ProdigalFrog @ ProdigalFrog @slrpnk.net

A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.

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I haven't encountered what you're describing, unless you mean Invidious links? But I think those show the channel name as well, so I assume it's something else.

Do you still have access to the sort of link you're talking about?

AFAIK, GrapheneOS supports the Pixel Tablet, which is probably the only truly secure android tablet on the market.

If you're willing to sacrifice some UX, there are some Linux tablets. A cheaper option could be a 2-in-1 chromebook that allows installing Linux.

Otherwise, you could try to degoogle your Samsung tablet by installing LineageOS on it, if it's supported.

MIDI.

Before the 80's, there was no standard interface to control electronic instruments, just a bunch of proprietary interfaces unique to each manufacterer. But in 1983, amazingly they actually standardized on MIDI, and it remains a useful standard to this day, with any new versions of MIDI being completely backwards compatible, so your Yamaha DX7 from the 80's is still just as viable to use today as the day it was new!

James Lee was right.

Another reason to add to the pile in favor of citizen controlled media like the fediverse.

This is such an excellent video, really pumps you up to actually switch 😄

I consider odysee to be a longer term pump'n'dump scam for the reasons outlined here:

https://slrpnk.net/post/11302039/9749921

Personally I wouldn't place much trust in them.

There's Sepia Search, but I don't really understand why that's not just built into the Peertube UI itself.

I would very much appreciate the ability to explore other instances and see what channels are hosted there from my own instance, instead of having to open the new instance in a new tab, then copy and paste the link to each interesting channel into my instance to be able to subscribe to it.

I wish there was a similar feature for Lemmy as well.

Noam Chomsky would call that phenomena Manufacturing Consent, which highlights the importance of citizen controlled media, which has a much better (though not guaranteed) chance of accurately reporting on reality

I'm actually going to suggest; Yes, possibly. But for a very specific reason.

While much of social media isn't ultra necessary, federated social media could be quite essential to collectivising and resisting state and corporate manipulation and propaganda. All other forms of media and news are corporate or state controlled, and thus can construct and project false narritives that are beneficial to their aims, much to our collective detriment.

Social media has become the dominant way that many, possibly most people, see the news, discuss such news with eachother from people around the globe, and build a picture of what's going on outside of their isolated part of the world. I think Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent gives a pretty fantastic argument on the importance of citizen controlled media, and federated social media is about as citizen controlled as it can possibly get. It's non-corporate self-hosted open source software as far as the eye can see! It's not perfect, but holy shit this is as powerful as a tool to diseminate ideas and information on a grassroots level that we've ever had, and we should not underestimate its usefulness in the coming decade.

An excerpt from "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45", an interview with a German after WWII on why they didn't rise up:

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Dude.

This is the same guy who, just a couple weeks ago, publically endorsed the AfD (the far right nazi party in germany), saying "Only the AfD can save Germany."

For context, this AfD (That is a real ad by them). Look familar?

Surely you must see these aren't just a series of unfortunate coincedences?

I agree entirely, especially as modern systems massively ballooning the required knowledge and skill.

However, I do think there could've perhaps been a happy medium, where OS's retained and continued to develop a simple, built in way to program easily and without setup to retain the spirit of what BASIC provided.

I guess I'm imagining a sort've evolved version of Hypercard, which seemed to be on the path of providing something like that.

The beauty of HyperCard is that it lets people program without having to learn how to write code — what I call "programming for the rest of us". HyperCard has made it possible for people to do things they wouldn't have ever thought of doing in the past without a lot of heavy-duty programming. It's let a lot of non-programmers, like me, into that loop.

David Lingwood, APDA

There seems to be Decker as a spiritual successor, which is pretty neat.

Yarr! 😉

From what I've gathered recently, the Mullvad browser left unmodified and combined with a VPN is one of the most private browsers you can use, short of using Tor.

Soda Fountains from that time period are not strictly describing the device that dispenses the soda itself, it refers to the entire establishment. A soda fountain was like a Starbucks if it was entirely dedicated soda. There were Soda Fountain manuals teaching how to combine different essential oils and herbs to form hundreds of unique and interesting flavors, making it an interesting craft in itself. What we have now, where the machines just dispense a few select flavors that have the most market appeal is a pathetic shadow of what soda could be.

Boomer nostalgia aside, soda fountains were genuinely badass and it's a shame they disappeared except for a handful of specialty shops.

Ribbit :)

I'm coming around to this conclusion, and updated the post to reflect that. For something as important as a browser, it's a little concerning the Librewolf dev team is so short staffed, but they do seem to be holding their own. I hope they're able to stick around long term.

That's a well reasoned take, honestly.

As I investigate other options to LW, all of which also require a certain level of trust and/or diligence, ultimately I'm finding LW seems difficult to replace, as it does walk that line between 'good enough' security/privacy and convenience. The Phoenix project seems promising, but so far is only convenient on a few distros, leaving Windows users with LW, or perhaps Zen.

To clarify, the only relevancy PrivacyGuides has here is that their forum is where I found the link to the Arkenfox github issue, and how their arguments against Librewolf appeared to have been potentially validated by said github issue.

The main concern is that github issue, where one of the main developers of Arkenfox, from which Librefox is derived, claims:

LW since fxbrit left/died/who-knows has gone to shit - I worked with him behind the scenes to make the right choices and while he would do his own analysis, we always agreed, and his voice influenced them. Now they don't know what they are doing, and in fact have compromised security and make really stupid decisions. Same goes for all the other forks - really dubious shit going

And directly after which a Librewolf team member then voices agreement that Librewolf's quality control has degraded since the departure of fxbrit.

Now it could be that the Arkenfox dev is exaggerating, and tbh he comes off as a bit of a prick later in that github issue, but overall, I'd say it merits at least some concern (though perhaps less than I originally thought)