Saying that I dont trust a homophobe is not “sharing my political opinions”

That’s true.

However, you did not just say that. You mentioned how he supports some homophobic politics (ie. regulation against gay marriage), which you (and I’m sure a lot of people, me included) disagree with. That’s politics.

You also shared your opinion about why you think privacy is important for our society. That’s also politics.

I’m not saying that what you said is wrong… I’m saying that what you said is political. Sharing political opinions is ok. It’s not like talking about politics is somehow a bad thing. At least not in this context. A lot of what surrounds the choice of a web browser like this is political.

You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.

Note that the Sun position is not consistent throught the year and varies widely based on your latitude.

In Iceland (and also Alaska) you can have the Sun for a full 24 hours in the sky (they call it “midnight sun”) during Summer solstice (with extremelly short nights the whole summer) and the opposite happens in Winter, with long periods of night time.

I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour.

Just the days of the week? you mean that 2024-06-30 23:59 and 2024-07-01 00:01 can both be the same weekday and at the same time be different days? Would the definition of “day” be different based on whether you are talking about “day of the week” vs “universal day”?

Bash. By default it might seem less featureful than zsh… but bash is a lot more powerful and extensible than some give it credit for. It might be more complex to set it up the way you like it, but once you do it, that configuration can be ported over wherever bash exists (ie. almost everywhere).

In that counter argument they are essentially admitting that 99% of their content was distributed without the copyright holder’s consent.

In the CDL lawsuit, they have admitted that of the millions of books we have digitized, they themselves have only made about 33,000 available to libraries; only about 1% of what we have done, and only under restrictive and expensive license agreements. This is, they claim, the essence of their copyright rights: the ability to restrict access to information as they see fit, to further their theoretical economic interests, without regard to libraries traditional functions and the greater public good.

Was it fair use in the past to redistribute reprints/format-conversions of works without the copyright holders consent?

I agree that copyright law sucks… but that’s why it needs to change so it actually serves “the greater public good”. The judiciary system is not the right place to advocate for that (they don’t make the law, just interpret it), so I don’t really think there’s much hope in them winning this. Sadly.

If they really think there’s no reason to hide anything, why are they prosecuting Snowden for exposing something that was hidden?

Before having surveillance on people, they should have it on themselves.

Imagine how many corruption cases could have been prevented if the government was publicly monitored, with live streams from all offices, like a “big brother” show set up in the white house with live recordings of all calls and communications, so the voters can judge by themselves and monitor if the person they employed as the servant for the country is doing its job.

This.

I don’t understand the appeal of microblogging. The content is generally very low quality, the signal-to-noise ratio is horrible… I’m not interested in the shower thoughts of any particular individual …or in marketing stunts.

The only individuals I’m interested on are my family & friends, and even for them I’d rather use a more private platform.

And when I want to read a public post I’d rather it’s well thought and ideally not restricted by micro-limitations. Even better if it’s curated by a public voting process among a community of people with my same interests, or some other process that makes it so I don’t have to waste my time going through tons of content I’m not remotelly interested on.

I expect it would be technically possible to have lemmy-like or peertube-like services built on top of the AT protocol Bluesky uses, like with ActivityPub. And I expect if/when that happens the communication across services would probably work too.

In fact, accounts being “portable” in the AT protocol can potentially make the integration more seamless across different services, not only might the posts be seen from different services, but you might be able to directly access those different services with the same account. Imagine if you could login in lemmy with a mastodon account or vice-versa.

Bluesky is just one of the possible services. But as long as the invites are private and you can’t host your own instance, I wouldn’t even consider it an alternative. I think it’s a bit early to judge, both its positives and its negatives.

It’s changing by having a library like wlroots do most of the work.

When you consider the overall picture, “wlroots + compositor” is actually less complex than “X11 + window manager” because you no longer need to consider the insanely high requirements of having to have a team maintaining the spaghetti mess of X11 code.

Wayland-based dwl has roughly the same line count as X11-based dwm (about 2.2k), without having to depend on a whole separate service as big as X11.

But of course, it being a completely different approach, it’s likely that for most smaller projects (ie. not Gnome or KDE) it’s easier to start a new project than creating a layer to maintain two different parallel implementations.

If you want something that’s more or less compatible with openbox, there seems to be this project, labwc, which claims to be inspired by openbox and compatible with its config/themes… though I haven’t personally tried it.

Also keep in mind that openbox (and I expect labwc too) doesn’t include any “panels” / “taskbars” or anything like that… and it’s likely your X11 panels might not work well if they do not explicitly support Wayland (but I believe that, for example, xfce-panel now supports both).

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Wouldn’t it be easier and more direct to simply impose a tax to those external big tech services?

I don’t understand why using protection against “bad actors” as an excuse is necessary at all if getting money from big tech were the ultimate goal. A lot of people within the EU would happily support such a tax targeting big US companies, it’s the privacy problems what we are pushing against, not the fees. So I’d expect a more direct and honest fee for external companies making business within the EU would be easier to pass if that were what they actually wanted, wouldn’t it?

espeak default voice backend is synthesized without using actually real voice samples. So it doesn’t require downloading a huge package for each language, which is convenient in some cases, but the outcome is extremely robotic.

You can use MBROLA as backend for espeak so that it uses some voice samples and the result should be less jarring (it’d still be easy to tell it’s not natural voice, but at least you’d be able to understand it better). There’s a tutorial on this here: https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/blob/master/docs/mbrola.md

Or you can try piper (https://github.com/rhasspy/piper) it’s one of the most natural-sounding TTS (here are some samples).

I don’t think EVERYONE needs to understand / know about it. I mean, I remember when I was young most people had no idea how to use the internet (hell, they didn’t even know how to program a VHS), yet I was perfectly happy using that technology.

I only need a specific set of people and specific communities to be there for it to be worth it. Like I said: I no longer use reddit, even though the fediverse has only a small fraction of the content existing in reddit… I would have expected people in the fediverse would be more receptive to unpopular but technologically/ethically superior alternatives.

Yes, but the question is: what does matrix need to establish itself as a solid alternative?

You can’t answer that by saying “people don’t use it, change that” because that’s something only people can change, not matrix, that’d lead to a cyclic problem.

Specially when that’s given as a counterpoint to justify not wanting to do the change for “this community”. It’s contradictory to want its popularity to be changed but accept the lack of change alone as a valid reason to justify your communities not changing.

like how not being able to sign up for something with tor and monero is a privacy violation, it’s not.

Note that “secrecy” and “privacy” are often understood in Security lingo as different things. One protects confidentiality, the other one protects anonymity.

It’s possible to have one and not the other…

You can have a very private system through onion routing but have the contents of the messages exchanged be in plaintext, open to the public. Nobody will be able to know the one who wrote the message was you. But they can see the message. (then there is privacy, but not secrecy).

Or you can have very strongly encrypted communications (say HTTPS) but have the DNS exchanges (or the TLS handshake, or the IP addresses) be in the clear, so people in the middle (eg. your ISP… or your workplace tech guys) can know exactly that the packages are sent by you and where you sent them, even if their content is encrypted. They can know which service you tried to access to, for how long and how many times (so you have secrecy, but not privacy).

But that’s cyclic reasoning. Nothing that you need/want will be on matrix if you (and everyone else) does not think it’s worth to make what you need/want be in matrix…

I don’t need EVERYTHING to be in Matrix, just the things I’m interested in. So I’m happy when I see a push to have those specific things there. This is the same argument as to why I don’t use Reddit anymore, despite Lemmy/Kbin having only a fraction of the content.

It also helps the fact that Matrix is very flexible when it comes to mirroring/proxying other protocols. I can easily access IRC communities from Matrix, for example. The integration in that direction is nicer than requiring discord channels to add bots that parrot an IRC chat.

I think part of the reason why the long extension is often preferred is because it’s much clearer and it’s guaranteed to be supported and decompressed by the respective tools. Even when they don’t suppot tar archives, they’ll just give you the uncompressed tar in that case.

It’s also very common to do that with other extensions (not just .tar) when compressing big files. For example, when archiving logs they’ll often be stored as .log.gz, which makes it automatically clear that it’s a log file directly compressed with gzip and meant to be examined with tools like zcat and zless to view it.

And in cases like that you really need it to be clear on what data does the gzip stores, since it does not keep metadata about the file so you might not be able to get back the original name/extension of the file if you rename the gz file.

In fact, it’s not unlikely that the behavioural data of people who pay to opt out of being spammed with ads will be more valuable to data brokers.

True. This is why the AdNauseam extension doesn’t simply “hide” ads, but it goes out of its way to actually simulate clicks for ALL ads, causing algorithms to be unable to more accurately profile you and making the pay-per-click model fall on its face. If everyone did that, advertisers would have to pay for completely meaningless clicks making it no longer worth it to advertise this way.

Though it’s still not a solution to privacy, since it still gives some insight on your tastes by allowing them to know what websites do you frequently visit.

Sad. I did not know that.

Although, to be honest, I was sort of expecting it would happen sooner or later. It did not look like the product was ready for mainstream users yet, and the devices at that price must have been tough to sell.

For anyone curious, this message from the CEO has more details: https://web.archive.org/web/20230822232437/https://mycroft.ai/blog/update-from-the-ceo-part-1/

If they were complaining about cronjobs being created (like the post says), then they must have known what cron is.

You can grow potatoes for political reasons too. Everything a human being does might be politically motivated, but that doesn’t mean potatoes are political.

Anyone can take that same software, that was created as a particular political statement, and use it for the completelly opposite political reasons to make a completelly different political statement. Just the same way as many have used songs in contexts that are completelly politically opposite to what the original author of the song intended.

In the end, the only thing that’s political is the goal/purpose/motivation of an action, not the result of the action. No piece of software/hardware/thing is political when you dettach the artist from the art and just see it for what it is, regardless of what the author might have wanted you to see it as.