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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: November 25th, 2024

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  • Fair, and this is why I hesitate to recommend LibreWolf as a true alternative to Firefox. It wasn’t meant to be the common man’s general browser. It was flavored with a privacy goal in mind and that’s what it does.

    It’s a half-step toward recommending someone use Tor browser as a daily driver. Which wouldn’t work out very well. But it’s quite private and anonymous!

    There just wasn’t a need/enough funding or drive for another “good enough” browser like Firefox, the answer for that was Firefox. Everyone else is off one deep end or another.


  • default dark themes make surfing less secure

    Not less secure per se, but less anonymous. Default dark mode reports your preference to websites and analytics, so it ends up being something that makes you different.

    Same reason privacy browsers use a default resolution and won’t let you stretch websites bigger if you have a huge monitor, keeping a border instead…

    The idea is to devalue tracking attempts by making the results a big nothing burger of more of the same. A herd of clones.


  • An excellent question. For a literature example to share, have you ever heard of Anne of Green Gables, a series of novels from the early 1900s? The title character herself would be treated for ADHD today, and there is another whose name escapes me that would be under ADD.

    But they don’t have these terms, it’s the 1900s, so these characters are simply excitable, absent minded, moody, day-dreamers…

    Neurodiversity has been with us probably as long as neurons, but we like to make people fit a mold, and anyone who deviates is given a funny nickname and pushed into the mold anyway, or ostracized for their “incompatibility”.

    Same with autism and any others, we’re just at the point where we want to look at it medically, and use medications and therapies to get them in the mold, rather than “a good whipping and back to the school books, damn slur” you’d get in the past.


  • I generally go with Debian, makes a good stable base. Then over SSH you can use a helper script like LinuxGSM, or use Docker containers. Or both? I’ve seen containers that use LGSM inside…

    For the web aspect, you can use DockGE or Portainer as a simple interface for the docker containers, but if you want to dig into the game configs from the same panel, you might want a full grown game management program, or a system level panel like Cockpit.

    One cool looking option is to set up a full out hosting panel like AMP, though admittedly it gives me weird issues often enough to think about downgrading to more basic options again. It was meant for a hosting seller environment, and behaves accordingly.


  • And don’t even get me started on “AI”.

    As the family technical person, I can say after years of attempting to teach people to understand and solve their own problems, my support calls are down in the past year! Is it because they got smarter? No! They started using ChatGPT, CoPilot, etc and following it blindly. Do they understand the concepts of what they are changing and doing? No, but as long as the original problem is fixed, who cares if a dozen more are created, as long as they(the problems) keep quiet.

    I am cursed to be in the middle, couldn’t just be given a well paying technical job like my forebears, but nobody thinks they need my technical skills anymore, so I have talents now viewed as outdated and of limited use.


  • To me, something like this might be a great help as the economy hits a downturn and people look to tighten purse strings. While there would be some guilt, tips are “optional”, and adjustable, so if money is tight I’m sorry but the percentage is going down. Ideally I never would have eaten out at all but if I did…

    Ok, so I guess I’m also a little salty about tipping culture in general, how it has changed to a passive aggressive percentage system that now tries to push high values at the register instead of actual like, token of appreciation tips.

    Listen, I can drop a bill on the table if it was good service, but now that things are so often percentage based…wether I got the burger or the steak did not change the level of service you provided, yet my expected tip has doubled with the meal price? And bringing the tip down to the value I have free is now an “insult” at “only” x percent?

    I personally have taken to avoiding services that “require” tremendous tips, and the guilt that the tip makes up 90% of a persons pay rather than being a treat on top like it used to be has only emboldened that decision.

    I hear the argument that tipped workers can actually walk away with much more than average wage after tips on a good night. Is this common or a happy outlier? I also hear they can get royally screwed on a bad night.

    And now that we so often have the tips included in our receipts, part of digital payments instead of cash on the table, how much are they actually getting it vs the house keeping most of it or it being averaged out to the cooks and managers?

    Then begets the argument, shouldn’t the cooks get a tip? They put significant labor into the food prep that the waiter delivered, but we tip the waiter only if we leave cash…

    And so I hate tips and may be a little biased. I think we absolutely should be paying people wages, and tips should be token gifts granted for exceptional services or from charitable people with money to burn.







  • Others are posting the well written explanations, so I’ll make the short comparisons.

    GitHub is like Reddit is to Lemmy. It’s the main player in source code hosting, proprietary and centralized to the profits and whims of Microsoft. But for that cost, you can easily bet a project you are looking for has a presence there, and it’s easier for a dev to pop from project to project with one account and identity.

    The others are like Lemmy, meant for hosting your own GitHub-like website with all the bells and whistles on top of the standard Git codeshare. There’s a lot of feature parity, though some softwares have more than others. But it comes at the cost of obscurity, Codeberg is a big player but any instance you find is isolated, and any devs you entice to help you need to register additional accounts personal to that instance. And the hosting costs are on you, it can all vanish with an unpaid domain/server bill unlike the central giant of GitHub.


  • Note what they continued to allow. They could still text and call, they did not completely isolate. They just shrunk their bubble.

    Instead of being bombarded by global stressors, international conflicts, and the need to participate on a massive stage, they were limited to those friends and family they would give a direct line of contact to.

    An echo chamber, if you want to think negatively about it. A village, for a positive label.

    The internet is an ongoing experiment, what happens when you take a being who for thousands of generations commonly only directly interacted with his village and neighboring villages, for whom “The World” and all its glories and shames, was just an abstract concept brought home by stories from wanderers…what happens to that species when you put the whole world, up to the minute, within reach at every moment?

    What happens when you can subscribe to every conflict and decision made way above your pay grade, and worry how it might hurt you? What happens when you don’t even have to choose to subscribe, it’s injected into your data stream because your anxiety and need to know bring revenue? What happens when you don’t even seek it, but it is delivered right to you?


  • From the looks of it, the variety of ways you can purposefully or accidentally destroy your local database, and the strict limits on accessing your profile, really gives me the feeling SimpleX is intended to be extremely disposable and deniable.

    After playing with it I just don’t see it being used for anything expected to be convenient or ongoing. Regarding the one device per account thing, I think the whole point is you just protect your one app, nobody is sneaking in your laptop or tablet, no remote leaks possible from a sync engine. On iOS you can link to a desktop app, but your phone must remain not just on, but in the app and on the pair screen. One twitch out, PC disconnects.

    Feels like something for journalists, whistleblowers, protesters, and all the bad ones. It’s a burner app for your burner phone.






  • Is it? The bottom of the totem pole might believe that and feel empowered by it, but I think the top is only concerned about themselves. I just don’t see them wasting the McCalories sparking a real thought about anything but their own gains. Sure, they don’t like us poors, but really they don’t like being told they have to treat us fairly. Or that there’s anyone above them that can say that.

    As in, they don’t exactly want to gut the government purely out of desire to throw us into suffering, the suffering is just a bonus to the original goal of never ending wealth, and never being told what they can’t do.

    Cut the spending, cut their taxes. Cut the public agencies, open up private revenue streams. Big G wants to say you can’t destroy your competition and become the only company people can send money to? Says you can’t bulldoze that forest? Can’t dump your waste in the river for free? Can’t have your workers working for next to nothing? Cut the agency. Cut the program. Become Gods.


  • I try to wonder, what’s the 4D chess here?

    R’s always want to dissolve these agencies, claim they overreach and abuse, and suppress their poor, unfortunate monopolies. But the mass opinion so far is hell no, we don’t want the unregulated hellscape that follows, we don’t want unchecked corpus.

    So now that they can, do they order said agencies to actually overreach and abuse, so when it is offered to end it later it gets celebrated and accomplished?

    Or should I give up because it’s not actually supposed to make any sense or semblance of a plan? Or is it all just a mess of distraction and unrest?