shirro @ shirro @aussie.zone

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290

Joined

2 yr. ago

Phones like vapes in schools are there so businesses can profit by exploiting kids. The device hardware is powerful and potentially useful with the right software but the most popular apps are generally exploitative and potentially dangerous to mental health and privacy and because the industry uses dark patterns based on gambling to drive up engagement they are a distraction and reduce attention.

My kids have a lot of access to technology and the Internet at home. I am not opposed to them having phones when they show the right level of maturity and demonstrate a real need but they don't need them in class. Their school has had a phone policy for a long time which I support. Kids should have the freedom to be themselves at school and make mistakes without them being captured and spread via mobile devices.

I wonder if the government and ASIC shouldn't take a closer look at Paypal as well. According to Ms Luke her account was one of 35,000 Paypal accounts breached in an incident last year and criminals used it to process thousands of transactions over a couple of days.

Be conservative and use the simplest thing that supports your needs and don't be suckered by feature lists. I have never needed more than ext4. It generally has the best all round performance and maturity is never a bad thing when it comes to filesystems. It isn't most suitable for some embedded and enterprise environments and if you are working with those you generally know the various tradeoffs.

Kids spend a large amount of their school time copy/pasting from google images and wikipedia into powerpoint and have done so for a couple of decades in many schools.

It seems very likely the lack of hand writing and illustration creates a huge deficit in fine motor skills. And copy pasting is probably detrimental to comprehension and knowledge retention. As long as educators don't question the motivation of tech companies using their classrooms to expand mind share and view technology uncritically as some sort of magic nothing will change.

My kids have been gaming all day on Steam. They have zero intellectual curiosity about the system they are using. They have been using Arch for years but it might as well be a console or Mac. They log in and launch a web browser, Steam or a Minecraft launcher and that is it. It makes me a bit sad.

I pay for Nebula but watch nebula creators on Youtube. Watching on Youtube boosts them in the algorithm and gives them a small share of premium and it is more discoverable. The problem with distributed alternatives is that using them would disadvantage creators on youtube which is their primary outlet. We may need to concede that unlike Reddit or Twitter that clearly can and should be replaced by distributed alternatives, Youtube has proven to be a natural monopoly and as such needs to be regulated to protect consumers and creators from monopolistic abuses.

I have a very pragmatic view on capitalism. It isn't inherently good or evil. Social democracy provides the best compromise where regulated capitalism generates wealth and funds innovation while responsible democratic government protects employees and the environment and provides services that have a strong social benefit.

Unfortunately social democratic policies are undermined in many countries and resisted in others to the point where some young people become frustrated and look to answers in hateful extremist politics which really is a horseshoe.

Regulated capitalism can direct capital to innovation in low/zero emission technologies and disincentivize investment in polluting technology very effectively,. More effectively than a corrupt command economy could do it. Fossil fuel companies have fought against interventions to push the market towards alternatives but the biggest failure has been on the political class and voters who haven't done enough to push the market in the correct direction. Photo voltaics, storage technology and wind turbines have received a lot of investment and are growing rapidly despite the work of the big polluters to stall action.

Yeah, I really, really hate ads. Premium used to be a lot cheaper so I am sort of grand fathered in though I expect that won't last. I could ad block (all my browsers are ad blocked) but I would have to maintain it not only on my devices but other family members with a variety of apps, platforms, networks etc. It is easier to pay fuck off money. Bonus is that a dribble of the funds goes to creators I watch though realistically the best way to support creators is to fund them more directly if you can afford it.

As with all monopolies/cartels/prohibitions unsatisfied demand always finds alternatives. If the rules get in the way people circumvent them. Youtube premium price increases will create a bigger demand for ad blocking. Just as the balkanisation of streaming services and reduced value will return many people to piracy. The people who run these organisations are idiots who destroy brands and shareholder value to get short term attention and bonuses.

I am very selective with what I watch but even so the amount of good content on youtube exceeds my available time while other services have a couple of shows a year to binge and then they can be dropped. With writers and actors striking conventional content is only going to get thinner for the other streaming services. There is a limit to what I will pay for a painless ad free experience for the whole family on all their devices and Youtube is rapidly approaching it.

Many people don't get what Framework is doing and that is fine. Buy a disposable laptop with everything soldered in and throw it in land fill when it breaks if that is what you want. The costs of unsustainable mass consumption isn't properly costed into purchases so the pollution and waste are left to future generations to deal with and plenty of people are more than happy with buying a bigger SUV, rolling coal and throwing out their laptop and phone every couple of years.

The modules are easily replaceable to deal with failure or changing needs without buying a completely new device.

The Framework is 2256x1504 in a 3:2 13.5" display and Macbook Pro 13" is 2560 x 1600 16:10. The Mac wins as they should with Apple's massive vertical integration and profit margins but I would argue those numbers are comparable when a lot of laptops are still shipping with 1920x1080 16:9 displays.

The Framework 16" is going to be a 165Hz 2560x1600 16:10 which is well behind the Macbook Pro 16" but they are addressing very different markets. Many Linux and possibly still some Windows users are skeptical about the battery use, performance and os/app scaling of very high res displays while Apple addressed those issues a long time ago. I considered scaling a negative over using native resolution when looking at the Framework 13. It turned out not to be a problem.

Framework is a sustainable/repairable device for Windows/Linux/BSD/ChromeOS and they only really need to compete with what is available to those users. Their Chromebook is way ahead of the Chromebook market. They can't compete against Apple because Apple doesn't licence their OS or processors to other manufacturers so it is a pointless comparison.

I bought a Framework DIY. I live in regional Australia and being able to order parts to install myself and extend the longevity of my system was decisive. The Framework was a compromise on specs and wasn't my first choice but nothing compares for sustainability and serviceability. I sourced ram and nvme locally and installed Arch.

System76 are a bit of a fantasy for me. I looked at them for years but I don't want to pay a premium then deal with international RMA on a rebadged Clevo. I always bought whatever looked good in locally available Windows laptops instead before Framework.

Now I am in the ecosystem I very selfishly want Framework to succeed and guarantee my access to upgrades and parts. I respect System76's mission and understand why people would wish to support them, particularly when their own laptop designs start shipping. System76's focus on North America and dependence on white box laptops hasn't delivered as well in my opinion, at least for my needs.

System76 have tried hard to improve openness and repairability but their laptops are still disposable at end of life while Framework have made a huge leap with upgradability that has the potential to reduce ewaste and I want to see how far that model can be pushed.

I don't think it was as good as SNW but I enjoyed it for what it was - a reunion special full of cameos. I think anyone who watched TNG, DS9, VOY era would feel the same. Even my kids who never watch Star Trek drifted in while I was watching Season 3 for some reason which surprised me. It was a great one off for the fans but clearly it isn't the way forward for Star Trek given the age of the actors etc. We are overdue for a proper Enterprise finale given we were ripped off the last time.

I wouldn't have watched Picard Season 3 or SNW without the Startrek community setting up this lemmy site and some of the great suggestions here.

Great. Now how about making them available on Paramount+ again which is supposed to be the home of Star Trek so kids can actually watch them.

As much as I disliked Disco and Picard, they have to try new things to grow the franchise for shareholders and it offers new possibilities for us viewers as well as more opportunities for creative talent. My kids, who think Star Trek is boring, loved Prodigy but we rotated subscriptions part way through the first season and never finished it and now we are back and all the episodes are listed but the content is all unavailable. Not the smartest way to attract a new generation of viewers.

Having grown up watching matte paintings, shaky plywood sets, bubble wrap monsters and people running up and down the same corridor repeatedly and then decades of soulless bad CGI I have nothing bad to say about modern productions standards. There is something special and human about the artistry of matte paintings, scale models and physical sets but I don't know that today's viewers have the same capacity for suspension of disbelief. LED walls allow some story telling that would otherwise be to expensive to visualise.

I respect that. I do code occasionally and I was only interested in 16:10 or squarer for a laptop. I was very concerned about the high dpi but it has been fine for me.

Ideally I wanted a 14" 16:10 (ideally 1920x1200 so I didn't need fractional scaling) with a high refresh rate and integrated amd graphics but the expandability and ability to maintain the system myself in a fairly remote area sold me on the compromise and I don't regret it but it wasn't my ideal laptop.

Expanding a custom product line is very expensive and will take time compared with slapping a badge on generic machines. The 16" framework with 16:10 aspect and 165hz refresh is going to expand Framwork's customer base a lot but my ideal is a system that falls in-between the two.

Without an equivalent to the Framework marketplace or a local presence I don't see myself ever buying a system76 despite looking at them regularly since they started. I bought an ASUS z35fm in 2007 based on what I think was their Darter at the time. They had 16 years to convert me to a sale and it took Framework a year with a better business model.

I have been watching system76 from afar for a long time and everytime I upgrade I look at their systems but I was never confident of local support. I bought an equivalent to one of their early laptops from a local company once. I think it is great that they are bringing more design in-house as rebadging generic systems limited their documentation and repairability.

While competition is good I can't look past Framework at the moment. They shipped to me direct from Taiwan as fast as a local delivery and I know I can repair the system so it removes all the concerns I had about dealing with a niche foreign company. I see no value in PopOS or the other user space stuff from system76. Open firmware is an advantage but I think framework will get there eventually. As much as I respect system76s mission I think their business model is dubious. They should have gone in-house open hardware earlier and I think the userspace stuff is a pointless distraction.

A subset of AUR PKGBUILDs are downloading a prebuilt desktop application binary packaged for another distro (deb, rpm, tarball, appimage) from upstream and then unpacking it. Those packages are trying to solve some of the same problems as flatpak, distributing a generic desktop binary but often do it worse and people should be weighing the alternatives. More broadly AUR packages aren't comparable with flatpak but some are.