FriendOfDeSoto

I signed up for Ente last fall as a Google Photos replacement. The backup works fine. The Android app is prone to crashing so I don’t use it as my go-to gallery app. The process of moving a big library of pictures away from Google was painful. Ente does a lot in terms of making it easier - but it’s still a pain in the butt. Their desktop app runs poorly on old desktop hardware if you keep their machine learning on. The ML lets you search images content down the line.

I signed up for a year and I’m already looking at another solution. Laziness may win though because transferring the library was a terrible experience.

Link

Merz is in his 70s. He is not the most gifted politician. One nickname given to him by a journalist is “the unavoidable” in reference to him having no good competition for leadership in his party after a perceived century of Angela Merkel in charge who had successfully sidelined him. For a reason, it seems.

He is very good at dropping shit like this in the media and then having it walked back or watered down. I do not see this idea getting a majority in the country where Google street view is useless because people rebelled against having the public facing side of their buildings photographed for easier navigation. And I can see a few arguments that would occupy the supreme court for a decade, were this to become law.

I appreciate the air of publicity this story brings.

You probably can’t trust your password manager if it’s compromised

In other headlines: water is surprisingly wet.

One thing that what they call agenetic AI will undermine might be a lot of the subscription based biggies of the industry. I’m thinking about Adobe in particular. They charge a monthly premium for having user-friendly, low learning curve software that often has become industry standard. But there are open source alternatives for many of their big hitters (Inkscape, GIMP, etc.). If the agenetic model needs a tool to design a logo or expand an image - and you probably already pay for the privilege of using the agent model - this may prove to be a boon to the open source development of these intermediary software tools. Because the relative difficulty to use them as we hear from Adobe heads all the time won’t matter to the computer. And they are free (with a request to donate). So a chunk of interest and probably money and effort will move from those subscription services to open source alternatives and their development. This is just one positive effect so-called AI could have for some open source projects.

Sadly, at the same time we squander resources and kill polar bears.

I frankly don’t believe that this guide alone would have solved as many issues for you as it would also cause. What is presented as universal wisdom is never that simple. The “nobody taught you” aspect is not universally true. I counted ten items in the list I was taught in school or by my parents. I’m not the center of the universe but we can extrapolate that some people have been taught some of these things in some setting. So there is already a mistake in the headline.

This “cool guide” is either redundant (letting people exit a place or the elevator first are roughly the same thing) or not specific enough (letting people exit buses and trains etc. before you enter is missing). You should also offer your chair or seat to those who need it more than you (e.g. pregnant, old, or injured people). You don’t have to offer a replacement date if you cancel an appointment if you canceled in the first place because you don’t want to hang out with an asshole. You don’t need to clean up a mess you made while running outside while the house is on fire. There will be instances where you don’t need to return a borrowed item in the same or better condition than when you borrowed it. If I lended you my dirty lawnmower I would not expect you to clean it or sharpen its blades before you returned it. The additional wear and tear is factored in already.

This poster gives the impression to contain simple, universal, virtuous truths. But none of them are always simple or always logical. They are at best a patchy guideline missing even more unarticulated conditions and exceptions that render them useless. And if you aren’t aware of the missing bits, you’ll still have awkward social interactions.

My suspicion is that somebody created a list of things they thought was the epitome of wisdom in general social interactions, in the US and not in a city with public transport options. They possibly used so-called AI to compile this list. It’s even more likely that they used it to design the poster and to draw the little pictures. And then posted it online to be praised for their effort (don’t aura farm ought to be a bullet point on this poster as well). It deserves to be criticized.

No one taught you this? Even if nobody sits you down for a lesson, you are taught by example by the people around you when you grow up.

Also, the tipping and keeping doors open for people behind you are not universally applicable. In large swaths of Asia you’ll be met by ire or confusion respectively. So maybe this is missing a generated image for being culturally sensitive.

I’m not an Apple user so I cannot answer your question there. I just wanted to add another way to get ad-free podcasts. If the podcast offers a patreon feed, any RSS-based podcatcher anywhere will be able to do this.

I am not an expert and I think this falls at the first hurdle because a login is required to view more than the latest post or two.

Here is how I use it: you take an old device that you never installed Insta on, run it under a burner account at the OS level, run a kill switch VPN on it (preferably always on the same server), and then create an account on Insta that you’re ready to ditch the moment they want your ID. That device doesn’t do anything else than Insta.

Tried it with VPN on and on Vivaldi on Android and it works just fine. I think you have another gremlin in your setup.

What confuses me about this scenario you’re painting is this: it doesn’t matter which app is better than WhatsApp for your mother to navigate if none of the contacts she texts with are willing to move with her. She’s not breaking off contact with folks over a GUI issue, is she? Or is she only using it with you?

Also, random messages not going through has not been an issue in the “war” between Android and iOS so far as I can see. Image quality of attached images, getting spammed with a new text for every reaction of a user in iMessage on the Android side, and some rare messages in group chat contexts that originated in iMessage were issues (and they’re not anymore IIRC). Now, if those are the ones you mean with “random messages” then okay. Did you or she convince all her contacts to move to WhatsApp as a result? If so, once again, moving her off it won’t do any good unless everybody follows along with her.

A move off of WhatsApp and to Signal is recommended from a privacy point of view. Meta is a terrible company. Signal is less bloated than WhatsApp. Beyond that I think they’re all roughly similar in functionality and user interface. By which I mean equally confusing for somebody over 60 today.

We’ll never know until another NSA employee defects to Russia.

Just to add more context: these are good guy hackers who have responsibility shared their findings with the companies affected. It took them around 3 years to translate the signals they intercepted. And as far as anybody can tell, no one used this in the wild. It’s wild but it isn’t Snowden-wild.

If you care about things beyond the operations, the Proton boss came out in support of 47’s adminstration with regards to regulating big tech IIRC. I’m not aware the Mullvad chief did something similar.

Proton works well. But it’s designed to be the basket for all your eggs (VPN, office suite, email, etc.). They want you to use all their services and push for upgrades to the highest tier. I found their customer support you be … very … slow.

If you need port forwarding, AirVPN is another option. I think they’re cheaper than Mullvad but it’s held together by dedication and duct tape. It works okay but read their website first to see if you’re okay with how it’s set up.

Seconded! LMMS is a good free DAW to get started.

We are already living in a privacy nightmare. Whether you film and then doxx folks with a smartphone, a camera you’ve hidden in your clothing, or one built into the frame of some spectacles really doesn’t move the needle much any more. We’re in the red already. The nightmarish data collection and then sharing is already baked into our internet experience.

And the people at large sit in a chair in a burning room that is this nightmare we’re in, uttering “It’s fine.” It’s been years since the Google glasshole debacle. People are so used now to other people just filming shit all the time. I think these glasses will end up just being tolerated. There won’t be thousands around in your daily life, like smartphones. Society will acquiesce even in occasional perverts and intentional doxxers. The digital Overton window will move on.

What I can foresee is a more enforced no filming ban in certain areas, like restrooms and changing rooms. There could even be a technical solution that garbles recordings whether they are attempted or not.

Yes, you must have missed it. And so it begins.

Google is moving to make Android less open source. I’m not sure more devs following suit is going be good for them or their users. The G doesn’t give an F.

What we need is an OS fork that gets maintained. If not that, some other workaround that fools the Google servers. Because you can bet money that nobody made from flesh and blood is going to look at this inside Google.

Maybe devs can band together and form Middle Finger Corp. and designate one willing person as their contact to serve as registered dev for a gazillion apps. Follow the letter of the law, not the misguided spirit of it, in a manner of speaking.

If you are sitting on a mobile OS and you were afraid to fail like Windows, maybe now is the time to give it a go?

This is another cut, among thousands. It’s bad because we can see the motivation behind it. Free speech only for one team.

I don’t want to be victim-blaming when I say expecting any big US corp to protect your privacy is futile. I know they want the reach of Insta and that’s of course not a bad thing. But it’s a threat considering who runs it. Another threat is editorializing the content. Don’t put music on it, don’t opine on the shamefulness of what the jackboots are doing, just post it. It’s the best chance of this dying in the courts before the independence of the judiciary has completely gone. Constant dripping wears the stone and the MAGAs are pissing on it full force.

Another consideration must be at this point to host or mirror your content on servers outside the US. Countries that already didn’t give an eff about the US or cooperating with its authorities. If you run your digital opposition on US-run/controlled infrastructure, you’ll be shut down soon.

It did for me. Anything with file access will ask for permissions first time around. (Android 13)

If you were using Photos as a photo roll app you need to stay angry at yourself a while longer. That’s on you when you should know you cannot trust the G. Don’t grant an app permissions to photos and videos that could sync it to the cloud. And as another precaution, don’t keep sensitive pictures in the DCIM folder. If I have to take pictures of sensitive documents like that I disable WiFi (sync set up on WiFi only), take the picture, move it to a folder that’s never backed up elsewhere on my phone, and then turn WiFi back on.

You are not normal because you care about these things. The normal user doesn’t care and that’s who they are catering for. I’m not excusing their behavior (I don’t like it either) and at the same time you need to be more on your toes.

I’m planning to move to Ente this year when my Google cloud subscription runs out. Not looking forward to the work it entails but to the [paints face blue] FREEDOM!