At a certain point, though, you have to wonder whether a traditional desktop linux distro is better for regular users than just preinstalled ChromeOS on a Chromebook.
The funniest part, though, is that the $13 billion in debt to Twitter is held by lenders who would be first in line to get any payout from a Twitter bankruptcy. If the enterprise value as a whole drops below $13 billion, then Musk would get nothing out of the bankruptcy, and would lose his entire $30b+ investment with nothing to show for it. Unless, of course, Musk decides to put good money after bad, and pony up a new investment of even more money, that the lenders would agree to take.
One of the areas where YouTube/Vimeo/Facebook/Twitch really excel, compared to things like PeerTube, is storing a shitload of file formats with all the different options of resolution/quality and codec. When a user uploads a supported file, YouTube automatically generates files containing h.264 video in mp4 containers at several different resolutions/bandwidth/quality settings, and then processes the more popularly viewed videos into more bandwidth-efficient codecs, like VP9 or AV1 (at the cost of much more processing/server load, which is why they only do this for videos that reach a particular threshold of views).
Then, when someone views a video, it seamlessly sends the “best” video for that person’s resources and supported codecs, including stepping up or down in quality mid-stream based on the performance of that connection.
Decentralization of these functions is a complex task, because not everyone will have the right hardware to do these things efficiently. Intel, AMD, and Apple CPUs support different hardware acceleration for video encoding or decoding, while Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Apple have different GPU support, too. So transcoding and related functionality tends to be much more device-dependent. It’s not an insumountable problem, but in the meantime we’ll just basically live with less efficient quality-per-bandwidth settings on PeerTube videos. So that’ll exacerbate the cost of storage and bandwidth (or the quality) in a service that relies on user-donated storage and bandwidth.
The one place where 401ks really shine is (legal) tax evasion and high-spend retirement.
One big place where 401ks are better for the modern workforce is portability, because the investments in the 401k are vested property of the worker, so the worker gets to bring that retirement with them even when changing jobs. Under the traditional pension programs, people who left the employer for another job would often be leaving behind a lot of pension benefits, and be behind at the new employer’s pension plan.
Reddit is the same backend as the Reddit I was using through a third party app a few months ago, but the user experience is significantly worse for me, because the interface I’m accessing the service through adds friction to how I use the service and steers me towards how I don’t use the service. Same with accessing email through a web interface versus Outlook versus Thunderbird versus Alpine versus the iOS Mail app.
Lemmy is how I want to interact with user-generated text and comments. Mastodon’s interface is not. I don’t care that it happens to be ActivityPub on the backend, because the interface drives how I consume and interact with the content.
Desktop linux was my daily driver from about 2006 to 2016, then I was dual booting from 2019 to 2021 or so before it became my daily driver again. Choosing Linux-friendly laptop hardware is a compromise.
From 2006-2009, I had a few issues with a shitty wifi driver. Then I bought a “built for Linux” laptop that worked well enough for my purposes, but still had a few minor limitations: shittier battery life, no Bluetooth, and a video card that NVIDIA eventually dropped support for. Even when using the proprietary driver, I couldn’t use Wayland or KMS. During that era, it took a while for font rendering to look as good as Windows, and it never quite caught up with font rendering on Macs.
Then I bought another laptop and had to deal with trying to get the user experience with High DPI screens not to suck (it’s OK now, but took a while to get here). I don’t have a Wifi 6E access point yet but I’ve seen from the forums that it’s sometimes buggy with the 6E channels.
Basically, Linux support for laptop hardware and experience seems to lag behind, and actively selecting for best Linux compatibility is also a seriously limiting filter when buying hardware.
I don’t think there is a default in Arch. You have to choose your own bootloader, and the documentation just lays out the options on what kernel parameters to pass. For systemd-boot, the Arch documentation gives example configurations that don’t include the “quiet” parameter.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that they want me to use a random internet service to add a keyboard to a usb wifi receiver, they have the balls to put this for Firefox users. I clicked out of pure curiosity, as I’m not even remotely interested in involving a corporate internet service in getting my keyboard connected to my...
Curious what everyone else is doing with all the files that are generated by photography as a hobby/interest/profession. What’s your working setup, how do you share with others, and how are you backing things up?
Raw images import from SD card to network drive (physically on spinning hard drives in a NAS in my home).
Lightroom catalog is on my laptop, where I actually do all processing and editing, using a network connection with the raw files stored on the NAS.
Exports go to local folder on the laptop, to be shared however I share.
Travel/offline workflow is:
Raw images import from SD card to external SSD.
Lightroom catalog is on my laptop, and I can do all editing there as part of the same catalog even when I don’t have access to my NAS (or when my connection is slow).
When I get home, I manually copy the files from the hard drive to the network drive, and then update the library file location in Lightroom to point to the new location.
My raw backup solution:
Cron job backs up raw files daily to an external drive hooked up to my old always-on Mac Mini.
Mac Mini syncs with a cloud backup service that charges per machine rather than per terabyte, so I can take advantage of the pricing that works out to be $8/month for about 8TB of data.
My post-processed backup solution:
All exported, post-processed pictures get copied to Google Photos, for all the functionality of cloud syncing/sharing, face recognition, etc.
All photos taken directly on my cell phone are also automatically synced to Google Photos.
Things I’m generally considering:
I’m always on the lookout for de-googling
I’m also all for making the workflow simpler/easier/more reliable between my files stored locally on the laptop, on the external SSD, and the main NAS storage drives.
I might switch the NAS storage to SSDs instead of hard drives, but that’s lots of money just for a little bit of extra speed.
I might want to switch my cloud backup to live cloud features instead of a cold backup, but I like the pricing I have with cold storage.
I’m wondering whether it’s possible to have an automated solution that always keeps the most recent 50GB of raws on my local laptop, maybe 500GB of raws on a networked SSD, and the rest of my files on networked hard drives, while seamlessly updating the older files to the slower locations. I’ll have to think on this some more.
It’s an elaborate workaround for Backblaze’s pricing. What I was alluding to in my comment was that they charge $8/computer for backup, but without any limit to the amount of data they’ll sync. They won’t let you sync network drives, but they will let you sync external USB drives, so syncing a network drive to an external drive allows you to basically sync that external data to a cloud backup.
That way I have 3-2-1: 3 copies, on at least 2 devices, on at least 1 remote location. For $8/month (but also, some up-front investment in physical stuff I had to buy).
I lurked from 2007 to 2009, finally created an account in 2009, and used just that one through maybe the first 5 years or so. In 2014 I started creating alts and deleting old accounts just to be able to cycle through some kind of anonymity to prevent cross referencing comments on one topic with my real identity on another. By 2019 I got pretty aggressive about anonymity and increased the number of alts and throwaways I used (and then used throwaway emails to “verify” with reddit, because I stopped trusting them with the backend data that could be used to correlate alts).
I deleted most of my alts, but kept two, for specific niche interests: the one I used to comment on the nuts and bolts of the legal profession, mostly in private subreddits that weren’t crawled by search engines (or AI training), and one that participates in my city’s subreddit about local issues.
At this point, I think the technology discussions on lemmy/kbin are already at or above the quality of reddit. There’s still a ways to go with other general topics of discussion, but I think we’ll get there on the big ones. I don’t know if the niche topics will really take off, so for now I keep my reddit accounts that correspond to those.
Swartz founded Infogami, which merged with reddit when they were both early stage incubator startups. In a sense, he became a founder of Not A Bug (which became the parent company of both Infogami and Reddit), but Reddit the subsidiary and project and website predates his involvement. And Reddit, the project, was a big reason why Not A Bug was acquired by Conde Nast in 2006.
He provided big early contributions (migrating the code base from lisp to python was a significant project), but wasn’t really a founder, and didn’t really contribute much after that first year.
The only thing more annoying than a person who thinks that correlation is always indicative of causation is the person who thinks that correlation is never indicative of causation.
The guy that currently runs the .ml registrar is warning the US military that a lot of emails meant for .mil addresses are ending up on mail servers that he currently controls, and will end up in the hands of the Mali government very soon. He set up the navy dot ml and army dot ml domains years ago to intercept and discard those mistyped emails, but is renewing his efforts to contact the US DoD about the issue because he’s losing access/control of those servers when the Mali government takes back .ml.
I joined a bunch of instances (including kbin) with a bunch of different usernames, and have mostly stopped visiting kbin. The default browser interface isn’t as good: no collapsing comments, unintuitive displays of what magazine/community you’re on (thread links weirdly prioritize telling you which instance hosts the community rather than which of that instance’s local communities it is), etc.
This UI/UX stuff matters, I think. After all, a big part of the reddit migration was prompted by users being forced off of their preferred interface.
How is reddit post protest, did it really win over protesters? Did the ones who left make a dent? Or like all things before, did it ultimately do nothing?
I would imagine that instances would really compete on channels/communities/magazines and the mods/admins running those. At a certain point, then, the instances would also tend to have some kind of home field advantage on new users who sign up specifically for that instance’s sports communities. Users from other instances can still interact with the most popular communities, but that’s what I imagine when people talk about instances that focus on a particular niche.
I don’t think that site would be problematic. After all, we’re just talking about custom interfaces to analyze public data.
A big part of the solution is that users should have an awareness that their activity is public. Every once in a while someone gets burned not knowing that anyone can view what a specific Twitter user or Instagram user liked (like politicians liking risque thirst trap photos).
Another is easy alts and throwaways, with tips to avoid correlations:
Don’t use the same verified email address
Don’t reuse usernames, including across platforms
Try not to use the same instances, such that instance admins can see whether login activity is coming from the same place, unless you absolutely trust that the admins won’t analyze your data OR inadvertently leak their records.
Be aware of the techniques used to correlate users: analysis of timestamps, linguistic/grammatical quirks, etc.
This is a public place, so people should be aware that this is a public place. That means they can still find this useful space, as with many other public places, but should be aware that the more they do on this platform, the easier it is to correlate with a real life identity.
Thinking about this some more, I don’t mean to put everything on the user.
The platform itself, through its design and architecture and settings, should also do stuff to make super detailed analysis more difficult:
Don’t log unnecessary metadata, such as views/visits, clicks, scrolls, time spent on specific posts, etc. Information that is never observed/logged can’t be shared/published.
Don’t share unnecessary information with other instances. For example, with an update to the protocol, an instance might be able to hide which local users voted for what in local threads, while maintaining the proper count internally of what the vote totals are, who has already voted, etc. Non-local users would have to have their votes publicly known, though.
Make the public nature of each action obvious. Make votes more obviously public through the interface (perhaps by allowing people to view who upvoted or downvoted). Make people’s comment history and like history easy to view within the native interface, so that people understand that the information isn’t private to begin with.
Commit to deletion in a public, auditable way. Let instance administrators know that being a good citizen on the fediverse requires adherence to norms about privacy and deletion, and have watchdogs publish stats on how long it takes for an instance to delete a comment or vote or whether it retains edit/delete history.
If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.
Yes. In the mid 90’s, anyone with an AOL or Juno email address was a noob. Many people on the internet had .edu email addresses, because it was pretty hard to get internet access unless you were affiliated with a university. The rise of Hotmail and Yahoo mail ended up removing the association between email address and internet service provider, to the point where people who were using ISP-provided email addresses by the early 2000’s were seen as unsophisticated and usually older.
I use Debian BTW (lemmy.ml)
Elon Musk admits X 'may fail, as so many have predicted' (www.businessinsider.com)
Your Operating System is Not Supported. Please install Google Smart Home OS to continue. (reddthat.com)
SanDisk's Name is Now Mud (petapixel.com)
As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
Windows 11 vs Linux supported HW (lemmy.ml)
Sometimes less is more (lemmy.world)
2023-08-09.jpg (lemmy.ml)
It's not just Adobe. Now Logitech wants me to go to a random website in order to add peripherals to my computer, and I'm met with this when I go to the page they tell me to (lemmy.world)
As if it wasn’t bad enough that they want me to use a random internet service to add a keyboard to a usb wifi receiver, they have the balls to put this for Firefox users. I clicked out of pure curiosity, as I’m not even remotely interested in involving a corporate internet service in getting my keyboard connected to my...
What the fuck is a kilometer? (lemmy.world)
(gun and eagle noises) 🦅🇺🇲
What's your setup for storing, using, sharing, and backing up your files?
Curious what everyone else is doing with all the files that are generated by photography as a hobby/interest/profession. What’s your working setup, how do you share with others, and how are you backing things up?
Sound Off: How many 10+ year redditors have left the site?
I was just browsing a thread on c/nfl looking for new mods. There were multiple 12+ year Redditors there offering to help....
Aaron is no longer considered as cofounder by reddit. He fought for free speech. (lemmy.world)
Vaccine politics may be to blame for GOP excess deaths, study finds (wapo.st)
Lemmy banner on r/place (i.imgur.com)
Edit: We’ve lost to South Africa. Please help with overwriting this r/ to c/ instead!...
/r/AccidentalRenaissance moderators have all resigned. The subreddit has permanently shut down and moved to Lemmy. (lemmy.nz)
AccidentalRenaissance has no active moderators due to Reddit’s unprecedented API changes, and has thus been privated to prevent vandalism....
How reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history: Did it, though? (www.theverge.com)
How is reddit post protest, did it really win over protesters? Did the ones who left make a dent? Or like all things before, did it ultimately do nothing?
Announcing OpenLemmyStats.org: Publicly Queryable Vote History + Other Hidden Data for Any Lemmy User! (lemmy.world)
What’s stopping me from doing this? Here we go:...
If Lemmy and Mastodon continues to get popular, we will eventually get Instance wars.
If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.