• 3 Posts
  • 81 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • True, but w/ a caveat at the bottom:

    At the end of the day, you have to remember that Apple devices are essentially a sealed unit. Any claims they make about privacy cannot be proven - they could slip tracking and keyloggers into every device, and unless you build a device from scratch and program it yourself, there’s nothing you can do about it. You have to trust that they won’t do that, and Apple is in a relatively unique position (particularly compared to google and facebook) in that the business isn’t designed to profit from this, so they have no real reason to do so.






  • I quit my job to start the year and I’m currently doing a sabbatical year. I’m apathetic about the idea of eventually honing in on a specialty to learn when I re-enter the workforce because I’m unsure how sustainable the skills I learn will be in demand for.

    The only thing I can think of is expanding my base level understanding of LLMs. My bet is that they will become the foundation with which future projects are launched in the same way that elementary school is the foundation for basic reading/writing/comprehension skills.







  • Fan of firefish but I will say the main, most popular instance (firefish.social) has been buggy for me for months. Often my feed/notifications won’t load, or I have trouble replying to comments. Or I can’t react to posts or open up fediverse posts. Real dealbreakers.

    I’m going to try a different instance but otherwise I will likely move my acct to Mastodon.


  • Great question. Had to think about it and I’d say for me personally, poor implementation of color pickers is the biggest frustration.

    As a technical user, I have no qualms w/ editing the default selection if it’s hard to read due to colors, but I get frustrated with poor color picker implementation. For example, color swaths that don’t have named descriptions when you hover over them. Even/especially the standard ROYGBIV colors on the first page of a color picker, but also to a lesser degree, descriptive hex codes on more nuanced online color pickers. I can’t tell the difference and don’t feel like hearing someone ask why I made the bold choice of making the sky pink.

    Another issue is something like KDE’s Konsole has a color picker that doesn’t have clear names/examples for which aspect of the terminal is being changed, so when I wanted to change the bash custom prompt color to improve readability, I had to edit 5-6 different options, and use trial and error to fix the color.






  • That my solution. I have a ‘Sync’ folder on every device’s Home folder, and then I use some aliases to determine whether to grab the bash_aliases file or replace it:

    • alias dba=‘diff -s ~/.bash_aliases ~/Sync/.bash_aliases’ # compare files
    • alias s2ba=‘cp ~/Sync/.bash_aliases ~/’ # Push from Sync folder to current bash aliases
    • alias ba2s=‘cp ~/.bash_aliases ~/Sync/’ # Push from current bash aliases to Sync folder

    By far, the diff alias is the most used. It allows for a quick check on what is different between files w/o having to open them up


  • My uneducated guess is that Endless OS pays manufacturers to have their OS installed as it has what appears to be privacy-conscious telemetry. It won’t be anywhere close to what Microsoft/Apple, but in the Linux telemetry world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and so it’ll still have valuable data.

    Some of the areas that are unlike most other distros I’ve come across:

    • Their website for Endless OS does a lot of tracking and has a policy that is more ‘business-orientated’ than many distros
    • Privacy policy for the OS is not available online, only when downloading program
    • They use dark patterns to have the default for telemetry as ‘opt-in’ which might be the opposite for FOSS IIRC
    • Complete list of things tracked here

    To me, it’s akin to the free third party apps that come packaged with many Android mobile devices. Less intrusive since it’s anonymized, but also feels more intrusive because it’s the entire OS being monitored. I believe I came across a headline that Fedora is attempting to use the same tracking software in the link above

    This review shares a more judgmental view of their practices

    This article has a more positive spin