abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

Chrome is run by a massive corporation with a reputation for for invasions of privacy. Opera is run by a nation state with a reputation for invasions of privacy.

Vivaldi is far better than either of those.

It uses whatever rending engine works best on the platform you're using - Chromium's main advantage is the extensive plugin library so that's the one they use on most platforms, though they have said they have internal builds that run on other rending engines and those work fine (except for plugins). If there's every any reason to drop Chromium they will.

As for being "just another" anything - it really isn't. The way tabs work is fundamentally different to any other browser. At a glance, it just looks like a basic browser with tabs in the sidebar instead of across the top but it's so much more than that.

For example most browser have three types of tab - Regular, Pinned, and Incognito. Arc has "Today" tabs, Pinned Tabs, Favourite Tabs (these are closer to "Pinned" tabs in other browsers), "Little" tabs, Split tabs, Popup Tabs, and Incognito tabs.

Notice there is no "regular" on that list - none of the tabs in Arc behave like a regular browser tab. Arc also doesn't have bookmarks - tabs replace bookmarks. Here's the breakdown:

• Today tabs go away at the end of the day (you can change this to be longer, I don't recommend doing that). They go into an Archive and can easily be recovered.
• Pinned tabs aren't like pinned tabs are synced between all your devices/browser windows and they stick around until you get rid of them. The process to create and remove a pinned tab is really simple and they are organised in groups and folders. Pinned tabs won't necessarily bne running in RAM, so in a way they're almost like a bookmark.
• Favorite tabs appear as just an icon instead of a full tab, and they appear in all of your groups (within a profile). They are also pre-loaded — handy for web apps that take a while to load.
• A Little tab tab doesn't have tabs - it harkens back to the old days when the web was a lot simpler. It's useful for quickly looking something up and then closing it a few seconds later. Links from other apps open in this mode by default.
• Split tabs are a single tab that contains multiple webpages - e.g. you might have your zoom meeting and your notes as a single tab.
• Popup tabs are similar to "little" tabs, except instead of being in a separate window they are embedded in a tab. If you have, for example, your issue tracker as a pinned tab, and you load up a link to a different domain name, it will open in one of these. You can go back to your issue tracker by closing the popup tab instead of hitting the back button six times... but it will still be a single tab for both your issue tracker and the link that the issue tracker took you to.
• Incognito works the same as any other browser.

Yes - it is closed source... but it uses an unmodified open source rendering engine and for me that's good enough.

At a guess - they're likely selling those laptops at a loss and making the money back on (hopefully) service contracts or (probably) selling your data. As soon as you install a custom OS they won't support you (so you won't buy support) and they won't be able to sell your data.

I don't think you need to build a computer for this. Just run Docker on whatever computer you have. A laptop is fine.

I’m not sure, whether there is any government that has made a pledge to donate a certain amount of money per year into the development and funding of such general purpose software

Tor (The Onion Router) was invented by a United States Naval Intelligence Unit. They released the source code as open source and handed control over to the EFF but several US Government agencies continued to provide substantial funding (especially the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Affairs). As far as I know they continue to fund it.

There are definitely examples of Governments funding open source software, especially things that are as valuable as a social network.

I am exactly doubting your suggestion of tax paid donations. I don’t think this will happen, unless we actually come together and try to actually enforce this on the political level in various countries.

I meant private donations, which are already happening.

I think tax revenue would be spent on government employees looking over content in search of evidence of crimes/etc, which I'm sure is also already happening. I hope they don't just look - they should be reporting whatever they find.

I'm not suggesting Beehaw/etc should be government funded. Rather I'm suggesting it's already possible for basically anyone in the fediverse to report a post as needing urgent moderator attention.

I think there will be tax payer funded efforts, donation funded efforts, volunteers, etc that are unaffiliated with any specific instance but go through major instances and hit the report button where they consider it to be appropriate — not just manually with people but also with automated tools such as searching for images by a hash of their contents or maybe even running messages through a Large Language Model to check if it is, for example, a form of targeted harassment.

And yes, the report feature will be abused. That's unavoidable and needs to be taken into account when deciding how to respond to a report. An algorithm could easily prioritise reports based on the history of past reports made by the same person / organisation.

Stack Exchange has a pretty good system - decisions by individuals are not trusted. Rather those trigger a review by a randomly selected (and trusted) individual to get a second opinion. And even after a decision has been made and an action has been taken (ban a user, etc) there's often a third or even fourth review. And there are processes to appeal and question decisions.

It's not an easy problem to solve, but as the creator of mastodon said - many hands make light work. The fediverse can some day have a billion people doing moderation tasks - where even simple acts like hitting the upvote button become part of the moderation system (upvote would imply that this account holder tends to make valuable contributions to the community, and should make the moderation system less likely to come down with a ban hammer).

And I also think there is scope for some communities to be entirely government funded. For example I'd love for every city in the world to run an offical community, with official local government anouncements as well as moderated discussions relevant to people who live in or are visiting the city.

According to BlueSky's own timeline - the original account was deleted 18 days after it was created. They were quick to react once they knew about it, but they took too long to find it.

That was also followed by almost two weeks of activity without clearly making any statement about what was going on. Better late than never but this "Letter to the Community" should have been written over a week ago.

As for how long it should take to take an account offline on Lemmy - personally I'd like to see some kind of karma based system. If an active account that's been around for years is flagged... maybe ignore that unless there are multiple flags. But if a brand new account or an old account that hasn't been very active is flagged, kill it instantly and flag it to be investigated (and potentially restored).

I agree, but who’s going to pay for it?

How about police/the tax payer?

If university researchers can find the stuff, then police can find it too. There should be an established way to flag the user (or even the entire instance) so that content can be removed from the fediverse while simultaneously asking for all data that is available to try to catch the criminals.

And of course, if regular users come across anything illegal they will report it too, and it should be removed quickly (I'd hope immediately in many cases, especially if the post was by a brand new/untrusted account).

I slammed my head into the concrete really hard. Hard enough to destroy the helmet. Hard enough I could have died even wearing a helmet.

It was a totally unexpected freak accident, did something I'd done a thousand times before, only this time I fell over. You just can't predict some accidents.

I've probably crashed a bicycle or motorbike 50 times in my life. The only people who haven't crashed are people who don't ride often.

I get what you're saying, people take more risks when they are wearing a helmet. But at the same time, not all crashes are the rider's fault. Sometimes it's another vehicle. Sometimes it's an unexpectedly slippery surface. Sometimes it's a mechanical failure (have you ever had a tyre rapidly defalte suddenly at speed and then come off the wheel rim before you could stop? I have. Twice. It's not fun). Sometimes you just get hit in the face by a rock or a large bird.

Cycling is inherently dangerous. Protection is appropriate.

... also ... if the statistics say wearing a helmet may protect you... then fuck, I'll take those odds. Imperfect protection is better than no protection at all. If you cycle regularly, you will crash. There's no uncertainty in that - everyone who has cycled regularly for any period of time has crashed more than once. And head injuries are the most common cycling injury according to Australian hospital statistics (among serious injuries anyway - hospitals obviously don't collect data on minor bruises).

But every kid is entitled to $x per year funding

According to the ABC, independent private schools average $10k per year per student and public schools $14k per year.

AFAIK The exact amount a private school gets depends on how affluent the families are estimated to be (estimated by the government - not the school).

The reality is if every kid went to a public school, we'd have to significantly raise taxes to cover the additional cost (we'd also have to open new schools). I'd probably be in favour of that, but not everyone would.

All I can say is I've hit my head hard enough to get a concussion while wearing a helmet. Pretty sure I would've died without the helmet.

So I'm glad I was wearing one, and I will continue to do so every time I ride.

Have you asked the school?

Because if it's server side Linux... then Docker is the way to go. It will run Linux inside a very light weight virtual machine that you barely even know is running at all.

Apple Watch for me, because of how well it integrates with my phone - the point where i end up using my phone a lot less.

I don't really bother with fitness tracking to be honest. I know in my head that I went for a 50 minute bike ride on the weekend. That's enough for me. I do appreciate when my watch tells me if I've been too sedentary/etc today or reminds me that it's late and I should probably get some sleep, but that's about the extent of my "fitness tracking" needs.

The Mac boot process is completely unlocked, at least on Intel Macs.

On Modern Macs, the process is somewhat convoluted, but you are able to boot into a custom compiled boot loader / operating system while secure boot is enabled. It just needs a few minor hoops to sign the boot loader - steps that would be difficult to social engineer around but perfectly reasonable to do them intentionally if installing an alternate operating system is your thing.

iPhone is, of course, a different story. Hopefully that changes some day. The CPU and boot process is the same as a Mac, so there's no reason it couldn't be unlocked. Might require government intervention though.

the reason Google keeps the money flowing to Mozilla is for Chrome to have a real competitor, Firefox to date is the only popular web browser with different engine and all that

Did you forget Safari? It has orders of magnitude more users than Firefox and it doesn't use the same rendering engine as Chrome.

If I had access to a good LLM, that'd be enough for 99% of my research. And the other 1% I could probably do on a phone.

free and open-source software developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity

99% of open source software development is part of a commercial activity.

As I understand it - and I'm not sure I do - the act essentially makes contributors to open source software legally responsible for security. And the penalty for failing to comply is 15 million Euros.

Combine a fine I can't afford, with legislation I'm not qualified to understand (I am not a lawyer), and basically I'm just going to have to stop writing open source software. I can't afford to pay a lawyer to check if I'm in compliance, so I have to assume I could be fined. Which just isn't worth the risk.

Other countries around the world already approved this deal a long time ago.

The US has shown the most resistance.

IP68 is defined as:

suitable for continuous immersion in water under conditions which the manufacturer shall specify

The Apple "conditions" include this choice quote:

resistant to accidental spills from common liquids

And this one:

Splash, water and dust resistance are not permanent conditions and resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Liquid damage is not covered under warranty

I think it would be hard for Apple to argue handling "accidental spills" meets the EU requirement for the device to be "regularly subject to splashing water". Especially when "normal wear" can decrease the water resistance and it's not covered under warranty.

If, on the other hand, Apple actually makes a phone I can use to record my kids swimming underwater... heck yeah that sounds awesome. I'd totally sacrifice a user replaceable battery. Bring it on.