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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)SO
Posts
9
Comments
369
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • There is already a subscribed tab, and I use it most of the time when I want to catch up on selected topics. I use the local or all feed when I want to browse a wider view of what's going on in general. Right now the total amount of Lemmy traffic is small enough that browsing that way is tolerable, which it wouldn't be e.g. on reddit.

    I do think that the Lemmy software design is more meme-oriented than I'd prefer, because of stuff like the thumbnail pic with every post in the main feeds. The more interesting parts of reddit to me were text-only and we don't have that here.

  • I'd like the feed to be adjusted so that if there are a bunch of posts from the same community not too far apart from each other chronologically, to group them all together. Alternatively, a way to block communities showing in your front page view without blocking them completely. It's not just memes, there are a bunch of other topics that also clutter up the front page constantly. Even things like news reports in Dutch, which are perfectly legit except I can't read them, would be less annoying with this type of feature.

  • Yeah, I couldn't name one either (I'm from the US). The first name that popped into my mind was Jimi Hendrix but he wasn't British. I guess Othello wasn't British either, and may not have even been historical. I had heard of Idris Elba but didn't realize that he was British. No idea about the Spice Girls.

    There is a story (maybe apocryphal) that former US Vice President Dan Quayle (famous for malapropisms) once referred to Nelson Mandela as a "great African-American", fwiw.

  • Well what phone is it? There are tons of music playing programs on f-droid. Why not just run one? I've been using Vanilla Music. I don't like it that much, but don't feel like derping around trying more and more of them. Vanilla is better than some others that I tried.

  • The codecs are built into the client (I'm using linphone) and they all sound like crap. Provider is vitelity.net but I have a twilio account so could try that. Also, they only work at all when the phone is online by wifi. Using the phone's mobile data is total fail. Too many dropouts etc.

  • Voip call quality is terrible, it is near unusable over mobile data IME, it adds latency etc.

    I guess an intermediate measure might be to make all your phone calls through a forwarding proxy (e.g. implemented with Twilio API) so that all the mobile carrier sees is that your phone calls all go to the same number. Similarly you'd give out a VOIP DID number that forwards to your mobile, so all your incoming calls would appear to come from the same number.

  • Don't know about Signal but the way PFS usually works is there is something like a Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange. Each person generates a random (private) number, remembers it, crunches it mathematically into a public number, and sends the public number to the other person. Each then combines their private number with the public number that they got from the other person, and this (because of how DH works) cleverly gives both people the same secret number they use for the encryption, but the secret can't be reconstructed without knowing at least one of the private numbers. Finally, the PFS part is simply that each person permanently deletes both the shared secret and the private number they generated for that exchange (they will create new ones next time they want to communicate). That means there is no way to reconstruct the secret and re-decrypt the message.

    Of course, authentication also has to be added to all this.

    For more info, probably easiest to look up Diffie-Hellman key exchange online.

  • Psychologists are therapists. Just specifically trained.

    Nah, there are psychologists who measure axon potentials in rats and stuff like that. Therapy is an area in clinical psychology, which is a subfield of psychology, but you can get a psychology degree without ever going near that subfield. You get to be Dr. Rat Maze or whatever. But who knows, you might end up training the next Algernon who then takes over the world.

    Source: had a grad student housemate doing that type of research. He said when people heard he was studying psychology, they thought he was getting trained to be a marriage counselor. Nope, nothing of the sort.

  • I'm a chess fan. Men-only events were abolished in the 1980s. There are now women's events (no men allowed) and open events (everyone allowed). In practice open events are 90% male, and the male players, especially at the lower levels, tend to fit the smelly and socially inept stereotype. Playing in them can be unpleasant for women, and women's events exist basically to provide playing venues where women can enjoy competitive chess while staying the hell away from us clueless males. As a clueless male myself, I can get behind that, no problem. I understand and I'm fine with it. How do cis women feel about playing alongside trans women? Idk, I'm cis male and I don't feel entitled to spout off about that. But I think they are the ones I'd want to listen to the most.

    The top levels from what I can tell aren't as bad as the lower levels, since the effort it takes to reach that level of chess tends to weed out the clueless and lazy. There is still bad stuff though, e.g. the incidents with GM Alejandro Ramirez.

    You might like the book Chess Bi tch (that is the title, damn censor bot),by WGM Jennifer Shahade reviewed here , about her experiences in both women's and open chess events coming up through the ranks.

    As for FIDE, there currently aren't really alternatives at the top levels. FIDE on the other hand is not much of a factor in lower and mid level chess. Those events tend to be regulated by national and ad hoc federations, etc.