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thehatfox

@ thehatfox @lemmy.world

Posts
27
Comments
79
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky

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  • That's a gross assumption that people care about any of this.

    For any form of federated community to be sustainable, its users have to care about that. Otherwise those communities will eventually be consumed by whichever instance gains the critical mass to close itself off and become another Twitter or Reddit.

    To achieve the benefits of federation, users must be educated on principles of federation, not be obfuscated from them. The question is how the Fediverse can do that.

  • What's a technology that was cooler in its older iterations?

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  • seriously, it's the one thing keeping the web usable

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  • I honestly don’t know how they do it. Whenever I get handed someone else’s device without an adblocker I find it almost painful to try and use.

  • A Google breakup is on the table, say DOJ lawyers

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  • Years ago a Microsoft breakup was also once on the table, but it never happened.

    I wouldn’t get too excited that regulators will follow through with this for Google either.

  • Words for the End of Summer [INCIDENTAL COMICS]

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  • Resplendent and fungiform definitely are, and I hope slugabed is because it’s describing my mood this Sunday morning rather aptly.

  • They stole my voice with AI | Jeff Geerling

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  • We are going to need much stronger image rights for individuals in the AI age.

    There’s no way to stop the technology itself (although current development may plateau at some point), so there must be strong legal restrictions on abusing it.

  • Mozilla exits the fediverse and will shutter its Mastodon server in December | TechCrunch

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  • I don’t think Mozilla running a Mastodon server is losing focus. The ethos of Mozilla and the Fediverse have a lot of overlap, and Mozilla should desire to have a foot in it.

    An official Mastodon server is also a useful platform for marketing and outreach. In contrast an organisation claiming to be all about privacy and open source retreating from a social media platform that embodies those is not a good look.

  • Virgin Media Warns UK Broadband Users Not to Switch Routers Off at Night - ISPreview UK

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  • High energy bills and misinformation about energy saving seems to be causing some odd behaviour here in the UK.

    I have relatives who go round turning off every device and appliance at night, despite the negligible power draw they have in standby. Another will only charge their phone at night during cheaper the electricity rate - but runs the tumble dryer during the day.

    I also often hear stories about people fearing electronic devices will catch fire if left on standby over night. Which may well be a risk for charging a dodgy Chinese e-bike but probably not for a home router.

  • OG dick pic

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  • With RFC 1149, this would still work now.

  • Yarr

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  • According to the internet, he did it at university, eating nothing but mince, chicken, and mayonnaise for about 2 months. He did so to annoy other students in his classes who were vegan or vegetarian.

    I’ve actually heard a few stories of uni students getting scurvy, although they were because they either didn’t know how to cook or couldn’t afford food.

  • Some basic info about USB

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  • The P and D symbol is the DisplayPort logo. I'm not sure when it was first used, but the DisplayPort standard itself is quite a bit older than USB Power Delivery.

    It's still confusing though regardless of which can lay the best claim to the letters P and D. I would have suggested Power Delivery could use some sort of lightning bolt symbol, but then I realised that would probably conflict with Thunderbolt, which also uses USB-C.

    It's almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.

  • Bots are running rampant. How do we stop them from ruining Lemmy?

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  • Creating a cost barrier to participation is possibly one of the better ways to deter bot activity.

    Charging money to register or even post on a platform is one method. There are administrative and ethical challenges to overcome though, especially for non-commercial platforms like Lemmy.

    CAPTCHA systems are another, which costs human labour to solve a puzzle before gaining access.

    There had been some attempts to use proof of work based systems to combat email spam in the past, which puts a computing resource cost in place. Crypto might have poisoned the well on that one though.

    All of these are still vulnerable to state level actors though, who have large pools of financial, human, and machine resources to spend on manipulation.

    Maybe instead the best way to protect communities from such attacks is just to remain small and insignificant enough to not attract attention in the first place.

  • Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

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  • Platforms like Facebook have an incredible hold on some people. I remember a few years ago when the "Momo" hoax happened, an older coworker arrived at the office and started warning us about the danger of "Momo" they'd seen on Facebook. I'd already heard about the hoax (and was aware of the original creepyasta origins), and brought up a few news articles explaining it, including an official statement from the police. Everyone seemed satisfied by the truth, except for the Facebook addict. They just gave me a blank stare, and a few hours later I heard them telling another group of colleagues to beware of "Momo" getting to their children.

    I have family members and longstanding family friends who have succumbed to this. Interestingly almost all of them were decrying the internet as something that couldn't be trusted before the age of social media.

  • Mint snaps Ubuntu or something

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  • What's the issue with current browser engines?

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  • One of the main issues is the lack of competition. There are now only 3 main browser engines, Blink, Gecko and WebKit. Blink (which poses Chrome and Edge) is by far the largest, and has a the enormous marketing might of Google (and Microsoft to a lesser extent) behind it. WebKit runs Safari, which only runs on Apple platforms and arguably only has the market share it does is because Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines to run on iPhones and iPads. Gecko, the engine of Firefox, continues to slide into irrelevance (which pains me to say as a long time Firefox user).

    We are in real danger of the web being trapped in a browser monoculture again, like the dark dark times of Internet Explorer’s dominance. This led to a period of stagnation in web technology Microsoft at the time put little effort into developing IE. Allowing Blink/Chrome to do the same will likely be just as damaging, albeit in different ways - particularly for privacy on the web.

    For the good of the web no one company should ever be in the position to dictate web standards, which is why we need a healthy and competitive marketplace of web browsers and browser engines. The problem is that web standards have now become so complex developing an indecent browser engine is now a monumental task. Opera gave up on Presto, once the poster child for browser innovation. Microsoft, a company with far more resources, gave up on Trident. Mozilla was developing a new generation browser engine called Servo, but gave up on the project also.

  • "Outdoor Cat vs Indoor Cat" by Sarah Andersen

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  • Yes, according to the RSPB habitat destruction from expanding urban areas and farmland is the main threat to bird life in the UK.

    When my family had a cat it would mostly catch and bring home earthworms.

  • "Outdoor Cat vs Indoor Cat" by Sarah Andersen

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  • There was a BBC documentary a few years ago where they gave GPS tracking collars to a bunch of cats in a neighbourhood and tracked where they went. Each of the cats had their own territory and favourite locations.

  • Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards for the first time since 1994

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  • So now Windows bloat is extending to the physical keyboard itself.

    Looking at the Microsoft blog post they haven't said exactly how they want keyboard layouts to change. So on a full size keyboard this could be either new key entirely, or replace an existing (and arguably more useful) key.

  • What is your preferred fitness tracker/smartwatch?

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  • If you had one of these when the TV came out in class, you were a god: