I didn’t know that. Hmm, sounds like it’s decently likely this is a bit overblown then. I mean, I suppose there are a lot of lazy companies out there that will skip this, but that severely limits the functionality in a way that it’s going to force the secure method.

Sort of. If you’re receiving a notification from a remote server on iOS or standard android, they go through Apple or googles servers. That said, some apps rather than sending your device the actual notification (where this vulnerability comes from) will instead send a type of invisible notification that basically tells the app to check for a new message or whatever and then will display a local notification so the actual message stays on device and inside of the hosting services servers (like a self host.)

Oh god yes. There is now a blanket rule in our house that we only buy one system of storage. At some point, we revisit. I think on our next revisit, we might just go to deli-tainers.

As for socks, and I must state for clarity, this has been done against my will, we have at least, at least, 17 different types of socks. I have made clear, that the first thing we do when we win the lottery or whatever is declare sockruptcy, throw those all away, and just buy one at-least-ok sock.

I mean, it’s splitting hairs. While the proximity probably didn’t help, I doubt the companies deciding to pull ads weren’t like “sure, we don’t mind hanging out in a nazi bar, just make sure not to seat us next to any nazis.” I mean, some probably were, but there has been increasingly large amounts of pressure on these people and within like 24 hours of each other Elon endorses replacement theory and the MM story drops that Elon is running ads for nazis. There are only so many times you can make a dumb excuse. For lots of us, that was a long time ago. Even the capitalists are realizing now at least that he’s bad for business.

I, for one, will turn to Scalzi on this one:

This is the “So few people find a festering rat’s anus in their can of SpaghettiOs that finding one shouldn’t be considered an actual problem” argument, eliding the fact that the number of rat anuses in ANY SpaghettiOs can should be “zero”

source

Like, really looking forward to court case when Elon or Yacco have to explain “yes your honor, the thing they said is true, but to get it to happen they had to use our platform!!!” If I had to guess, Elon has to know he’s going to lose, but the point isn’t necessarily a win, it’s to tie up Media Matters in a legal battle that Elon can keep going effectively forever. This is one of his favorite tactics – doing whatever the fuck he wants because he knows the only thing you can do is sue, and he can pay lawyers forever so you’re going to have to blink first.

Yeah, this is def a thing that is a big sticking point for me. I have a hard time supporting a company these days without a clear revenue plan because it’s just kind of a bait-and-switch otherwise.

Gotcha, thanks for the info. I’m def behind in following the goings on there. Do you have any insight on the revenue plan?

I am skeptical of Bluesky. It’s led by Jack and we’ve already seen how that goes. Second, there isn’t really a good technical reason for it to exist as it’s own protocol outside of the fact that they want to control it given that Fedi/Mastodon was already there and they could have just as easily contributed to that with the things they wanted, they just wouldn’t have had full control. Similar to Threads promise to federate, I will be somewhat surprised if they ever do it.

Were Bluesky/Threads not a corporate effort, I have a feeling that it would have followed a similar pattern as the fediverse - build the protocol and release that, then the clients will follow. Bluesky still isn’t federating even with its own protocol, and Threads isn’t either. Given that’s stuff that tiny teams with far, far fewer resources than the corps have accomplished, it’s a little wild that neither have gotten there.

Especially with Bluesky, there doesn’t seem to be a stated plan for how it’s going to make money. And we’re talking about a lot of the same people that destroyed the Twitter API and started locking things down even before Elon killed it completely and they’re trying to convince us that they are pushing for an open environment.

I’m sold on user replaceable batteries, just not necessarily like they are the Nokia’s of old. Especially with phones, they’re mature enough where the end of support for them is either a choice a company makes, or just purely because the battery is dead. Batteries don’t necessarily need to be hot-swappable, but they should be able to be replaced by most people in-home, with tools you probably already have.

I don’t think that even the languages are the problem, it’s the toolchain. While certainly if you went back to C or whatever, you can design more performant systems, I think the problem overall stems from modern toolchains being kinda ridiculous. It is entirely common in any language to load in massive libraries that suck up 100’s of mb of RAM (if not gigs) to get a slightly nicer function to lowercase text or something.

The other confounding factor is “write once, run anywhere” which in practice means that there is a lot of shared code and such that does nothing on your machine. The most obvious example being Electron. Pretty much all of the Electron apps I use on the reg (which are mostly just Discord and slack) are conceptually simple apps that have analogues that used to run on a few hundred mbs of storage and 10’s of mb of RAM.

Oh, one other sidetone - how many CPUs are wasting cycles on things that no one wants, like extremely complex ad-tracking/data mining/etc.

I know why this is the case, and ease of development does enable us to have software that we probably otherwise wouldn’t, but this is a thing that I think is a real blight on modern computing, and I think it’s solvable. I mean, probably the dumbest idea, but improving translation layers to run platform-native code can be vastly improved. Especially in a world where we have generative AI, there has to be a way to say “hey, I’ve got this javascript function, I need this to work in kotlin, swift, c++, etc.”

Lots of stuff -

On the internet, more open standards and community driven stuff. It’s currently really, really annoying that on my mastodon there are a lot of people sharing bluesky codes, as if that’s not just punting the ball for another couple of years. Although this will hopefully be a better outcome than straight up silos like the old social media, fediverse still should be the default way we think about connecting humanity (or something like it, the underlying tech isn’t really that important.) Also, far more things should just be like, a dollar a month or whatever instead of having a massive amount of privacy invading, user experience destroying ads.

In software in general, more privacy. It should be assumed that unless I explicitly opt in, my data is just that, mine. This is a tricky one because I remain hopeful about generative AI and that needs data to improve the models, I’m leery of sharing my data with it because so far the more pedestrian uses of data mining have not been used for things that I can really support. I remain extremely leery about GAI that isn’t explicitly open source and can’t be understood generally.

On the hardware side, computers have mostly been good enough for a while now. Tech will always get better, but I would like to see more of a focus on keeping working devices useful. Like, at some point, technology products will cease being possible to be useful in a practical way because it can’t run modern software, but we’re leaving a lot of shit behind where that’s not the case. Just about any device with an SSD and a processor from the last 10 years (including phones!) should be able to be easily repaired, supported longer, and once support ends, opened up for community support.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgflip.com%2F31blu5.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=a84661eca1f07450cb959905a993236a81c651688610f8caeb8d9c4601ed4b66&ipo=images

Pretty much. SW is a very “hero’s journey” story. Somewhere else in this thread, I posted this:

And although I would say that Andor is proof you can do cool things with a Star Wars background, at its heart SW is a conceptually fairly simple. Young person with the help of wise wizard and plucky band must master his powers to face down the evil tyrant. Now, is that the OG trilogy? Prequels? Sequels? LoTR? The Matrix?

That, but in a space samurai/western backdrop. Andor not only respects the canon, it explores it. Sure, it’s not telling a hero’s journey tale, but it’s grabbing a piece of existing canon and enhancing it if anything.

This is where JJ I think fucked up with the Trek canon.

Although I do really like both of those and would probably put them at the top of the current generation of SW, they feel much less like SW properties and a lot more like they’re wearing a SW skin. Which, you know, is fine since it’s actually good and doesn’t destroy the property. Even if you don’t like Andor, they’re still making a ton of just regular Star Wars shit.

JJ basically derailed Trek for those of us that actually like the type of thing Trek was doing for nearly a decade. Basically took until SNW to get an actual Trek show.

Honestly, just move away from it in the timeline. Legends canon has a a few thousand years to work with, and one of the funny bits about Star Wars is that even though the Old Republic and New Republic exist extremely far apart, the vibes and aesthetics are all fairly similar. And although I would say that Andor is proof you can do cool things with a Star Wars background, at its heart SW is a conceptually fairly simple. Young person with the help of wise wizard and plucky band must master his powers to face down the evil tyrant. Now, is that the OG trilogy? Prequels? Sequels? LoTR? The Matrix?

JJ at least got this part, the problem is you have to add enough flavor to the story that it doesn’t feel like a complete rehash, which JJ failed at with TFA even if that was the closest the sequels got. No idea how Rian made it out of the pitch meeting, pretty clear he had no interest in making a SW movie, and basically just went “never mind all that” to TFA. And then JJ has to land the plane that was basically rebuilt into a railcar midair, and it went about as well as could be expected.

From me? Of course not. Unfortunately, I do live in society and do have to share my contact info with others, and I’m guessing the vast majority of people just spam the “okay” button as Facebook asks for contact access, mic access, camera access, access to your colon, etc.

Meta already demonstrably does this. I deleted my real Facebook in like 2016. Around 2019-2020, I created a new burner account to browse Marketplace with nearly all fake info expect my name, phone, and email. And lo and behold all of my friend suggestions are people I know and mostly were on the old account. The most charitable I can imagine is that those suggestion had me in their contacts which they agree to share with Facebook (which is problematic af imo) but it is extremely likely they just retain all of data especially since many of the people I was suggested have never had my current number/email.

That covers a small subset of the reason a lot of us set it up the way we have. I mean, if that is working for you, great. But you still have to move a physical device, and the ability to watch media is still limited to the location of said device.

If I understand your setup, when you decide you want to a new movie you have to download it, pull the hdd over to the machine, transfer it to the hdd, rename, perhaps even transcode, and then put the drive back on the TV.

In the type of setup described above or like mine, I can pull out my phone and using a very simple search all of the file handling and such is taken care of for me. I don’t ever have to worry if I have the right filetype for the device I’m on, and I can watch that from any device on my local network, or just about any device that has an internet connection. Also, while I’m watching one thing, several other people can be watching whatever else they want on their devices.

I’m still maining plex, and at least there, they just create a plex account, you grant access to that account, and that’s it. Don’t even have to open ports. My guess is with JF since there isn’t a central account host, you’d probably have expose some ports on your network to be able to login without a VPN.