Thats pretty reasonable. I’m sure there are a ton of orphan accounts just lingering out there. Including accounts that other people may like to have.

All of these companies are tightening their belts. Those interest rates going up are sure making companies reassess their business models.

Because fuck that bot in particular!

The GPL doesn’t “encourage” redistribution. It requires it.

I want to throw AntennaPod out there for anyone looking for a solid android podcast app. Its FOSS as well for those that care about that sorta thing.

https://antennapod.org/

Most companies that are going back to the office are STILL HAVING VIRTUAL MEETINGS. The hybrid environments ABSOLUTELY are. So you are getting all of the shitty aspects of going into the office and all of the downsides of not-in-person collaboration. It’s the worst of both worlds.

When you ask an employee to wake up an hour earlier, spend an hour in traffic, to pay for parking, to sit in a ‘hotel cube’, to get on a virtual meeting that they could have done at home…you are absolutely going to have people leave your company.

The data on people equating lack of flexibility with a 2-3% paycut seems incredible low to me.

I think its a much more significant impact than that. I know people who have basically taken a 20% paycut (lost their cost-of-living adjustment) to move to a different state–doing the same job remotely. That’s basically a way of saying flexibility/remote work is work 20% to them.

The road to (technological) serfdom

They are called pavement princesses and mall crawlers.

Lifted trucks and jeeps that have never even seen a gravel road

My hot take:

Biden has been the best President we’ve had in 30 years.

He’s exactly who we needed when we got him. He got us out of Afghanistan. As much as a debacle as it was, he not Trump and not Obama pulled us out. His deft handling of the Ukrainian conflict where he used soft-power and influence to let the EU and NATO members come to decision to enact the super harsh sanctions themselves. Knowing that if the US pressed, they’d resist. It had to be their decision. He’s continued to say and do all of the right things. His attempt to forgive student loans his huge. Some of the measures worked even if all of them didn’t. He got the most meaningful infrastructure bill passed that I’ve ever witness. Neither Trump nor Obama could make it happen and Biden did it with a split Congress That infrastructure bill was also the most meaningful environment legislation that we’ve ever had That bill also paves the way for significant investment in our broad-band across the country Passed the Safer Communities Act …actual gun related legislation since the Brady bill. Again, with a split congress. Gave us our first public defender SCOTUS justice. This might not seem like a big deal but I think its pretty significant given the amount of case law that exists that, so far, hasn’t had a public defenders ‘say’ in it.

I could go on but I gotta go eat dinner.

People want to shit on Biden, but I actually like him. He’s not perfect, but he’s been insanely effective given everything he walked in to. Including him diligently and quietly rebolstering the executive branches that were gutted and had people leaving in droves in the last admin. Eg the Department of State. He’s assigned quality folks into key roles and its making a difference.

I voted for him without hesitation because well, the alternative was terrifying, but I was not expecting much from him at all. He’s surprised me.

edit: I literally can’t figure out how to make this a list. Sorry for the wordblob.

100% but I believe these are typically locked down to one domain, and in this case its not.

At least thats how I understand it. So I guess the article is a little misleading in that sense, but the net effect is the same. You have carte blanche access to the web, via android system webview, thats acting as a de-facto out-of-band browser. So its misconfigured or not locked down, which means you can use it effectively as a “hidden” browser.

I was just about to post this article (Thankfully lemmy warns you that it might be a duplicate!).

This guy isn’t a household name by any stretch but this invention quite literally changed the world. Few people have as far reaching of an impact as he had. Almost 101 years old too. I think he did Good…enough.

(I’ll see myself out)

Are you saying, when you talk to people who use Linux, they can’t explain what they use it for? Or are you doing some weird gate-keeping because you’ve complied a kernel before?

To your last point, yea sure, you get lots of experience building software from scratch, configuring everything manually, etc etc. But doing things manually for no other reason than to do it that way is a huge waste of time (eg Gentoo and your BSD oses–although don’t port and pgk sorta do it for you now?)

There are plenty of opinionated Linux gurus out there with experience and skills. The more experienced ones would probably get a chuckle at compiling software from source or debating make config options…when they can just use a package manager or a flatpak and get their job done in 20 seconds.

if I start talking about OpenBSD and FreeBSD, they shutdown or are put off by it, have nothing to say about Linux vs BSD.

Maybe they shutdown because they dont know enough about OpenBSD or FreeBSD to have an opinion?

I used FreeBSD a while ago just to try it out. That little devil guy was too hard to resist. Besides the fact that the community is tiny what would you be discussing? That its like using linux but harder :) ?

Now this is a hot take!

I dont know if I agree with you, but its making me think.

I read this on Daring Fireball the other day:

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:

  -Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;

 -Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and

 -When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former

A lot of the hardcore advocates of free software get, understandably, upset when they see masses of people spout FREE software! or opensource software…then not give a flying fuck about what that actually means. The quote above is pretty accurate imo.

I think half of the people using free(as in libre, not gratis) software are doing it because its free (as in cost). Not because they care about the “four essential freedoms”: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions. Because, well, see the quote above. Most wouldn’t even know where to start. They just want to use the software…and not pay for it. They aren’t opposed to closed, non-free software.

So if you truly believe in the philosophy behind free software, you’ll start getting pretty opinionated as you see people co-opt, distort, and disregard key tenants of your philosophy. Even looking at some of the responses to this post, you can see people misusing the definition of free and/or not being precise with their language (which for something like this, can completely change the meaning).

This is a fantastic article: https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html

It gives a good short history of how we got here.

He’s the embodiment of “you’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole”*

BeyondPod

I’ve been using it for years. I have the paid version of it.

I’m sure I barely use any of the features. At the end of the day it lets me download my podcasts and prunes them as I listen (as I’ve configure it).

I feel like I need to buy it again to give the dev some money.

Ubuntu is the typical go-to.

Id recommend pop!_os personally.

Fedora is another great option.

The reality is, as a new Linux user, you’ll probably hop around quite a bit. I say go for it! Try out everything you want.

As crappy as googles results seem to have gotten over the last year, anytime I try to set my browser default search to anything else, I end up irritated and going back to Google for 50% of my searches(maybe even more ). Bing is fairly decent, but if the goal is privacy…

The alternative search engines just always lack the context–ehich presumably google has from me by pilfering my information for the last 2 decades.

That’s a really solid point. I guess it depends on the phone. The low end Android market probably isn’t holding up as well as the high end or iphones.

My pixels seem to last as long as it takes for me to pay them off before they just black screen and brick themselves. I had 3 pixel threes, since two replaces under warranty and the last one died a few weeks outside.

Meanwhile my wifes iphone was just fine. She only changed because her dad got the latest and greatest and handed down this last-year model to her. So I could see batteries being an issue over time.

It sounds like it’s only for new people and when you are due to renew. At least that’s how I read it.

So you might only have it until your term is up?