Yes. Even the more reputable VPNs make ridiculous claims in their marketing.

Like, if you’re worried about hackers stealing your credit card, you don’t need a VPN. You need a chill pill.

You’ll think I’m crazy, and you’re not wrong, but: sneakernet.

Every time I run the numbers on cloud providers, I’m stuck with one conclusion: shit’s expensive. Way more expensive than the cost of a few hard drives when calculated over the life expectancy of those drives.

So I use hard drives. I periodically copy everything to external, encrypted drives. Then I put those drives in a safe place off-site.

On top of that, I run much leaner and more frequent backups of more dynamic and important data. I offload those smaller backups to cloud services. Over the years I’ve picked up a number of lifetime cloud storage subscriptions from not-too-shady companies, mostly from Black Friday sales. I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of most of them and it doesn’t look like they’re going to fold anytime soon. There are a lot of shady companies out there so you should be skeptical when you see “lifetime” sales, but every now and then a legit deal pops up.

I will also confess that a lot of my data is not truly backed up at all. If it’s something I could realistically recreate or redownload, I don’t bother spending much of my own time and money backing it up unless it’s, like, really really important to me. Yes, it will be a pain in the ass when shit eventually hits the fan. It’s a calculated risk.

I am watching this thread with great interest, hoping to be swayed into something more modern and robust.

Wow that gpt rewrite is awful. Not just bland as hell but it also changed the meaning. The first sentence is very different.

(and has E2EE)

Normally my policy is “E2EE or GTFO”, but the concept only applies to a subset of Discord use cases. A good Discord alternative needs to handle the same variety of use cases as Discord.

E2EE for a public forum makes no sense. Lemmy doesn’t have E2EE either, obviously. That’s an absurd idea.

Discord is mostly used for public or semi-public spaces. I’m in Discord servers for some of my favorite games and game studios, for example. The only barrier to entry is clicking a link, which is usually publicly advertised. I’m also in some semi-public Discords that are locked behind a membership of some sort (like Patreon), but those are still full of an arbitrary number of people I do not know. It’s not a private space. E2EE would be counterproductive.

That said, I have a few friends who habitually DM me on Discord, and I’m like “dude, I know you have Signal. Use it FFS”. One thing I like about Lemmy is that when you go to send a DM, it literally warns you against using it for DMs:

Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.

The problem is that there are very few people who are familiar enough with both Discord and Matrix to give a meaningful answer.

Personally, I use both, but for completely different use cases. I do not understand how one could be used as a substitute for the other. Perhaps I’m missing something, or perhaps everyone who thinks Matrix is a good substitute for Discord just don’t use Discord very much.

If you have a small group of friends who occasionally hang out in chat, sure, Matrix is fine. If you’re in dozens of Discord servers, each with dozens (or even hundreds) of channels, and hundreds or thousands of users, no. At least, not with Element. Perhaps there’s a better client out there for that?

Same with Italian food. Tomatoes were only introduced to Europe in the 16th century.

Leonardo da Vinci lived his whole life never knowing what a tomato was.

I don’t think anyone called those “web apps” though. I sure didn’t.

As I recall, the phrase didn’t enter common usage until the advent of AJAX, which allowed for dynamically loading data without loading or re-loading a whole page. Early webmail sites simply loaded a new page every time you clicked a link. They didn’t even need JavaScript.

Yeah. I’ve been using Macs since System 6 and while I’ve often disagreed with Apple’s direction, this is the first one that feels downright incompetent, in much the same way as Microsoft’s Vista and Windows 8 designs were.

There’s no consistency between how things look and how they behave. There is useless clutter everywhere. Legibility of text is an afterthought. It’s like they forgot the distinction between graphic design and UI design.

But it looks pretty at a glance, so…great…

Sounds interesting. What kind of data can it reliably ingest with “attach”? If I dropped, say, the entire Python docs in there, would it be able to get anything out of that? Or does it need to be minimalistic plain-text statements? How is it actually performing retrieval?

A poly group (also known as a polycule) is a network of polyamorous people’s relationships. Polyamory, in case you’re unaware, is the practice of having multiple romantic or sexual partners at the same time, in contrast to monogamy.

If you were polyamorous and wanted to graph out your relationships, you could do it a few different ways. For example:

• Just you and your partners. If any of your partners are also in relationships with each other, you’d draw lines between them as well.

• Extend an extra level and include all of your partners’ partners (known as metamours), again connecting any pair on the graph who are partners.

• Extend that further and include all of your partners’ partners’ partners (no specific term for this as far as I know). This would likely include people you don’t personally know, and it would be difficult to build a complete graph of all their relationships.

Etc.

Unga bunga.

The last time I did any html/css work was about 15 years ago. Now I’m curious what’s changed.

If Civilization II taught me one thing, it’s that ongoing payments are an absolute scam… Unless you’re planning to declare war anyway.

Share pictures of yourself, or your children, only with actual friends and not for the whole world to find

Good advice but let’s be real: in practice, this means having no social media profile, and even that is a half-measure.

Even if I carefully curate my friends list (most people don’t), and share my photos with only my inner circle (most people won’t), I have no control over what my friends do. If my cousin posts a photo he took at Thanksgiving, it’s probably going to be visible to all his friends, and even friends-of-friends. That’s thousands of people I’ve never met and there’s not much I can do about it.

There are pictures of me on Facebook, and I do not use Facebook. The social cost of getting on everyone’s ass about taking/posting pictures with me is too high even for a grumpy old fart like me. At least I’m not tagged (since I don’t have a profile), so it’s not neatly pre-sorted for potential attackers. But that’s at best security through obscurity, and it isn’t even very obscure. Anyone targeting me specifically would have no trouble finding pictures of me, and none of that is realistically within my control.

It’s more like “beater bike security”. Any bike lock can be thwarted by a dedicated thief, so the best strategy is simply to be a less attractive target than the other bikes around.

This is a systemic problem. It goes beyond individual choices and even beyond social media policies.

Yeah, I meant for AI stuff specifically. Their main products are…well I wouldn’t say “good” but they successfully choked out all competition in the 90s so…

Microsoft has nothing worth using. Microsoft hasn’t made anything that’s even worth talking about. Anyone with an OpenAI key and an afternoon to kill could make something every bit as good as what Microsoft has done. They put the absolute bare minimum of effort into everything they’ve done with AI.

The only advantage they have is customer lock-in. Historically, that’s usually enough for them. I hope it’s not this time.

Eventually Microsoft will probably buy a company with people who know what the fuck they’re doing. I think that’s their only way forward because it looks like the brain drain has finally caught up with them.

Jesus Christ what a dumb take. But at least they didn’t say that millennials are killing the cell phone industry. I guess that doesn’t make for good clickbait anymore.

Reminds me if the parable of the broken window, in which French economist Frédéric Bastiat explains the painfully-obvious truth that breaking windows is generally a bad thing, even though it drums up business for the glass maker.

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

The actual paper presents the findings differently. To quote:

Our results clearly indicate that the resolution limit of the eye is higher than broadly assumed in the industry

They go on to use the iPhone 15 (461ppi) as an example, saying that at 35cm (1.15 feet) it has an effective “pixels per degree” of 65, compared to “individual values as high as 120 ppd” in their human perception measurements. You’d need the equivalent of an iPhone 15 at 850ppi to hit that, which would be a tiny bit over 2160p/UHD.

Honestly, that seems reasonable to me. It matches my intuition and experience that for smartphones, 8K would be overkill, and 4K is a marginal but noticeable upgrade from 1440p.

If you’re sitting the average 2.5 meters away from a 44-inch set, a simple Quad HD (QHD) display already packs more detail than your eye can possibly distinguish

Three paragraphs in and they’ve moved the goalposts from HD (1080p) to 1440p. :/ Anyway, I agree that 2.5 meters is generally too far from a 44" 4K TV. At that distance you should think about stepping up a size or two. Especially if you’re a gamer. You don’t want to deal with tiny UI text.

It’s also worth noting that for film, contrast is typically not that high, so the difference between resolutions will be less noticeable — if you are comparing videos with similar bitrates. If we’re talking about Netflix or YouTube or whatever, they compress the hell out of their streams, so you will definitely notice the difference if only by virtue of the different bitrates. You’d be much harder-pressed to spot the difference between a 1080p Bluray and a 4K Bluray, because 1080p Blurays already use a sufficiently high bitrate.

Does it do that even if you set it to “use device MAC” for the wi-fi network you’re on?

The exact location might depend on brand/OS, but in stock Android it’s in Settings > Network & Internet > Internet > gear icon next to active wi-fi network > Privacy.

The only thing I would use such a thing for is installing an ad blocker for the real world.