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namingthingsiseasy

@ namingthingsiseasy @programming.dev

Posts
7
Comments
278
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Happy #GlobalSwitchDay

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  • My understanding from what you're writing (and from this article) is that the phone number is really the account number. That's all well and fine, but then they force you to verify that the number is yours (or at the very least, one that you have access to because you need to receive a confirmation over SMS), so you can't use something more private. And sure, it makes it a little harder to find your new contact, but I don't think it's really that big of a deal - just exchange your other "account number" via some other channel.

    Besides, don't think for a second that when this identifying information inevitably falls into the wrong hands that it will benefit you in any way. "What are you hiding, citizen?" and all that bullshit.

    The part of it that bothers me is the sense of entitlement that these companies exhibit. The "Give us your phone number or fuck off" sentiment is something I just refuse to accept. If Google forces us to do the same and we refuse, what makes Signal think that we'll do it for them when they're so much smaller by comparison? Especially when you're trying to claim you're more secure and private to people that much more tech savvy than average, this just comes off as not understanding your audience very well. I'm sure I'm not the only one that is holding out against using Signal because of this.

  • Happy #GlobalSwitchDay

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  • I'm surprised this hasn't been said yet... but what I hate most about Signal is its requirement for a phone number. I don't want to be identified, and I want to be able to create multiple separate accounts with different identities if I want to.

    I also hate the fact that it's a mobile-first service. Yes, there is a desktop application (and just one really crappy one at that), but it's clearly designed to revolve first and foremost around your phone and be virtually impossible to use without one. As someone who hates writing on a 3-inch screen, this is a also non-starter for me.

    I understand the arguments about perfectionism, but this is too much. I'll stick with XMPP, Matrix and IRC, thanks.

  • Happy #GlobalSwitchDay

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  • but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.

    The fact that we have a telephone system that works with separate providers contradicts this sentiment. If I want to pick up the phone and talk to my cousin's puppy in New Zealand, I can do that without creating an account on his provider's service.

    I don't understand why we've forgotten this as a society. Yes, it was difficult to upgrade the phone systems over the past century, but it's worth it in my opinion. I really wish we'd start seeing government regulation that says "you should be able to talk to someone on a service without having to create an account on said service." I thought the DMA would do this, but sadly, Whatsapp still requires an account to talk to people using that service. Very disappointing.

  • Happy #GlobalSwitchDay

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  • The colors in the peertube logo are pretty hideous.

  • Happy #GlobalSwitchDay

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  • Are we claiming now that Activity Pub is the only protocol that we can use for the fediverse? I think XMPP is roughly 30 years old at this point, and I'm pretty sure Activity Pub is much younger than that. I could be wrong though.

    But regardless, I don't see why Activity Pub has to be the only protocol we accept to be considered a part of the fediverse. It's not even like different AP implementations talk to each other all that well. My understanding is that Mastodon doesn't federate that well with Lemmy, and I haven't seen Loops or Pixelfed on Lemmy yet either.

    I'd be happy to be corrected on any of this though, I haven't looked too closely into exactly how AP works or how it's supposed to interoperate with different applications.

  • ISO 8601 ftw rule

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  • Nah, ISO is a shit organization. The biggest issue is that all of their "standards" are blocked behind paywalls and can't be shared. This creates problems for open source projects that want to implement it because it inherently limits how many people are actually able to look at the standard. Compare to RFC, which always has been free. And not only that, it also has most of the standards that the internet is built upon (like HTTP and TCP, just to name a few).

    Besides that, they happily looked away when members were openly taking bribes from Microsoft during the standardization of OOXML.

    In any case, ISO-8601 is a garbage standard. P1Y is a valid ISO-8601 string. Good luck figuring out what that means. Here's a more comprehensive page demonstrating just how stupid ISO-8601 is: https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601

  • Stop Treating Phone Numbers As A Digital ID

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  • No you don't! That's why we have key-signing parties!

  • Internal documents reveal European Commission fears over Microsoft dependency

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  • Interesting! I was already vaguely aware some of these efforts, but that was still quite informative. Nonetheless, from what I've observed, it seems that these kinds of funding initiatives aren't very popular politically. Most people don't benefit from it enough, and then it's only natural to ask why we are spending, néé, wasting money on them. I think better messaging is needed on these types of issues.

    And education would help a lot too - most people don't think about where the software that they are using is coming from and that is a big problem. When you present people with two pieces of software, they don't really give any thought to where those pieces of software came from or how it's made. So they won't be able to understand issues like the fact that vendors can just pull the rugs from under their feet whenever they feel like it. If people don't understand concepts like these, then obviously they won't understand how to avoid these things from happening!

    I do think there's hope on the horizon though. If we can brand Microsoft et. al. as American companies and successfully convince people to be more and more skeptical of the USA as a whole, then maybe we have a chance in stimulating people to take more initiative in getting off these products and adopting other ones.

  • Internal documents reveal European Commission fears over Microsoft dependency

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  • We should be worried about Windows as well to be completely honest. But at the very least, it's still more replaceable.

    Nextcloud is a great start point, but it's terribly underfunded... as are all of our "alternatives" to big tech companies.

  • Internal documents reveal European Commission fears over Microsoft dependency

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  • We've had FUCKING DECADES to do something about this. DECADES!!!

    When will we ever learn....

  • Wealth of world’s billionaires grew by $2tn in 2024, report finds

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  • It's not money they want. It's power. They want global domination. And this is not an exaggeration by any means.

  • Flirting with Trump is flirting with Nazism - Response to Andy Yen (CEO of Proton AG) on Reddit 📢📢📢

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  • It is very sad indeed. I went through the same experience when I wanted a license plate to commemorate Albert Heijn.

  • Steam has the best UI

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  • This is the thing UI designers never understand[0] - if you keep changing shit around, nobody will ever figure out how to use it. If you keep it consistent and don't make dramatic changes, users will have a much easier time using it because they don't have to keep relearning the damn thing. Consistency is the most effective UI paradigm.

    [0] or to put it in better terms, they're paid to not understand this so they can justify their jobs....

  • Cory Doctorow proposes that Canada break ranks with international IP law enforcement

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  • While I think this is a good idea (because copyright is a stupid concept in the digital age), the problem with this proposal is that Europe is also very pro-copyright. Doing something like this would probably piss off Americans, but if it also pisses off your next best ally as well, it's probably not going to work out.

  • Removed

    The ‘world’s largest’ vacuum to suck climate pollution out of the air just opened. Here’s how it works

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  • She better not go from suck to blow....

  • Linux Foundation endorses Chromium, SteamOS ISO is coming Linux & Open Source news

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  • Google pays the Linux Foundation a LOT of money.

  • Accurate programming movie

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  • Can we push back the deadline for the apocalypse? Have we talked to the customer to see if this is a possibility?

  • Physical Media Is Dead, Long Live Physical Media

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  • That's actually very easy to do and you don't need any special equipment. Simply use a male-male 3.5mm cable and connect one end from the stereo output of the cassette player and the other end into the microphone jack of any computer you own. Play the cassette - you can test the audio quality by running arecord -f cd - | aplay - - you will have to tune the volume output of the cassette player and the input sensitivity of the microphone.

    From there, if you're paranoid, you could use arecord to save the output to a .wav file and encode it once the recording is done, but I had no problem just using oggenc directly on the piped audio. The final command looked like this: arecord -f cd - | oggenc -q 5 -o file.ogg - (change to -q 10 if you want lossless encoding).

    I'm not sure if this is the best quality per se, but I would definitely recommend it over using specialized equipment like cassette-mp3 converters. The problem with those devices is that if they use underpowered hardware, you might experience buffering issues where the encoding hardware can't keep up with the audio stream or something like that. But doing it on a computer ensures that you will have all the processing power you need to make sure that this doesn't happen.

    Good luck! I found it very easy to do - it took 5-10 minutes of setup.

  • Apple opts everyone into having their Photos analyzed by AI

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  • For-profit companies are perpetually locked in a conflict of interest. Inevitably, they will have to decide between what is in the best interest of their users (or other public interests such as the environment for example) with their never-ending obsession to make ever more money. No matter what they say or do publicly, they will always sell out for more profit.

    In this case, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors (people who have collectively made trillions over every iteration of IT progress) are forcing "AI" to be the next thing. They have basically decided that they want all tech progress to focus on this area and are forcing every company they invest in to make that happen, regardless of the societal impact.

    As a result, you can see clearly that all of these companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit) are basing all their business decisions into trying to make this fantasy become a reality. Even Apple now, the masters of creating a facade of privacy is falling straight into line. And the one thing they all have in common: investors.

    And that is why you should always be wary of interacting with big business interests - they will inevitably sell you out someday.

  • Waiting for

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