He was getting written about by others and the courts eventually said “no, this can stand. This information should remain available”. So I imagine, public statements made by an individual certainly wouldn’t qualify to be forgotten.

At the end of the day, to me, this is a technical decision not a privacy one.


I think this is a great point. I would say its much less of a privacy issue and more of a technical issue.

I think deletions should propagate across all instances and there should be a level of trust between federated servers that they will make those deletions as requested. If only because we’d have a mismatch and orphan comments lingering in perpetuity and we could end up with wildly inconsistent data across the fediverse.


I truly can’t imagine a world where they do it in secret. They’ll advertise it and slap their branding all over it.


What license is it open sourced under? I think AGPL (or one of the GPLs) would be the only one that could sorta force that issue.

The community would have to enforce the rules of the license. It wouldn’t stop them from attempting to commercialize but the code would all have to be 100% free and public. All of it. Free to review, change, copy, etc.


I guess I did forums a little differently. I had 2 main forums where I posted a lot and then a handful I would peruse occasionally. If you had a good forum, there would be a very ‘reddit-like’ feel because they’d have general discussion, fitness, gaming, etc.

One of the things I liked about forums back in the day is that, while they didn’t have the scale of Reddit, the engagement and interactions seemed better. You got to know posters.

I couldn’t tell you another redditor’s username.


The only drama I’ve seen on it is a few idealists on other instances complaining about it and these posts.

I actually like beehaw more as an instance because of what they’ve done.

Nilay Patel had a great article when Elon bought Twitter. One of the key take aways I tend to agree with is:“The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.”

I love being part of a community and being able to discuss and debate. But ultimately I want to do it in a place where I don’t feel creeped out, skeevy, or where I am getting harassed or threatened.

I value the moderation. I value the curation. I want the mods to defederate if they see an influx of trolls, shit posts, or sketchy content from a particular instance.

And you know what, I’ll be annoyed when they block something or someone I don’t think they should have.

The reality is: the fediverse is designed for this sort of thing. Theyve been very transparent and they will re federate when the tooling is better. I have no reason to doubt that.

I see this as growing pains and nothing more.


My take is that "L"LMs are already old news. I think targeted or limited data-set language models are going to be the next wave.

I think this partly because very few people can do LLMs at the scale of Microsoft and Google so I think smaller firms and people in their garage are going to aim their sights on smaller targeted data sets with a eye towards factual accuracy.

And then maybe link them/daisy chain them together. I hope there is this unix philosophy for models where they do one thing well but you can ‘pipe’ data from one to another.


I wish the article included a map of the gains. It’s tough to visualize/understand the progress without it.