Milk has always grossed me out for weird reasons. Reading comments like this makes me glad for that.

And for anyone that has some kind of gross facts about oat milk, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT THANKS!!!

When is the last time anything Microsoft made was an upgrade…? Word 97??

Indeed. For the Finns, the hardest part of the coronavirus pandemic was adjusting to 2m of social distancing, down from their preferred distance of 5m.

There may still be lawsuits, however. There are still many ways that he could lose a lot of what he gained.

First, we’ll take away the headphone jack.

Then, we’ll remove everything else!

My understanding from what you’re writing (and from this article) is that the phone number is really the account number. That’s all well and fine, but then they force you to verify that the number is yours (or at the very least, one that you have access to because you need to receive a confirmation over SMS), so you can’t use something more private. And sure, it makes it a little harder to find your new contact, but I don’t think it’s really that big of a deal - just exchange your other “account number” via some other channel.

Besides, don’t think for a second that when this identifying information inevitably falls into the wrong hands that it will benefit you in any way. “What are you hiding, citizen?” and all that bullshit.

The part of it that bothers me is the sense of entitlement that these companies exhibit. The “Give us your phone number or fuck off” sentiment is something I just refuse to accept. If Google forces us to do the same and we refuse, what makes Signal think that we’ll do it for them when they’re so much smaller by comparison? Especially when you’re trying to claim you’re more secure and private to people that much more tech savvy than average, this just comes off as not understanding your audience very well. I’m sure I’m not the only one that is holding out against using Signal because of this.

I’m surprised this hasn’t been said yet… but what I hate most about Signal is its requirement for a phone number. I don’t want to be identified, and I want to be able to create multiple separate accounts with different identities if I want to.

I also hate the fact that it’s a mobile-first service. Yes, there is a desktop application (and just one really crappy one at that), but it’s clearly designed to revolve first and foremost around your phone and be virtually impossible to use without one. As someone who hates writing on a 3-inch screen, this is a also non-starter for me.

I understand the arguments about perfectionism, but this is too much. I’ll stick with XMPP, Matrix and IRC, thanks.

but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.

The fact that we have a telephone system that works with separate providers contradicts this sentiment. If I want to pick up the phone and talk to my cousin’s puppy in New Zealand, I can do that without creating an account on his provider’s service.

I don’t understand why we’ve forgotten this as a society. Yes, it was difficult to upgrade the phone systems over the past century, but it’s worth it in my opinion. I really wish we’d start seeing government regulation that says “you should be able to talk to someone on a service without having to create an account on said service.” I thought the DMA would do this, but sadly, Whatsapp still requires an account to talk to people using that service. Very disappointing.

The colors in the peertube logo are pretty hideous.

Are we claiming now that Activity Pub is the only protocol that we can use for the fediverse? I think XMPP is roughly 30 years old at this point, and I’m pretty sure Activity Pub is much younger than that. I could be wrong though.

But regardless, I don’t see why Activity Pub has to be the only protocol we accept to be considered a part of the fediverse. It’s not even like different AP implementations talk to each other all that well. My understanding is that Mastodon doesn’t federate that well with Lemmy, and I haven’t seen Loops or Pixelfed on Lemmy yet either.

I’d be happy to be corrected on any of this though, I haven’t looked too closely into exactly how AP works or how it’s supposed to interoperate with different applications.

The best UIs are the ones that never change.

No you don’t! That’s why we have key-signing parties!

It is very sad indeed. I went through the same experience when I wanted a license plate to commemorate Albert Heijn.

Not to oversimplify but a shit economic situation was a large part of the reason the Nazis were able to rise to power.

And as I look at around at our current world… Oh. Shit.

But jokes aside, I think a lot of people are just not aware enough to realize how easy it is for extremism to fester in a society where people are economically (and morally) depressed. If you want to know why Hitler rose to power, then look no further than 1930s Germany to understand that. Our world doesn’t look too different from that.

And besides, it’s not like anyone knew exactly what was going to happen as events unfolded. Nothing like WW2 had ever occurred in the history of the planet, so even if you had a perfect time machine so you could go back and tell people what was about to happen, it’s not like they would actually believe you. People were miserably, angry and desperate… so they wanted to fuck around, and eventually they found out, so to speak.

And one last point: Nazi Germany is also an extreme example of what can happen to a depressed society, and it’s not like things always turn out the same way. I’m pretty sure that things are going to end pretty miserably before the world becomes a better place, but it doesn’t necessarily mean WW3 or another Holocaust or anything like that. We can’t know any of this with certainty - all we can do is hope for the best (and prepare for the worst, as they say).

This is the thing UI designers never understand[0] - if you keep changing shit around, nobody will ever figure out how to use it. If you keep it consistent and don’t make dramatic changes, users will have a much easier time using it because they don’t have to keep relearning the damn thing. Consistency is the most effective UI paradigm.

[0] or to put it in better terms, they’re paid to not understand this so they can justify their jobs…

While I think this is a good idea (because copyright is a stupid concept in the digital age), the problem with this proposal is that Europe is also very pro-copyright. Doing something like this would probably piss off Americans, but if it also pisses off your next best ally as well, it’s probably not going to work out.

That’s actually very easy to do and you don’t need any special equipment. Simply use a male-male 3.5mm cable and connect one end from the stereo output of the cassette player and the other end into the microphone jack of any computer you own. Play the cassette - you can test the audio quality by running arecord -f cd - | aplay - - you will have to tune the volume output of the cassette player and the input sensitivity of the microphone.

From there, if you’re paranoid, you could use arecord to save the output to a .wav file and encode it once the recording is done, but I had no problem just using oggenc directly on the piped audio. The final command looked like this: arecord -f cd - | oggenc -q 5 -o file.ogg - (change to -q 10 if you want lossless encoding).

I’m not sure if this is the best quality per se, but I would definitely recommend it over using specialized equipment like cassette-mp3 converters. The problem with those devices is that if they use underpowered hardware, you might experience buffering issues where the encoding hardware can’t keep up with the audio stream or something like that. But doing it on a computer ensures that you will have all the processing power you need to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

Good luck! I found it very easy to do - it took 5-10 minutes of setup.

They don’t think that way. “It does not generate revenue, therefore it cannot be allowed to exist.” This philosophy is so deeply ingrained into the American psyche that it is inescapable.

Story time: American colleague and Canadian colleague are talking. Canadian says that university costs only 5000 CAD in tuition. American nearly falls out of his chair and yells, “BUT HOW DO THEY MAKE MONEY??”

And bear in mind that he was one of the most educated and successful people I have ever met, and yet he found it so difficult to fathom that a university could exist without making money. Now with that in mind, imagine convincing a large group of average people to fund public services.

This is why the USA is the way that it is.

For-profit companies are perpetually locked in a conflict of interest. Inevitably, they will have to decide between what is in the best interest of their users (or other public interests such as the environment for example) with their never-ending obsession to make ever more money. No matter what they say or do publicly, they will always sell out for more profit.

In this case, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors (people who have collectively made trillions over every iteration of IT progress) are forcing “AI” to be the next thing. They have basically decided that they want all tech progress to focus on this area and are forcing every company they invest in to make that happen, regardless of the societal impact.

As a result, you can see clearly that all of these companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit) are basing all their business decisions into trying to make this fantasy become a reality. Even Apple now, the masters of creating a facade of privacy is falling straight into line. And the one thing they all have in common: investors.

And that is why you should always be wary of interacting with big business interests - they will inevitably sell you out someday.

Does this mean we can freely distribute Tintin in Thailand now? Outstanding piece, everyone should read it!