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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • I always go back to Fedora. Different strokes for different folks and I’m definitely not trying to have a “Which distro?!?” conversation. Maybe you have philosophical reasons to hate it. (I do sometimes too.) But that’s my home base.

    It’s partly because I learned on WhiteHat/CentOS/RHEL for work. But even today, it’s my stable, baseline distro. They don’t change Gnome or push updates without at least some testing. (I know.) Drivers almost always work. There’s (usually) documentation written by paid professionals. It’s just a good, solid OS that I can make mine without uninstalling shit or worrying it’s unstable.

    Debian is perfect for that too, obviously and I’m eternally grateful for Arch’s wiki and community. But for my needs, Fedora strikes a near-perfect balance.




  • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 months ago

    I don’t want age verification for social media — I’d rather parents, who in 2025 probably grew up with connected devices, be responsible for it — but if they do force this, it should be part of the operating system. Sort of like Apple Pay and Google Pay where sites and apps can essentially put some boilerplate code in that’s easy to implement and all the sites/apps get back is a yes/no answer. Users only have to go through the process once. It protects privacy way more than giving your info to every “social media” site that comes along.

    It’s not ideal but it’d be way more workable than having to provide ID to every site that has social media functions. I mean, you could classify any random forum or site with a comment section as “social media” if the definition is too broad. Things like Fediverse instances wouldn’t have to each write their own implementation. (Eventually, there would be trusted, mature libraries, obviously, but that could take awhile and presumably would need to be part of every browser/app language but also at least some code for every back-end language to store the data.)




  • I know there’s rights issues and all but if they made a real BBC streaming service with their back catalog and every David Attenborough special in 4K, it’d be one thing but Americans are inundated with news and streaming services. I pay for my local newspaper’s digital site — mostly because if I don’t, who will? But even The NY Times has to have recipes and word games to keep people subscribed. Why would anyone pay more than a dollar a month or something for BBC News?

    The U.S. seems like an odd place to trial this. It’s the most competitive media market in the world and we’re all already sick of being asked to pay for 40 different services. In conclusion:🏴‍☠️




  • I’ve always wondered if the world’s major governments all have their own secret, bespoke operating systems for highly sensitive situations. Like, not Windows, Linux, macOS, BSD, or anything even remotely known to the public. But then you see high-ranking admin officials using bootleg Signal on an off-the-shelf phone or whatever.

    I’d assume the actual intelligence agencies are more sophisticated. I doubt they’re running some “hardened” version of Windows or Android or whatever. But maybe I’m being naive and they all are just working with vendors.


  • Yeah, but I doubt they’re close to having the capacity to offer full 5G service like a traditional carrier. I have T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom‘s US subsidiary) and they have a deal with Starlink but it’s (a) in beta and (b) limited in what you can do. Unless things have changed, even when it launches, it’ll be just LTE text and voice and you need a pretty modern phone.

    So, it’s not like a drop in replacement for a land-based plan where you get internet and stuff. Plus, Trump and his kids aren’t going to do any of the hard work. Even before his presidency, “Trump” was just a licensing brand and now it’s a pretty shitty brand. It’s not like the family was running Trump Steaks and packing boxes for shipment or whatever.




  • When I worked in IT, we only let people install every other version of Windows. Our Linux user policy was always “mainstream distro and the LTS version.” Mac users were strongly advised to wait 3 months to upgrade. One guy used FreeBSD and I just never questioned him because he was older and never filed one help desk request. He probably thought I was an idiot. (And I was.)

    Anyway, I say all that to say don’t use Windows 11 on anything important. It’s the equivalent of a beta. Windows 12 (or however they brand it) will probably be stable. I don’t use Windows much anymore and maybe things have changed but the concepts in the previous paragraph could be outdated. But it’s a good rule of thumb.




  • This seems like a perfectly reasonable experiment and not something they’re going to release without extensive human and security review.

    Oauth libraries aren’t new and A.I. can probably generate adequate code. My main problem with A.I. for this purpose is that senior developers/experts don’t pop out of thin air. You need junior developers now if you want any real experts in the future. Maybe you need fewer and more specialized training. Maybe the goal is to offload the training cost to Universities and tech companies only want PhDs. Maybe someday LLMs will be good enough to not need much supervision. But that’s not where we are.

    We probably need a Level x capability scale like self-driving cars for this sort of thing.


  • I try to support Mozilla (and more obscure open source projects we take for granted) through donations and subscriptions. But I never used Pocket or Fakespot.

    I don’t think it should be a forced payment but I’d pay a few bucks a month for a true developer edition. The current one is essentially just the early beta for extension developers but something really developer focused with no bullshit and developer tools at the forefront. I don’t know if that’s something other people would pay for but I feel like it’s easier to shell out cash when I’m using it for work. A lot of people could probably expense it.

    It likely wouldn’t replace the Google money but it’d be a start.