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GadgeteerZA
GadgeteerZA @ danie10 @lemmy.ml
Posts
31
Comments
148
Joined
4 yr. ago

  • I certainly notice it as I post a lot across networks. I always have a title with my content explaining what's what. There are so many times I have to reply to a commenter, saying "yes, that was what I mentioned in the post". Clearly, way too many just dive in and comment on a title without even bothering to read the post content. It's not that the content is pages long, it is usually maybe 3 or 4 paragraphs.

    It's no wonder so much misinformation takes hold, as few take the time to critically comprehend what they're reading.

    I think it is partly just fast scrolling and laziness to actually read the point being made. But then you may ask, why bother commenting at all then...

  • "Be careful what you wish for"

    --Aesop--

  • I think it is quite well known that only Telegram Secret Chats are true E2EE. That said, Telegram is still not in the business of selling metadata actively like Whatsapp/Facebook/Meta are. As far as plain features go, Telegram is streets ahead of Whatsapp. But if I needed real "secret chat" I'd probably use Threema, SimpleX, Nostr, Jami, etc where I'm not tied to my mobile phone number or e-mail address.

  • Yes and no. It is good and I did one restore of some files that worked fine, but in my case it was noticeably affecting my boot up times, and I reverted to ext4 (boot ups were fast again to less than one minute). For some reason, BTRFS was resulting in quick login, but about 18 mins before my actual desktop was responsive after login. I spend many days trying to troubleshoot that. Maybe you won't have this problem. I had my SSD system drive on ext4 with Timeshift backups, and my /home partition on BTRFS.

    So I'm back on my ext4 doing a daily automated backup to a second drive with rsync (LuckyBackup app). I think there are further kernel improvements coming to BTRFS later in this year. But I'll probably only retry it again end of 2023 or in2024. So if you decide to move, just benchmark your boot times, so you can judge if it affects them badly or not.

    That said, BTRFS has some great features, lost no data for me, and I think has a great future.

  • Actually no, Impi Linux was SA govs Linux distro in mid 2000's before politicians changed. It was all political decision making. Ubuntu was a private initiative of Mark Shuttleworth, which he took to the UK. He was from SA and did give support to Impi Linux.

  • The bigger problem was a massive buy of Microsoft Cloud services with Office365 etc. It's moved beyond the desktop and moving back is not going to be easy. MS cloud makes it's easier to use Linux on desktops, but basically the horse has left the stable.

  • Credit card everywhere in South Africa for me - firstly safer, but I also settle it in full monthly so avoid bank costs and interest, and I get a lot of benefits back like 35% off fruit & veg, 75% off fitness devices annually, etc.

  • Yep too similar, and often both in a Linux gaming environment ;-)

  • I do yes as I also have a channel that I do videos for (my only income as I fund my own website without ads or 3rd party trackers). I do make my videos' ads skippable though. And yes my own browser blocks ads.

    But the pleasantness, or lack thereof, comes down to a site's rules and moderation. The vast majority of people don't want to be aggravated, and they also don't really want to pay to use a website.

    But scammers and clickbait are everywhere. I think a lot depends on whether they can game the algorithm to force their way into your home feed or not. Many news media sites also use clickbait, and the same goes for politicians wanting to get attention through fear and anger. But I agree very often clickbait crosses the line - it is really irritating when you see a thumbnail of something, and that image literally appears nowhere inside the content.

    I mostly follow technology channels though.

  • I've filed at least three reports to X about incitement of violence and racial issues, and each came back as "the did not contravene our policies". So that was the last time I opened X to read anything. It's one thing to have a differencing point of view and debate it, but it's another thing to stir up hatred without any reason or logic. It has got super toxic. I think more, and more brands are going to start realising this. No-one really needs all that negativity and hate, and there are better options on the Internet.

  • That's a wide open topic, but for self-hosted I use FreshRSS with Full Text RSS coupled to it to get the full text of feeds. For desktop, I like cross-platform open-source Fluent Reader (just did a video about it today in fact) - again because it pulls in full text and can still sync reading progress across devices through multiple services inc FreshRSS, Nextcloud, and others.

  • They have just updated the ToS tho to now exclude using your data without permission for training AI. But Jitsi Meet is still a better option ;-)

  • No it's not more secure going via Gmail. But what I did was to get the paid Proton Mail and I used my own domain name. So yes plenty pain and time now to slowly update my email address everywhere away from Gmail to my own domain name with Proton Mail.

    But hopefully it's the last time I have to update the email address everywhere, because even if I leave Proton Mail, my mail address is not tied to them, but to my own domain name so I can point that to any other mail provider.

    So every mail address I'm changing now, is one away from Gmail. But if course 99.9% of businesses don't Encrypt mail, so I'm only really cutting Google out of the loop (assuming the other party is not using Gmail of course).

  • The "popular vote" is also not a perfect system. When there are a majority of rural voters in area, and those voters are poorly educated, they come up with some interesting choices of town mayors, who then have no clue how to actually run a town council and provide services (not inside the US but just saying, no political system seems to be perfect).

  • Which looks very different if you choose any of the other themes. We have tons of choices, and each of us decides. Some may even want theirs to look like Windows.

  • Eggs are pretty nutritious actually (as long as not too many, like many other things) and yes they contain some cholesterol, but a body with zero cholesterol is a dead body. The brain needs cholesterol to survive. It's all about moderation, as the dieticians love to say.

  • Anything with a "Foundation" or a "Board of" behind it, seems to get lobbying rights to veto any changes, i.e. to preserve their status quo ;-)

    Supposedly too, you used to be able to commission a "research project" and define it's scope nice and narrow, and get just the results you'd like to have published to support the "no change". It does take a lot of money to be able to do this, though.

  • I'm not sure RCS is yet complete enough. It was really designed with replacement of SMS in mind. It also needs to work independently of any phone number and ensure full E2EE.

  • RCS is more carrier based messaging and the whole stack is not built with proper E2EE as far as I know. No I'm thinking more like XMPP type open protocol, but endorsed by an international open standards body. I'm fearing that RCS is too tied to carriers just like SMS itself was.

    Interesting that we already have a W3C standard for social networking but messaging itself seems to elude us..