abbenm

@abbenm@lemmy.ml

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

abbenm ,

I was never, at any point, as much of a child as I was told I was.

abbenm ,

That's what I did!

abbenm ,

My Puxl was from eBay.

To be honest, I don't know much about how credit cards can be associated with phone hardware. I would think it could conceivably be tied to phone #s. In my case the phone is unlocked and it's not an esim, which I understand we will all be moving too soon.

I wonder if it might have something to do with Google Pay or Apple Pay that ties hardware information to payments? And as for Esim, it might make it so that you can't distinguish phones based on their physical sim card so it perhaps introduces a possibility of reliance on hardware.

But this is all speculation on my part. I just don't know and I haven't made whatever precautions would be needed.

abbenm OP ,

I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood (TM) was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren't many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it's the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.

Rings of Power is a Disappointment, Here’s why | An Overdue Critique ( youtu.be )

Come for the two hour review of Rings of Power by a guy who has elvish on his wedding ring, stay for the Hbomberguy style twist into discussion of the way the far right uses the appearance of media criticism to radicalize vunrable young men and draw them into the manosphere.

abbenm ,

I wholeheartedly agree. I'm glad that Amazon wanted to be ambitious, but there's so much great fiction out there that hasn't yet been adapted, even of other Tolkien stuff such as the Silmarillion (not exactly a story but still plenty of rich details about the world).

I will say, it at least goes down smooth as turn-your-brain-off entertainment if you are looking for something that just looks nice. A lower bar to clear, but I liked having something to fall back to when I ran out of House of the Dragon.

abbenm ,

Beware, mods removed NYT reportage along similar lines as it applied to Russia when I tried to post it. Some topics are forbidden!

abbenm ,

Syncthing is brilliant, although for me it has had a heck of a learning curve to keep straight. Might just be me though.

abbenm ,

NewPipe is a killer app I would say, with nearly Youtube Red level functionality in something that's free and OSS. A bit afield from privacy, but you do get to access youtube stuff without logging in.

abbenm , (edited )

Very good to know. After following your Github link, I found my way to the blog post that it looks like you are quoting:

https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/announcement/State-of-the-Pipe-2023/

abbenm OP ,

I totally blocked from my memory the very brief period when holograms were a thing

Yeah, I think some corner of my brain I knew this was exactly the kind of thing that would make us go wtf after some time had passed.

abbenm ,

Wait, what? I don't think they were talking about piracy. They sound like they're talking about something more like a C-Span type thing, envisioned as a YouTube alternative.

abbenm ,

It is but there’s just not enough content to get me to fully stop YouTube yet

I don't think anyone is proposing an overnight switch. You've got to take the long view. That said, I do think when it comes to federated activity pub style projects, Mastodon has gotten off the ground, Lemmy has exploded, pixel-fed seems to be doing pretty good, but the video stuff appears to be a tougher nut to crack.

abbenm ,

Exactly. For any proposed change, it's going to run up against what I like to call Status Quo Extremism, which is a mindset that suggests that "But that would be different from the status quo" counts as a defeater argument against proposed changes.

The combination of incentives would, as you note, need to be driven by niche interests rather than attempting to reproduce the incentives of the top 0.01% of YouTube creators.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    abbenm , (edited )

    Are you sure that you actually know how to browse the rooms? I just opened my app, and I see, just for some examples, Linux gaming, vegan, and pine 64 all having activity within the past hour or so.

    I mean it's no discord by any stretch, But you're actually straight up saying that even the most active ones are 100% dead, there's something going on with how you're browsing and looking at the rooms.

    I feel like one of the biggest communication problems with stuff relating to open protocols or fediverse stuff, is that no one knows the lay of the land, there's no broadly held consensus of whether things are active or not, what the culture is like, and you end up with people making confident matter of fact statements that are just transparently not true based on cursory examination.

    When Mastodon was new, reporters would just make matter of fact claims that one of its downfalls was that instances couldn't connect with each other, even though that was called federating and just one of the most basic built-in features. Not that I'm the biggest fan of Blue Sky, but now that people are talking about blue sky, I've seen people just matter of factly claim that Blue Sky was 90% furry porn and rage bait. A totally outrageous claim, not even remotely aligned with my experience, but, just because there's no settled consensus about what's going on, there's not really any disincentive for someone just coming in and randomly saying that.

    abbenm , (edited )

    Because it’s pointless.

    This is like Marvel Movie brain except applied to OSs. This mindset suggests that the only conceivable rationale for an OS is that it's tied to shiny brand names and commercial rationalizations.

    Despite this insistence, numerous alternative OS's do in fact exist and have been listed here. And the range of motivations extends beyond just having glossy icons for whatever the first 3 or 4 companies that pop in your head.

    You have:

    • experimentation and novelty/niche interest that don't align with specific commercial interests (e.g. Menuet OS, TempleOS)
    • user-oriented design philosophies with specific definitions of speed and useability (e.g. Haiku OS)
    • study/teaching in academic context
    • niche/emerging product categories (QNX)

    If you are able to understand why people would have these kinds of interests, it's the kind of thing that lights a fire in your mind, and for some people, sets them on a career, or opens up a major new interest, or leads to them having fun with projects that scratch their own itch, so to speak in ways that do lead to commercial applications (lest we forget that every FAANG has an origin story about how it started with tinkering in a garage). "Because it's pointless" makes me feel like I'm witnessing that inner fire of curiosity and sense of possibility die in real time.

    It doesn't mean there's no barrier to market penetration or no difficulty creating a kernel, but there's so much more to the WHY of creating an OS than getting listed on Nasdaq.

    Google Allows Creditors to Brick Your Phone ( lemmy.world )

    I installed NetGuard about a month ago and blocked all internet to apps, unless they're on a whitelist. No notifications from this particular system app (that can't be disabled) until recently when it started making internet connection requests to google servers. Does anyone know when this became a thing?...

    abbenm ,

    And there's the rub. Sure, it's a financed phone. It doesn't follow that we have to suspend judgment on the means they resort to, to enforce their terms.

    abbenm ,

    Perfectly stated! The moralizing story kind of serves as cover, as a complete blank check to excuse practically any behavior of the lender, without any limiting principle.

    abbenm ,

    This was a longstanding fediverse complaint, which was quite remarkable to me. It was described as a "missing" feature even though you never had this ability anywhere else let alone the fediverse.

    If you get a new email address, it doesn't bring your contacts or your history of emails with you. If you make a new twitter account, same thing. And of course, don't even think about trying to port, say, your facebook stuff into a youtube account. But if the fediverse can't, then it's a dealbreaker.

    If you truly want to channel the limitless depths of human creativity, give a Comment Section Skeptic (TM) every fediverse feature they say they want. Then wait and watch as that creativity goes into action, as [insert new feature] is now the new dealbreaker. It is and always will be an endless game of whack a mole.

    abbenm ,

    loops.video

    Wow, first I've heard of it! Super excited.

    abbenm OP ,

    Yes and no. That story was bad for a reasons specific to that story that were uncovered and sourced from other credible reporting. You can't proceed from that to a blanket generalization over everything else in New York times reports without any additional supporting evidence.

    Also it's sourcing and quoting other sources, so you'd have to explain if you believe that the New York times made up those sources.

    abbenm OP ,

    There is no actual evidence presented in the article

    You're so full of 💩.

    For one example, they give examples of several websites, including one called DC Weekly, they explain that the sites use fabricated authors, lorem ipsum template text, files uploaded in Russian to sites presenting itself as an American site.

    In their report on DC Weekly, they show that the IP address associated with DC Weekly is John Mark Dougan, who lives in Russia. So there's an example, for one.

    abbenm OP ,

    So in your opinion is DC Weekly (mentioned in the article) in fact a legitimate american news source? I want to understand more about what specifically they are projecting.

    abbenm OP ,

    You started out by saying was no evidence, except there was. Now you've moved the goalposts and are debating the nuances of the evidence instead of saying that none was presented.

    You derailed with whataboutism, you made a blanket generalization based on an unrelated story. Are you just going down the playbook, one derailment tactic at a time?

    Five posts from now you will be saying "well yeah, maybe they proved the IP was from Russia, but the guy from Russia generated a fake site with 17 fake authors because he cared so much about journalistic integrity!"

    abbenm OP ,

    Okay, the next step in the playbook is "no one cares". I don't know, I think online disinformation has emerged as one of the major international issues characteristic of our time and will go down in the history books. So I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that no one cares.

    I'm sorry that calling you out on your 💩 means I'm a debate bro. But the flip side of the same coin is that you're the one spewing the 💩💩💩.

    abbenm ,

    He says he wants blue team to win in 2024, but we are blue team and we hate him!

    Well we're off to an awfully bad start because this is about the shallowest bad faith caricature I could possibly imagine. Let's put it this way:

    • Putin absolutely has a propaganda strategy aimed toward the west that utilizes a number of tools and messaging strategies
    • Among the strategies reported on, one has been to escalate existing divisions within the United States, with one example reported on being creating opposing conservative and liberal events and scheduling them at the same location
    • Purin preferred Trump for his first term
    • Putin preferring Biden can be politically damaging to Biden in the context of domestic politics
    • a Trump victory could prove exceptionally destabilizing to domestic politics in the United States

    I'm not even 100% saying I'm right, but every step of this is perfectly reasonable, it doesn't rely on any outlandish assumptions, and communication about this isn't helped by mocking people with bad faith caricatures and performative incredulity.

    abbenm ,

    Echoes of Peter Theil's strategy to destroy Gawker.

    abbenm ,

    I couldn’t just find you by searching for p03locke, I’d have to search for @p03locke.

    I literally just searched "p03locke" from mastodon.social and found them in one step.

    abbenm ,

    Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain

    What was there to figure out in your case?

    abbenm ,

    I just logged in to two smaller instances where I have accounts, anticapitalist.party and mastodon.xyz. I found them in one step and I could see their posts and replies on both of them.

    abbenm ,

    I think all stars in the galaxy will be dead by then.

    abbenm ,

    I don't know how privacy respecting it is but one well done AI search engine is:

    https://search.marginalia.nu/

    abbenm ,

    other than limiting exhaust, or is that it?

    Gee, when you say it like that, it makes extinction-level events sound not so bad! It is That Bad, so that would be the most direct answer.

    The important thing to note is that even though some electricity is generated from fossil fuels, EVs eliminate the path-dependency that ties transportation to fossil fuels.

    abbenm ,

    When Taylor Swift’s JET ALONE produces more carbon annually than 1000 individuals driving their car daily, it doesn’t matter one iota what kind of vehicle the average joe drives.

    Amazingly, you're missing your own point. If it's not about individuals, well, even Taylor Swifts jet by itself is a rounding error when considered in the context of global emissions.

    But more importantly, it seems like you are contradicting yourself in a pretty fundamental way. You are perfectly comfortable taking Taylor Swift's emissions and holding her responsible for those due to her belonging to a class, namely folding her into membership of "corporations/billionaires". So Taylor, insofar as she represents the collective actions of that class, gets moral responsibility.

    But individual consumers are also contributing significant emissions when conceived of as a class, which is a way of conceptualizing individual actions that, by your own Taylor Swift example, you are perfectly comfortable doing.

    It doesn't mean it's the only thing we should strive to change, but it definitely is one of them, because the global collective emissions of people using internal combustion engines is in fact a significant input into CO2 levels, and we can reason about these things at those scales if we choose to.

    abbenm ,

    is one where our impact as private citizens is as close to nil as it can be

    Individual choices aggregate into large scale consequences, and individual choices do matter at scale.

    abbenm ,

    Sounds like the heydey of the Geo Metro, which got astonishing MPG for its time.

    abbenm ,

    Right, and to your point, part of that is stymieing focused, direct action and ramping up of industry in the western world. So it makes perfect sense to be a global leader in every part of the EV supply and manufacturing chain while being interested in sowing division elsewhere so there's no convergence of public interest and policy momentum that grows competitive industries. There's no contradiction between those two things insofar as they serve China's interests.

    Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve ( www.omgubuntu.co.uk )

    Timothée Besset, a software engineer who works on the Steam client for Valve, took to Mastodon this week to reveal: “Valve is seeing an increasing number of bug reports for issues caused by Canonical’s repackaging of the Steam client through snap”....

    abbenm ,

    It's too bad. I feel like they're a versions of Ubuntu from 2006 to, say, 2012 or so, that were beautiful and perfect and were accessible to me as a college student. It set a new standard. It seems like half the battle is having people with good vision making important decisions so things don't go off the rails.

    Best options for Non-Google cloud storage as of 2022?

    What are Lemmy's feelings about the best cloud storage options these days, if you really want to break into the 1-2TB range? I'm not there yet, probably not even halfway there, but I like the peace of mind of potentially having the space if I need it. And I think subscribing to something in the Netflix price range is maybe...

    abbenm ,

    I think this is an excellent idea, a worthy project, and I applaud you for putting some real thinking into practical steps!

    My federated X wishlist had social media, reddit-like thing, instagram-like thing, and a youtube-like thing. A federated IMDB alternative would be awesome.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • test
  • worldmews
  • mews
  • All magazines
    •