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Zak

@ Zak @lemmy.world

Posts
7
Comments
872
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Unlockable bootloader.

    Maybe that's not underrated on Lemmy, but mainstream reviews never even mention it.

  • My mom says that people who don't have "value" don't deserve to live and that "depression" is just an excuse for laziness. What's is your rebuttal for it?

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  • Who is she to decide who deserves to live? God?

    Of course, I'd hesitate to accept such a judgment from a god who presumably made those people that way. That would be a dick move.

    As for pronouncements about mental health, I will accept citations, or maybe credentials. With neither, hers have no value.

  • Is there a secure video chat that does not require a phone number?

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  • It looks like Session has video calls in beta.

    Note that most services requiring a phone number for registration don't actually require that phone number to be connected to a SIM card in the device you're using. That may be helpful depending on your use case.

  • Is there a secure video chat that does not require a phone number?

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  • It does not appear to require a phone number. It even looks like an email address is optional.

  • To Lemmy people who came from reddit: Have you guys tried other fedi software like mastodon or sharkey?

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  • The character limit is hardcoded in two places. They could, and should make it a setting, or just eliminate it.

  • To Lemmy people who came from reddit: Have you guys tried other fedi software like mastodon or sharkey?

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  • I tried Hubzilla, Akkoma, and Mastodon. I still use Mastodon. I have the ActivityPub plugin on a Wordpress site, but haven't yet migrated that site's Mastodon account because Wordpress doesn't offer a great experience for consuming content from accounts I follow. I may try out Wafrn.

    I've always had mixed feelings about the microblogging category. Low friction to post and interact is good. Character limits and a complete lack of formatting, not so much. I set the character limit on my self-hosted Mastodon instance to a big number I never approach; I routinely exceed the default 500.

    I was aware of Lemmy for a while, but didn't join until the Reddit API fiasco because most of the activity was weird political extremism until suddenly a ton of people wanted Reddit alternatives and new servers sprang up.

  • Why did you join Lemmy?

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  • I joined Reddit in 2005 and liked the format. I had been self-hosting Mastodon for a while before I joined Lemmy because it had long been evident that a centralized corporate internet is not exactly great for its users or the world at large. I had also experimented with Hubzilla and Akkoma.

    I looked at Lemmy a couple times before the Reddit API fiasco and it was just a couple servers that were dominated by people who thought Stalin did nothing wrong and killing Uyghurs is just fine and/or not happening. I was not motivated to participate at that time. When lemmy.world launched, I joined it because I had the impression mastodon.world was well-run.

  • Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft

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  • KDE has a bigger team now. Gnome doesn't have a Windows-style panel by default. I was thinking of projects like Xfce and LXDE.

  • What popular belief do you disagree with?

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  • The effect of a downvote is that fewer people see the comment. If you think fewer people should see my comments, I can assist you with that by not posting them.

    If you feel I've missed your point rather than understanding and disagreeing with it, feel free to articulate it more clearly. Your claim as I understood it was life is harder and crueler (for most people, most places) these days (than at some point in the past).

  • What popular belief do you disagree with?

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  • Why would I continue this conversation with you if you're going to downvote my replies? That's rude.

  • What popular belief do you disagree with?

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  • No. I live under a rock and haven't noticed that there's a global increase in far-right movements, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and a race between Sam Altman and Elon Musk to see who can boil the oceans faster to make better slop factories.

    Bad news makes for good headlines, and we absolutely have serious, pressing problems worldwide. Despite that, ask yourself if you'd rather live in 1925 than 2025. 1825? 1725? Think about how the average person lived and died in those times. When was life actually easier and kinder for most people?

  • What popular belief do you disagree with?

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  • life is harder and crueler these days.

    I think you just found the popular belief that I disagree with.

    Compared to most of human history, life now is pretty good. This article uses childhood mortality (globally 4.4% versus 50% for most of human history) to make the point. There's still lots of room to improve - the EU has a tenth the global average - but humanity has made incredible progress on that front over the past two centuries.

    Looking at a smaller time scale, the human development index is trending upward everywhere since 1990.

  • Family ‘banned from more than 1,000 petrol stations’ amid fuel theft row

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  • An easier way to prevent fuel theft is to require prepayment or a credit card authorisation to activate the pump.

  • What was it like the first time you had to call 911?

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  • I've called for drunk or similarly erratic drivers a few times. One of them was in a tanker truck and had several near-misses before he found a place to stop. The cops started following and he tightened up his driving. I'm not sure if they actually contacted him.

  • What was it like the first time you had to call 911?

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  • I was 12 and I was on my way home from school. I saw an outbuilding in a neighbor's yard on fire, so I ran home and called 911. It had already been reported, and the firefighters managed to contain it.

  • Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft

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  • The bit about apps having to reflow seems nonsensical. They have to reflow any time the user resizes their windows.

    I'm not accepting any excuses from MS about limited resources when Linux desktop environments built by hobbyists have the feature in question.

  • You can pry pattern matching from my cold dead hands

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  • In most languages, I would agree with that. In Lisp, I think I might not. If Common Lisp didn't come with CLOS, you could implement it as a library, and that is not true of the object systems of the vast majority of languages.

  • You can pry pattern matching from my cold dead hands

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  • You don't even need to define a class to define methods. I'm sure that's surprising to people coming from today's popular language, but the original comment was about syntax.

    Whether Lisp syntax is ugly is a matter of taste, but it's objectively not unreadable.

  • You can pry pattern matching from my cold dead hands

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  • I imagine the tricky part for someone unfamiliar with Lisp would be that there's no syntactic clue that a particular thing is a macro or special form that's going to treat its arguments differently from a function call. Someone who knows Scheme may have never seen anything like CLOS, but would see from context that defmethod must not be a function.