toastal

@toastal@lemmy.ml

toast.al

he/him

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toastal ,

For zero monies you & your friends could run VoxeLibre which has better performance characteristics. Microsoft doesn’t deserve your money or your user data, but I am sure VoxeLibre or Minetest wouldn’t mind a donation.

toastal ,

It’s being milked for Bedrock & there are dozens of free software alternatives with VoxeLibre being a standout

toastal ,

They are more than complete/polished with multiplatform support, with healthy modding communites, & better performance since they aren’t built on Java. In the past your money went to the developers—now it goes to megacorp Microsoft with little done in terms of maintenance.

toastal ,

On the Linux side: Crunchbang Linux when it was running Debian

I tried Microsoft Windows & Apple OS X before that, but that is is now behind me… as is Debian & Arch being a NixOS user for the last few years.

toastal ,

Hot season is my least favorite, but I come to love the rainy season for being cooler & more dynamic even if it can sometimes be inconvenient

toastal ,

Seems more a rejects of the flamboyance of the prior two generation which will certainly give it a different feel. It absolutely felt fresh at the time of inception.

toastal ,

Always online with kernel-level anti-cheat has a tendency to not work, but that is probably a red flag since there are thousands of different games you can play that don’t snoop around ring-0

toastal ,

We would have that freedom with Android too if those stupid banking apps stopped trying to dictate what you can run on your hardware & Google giving them more features to do so.

toastal , (edited )

Why do IT teams think being able to snoop any users screen is a good thing? Leave folks alone. Get authorized key consent to SSH into their box iff necessary.

This is why I only work with BYOD operations…

toastal ,

Thanks for confirming some of my suspicions about how it all actually operates & the reasons for doing so.

I really just don’t like this in principle as it is way too easy to accidentally do private stuff out of convenience on a machine which is why I do like I said with BYOD & will be present for all attempts to troubleshoot a device. I don’t really see a conceptual different in my digital desktop vs. my physical one & I wouldn’t let an employer install a camera at my desk just as much or would I think it is cool for a business to have cameras in the bathroom just because they own the rental agreement. It feels like there should be some form of privacy even in these digital scenarios that never happens & it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Is there a solution to allowing users privacy in their system or is it only considered fully private property?

toastal ,

That I could prefer: using a remote VM for the work & being able to opt out of a company provisioned device if possibre. It’s much easier to not pollute a VM & you will want to disable it as soon as you are done anyhow to free up local resources/connections.

toastal ,

XMPP Newsletter: https://xmpp.org/blog/index.xml

toastal , (edited )

I wrote a whole post last year about how using is often preferred. It’s incredibly annoying how hard it actually is to find themes that are optimized for OLED on desktop. Mobile is less bad but often, particularly in FOSS apps, black is an option.

toastal ,

I think you could make an argument about depth & shadows being more difficult with a black background but I would question your design if those were imperative to the design.

toastal ,

In recent years, car ownership in Thailand has annecdotal seemed to rise. The money/power is all centralized in Bangkok so even though public transport is plentiful in the capital, provinces don’t get the money or freedom to design better cities so everything has been moving from motorcycle parking to parking lots & it is sad. Electric vehicles are creeping in but it is still locked to home owners that can charge at home as there is little infrastructure for charging outside of it.

If they really wanted, there would be a wealth of clean energy to be tapped in undewater & above water turbines in the Gulf of Thailand.

Energy aside, the whole geographic region has a colloquially “burning season” where sugar cane & other crops get burned to the ground is the fastest/cheapest means of clearing the field & everyone in power turns a blind eye instead of offering subsidy & enforcing policy. There’s like a month that everyone wears a mask to deal with human-made burning pollution.

toastal ,

It’s the same UX. Not sure how one would be less easy to use than the other just for different nomenclature & things being in slightly different locations.

toastal ,

They don’t have to be exact. They follow the same design language for editing & you can do professional photo work in either.. it took me a couple of weeks to get comfortable in darkroom, but this was over a decade ago. When I oversee folks using Adobe software, it looks close enough.

toastal ,

Not if we liberate it from them
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/ba2245cd-4458-47e1-a236-465b24b12909.png

toastal ,

If you want more fun info: if you move abroad you still owe Medicare & Medicaid, the national healthcare plan. Neither of these can you get an tax exemption, reimbursement, or a voucher to use in another country even if you haven’t stepped foot on US territory in decades. You will pay into these services your whole life if you have a passport to that shitty system & never get anything in return unless you fly to the US to have a procedure that will cost more than it does in the country you might be living in (even without insurance).

During COVID when Sleepy Joe Biden promised vaccines for all Americans that want vaccines, the health minister had to step in when asked to clarify that historically the US does not help its citizens abroad & to go ask the host country instead--or to get on a plane, in a pandemic, quarantining both ways, if you want a shot. The cherry on top was sending vaccines aboard for political favors & if you asked if the embassy if any of those will be used for citizens abroad to be told these were for diplomatic purposes only (meanwhile France & China sent its citizens shots).

toastal ,

Honestly I think many consumers go buy “computer” & have no concept that it has an operating system or that you can change it.

If you know there is an alternative, then yeah… wtf

toastal ,

I’m still salty my current laptop is sold at a discount in the EU without a pre-installed OS due to laws in place--but where I am, I had no choice but to pay a Microsoft tax & immediately wipe it. I used to not connect to WiFi & just look around for a few minutes out of curiosity before wiping, but since 11 moved to Microsoft Account + WiFi required & all the telemetry on by default, I don’t even bother with that anymore.

toastal ,

Corporations aren’t your friend. Avoid the publicly-traded ones seeking quartely profits the most. If it isn’t a massive burden, find an alternative—avoiding some is better than none.

toastal ,

I read that as “don’t defend any cop” …Also good advice

toastal ,

Are FOSS licenses the best for a game & this sort of thinking tho? I am not convinced the FSF or OSI provide good enough guidance for those looking to escape corporate interest. Do you need a license that allows others to resell it? Why is the NC in Creative Commons seen with such hostility & incompatibility if upholding corporate interest isn’t a goal?

toastal ,

I mean I love the idea but I have had my misgivings about how the FOSS gatekeepers do their thing

toastal ,

I mean check any previous discussing that happened about License Zero/Parity/Prosperity licenses, or Peer Production License, or Anti-Capitalist, etc. & how they have wording that is basically like CC BY-SA-NC where you need to share the changes, attribute, but for profit entities are not allowed to use it without contributing (in terms of money, or code, or some sort of giving back). Droves of folks crawl out of the woodwork to say that this ruins the 4 FREEDOMS as if they are written in stone or that were made perfect since inception rather than trying to test if all these rules still apply or need amendments to the modern age & exploitation in software. It would be interesting to see if any group decided to really run with one of these licenses as a major project & seeing if the public not the OSI or FSF agreed with those terms… to maybe saying we need a new definition of those freedoms.

(Just as much I have seen some good arguments about devs to stop trying to use licenses as a battleground for politics or morality & that dealing with the status quo of establish licenses & fighting in other ways is a better use of effort)

toastal ,

Write back if you think exploring is worth your effort & find anything new in the space. It seems a bit underdeveloped since adoption is low where it seems most end up with OSI licenses as a practical compromise rather than what they truly wanted.

toastal ,

Also I really appreciate the cause. If I thought I had more relevant skills to what is mentioned I would ask to join

toastal ,

Just like the random Sponsor drop to get more folks enrolled in their donation system so they can skim more off the top of the transaction.

toastal ,

The best is to not trust the centralized server of either of these platforms. Set up your own XMPP server & gives these the boot.

toastal ,

Funded by Gates makes me leery

toastal ,

I’m still on my 1080 from 2016. It was such a huge leap for the era. I stopped having a lot of time for intense gaming to where I haven’t needed an upgrade (tho I would like to for LLMs, but I would also like to switch to AMD for being less hostile to Linux but those machine learning nerds never bothered to leave the walls of CUDA).

toastal ,

Microsoft is not your friend. GitHub is owned by thah US-based, publicly-traded, for-profit megacorporation & will do the bidding of the other megacorporate wishes like taking down youtube-dl for the music industry and so on. Get your projects & communities on another platform.

toastal ,

Thai/Lao is ไม่เป็นไร/ບໍ່​ເປັນ​ຫຍັງ translated as (implied subject “it”) + negation marker + copula + anything or “it’s nothing”

toastal ,

Better niche: ergo electrostatic capacitive switch keyboard

Literally no one sells them, & I hear many folks stick to mechanical because there are ergo options

toastal ,

Isn’t it historically the other way? Universities were bullshit refinement for the upperclass learning anthropology & philosophy since labor was optional for their class, while other education options were all about churning workers thru apprenticeships?

toastal ,

People get “positions” by getting off their arse and contributing.

I have a lot of issues with the letter, but it’s hard to deny that certain demographics get better opportunities to have the free time & will to contribute. Does that mean you force other demographics in or not? I’m still on the fence as it the upsides have some drawbacks, but discussions should be had--especially by those other demographics & folks better educated on the topic than myself.

I know there was the poor choice of sponsor

It was a defense contractor I believe. I’m not pro-autonomous drones or anything, but it seems odd to hone in on a single sector. Defense makes obvious tools for killing in the form of weapons, but we wouldn’t have GPS or the internet, etc. without research from the sector either (also see dual-use technology). It’s easy to criticize the military industrial complex, but we have just as many non-military corporations & industries absolutely putting their profits above folks & the environment which is just as destructive--just not as immediate/obvious. If you start kicking out all unethical sponsors, you’re gonna end up with no sponsors under our current capitalist system that doesn’t put any value into or reward being ‘ethical’ or even giving the correct value for labor.

toastal ,

There are quite a few stories of communities shutting down their servers since the costs of duplicating all messages & attachments for all rooms for all DMs for all users on the server. Add to the mix that the implementation server in Python consumes a lot more resources, it’s not a big surprise. As such, everything centralizes around Matrix.org where they get an unreasonable amount of the network’s metadata.

toastal , (edited )

more popular

That’s not true at all. There are a ton of business applications for XMPP from IoT messaging, to Nintendo’s user presence, to being a 90% chance your favorite online game’s chat back-end. Behind Jitsi & Zoom & WhatsApp is an XMPP server.
Matrix by design will never scale to these demands if history needs to live forever & all servers need to duplicate data.

More trendy would be a more appropriate phrase since Matrix wants to chase after proprietary Slack & Discord, where as XMPP is extensible & more generalized for all sorts of applications. Even with all of these proprietary applications, there are plenty of open communities hosted for MUCs & also blog/community thru Movim/Libervia & as an alternative back-end for UnifiedPush, etc. With the server resource usage being much lower, it’s cheaper & easier to maintain an XMPP server alongside another application in a VPS or even on a home network with dynamic DNS. If you are inclined, set one up & test it out.

toastal ,

A more general chat platform will really want end-to-end encryption which IRC doesn’t have. Matrix & XMPP offer decentralized rooms so you don’t have to create an account & join each server to chat, but rather your server can connect to another server.

toastal ,

If you want the messaging to be resilient, this makes sense as a server can go down but anyone else connected has the whole history on their server.

But I think that is better suited for a forum where copying Slack/Discord’s lead & trying to preserve all history in a chat isn’t worth it as I see this sort of thing as better tasked for ephemeral communication. However, there is something communal & intuitive about chat apps that make folks interact pretty well so they can make decisions. This is a ‘good thing’ where forums don’t get the same engagement—but at the cost of you had to be there or worse, you need an account to see the discussion for that decision.

toastal ,

iMessage doesn’t exist outside the US in practice. Signal is centralized, requires a SIM and a Android or iOS primary device (i.e. you must have a phone & it must use the duopoly OS) making it a low recommendation from me.

TLS is fine for an open, public room, but not all chat rooms are public tho. Folks DM each other too an a chat platform & their talks definitely shouldn’t be un-E2EE as it probably shouldn’t be the server operator’s business.

You don't have to solve every problem in a single application.

I know what you are saying, but also why not? In the case of XMPP, it is meant to be extended to solve any communication task provided someone can engineer the theory into practice (which is usually a money limitation not a technical one).

toastal ,

What an L-ass take. Nobody is stating IRC is bad, but stating that it’s flawed for a entire swath applications (encrypted chat) & at that rate you could say e-mail & mailing lists are older & could serve the same purpose (see what DeltaChat is trying to do).

If you think folks should be forced into Apple or Google products just for instant messaging you are a goober since chat doesn’t require that level of lock-in (see IRC as you noted existing & working before phones). Some folks don’t even want phones for being annoyances or don’t like a series of monitoring radios/sensors on their person phoning home at all times & making them get one just to talk to you due to you not wanting to pick a platform with broader reach is a dick move. …& that’s without getting into the class issues of telling folks “just buy a smart phone” ̇

XMPP isn’t crushed either. It’s used massively in commercial applications, especially in the video game industry that need… a presence & messaging protocol that is also extensible to their product needs. Extension & maintenance happens all the time from these applications opening up parts of their code bases for feedback/adoption. Has XMPP waned in personal usage post-Google’s dick move, sure, but it didn’t die & if anything has been gaining in popularity as folks look for chat alternatives with a large feature set & are self-hostable + decentralized to prevent lock-in--especially once they see how Matrix is too expensive to run.

toastal ,

Incorrect claim about what? That Apple’s chat system has very minor usage outside the US (+ Canada)? Last I checked, the majority of the population is not American… with my specific phrasing “in practice” holding true. Having a phone & having a computer are two separate things due to Google+Apple’s control. They do not want to let you use the device as a general compute device & almost nobody can use it for general compute so one could definitely prefer one & not the other since they unfortunately, in practice, are two separate categories. You should be able to chat with a phone & without a phone, with a personal computer & without--any platform that requires you must use one or the other is a bad technology.

Ask: How do you handle your résumés?

Usually I rely on my network & haven’t needed this kind of document in ages, but I’ve been tasked with creating a résumé for myself. I’ve grown more privacy-conscious every year & I think it’s weird that we are expected to give out so much information about ourselves to companies that lie about their culture & don’t...

toastal OP ,

Would be a good filter against those places that would actually get hung up on this

toastal ,

My hot take is the quickest way out of this quagmire is to abandon Git. With the education system & bootcamps raising the next generation to think MS GitHub is Git, it would probably be less work to start rolling with another VCS as megacorp Microsoft won’t have the agility to pivot away from Git. Git isn’t even that great—arcane CLI, patches don’t commute, basically permanently locks in your name & email, large files require a separate tool, etc. And most of the popular alternative forges are literally just trying to clone MS GitHub rather than invent something new or solve the shit problems it doesn’t like threading, pull request model sucks, source code doesn’t need to be a social media platform with gamified stars & anxiety-inducing activity charts to encourage that MIT code in your free time the corpos will use & never contribute back while demanding you use it to build your résumé… or it’s built on email as the common denominator with fingers in ears as if mailing lists are the optimal workflow for all projects when a majority of folks don’t even know how to bottom post & keep their mail with the same evil Microsoft or the other evil Google. Nothing is being bold enough to actually have a better user experience—currently the best lure is… free software, but worse UX? Being a better UX the Microsoft GitHub is not a even that high of a bar. Some folks claim “network effect” but it seems clear that a lot of folks already want out.

Nah. Start anew. Check out Darcs, Pijul, Fossil, Mercurial, Bazaar, or whatever else is out there. Build on the ideas that improve version control.

toastal ,

Distributed version control system

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