d0ntpan1c @ d0ntpan1c @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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2 yr. ago

This. We already rely on digital, currently through a rather small number of payment providers who, at the end of the day, suck at privacy and security. I'm not terribly well educated on digital ID, but i generally don't get why it is any worse than our current system (in the US, at least) of a bunch of corp run finance systems which are already very transparent to government surveillance, and care more about appeasing shareholders than security or privacy.

Comparing visa/mastercard/discover/credit reporting/banks etc to a government based digital option, at least the government option can be beholden to voters and at least the government, as a whole, isn't serving shareholders wants over privacy/security.

It certainly means an authoritarian government could abuse the system more easily, but its a mistake to think that an authoritarian government can't already abuse the current system to the same extent.

Whether the US adopts their own stablecoin and bans/doesn't ban other crypto, and whether this digital ID thing is the harbinger of that, it wont change what the vast majority of people reach for at the end of the day. Which, pending massive societal upheaval, will be whatever the government backs.

You wont be able to revert everything, since 115 is essentially a new underlying UI framework. Your best bet is a fork like betterbird since you'll be able to just load up your profile and keep going fairly seamlessly. But chances are rheyll eventually catch up to 115, and betterbird may diverge further or follow along.

Thunderbird 115 does have a decent amount of customization still. You can switch the list views from the new cards look back to the table layout, if that is your main dislike. It's the icon at the top right of the inbox list next to the quick filters button. You can also change the layout to a horizontal one from the hamburger menu under views.

As far as tool bars there is not much you can do other than try to get as close to your preferred setup with the customize capabilities. Just right click on the top header area, just like in firefox. It wont have everything from older versions of Thunderbird, but most of the common tasks are available to use there instead of in the message veiwer or on the list/table view.

And of course, there may be some add-ons which restore some UI elements or features you miss. Many of those things would need to be re-implemented for the newer UI framework and would need enough people who use them to justify an add-on dev or the thunderbird team to make it happen.

Foundry makes a great information hub, even locally. All your DM handouts, their character sheets and notes, bags of holding, etc can live inside it. No more "who has X thing?"

I usually have a couple of maps set up for global use. One is the world/region map and I move a toke on it to show where the party is. Journal entries are pinned to locations and I reveal them as the party learns info.

Then I'll usually have a map set up as essentially their "planning table" with all the info relevant to the current events, images, etc.

It's set up so that even if we are running a combat in another map, they can swap back and reference something themselves if they want. I can always draw their attention back to the combat encounter map on demand if needed.

Also, if you also run 5e-tools it makes life even easier. You can import all sorts of things from 5e-tools into foundry with no need to spend time re-creating spells and items and such

I'm somewhere between a skeptic and a believer. I'm happy to accept that there may be something to the paranormal. Magic is just science we don't understand, etc. I also know plenty of people who are dead serious about their experiences, and I've also had some. Most I can find a way to explain. Especially when I knew there might be a haunting ahead of time. But there are two instances where I did not have knowledge beforehand, yet the experiences matched up very closely.

The university I went to has a number of hauntings and paranormal stories. I did not learn about these or any details until after I graduated and I was setting up a Monster of the Week RPG for my friends who also went to the university and I was making for source material.

I quickly realized that the man who I often saw hanging out on the balcony of the "old main" building when walking around campus late at night/early morning was, in fact, a known haunting. Same description. Everything. I remember thinking it was weird at the time, especially since the building was being renovated, but it also wasn't entirely closed off to the public. A classic situation of a ghost you notice, but when you look back they are gone.

There was also a more paranormal haunting in another building. Apparently a student was dumped in a ditch in the early 30s and not found, but then when they built the building in the 60s they found bones and figured it had to be that particular cold case based on some other material found. We would often use that building after football games to watch the halftime show (marching band) and do some post-game wrap up. University football game, so we'd be in that space around 11pm to midnight or later depending on the game length. There was one time a bunch of us were taking our time packing up and chatting and we were down a hallway a bit further away from the majority of people. Everyone else had pretty much left and, even the faculty had locked up thinking no one else was left. Just the always-on emergency/safety lighting. Then it just felt... awful. Unwelcome, not a good place to be, the mental image of "get out". And we all wordlessly just got up and started heading out. The way you might all as a friend group collectively decide "well, time to bounce", but without any of the semi-ritualisric awkward conversarion cues or learned signals. Once we were away and took a moment to think about what happened, we all felt very uncomfortable and it felt almost like we were compelled to leave. Learned later that it was similar to other reports of the building.

Gnome Tweaks, dconf UI or cli, or extensions can adjust all of those things, CSD included. I wish it was more baked into the settings, fwiw. One of the first things I do is move the CSD buttons to the macOS location.

I definitely agree the baked-in CSD is annoying at times, but now that Wayland has matured a lot and most apps have adjusted to baked-in CSD along with adding Wayland support, it's pretty rare to run into problems.

Also... if you've only tried gnome recently on Ubuntu, def recommend trying it on debian or another distro that doesn't drastically change everything about it.

(And of course, all that said, desktop choice is wonderful and no one has to settle for anything, big or small 🙂)

That's how Microsoft markets their "safe links" in Outlook, which is more or less the same behavior of wrapping all links with a redirect. Whether they actually do anything with that to save you from phishing attempts or whatever... who knows. Even if there is a safety feature, it's still an easy way to mine url query params for data or learn about the user for other purposes (which they may or may not be doing)

IMO if you can't turn it off, there's a secondary motive to the feature. Especially when the feature is marketed from a place of fear rather than aid.

In Gnome's defense, they also make it really easy to replace or customize the vast majority of things to an almost surprising degree and while their extension SDK is a bit weird with some choices, it's also fairly friendly to anyone with some JS experience.

I used to not be a fan either, but 44 and 45 have felt pretty good to use with minimal changes. Some of the more recent design guidelines they've refined have made a huge difference. I use Dash to Dock, but that's the only real UX change I use nowadays.

I still dislike the macOS-like launcher menu for apps. But I also don't care for an application menu or windows 7-style menu so I live with it.

This. To implement most infinite scrolls UI's you are still doing pagination with an API,just automatically requesting the next page in the list rather than needing to press a "next" button to kick it off (usually). Most apps and sites could implement switching between pagination UI and Infinite Scroll UI as a setting.

One of those things that would not be a ton of effort, but since it does create two different things to show does increase maintenance efforts for the dev. So I get why people tend to go for one or the other and rarely both, but it'd be a huge win for user preference.

I have a 3000+ saved songs list which is my standard "just play some music, give me the kitchen sink" choice. The only way to get Spotify off of a "shuffle-loop" is to turn off shuffle, skip a few songs, then turn shuffle back on.

It will still inevitably go back to the same 50 songs after a while though. I haven't found a way to prevent this with any setting. I've not noticed it on any of my playlists with only a few hundred songs, but I don't listen to those as long or often as my saved songs.

On mobile you can at least pick a (Spotify generated) genre filter which helps.

I just want Spotify to shuffle like old school iTunes. All the songs on this list... but randomized. A setting like iTunes to favor songs you've listened to fewer times would also be neat.

But we're in the era of algorithms for everything, and apparently even Spotify premium isn't enough to save you from sponsored and/or targeted manipulation Or their algorithm is just bugged and they don't care.

I've actually noticed this with their AI DJ too. Listen to it long enough, it basically favors the same handful of artists and songs over and over again.