Zworf

Zworf , 3 months ago to Free and Open Source Software in Is osmand normally terrible?

It's not great. They finally added OpenGL acceleration but now the PoI icons are twice as big as normal so they are cluttering the map a lot.

And without that the app is pretty slow. I do love the way it is so configurable though. I have no issues with location.

Zworf , 3 months ago to Technology in Reddit gets ready for IPO, setting a top valuation of $6.4 billion

Or OnlyFans 😆 They almost went out of business. It was really disingenious to have a porn site..... ban porn? 🤔 😶

I don't think porn is a huge part of Reddit though. I always loved the way they had these great amateur communities of real exhibitionists, but lately things have been ruined anyway with more commercial people just teasing their onlyfans.

But due to the niche communities there, I think reddit banning porn would be a real opportunity for lemmynsfw. A mainstream community is much harder to move but a niche community can move pretty rapidly.

Zworf , 3 months ago to Technology in Google’s self-designed office swallows Wi-Fi “like the Bermuda Triangle”

Which is also what you want really, if you have everything on WiFi. High density setups with really small cells so you can reuse channels. A building with high signal attenuation helps with that.

Having said that I'd never want to work for a company like Google.

PS:

Bad radio propagation means Googlers are making do with Ethernet cables, phone hotspots.

"Making do with Ethernet cables"? For me that's still the most reliable and secure way of doing networking on computers. You're at a desk, why not have a cable there. For mobile devices, sure. At my work every docking station has a cabled connection luckily.

Zworf , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to Socialism in Europe’s Center Right Is Enabling the Authoritarian Turn

The center and the extreme right both seek to protect capital at all costs. One believes “decorum” and “the structures of power” are necessary to maintain capitalism, one believes an extreme restructuring of power is necessary to “save” capitalism.

And the reason they want to keep captalism is because they want to keep their privileged position because they are afraid they will lose something. Which isn't really true, we have less money than the richer people in the US but also a lot less worry because we have labour rights, free or cheap healthcare, much lower crime etc. And cost of living scales with income anyway. I would never want to work in the US where I can be fired "at will", can go bankrupt when I have a medical issue and have a much higher chance of getting murdered than anywhere else in the western world.

Also, if we go full capitalist, the Chinese will beat us at this for sure because their government cares absolutely nothing about their citizens and they can always hollow out their society's rights more to compete. They pretend to be communist but they're actually ultra-capitalist. But they can do the race to the bottom much much better than we can.

What we should go for is an ethical society that balances the interests of capital with society, environment etc, which we are much better at than any other major power. It's our strength. Unfortunately these guys are breaking these efforts down, sowing discord, and undermining our stability for their own personal gain.

The problem is what do we do about it. I've started blocking all the ex-friends who have been infected by extreme-right propaganda but in my country 24% voted for this trash in the last election, it's ridiculous.

I think the whole movement has been enabled by the central right because they have been undermining welfare for decades while framing the left as being lazy and just wanting to take everyone else's money. It makes people's lives much less secure and this insecurity is what breeds the extreme-right anger.

Zworf , 4 months ago to Technology in On DMA eve, Google whines, Apple sounds alarms, and TikTok wants out

YES! So true.

Many times something doesn't work, you log a ticket and they're like "according to the docs it should work so you're doing something wrong" and you get into an endless loop of providing logfiles and doing random updates because really their 'premium' support (which isn't even microsoft but accenture) has no clue whatsoever. They don't know anything more than anyone who read the docs. It's like you're in a courtroom and you have to prove your innocence before they're going to lift a finger to help you. At least in a real court you're innocent until proven guilty 🤦‍♂️

Then eventually after a month or two you bug your account manager enough that they finally escalate the issue to someone who actually knows something at microsoft and they're like "oh yeah that feature doesn't work properly, try this". I mean for real. 🤬 So much wasted time.

Zworf , 4 months ago to Technology in On DMA eve, Google whines, Apple sounds alarms, and TikTok wants out

Yes that's the exact feeling I have. Fast food.

We've been moving from a lot of best-in-class services to Microsoft ones and this is exactly it. They're always just good enough to be passable but never great at what they do. The only real benefit they have is that a lot of stuff is "free" with other things (how Teams is killing slack despite being piss-poor) and that everything integrates better with Windows. And they're always behind the competition, like Intune was much much worse than the competing MDMs when we had to use it, and they've only kinda caught up by now.

It's a smart move because even if you do have an AAA product sooner or later some smartass manager is going to be looking to make a name for themselves and cut costs with something that's 'free'.

Zworf , 4 months ago to Technology in On DMA eve, Google whines, Apple sounds alarms, and TikTok wants out

EntraID is pretty much the only time a MS rebranding actually makes sense because Azure Active Directory was confusing as hell.

All the other ones, like Lync -> Skype, Yammer -> Viva, Intune -> MEM were just marketing running wild for the sake of it and putting their customers up with the burden. And CoPilot is a disaster because they're dumping a whole load of different products under the same labeling and nobody knows what the hell is what anymore, even experts.

Zworf , 4 months ago to Technology in On DMA eve, Google whines, Apple sounds alarms, and TikTok wants out

They don't want their "kids" to leave the beautiful walled garden where everyone pays a fee to be there :P

Zworf , 4 months ago to Technology in On DMA eve, Google whines, Apple sounds alarms, and TikTok wants out

There's many EU commissioners pushing for commercial projects already, like Thierry Breton and his ever present "digital everything" initiatives that nobody asked for except the companies that are implementing it. Like eIDAS and the recent digital ID thing. The EU is very receptive to commercial interests but mostly ones originating from the EU.

It is true that we do have a very different outlook on privacy but that should not be mistaken for a lack of commercial interests.

Zworf , 4 months ago to Technology in On DMA eve, Google whines, Apple sounds alarms, and TikTok wants out

As a general rule, when trillion-dollar companies don’t like regulation, it simply means they’re admitting the rules are good for their customers.

We're not their customers. That's the root cause of this problem.

Zworf , 4 months ago to Free and Open Source Software in Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects

I don't really want to sign up to their T&C's, but I did in the past. But their web client is really annoying, it's constantly blocking me and kicking me out and giving captcha's. Probably I have too many ad/tracking blockers :P

But again, with a real FOSS ecosystem you wouldn't have to worry about such skullduggery because there is no tracking to block.

Zworf , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to Free and Open Source Software in Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects

You choose to exclude yourself by placing such a high value on privacy. Privacy for what here?

It's not the privacy of the content we're discussing, it's the horrible Discord client that keeps datamining your PC. It even inspects all the processes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/43lqyb/why_is_discord_recording_our_open_programs_and/

And they don't allow third party clients. They say it can't be turned off because of their push to talk features but I never use those anyway (and they are not needed for FOSS projects, they're more gaming features).

Anyway I don't trust them and don't want to do "business" with them (and definitely not with Tencent). My point is that this mindset of "placing a high value on privacy" while admittedly quite niche, is definitely something many FOSS projects subscribe to. In particular Home Assistant which I mentioned, because a big reason for people using it is because they don't want all their home data in a big data cloud (e.g. homekit, alexa, google home etc). The whole point of home assistant is so you can use your smart home equiment without having to subcribe to commercial companies. And then they do something like this.

What they could do is provide a secondary channel or a bridge to discord which they don't bother with.

Zworf , 4 months ago to Free and Open Source Software in Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects

YESSS. I so wish this would be considered more.

There's several FOSS projects that I engage with that use discord pretty much exclusively and as such I'm locked out of the community. Like Home Assistant.

I really don't understand why they use it for FOSS projects that are all focused on privacy (home assistant for example focuses on using home automation without cloud so your data doesn't end up everywhere). And then lock you in to such a privacy-hostile service to communicate with them, when actually great alternatives are available like Matrix/Element.

Zworf , 4 months ago to Technology in Threads widens the gap with X, with triple the daily downloads on iOS | TechCrunch

Yes indeed. I stuck with instagram a lot longer because it didn't do this, but now in an attempt to copycat TikTok they've done the same with the home screen that keeps switching back to "For you" instead of "Following". 🤦‍♂️

Zworf , 4 months ago to Technology in But with serverless you don't pay for idle time !

Did you sign a contract? Then no, probably not.