Welcome to Incremental Social! Learn more about this project here!
Check out lemmyverse to find more communities to join from here!

Zworf

@Zworf@beehaw.org

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Zworf , (edited )

10 bucks is too much though for a search engine, at least for me. Especially now that I use LLMs to replace most of the usecases of web searches.

I never used Google much anyway the last few years, I use duckduckgo which isn't quite as bad as google is now. Yeah I know it's just microsoft bling with a lick of paint but they didn't enshittify as much as google. But $10 + VAT is just a lot of money in Spain.

Maybe I'll try the $5 plan though, I never come even close to 300 searches a month anyway.

Edit: SearXNG sounds much better actually, thanks!! <3

Edit2: I installed SearXNG and love it <3 Really thanks for the tips here.

Zworf ,

TIL of this. Thanks.

Zworf ,

Isn't that exactly what the "weight" in searXNG does?

Zworf ,

On the other hand, it doesn't really matter so much anymore.

LLM is the new search. I can ask it the actual question I have and it will give me the answer. If it's not exactly what I need I can ask it to specify further.

Contrast that with a search engine that just gives me a ton of bookmarks to sift through to see if they actually might answer my question or are just clickbait.

Of course there's still some times when you need search, like when you need to find an actual website, or when you need a source reference. But really the need for me is greatly reduced now.

Zworf ,

Haha this is literally how we used to deal with this at CampZone, a huge LAN party, back in the mid-2000s.

At later editions they just enabled DHCP on the network, I think they didn't at first because they wanted to be independent of DHCP servers. Early editions even had a negligible internet uplink (after all, it was a LAN party). Though later ones had faster uplinks than the thousands of participants could fill.

Zworf ,

Oh yeah The Party was another big one. Probably gone by now too?

Zworf ,

I'd take a lower-priced plan with limited listening time. They're getting too expensive for the few hours a month I use it. If they bump it up more I will quit for sure.

The only reason I still use them is the qt-spotify third party client. None of the other services work on my OS (they all need DRM on the browser or other nastiness I don't have).

Zworf , (edited )

I don't really have any issues with it. Samsung has very fine-grained controls and most apps I simply don't grant notification permissions at all. Also I put every single chat group in Whatsapp, Telegram etc on Mute by default which helps a lot against overload.

By the way, I give it a year or so by when phones can run a local AI to automatically filter the notifications you're interested in.

Zworf ,

Yeah but that's really their problem. I mean, the OS literally asks them to allow it. What more can you do?

Zworf ,

On Android apps typically have their push notifications divided into different types and can almost always turn off the marketing notifications for an app while leaving the important ones on.

Oh, iOS doesn't have this? I didn't realise. Android has had this for a good few releases now and I love that.

Zworf ,

Good. I hope people will move away from it soon. I hate Discord for banning third-party clients and datamining my system for installed apps. So I've never really used it.

It does mean I'm excluded from some FOSS projects' support like Home Assistant but to hell with that :P

Zworf ,

It's a useful feature but it doesn't need space on my taskbar or a special button on my keyboard. That's just marketing BS. The same as with the huge search bar, because I can just press the start button and start typing and it does the same.

Unfortunately Microsoft is incredibly bad at marketing. They generally succeed only at pissing users off. Now they're doing the same again with copilot and dumping a ton of totally different products under the same name.

Zworf ,

That's their problem though. If they wanna get hacked, go for it.

But there should be a way to turn it off for us power users at least (without having to build a whole domain controller)

Zworf ,

Little Snitch

Little Snitch won't work because they use the Apple-blessed content filter which apparently doesn't allow blocking this.

Pointing it to localhost in the hosts file does work, as indicated in that article.

Zworf ,

Yeah in London this led to the death of a guy whose only crime was being a nerd. Because of trigger-happy soldiers :(

Zworf ,

It was this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menezes . Probably the one you mentioned.

Apparently he had some wires in his bag. He was an electronics geek, and he also looked similar to one of the terrorists apparently. Still, no reason to shoot him like they did of course.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    Zworf ,

    There already is gab on mastodon which is basically that. And yeah everyone sane defederates.

    Is there anything unsavory about ProtonMail?

    For some reason I have it in the back of my mind that they were at one point accused of being a honeypot for US intelligence because of their association with MIT. Probably complete BS, but maybe not. Are they as open source as they claim to be? Looks like they're on github. F-Droid seems to think they have some Google libraries...

    Zworf , (edited )

    Nothing really. They did once put a scan on someone's IP after the authorities asked them to. But it was a court order. Makes sense.

    I don't use them because I think Email is beyond saving anyway. 90% of our mail goes to or from Amazon, Google or Microsoft anyway. OpenPGP is not used by anyone, even Phil Zimmermann famously refused to use it. There is so much spam and phishing that most institutions no longer send anything of value by email, it's just a notification service for "please log in to our portal to view your message". Email is just so broken and the workarounds so feeble that it's beyond fixing.

    Email as we knew it is just gone and done. I just use O365 because it's cheaper and offers me a lot more (like 1TB cloud storage which I use with Cryptomator). Proton Drive is too expensive for me and I like doing the encryption on the user-end anyway because that offers real end to end security. I applaud what proton are trying to do but it's too little too late and I don't want to use a special email client. If they want to promote privacy they should do it with something where that's still possible.

    And for VPN I prefer mullvad anyway because I like the way they sell scratch cards on Amazon. And my password manager I self-host.

    But really it's not a bad service if you can afford it and don't want to go for Microsoft and Google.

    Zworf ,

    Federation no longer works, no. They did have it at first but Moxie hated it because it was harder to push new features.

    But you can use other clients. It's not expressly allowed and LibreSignal stopped their development, but they've never actually banned anyone for doing it. I use the Matrix bridge to Signal and I've never seen issues with it.

    Also, Moxie doesn't work there anymore so their attitude might be changing. I hope so, as having an official option to use third-party clients and bots (for the latter see Telegram where they add a LOT of value to group chats like live transcription or translation) would really make the platform a lot more viable for me. As it is now I hardly use it and I never recommend it because I don't see the point of replacing one walled garden with a slightly nicer looking one that is still nonetheless a walled garden.

    I realy like Matrix but normies tend not to grok it because they need a username and password. Weird, because Discord and other services do too and they manage to use them fine. But whatever. I'll just bridge all their shit.

    Zworf ,

    If you go into Proton Mail with the understanding that you’re doing it to stop Google from data mining your email

    You're not really stopping anything if most of the people you're emailing are still using Google or Microsoft :) Because they'll get a copy of your email then anyway. This is really the problem with email IMO. Well, one of the problems, a lack of sender authentication is another one.

    Zworf ,

    Yeah telling your advertising megacustomers to go F.. themselves on TV and naming them explicitly. Wow. That's some kind of nasty.

    It totally proved Disney right, too.

    Android users who have a keen eye for design and detail, how is the whole stutter/lag situation? Esp. after a few years of use?

    I haven't used an Android device since my last one, the Galaxy S8. Beautiful hardware, beautiful design, but it was plagued with animation stutters and dropped frames. I switched to an iPhone and an iPad around 6 years ago. And the animations were buttersmooth. It was almost unthinkable to achieve such a fluid interface on any...

    Zworf ,

    To be honest I don't really care about this at all.

    I also owned an S8 which I used for years until they dropped support way too early. It's been my best phone ever. I have an S23 now (which was a unique chance to get a real Snapdragon in a Samsung here in Europe). It's smoother but I'm not sure if it will be acceptable to you.

    I still loved my S8 more though. With its 3,5mm jack, Notification LED, flat camera (nothing sticking out), curved display and higher resolution than the S23 has today.

    Zworf ,

    Yeah there was actually a Samsung reuse-for-IoT program for old hardware.

    Unfortunately it was really dumb and you could only use your phone for a few usecases blessed by our Samsung overlords. As far as I remember you could use the phone as a light sensor or something which was terrible overkill.

    It wasn't anything like postmarketos. It's been deprecated or killed off silently too in the last few years.

    Unfortunately the S8 are hardly supported by AOSP distros. Lineage only supported the S7, S9 and S10 (the latter two it supports still) but the S8 was never on the radar somehow. Postmarket doesn't support it either. The only distros I found were a few once-off images (so no updates whatsoever) on XDA-Developers, with lots of things non-working.

    Zworf ,

    Oh octoprint is available as an Android app? Sorry I wasn't aware.

    Zworf ,

    And they are doing it again. CoPilot for Windows, CoPilot for Github, CoPilot for sales, CoPilot for Microsoft 365, Bing CoPilot. All different products with different properties.

    Zworf ,

    Another detail is that if they try to tax them they will flee to tax havens or create them

    Taxing does work, but you have to do it across the board globally and don't allow countries to offer evasion.

    The Netherlands is already thinking about how to create new tax exemptions to avoid having to obey the 15% minimum corporate tax globally. Our neoliberal government is always scheming like that 🤬 They undermine corporate taxes in other EU countries by giving the multinationals a cheap cop-out.

    Right now they are planning to cash the 15% but to give money back the following year (called tax credits). I mean this law was finally there for a reason and now they find new loopholes.

    Zworf ,

    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.

    Is osmand normally terrible?

    I just tried osmand. It took forever to locate me and then the map would freeze for minutes, then the blue arrow would finally jump to my location. It seems useless for real time navigation, is that normal? Google maps works fine on the phone (Android) so it's not the hardware. Is there maybe some setting I haven't found?...

    Zworf ,

    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 ,

    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 , (edited )

    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 , (edited )

    There was no real left in Europe after WW2 and the Marshall Plan. Only social democrats, which really are right-wing since they defend capitalism.

    Well France is pretty left, even still :P We're all pretty jealous of their worker rights. My own country the Netherlands was socialist too but the neoliberals indeed kicked in and screwed everything up. Which then turned the worker demography to anger and now they are massively voting for the fascists. As if that will help... But yes especially Holland is very beholden to the US. England too. But the rest of Europe not as much.

    I don't see a big American-led conspiracy here though. I think the worker community just got so rich they became conservative. And started wanting more and more and looking towards the glamour of the US (while completely ignoring the huge problems in their society among those who are not so lucky to 'make it').

    China is far far ahead when it comes to developing society for the people. The government there is spending trillions investing in infrastructure, health, education, housing.

    Society for those who don't step out of line even a little though. There's a big difference in caring about your population and just making sure your worker cattle is fed enough not to stir trouble. They have had a huge scare with the mass protests of their draconic covid measures which had the potential to really get out of hand. They are super afraid of this, after all revolution is how they got to power themselves.

    They recently declared housing to be a human right and started decommodifying it.

    Meh if they'd care about human rights they'd actually respect them. If you see how they treated people during covid with zero respect for individual rights, how they treat the Uyghurs, what they did during the olympics. Mass surveillance is rampant. You can't say anything that steps on the CCP's toes or you get silenced (look at what happened to Naomi Wu). I agree they do manage some things better but their society is not one I want to live in or even consider visiting.

    Decommodifying housing is good though, I agree. In Europe only Vienna really does that with a great public housing programme and it works really well. Holland used to do this too but things are really messed up now after 3 decades of neoliberal regime.

    You can check any major city in China nowadays and they all have much better quality of life than any comparable city. That meaning major metropolises in developing countries (so places like São Paulo, Buenos Aires, México City, Johannesburg, Jakarta etc.). Housing is much cheaper in China, salaries are higher, cost of living is lower…

    All those places are incredibly unsafe and have huge income inequality. You can't call those socialist :) I have been around the world a lot and lived in different places. These don't offer welfare for the poor.

    I mean Johannesburg is where they sell car-mounted flamethrowers to fend off carjackers. São Paulo where the police don't even dare to follow suspects into the favelas. Mexico with its cartels that have actual armies. Socialist paradises they are not.

    China is doing better because they are not really a developing country anymore. They have much more money than any of those because we've moved all our factories there.

    The one developing country that I do look up to is Cuba. They have the second-highest amount of doctors per capita in the world, after a middle-eastern country, I forget which. Despite their authoritarian regime (and all the boycots from the US for no reason at all) people seem to do pretty well. I hope to visit it some time to see if things are really as good there on the ground.

    Zworf ,

    Seriously, wow... I have probably not made that much in my entire life and I'm almost 50. Wtf.

    If I have heart surgery here (which I hope I won't!!) it would cost me exactly $0. Yes the money still has to be paid but it won't cost the community even close to that much of course. Because here nobody needs to make a profit of it. Wages and hospitals have to be paid yes, but they don't turn a profit for investors.

    Zworf ,

    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 ,

    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 ,

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

    Zworf ,

    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 ,

    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 ,

    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 ,

    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 , (edited )

    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 ,

    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 ,

    Yeah this is why I pay only for services with fixed fees (or that allow me to set a hard limit). Wow, 100k would bankrupt me completely.

    Zworf ,

    Good to hear but it sounds like if the person hadn't gathered so much traction on HN they might still have been screwed.

    Zworf , (edited )

    Hm yes and no. The user might have angered someone with their website and it might well have been targeted to them instead of Netlify as a whole? I can imagine them using that point in a court if that was the case.

    If I were to host on such a service I'd probably put cloudflare in front. Especially as it seems to be static content. But I wouldn't host on a service with unlimited pricing anyway. I'd much rather see my hobby site go down than to have world-class uptime and pay 100k :P

    Zworf ,

    Is there a customer involved here?

    After all if it's for a customer it might be better to just give them the choice since the bill is on them.

    Zworf ,

    I'm sure there not being one is the feature. Trapping people into the free tier and getting them on overages.

    Of course for a hobby site that will never manage to pay this is not a good business model but I can see how this works for more moderate corporate use.

    Zworf ,

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

    Zworf ,

    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". 🤦‍♂️

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • incremental_games
  • meta
  • All magazines
    •