patchexempt

joined 11 months ago
[–] patchexempt 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

take a look at owntracks, it's very "roll your own" but might get you a ways toward what you're looking for.

[–] patchexempt 36 points 11 months ago

I've worked with marketers for years. many of them have a blind spot for what they create: they can realize something is irritating, or invasive, but not when it's their marketing, which is obviously superior and what people want to see. it's some sort of artist+marketer brainrot.

sorry to generalize, I've just seen it a lot over the years.

I imagine this is something like it: we'll reach them with the perfect message, it'll be exactly what they want! won't that be delightful?

...completely ignoring how horrifying it is.

[–] patchexempt 20 points 11 months ago (10 children)

this was such a weird claim, and I never really understood how it could be true specifically for phones, where they aren't in control of system software. there's like a gradient of possibility here:

  • Android phones from major manufacturers, and Apple phones: doubt it. those things are too heavily scrutinized, someone would've found it, and the companies that make them don't have the impetus.
  • official "smart" voice devices from Amazon, Google, et al: doubt it, same reasoning as above
  • Android phones from small players, heavily subsidized models, etc.: sure, could be
  • smart TVs from major manufacturers: probably not? medium "maybe"? I bought one of these with a hardware mic switch so I guess that shows my paranoia
  • other smart TVs: I dunno, feels highly likely

so: I'm careful about what I use so my risk felt pretty low, but I also feel like if this were true security researchers would've discovered it. let alone the fact that what they describe is bandwidth and battery intensive (off-device or on-device respectively, I don't remember what they claimed as I read the 404 media report some weeks back) but it still makes me wonder: what led them to make these claims then? fascinating, pretty scary.

[–] patchexempt 1 points 11 months ago

I would like this feature as well. I'm finding it very difficult to navigate to other instances communities as there's no way I can find to browse to them, nor search for them. the only way I can seem to locate them is by accidentally coming across a community in my feed.

[–] patchexempt 2 points 11 months ago

agree with all these points. another thing I think about a lot is: I have the benefit of having grown up with the Internet but before social media, and so all of my embarrassing teen content is long gone. can't imagine having that follow you around for the rest of forever, tied to your real name, looked at by potential employers and being asked to defend it for the rest of your life.

[–] patchexempt 1 points 11 months ago

I got out of the "surplus hardware" a while ago; way too expensive and noisy to run, so super recommend ditching the poweredge. for home use, I ended up just going with a USB3 JBOD for storage, and a Intel NUC (which I think they don't make anymore). it runs a ton of virtualized servers under kvm, a virtualized NAS, all without issue because it honestly spends most of its time nearly idle. point is: it's definitely nice to have it all in one case and with high speed storage but maybe having to find something that can house a ton of drives isn't a strict need if you aren't actually going to put a ton of load on it.

[–] patchexempt 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I hadn't heard of CasaOS before; looks very cool. I am currently on TrueNAS and it's been fine, but I had been running it in a VM because it wasn't a good fit for running other things along side it. This seems like an interesting solution, thanks!

[–] patchexempt 1 points 11 months ago

these are my choice as well, and they work pretty flawlessly with Linux over Bluetooth; I use Momentum 4s for many hours each day to do meetings and they've been highly reliable. however they are not perfect:

  • ear pads are non-standard and have a built in plastic backing; I'm worried about long-term availability of replacements
  • can't do audio+mic over 3.5mm headphone jack, just audio. makes them useless for gaming when you don't want Bluetooth latency
  • they have USB audio support which I hoped could be used in place of that 3.5mm connection, but the quality is so poor that everything sounds like you're on a Skype call from 2003

so they are good but don't solve all problems, still looking for that perfect set of headphones, but these are excellent as work headphones where I'm just doing meetings and listening to music.

[–] patchexempt 2 points 11 months ago

yes, I'm using sway as well. i was lucky that my old i3 config mostly worked without modification, although it took a while to find good replacements for many of the little apps I'd come to rely on. I settled on bemenu, waybar, and then a dozen little glue apps like clipboard managers eventually fell into place. the archlinux wiki pages on sway and wayland are a great resource.

[–] patchexempt 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

fwiw I've been on Wayland for a few years now and the amount of times I've had to think "oh, I'm on Wayland" are in the single digits. not to pretend it you don't run into things you have to solve or alternatives you have to find, you definitely do, but I've been very happy especially over the last year or so.

I do not use asahi though so I can't comment on that specifically.

[–] patchexempt 27 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Yep, there is already a great example of what would happen, and it pretty much proved what many of us believed: governments and employers used it as a surveillance tool, and it's not a replacement for a real content moderation strategy. People are just as happy to be cruel to each other and spread disinformation even if their real name is attached to it.

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