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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Looking it up online, the subject of Opera being chinese spyware seems to be debated pretty thoroughly, but with no definitive consensus (that I could find at least). Any articles on the subject I could read up on?

    I use Firefox myself, so it wouldn’t really impact my internet usage, but I’m just curious about what’s going on with Opera.

    Funnily enough, I think the last time I used Opera was the Internet Channel on the Wii way back when, which was powered by Opera lmao


  • For me, I mostly rationalize my piracy as something generally unethical that I choose to partake in anyways. People often cite piracy as an issue with the service being provided, but there’s just a lot of instances where I’d rather pirate something than pay for it, not because the service is bad, but because “Why pay for something when I can just get it free, eh?”

    Though I think there is one specific case where I’d undoubtedly consider piracy ethical, which is for products that are not being sold on the market currently. Take a retro video game for instance. If it isn’t being sold by any company, then there is no way to legally play the game apart from getting a secondhand copy. Either way, the company that owns the rights to it won’t derive profit, and they aren’t involved in secondhand markets whatsoever, so pirating the game effectively results in 0 negative consequences for any party, compared to legally acquiring it.






  • Oh yeah, I agree it’s more effective, by far. I imagine that’s why Google has Opinion Rewards and other companies use surveys to directly understand the needs of their customers. Though getting people in mass to volunteer that info, especially without some small profit incentive like Opinion Rewards might be tricky.

    At least in the realm of targeted advertising, the closest example to user input would be when you set up an account, you’re prompted to select your interests. Like with Windows 10, when you’re setting it up for the first time, you’ll be asked about your interests, which Microsoft will then use to send ads and news pertaining to those categories.

    But yeah, I see what you mean


  • While I hate the shady data harvesting practices of companies like Meta, I do want to play devil’s advocate here, as far as the value of data goes, if only for the sake of me understanding the shortcomings of it better. If a company were to dig through your trash can to get an idea of what you want to eat, so to speak, they’d probably find data on a history of foods you have eaten, if you’ve been interested in burgers, or any other foods you’ve been interested in. Or if you’ve been an adventurous eater in general or if you prefer to stick to variants of the same stuff you normally eat.

    It may not give you a foolproof way of knowing what your next actions will be, but wouldn’t it give a company an educated guess, at the very least? Enough to improve the chances of targeted ads being more effective, as opposed to missing altogether.

    If catching the user’s interest is a dice roll, then wouldn’t the data at least improve the odds of rolling a number you want?



  • It’s nice people, the culture of Lemmy, and the amount of users

    On reddit, if you wanted to chime in on a thread that was popular enough to reach your feed, it was probably too late to make a comment that would stand out, since the people who comment on it early would get the upvotes, reach the top, and drown out your input.

    Here at least, the comment sections, number of users, and the way “Hot” is sorted allows people to feel like their input matters, rather than just trying to make short quips to farm the most karma. The lack of a karma system or comment/post awards also helps this, as people aren’t as incentivized to just farm upvotes.

    And of course, the bulk of Lemmy’s platform as of right now is built on people who left Reddit because they cared about their communities, and had strong opinions on how an online forum ought to be fairly run, leaving the more apathetic users behind. Naturally, this means most of Lemmy’s users care about their community, and share that common bond.



  • I was offput by it so much on my last phone that I rooted it (first time rooting any Android) just to override it as much as I possibly could. For me, it wasn’t because of the flatness, but entirely because of the huge padding.

    The volume slider, which was a thin stripe before, now looks like a comically large bar for no reason at all. Small circular icons on the notification shade which could fit 4 in one row, now only fit 2 in a row. Pulling down the notification shade still let you see the screen behind it, but now it grays it out entirely.

    As for the custom color selection, the main gimmick of Material You, it is entirely hit or miss. On my own phone, Pixel 3, I used a red/maroon color, and on my new phone, Pixel 5, I use a mint green.

    There’s situations where my chosen color looks really good, and others where it looks horrendous. As it turns out, having one universal color choice for things ranging from the notification shade icons, time display on the lock screen, calculator, etc. makes it difficult to find one color that looks good for all of them.

    TL;DR: I hated it when it came out. I have gotten used to it now, but still dislike it immensely.