Yes if you’re just writing your own simple documents libreoffice/OpenOffice will work, but if you have to do anything more complex than a single page spreadsheet, text-on-white presentations, or 3 page MLA book reports… or, even worse, have to interact with documents and spreadsheets created by basically any other person on the planet, I’ve just never had a good consistent experience with any of the free options.
If you’re using git to track document changes then you’re almost certainly in the tech industry and are quite familiar with the inner workings of your computer.
For 90% of people using computers right now, asking them to use git to do version management on their day to day work flow would be like asking me to fly a rocket ship to work.
I agree with the OP here, for what it does office is leaps and bounds ahead of any of the other software I’ve used to try to replace it and I always end up landing back on it.
There are many non-technical people in the world of mathematics and they manage to use LaTeX just fine. Overleaf offers synchronization without needing to touch Git.
Not only mathematics, pretty much everyone in the world of science/academia uses LaTeX. For git, I’ve seen some stuff, but most researchers that program a decent amount are reasonably familiar with git as well.
That’s still a far higher degree of technical competence than is possessed by the target audience for PowerPoint, Google Slides, or LibreOffice present. Also, claiming someone isn’t technical just because they’re not a computer programmer is a little odd. Most programmers I know don’t go anywhere near LaTeX because it’s so confusing and the spec is so complicated. They use powerpoint, Miro, or markdown slides when they want to present something.
This guys reply to me was literally “git isn’t too technical, mathematicians use this extremely complicated program for generating highly technical documents all the time so obviously grandma could too!”
I agree 100% with you, I tried to use LaTeX ONE time in college and nearly chucked my computer out the window, and I’m a software developer. I was using it for a math class and couldn’t get my head around any of it.
It certainly isn’t a good replacement for MSWord or PowerPoint for the VAST majority of people who don’t need to put mathematical notation into their presentations and just need words on a screen
Git diff will look pretty terrible for docx or similar files. The thing with the builtin change tracking is that it’ll actually show you what changed in the document view
Ah, I took it so that they mentioned beamer / LaTeX as a separate thing from change tracking, which is usually more of a document editor feature than a presentation editor feature.
But like, using LaTeX as a replacement for microsoft word is NOT really useful advice for the vast majority of people who use Word. I don’t need ANY of the special things LaTeX does, and I’ve been using Word all my life to do the basic stuff I need it for.
I get where people here are coming from, but the whole point of this thread is talking about proprietary software which is better for the average use case than open source stuff, and I think the point still stands that MSOffice products absolutely fit that bill. Yes, open source or free alternatives exist, but they aren’t nearly as good, feature-full, and easy to learn and use as the open source alternatives.
The fact that we’re here arguing whether LaTeX is a viable alternative to Word and Power Point kinda proves that MSOffice is the best for this IMO, because LaTeX isn’t exactly easy to pick up and use and is really intended for industries that need extremely complex formatting on their presentations and papers.
No one here is talking about using LaTeX instead of Word. They are talking about making presentations, not documents.
And yeah, I can see how making presentations in LaTeX is faster and easier (for some people) because PowerPoint is so incredibly annoying and slow to use. And the ability to use version tracking is very nice.
Imo using a text based tool for presentations is really counterproductive because presentations should use as little text as possible.
For me currently, libreoffice impress is actually the best option because it has all the necessary features (wysiwyg style editing, svg support, latex equations, some animations).
I’ve found OnlyOffice (not to be confused with OpenOffice) is very compatible with Microsoft’s Office document format. I can open and edit docx files created by other people with no problem.
I’m surprised to see quip here, honestly it’s never been for me (even with it’s salesforce integration). What do you like about it compared to gdocs / word?
If you have to interact with documents created by others it would be better to use open formats not proprietary shit designed to be not cross compatible
it’s pretty capable in term of most functionalities but you can’t get the formatting, e. g. word docs, exactly one-to-one with its MS office version counterpart. So it would be difficult to share to multiplatforms users.
And Microsoft intentionally introduce bugs in its files design so that certain functionalities will be extremely difficult to replicate.
unfortunately “pretty good” is not “guaranteed”, which is often what I need for both work and school. I tried to make myself use only libre options for like a week and just about every assignment I opened was broken in some way or another so I always ended up back in Word.
I’ll still use the libreoffice options if i’m, say, already logged into my Linux install and don’t want to bother going back to Windows. But since I get Office for free thru work and school, and so does everyone else, well… I just use it.
Not sure how it is nowadays, but back in 2018 Libreoffice Calc was struggling to handle even a single sheet of data entries, performance-wise, let alone multiple sheets.
I’m not expecting it to have every feature imaginable, but I do expect it to not freeze when processing even a relatively small dataset.
As someone that despises MS Office, LibreOffice is even worse. All I wanted to do was create a simple database of contact info, donation info, and reservation scheduling for a small nonprofit. Something I could do in minutes in Access. Let me tell you the database part of LibreOffice SUCKS. You can’t even import csv’s! Best you can do is copy paste cells into fields and Hope all the formatting and data types work. And connecting to other external data sources is an incredible pain. I found MS Office on sale for $35 and threw LibreOffice in the trash where it belongs.
I don’t need office much but when I do, I hate that I can never find what I’m looking for in that stupid ribbon. I also don’t know any good MS Access alternative.
Oh yeah 365 online simultaneous “collaboration” is absolutely useless. If I really need multiple people inside the same document I’ll use Google docs and then export it to finish off the formatting.
Honestly, I think that best thing to do is just pick one or two communities that you really care about and invest a bit of your time. Make a post or two, have some back-and-forth with a friendly person in the comments. You don’t have to be a moderator to help build a community. Even just taking 30 seconds to make one post would be good enough, and might encourage someone else to make a post.
I was always more of a lurker on Reddit, but I don’t think that’s really gonna be enough if we want this place to at least get to critical mass.
If it reaches that mass, it’s going to bring all of it, minus corporate control. But we could still end up with a corporate host hoovering up all the user base anyways, github style. Embrace, Extend, Monetize.
Well said, but I will say reddit felt more like being out in public. So you kept your distance and didn’t really interact, but here feels more like being at someone’s house that you know. At the moment. The federation aspect is a different wrinkle but ultimately will lead to a better experience overall. No ads is a huge bonus!
I agree - my level of engagement on Reddit dwindled with every unpopular decision Reddit forced on its users, and towards the end I had stopped engaging entirely, because it just felt like I would be interacting mainly with bots and hostile users. You’d constantly see bots steal others’ comments, people calling them out to no avail, and knowing that Reddit didn’t give a shit cuz it was engagement numbers to them either way really discouraged any chance of healthy discourse.
Rage-baiting might be a good short-term solution for boosting engagement, but allowing or maintaining that level of hostility across the site just tires people out and drives them away.
how do i get to the community page? and is that its name? do i look for “community page” or is it called something else? (i chose a random place to ask, its fine if you’re busy or don’t like to answer such basic stuff, i will eventually figure it all out.)
If you tap on the list button at the top left corner, you’ll see list of your subscribed communities. You can tap on any of them to go to that community page. You can also tap on the community name on a post in the main feed and go to that community. Lastly, you can also go to the search page and search for a community and go to its page. Let me know if you’re facing any difficulties.
I still have the community I moderate (!fitandnatural) set to mod posts only, because I’m the only mod and don’t want to risk someone posting something bad while I’m not on Lemmy. We really need an approved user feature like Reddit so that vetted community members can also make posts in communities where “anyone can post” isn’t a good option.
Couldn’t you toggle the mod posts only option on and off based on your availability? Maybe make a pinned post explaining it and write in the times it will be available inside that post?
That seems like it’d be pretty easy. Basically just like giving someone a moderators role but with extra tier of hierarchy below normal moderator.
Seems like a nice idea TBH … I’m generally all in favour of leaning into lemmy’s ability to create sorta blogging spaces that naturally federate (and therefore are easy to aggregate).
Lemmy and ActivityPub seems to have (nearly) everything to recreate a new blogosphere, but with federation beyond its own border over ActivityPub, comments, voting, aggregation, sorting and search built right in.
Yeah. Ive picked /conservative. Ive been posting a mixture of fluff and actual posts. Early days, but it seems to be picking up speed. Just post, it works!
Very confidently wrong, poor reading comprehension, poor grammar, limited vocabulary, emoji gore, catch phrase/pop culture quotes/talking points repeated with no comprehension of what they’re saying, clearly not aware of how many things in life work, religious regurgitation while being surprised everyone doesn’t agree with them. Very easily impressed with basic factual statements, clearly thinking confidence is the main thing that makes someone correct. Thinks their mom telling they they are handsome is a valid point. Idk, that’s all I got.
Depending on what you meant by “very easily impressed with basic factual statements” it could go either way. I’m an adult and I’m happy to admit I don’t know a lot things, sometimes I’ve been stunned that what I believed was totally wrong and all it took was some to give me a basic fact to make me realise.
Ever since I was a wee flipflop I always liked to learn from my friends (and yes I was that gullible naive friend) but now even in my 20s it’s still fun to learn outside a classroom. I don’t have to worry about my terrible memory not keeping all the info, if it sticks it sticks
It’s like I tell my kids, an adult is just a child who got old. It’s also why a lot of cultures have a concept of adulthood that has nothing to do with reaching sexual maturity alone.
What I wrote – Very easily impressed with basic factual statements
What you think it means – there’s something wrong with people who are learning new things.
Does ‘‘basic factual statements’’ mean ‘‘new information that someone is just now learning’’. Can it also apply to information they already know, or believe is true? Can it also be referring to basic knowledge nearly everyone knows?
Does ‘being very easily impressed’ include a situation where someone reacts to information in a typical fashion? Does it exclude adults learning or recognizing factual information and responding with a simple agreement, such as ‘yeah that’s true’? Or is this an indication that an overreacting response is the dead giveaway?
Did the sentance make a claim something is wrong with being a child?
Did the sentence claim that learning new information is likewise something wrong?
Please write one 5 sentance paragraph explaining your opinion on the above two numbered questions. Proofreading will not be necessary.
This is like reading a reverse horoscope - you’ve just thrown as many negative traits as you could think of at the wall, knowing at least a few will stick.
Nothing on your list couldn’t also apply to an adult, especially those most privileged and entitled in society.
This is the most efficient (known) packing of 17 unit squares inside a square. If you’re asking why it’s like that, that’s above my math proficiency level.
We’ve figured out optimal packing methods for any number of squares inside a big square. When a number is below and near a square number like 15, you just leave an empty box, but when it’s far from the next square number, you’ll be able to pack them more efficiently than just leaving empty squares around. Turns out this kind of stuff is hilariously hard to prove that it’s the most efficient method.
A female patient, a female politician, a female customer, etc. That’s the best way to refer to those.
What’s bad is using ‘female’ as a noun: “A female. "
In general, you just don’t use adjectives-as-nouns to refer to people. You don’t call someone “a gay”, “a black”, or “a Chinese”. That is offensive, and “a female” has the same kind of feel.
(there are exceptions to the above: you can call someone ‘an American’ or 'A German”, but not “A French”. I don’t understand why - if you can’t feel your way, best just avoid it)
Now, you could get around it by calling someone “a female person” - except that we already have a word for “female person”, and that’s “woman”. And to go out of your way to avoid saying “woman” makes you sound like some kind of incel weirdo, and you don’t want that.
except that we already have a word for “female person”, and that’s “woman”. And to go out of your way to avoid saying “woman” makes you sound like some kind of incel weirdo
Sounds more like a terf or “gender critical” person, but maybe that’s just my experience.
I think that’s because the descriptors come after the noun in reporting. Similar to how documentation is done for other professions, like healthcare. If it’s out of the context of reporting, or other situations listed in the site below, it sounds grammatically strange or rude.
Because it’s still acting as a descriptor rather than an identifier, despite playing the syntactic role of a noun instead of an adjective. It’s more about semantics in this case than syntax.
I know it’s playing the syntactic role of a noun, that’s what I said. But it’s playing the semantic role of a descriptor. The “thing” being described here is a suspect, one that is white and also male, as opposed to a male who is white and also suspected.
Syntactically, the word male was a noun. But semantically, it’s still just describing the suspect, rather than identifying the thing to be described.
Both are nouns. Suspect is the subject, male is the object. You could replace it with, for example “the suspect is a cat”, and I think we can all agree “cat” is a noun. “six foot” and “white” are the adjectives in that sentence.
Well yeah, why would I need a description of your friend unless it pertains to an upcoming story, and why not use his name if you know it? The cop can’t usually say “It was Steve what done it” because most places aren’t Mayberry.
And to go out of your way to avoid saying “woman” makes you sound like some kind of incel weirdo, and you don’t want that.
I’d just like to emphasise this. It’s not that using a different term is intrinsically bad, it’s just that the people who tend to do it are not cool and you don’t want to look like you’re associated with them.
Negative connotations to whom? If those described do not like the term it should not be used. Basic human dignity, just like using one’s preferred pronouns.
The VP of product messaged me a couple weeks ago after some back and forth about some work. She asked if I had some time to talk about the final solution. I went “uhhhh so long as we don’t call it that”
I’m like 90% sure she had no idea why that phrase is reserved.
Yes. Life is a game of trying to guess which people are full of shit. If they say “feeeemales” and then turn out to be fine, great, I’ll probably give them a heads up not to do that.
Yes. Language can show what sort of media people consume and the sorts of groups they socialize with, especially when it comes to the internet.
If someone is using incel language, there will be a strong initial assumption they spend time within incel circles consuming toxic content like Andrew Tate and will remain under that assumption until proven otherwise. Sorry, not sorry?
When I was growing up, saying woman was offensive, because it made people feel old. So we would say “girl”. But now It’s flipped. Saying “girl” makes people feel too young, apparently.
I’m still kind of adjusting. The word “woman” still feels icky to me because I was berated for saying it as a kid.
‘a Frenchman’ would be more correct than ‘a French’. Because French is only an adjective, while American and German are both nouns and adjectives. But Frenchman is not gender neutral like German or American.
Could go with Francophone, but that’s any french speaking person so that includes canadians, africans, etc.
And, it would seem to make sense to go with Frank, but the Franks were originally germans, then expanded their territory to include France, and the name stuck there but not in their original territory, so is it really correct to refer to the French as Franks? Since no one does it, I would guess not.
3 years ago, “man” in that context was considered gender neutral. More recently tho a lot of stink is being made about little language things like this. Theres no replacement word to use.
Sensitivities during Covid ran high. A lot of things changed then. For instance in the software world removing the name “master” from git usage, and on the TV Show Survivor, the host not saying his famous line “come on in guys”. At the same time pronouns became a huge thing, and these seemingly gender specific or sensitive word terms were targeted.
You are correct, there was a round of this in the 90s or so, where job titles like “waitress”, “stewardess”, “policeman” were all adjusted. I see that as a very different round of language change.
Yeah, 2020 is the time period I’m referring to. I had never heard of it being a thing until George Floyd and BLM movement in 2020, then GitHub changed in response to that.
I’ve been in IT for 35 years. And I never heard a single negative thing about branch names and master/slave terminology until 2020.
Perhaps you think that was set aside because IDE hard drives are dead.
As early as 1795, dissatisfaction with the convention of the collective masculine led to calls for gender-neutral pronouns, and attempts to invent pronouns for this purpose date back to at least 1850, although the use of singular they as a natural gender-neutral pronoun in English has persisted since the 14th century.
there are exceptions to the above: you can call someone ‘an American’ or 'A German", but not “A French”. I don’t understand why - if you can’t feel your way, best just avoid it
And yet here you are confidently expounding exactly how this works. Why, if you know you don’t understand, are you weighing in on this like you’re an authority on it?
Tbh I think it’s just because it sounds bad phonetically, since “a Frenchman” or “an Englishman” are both acceptable as well, but “a French” or “An English” just sounds dumb. Of course you can only do that to white countries, don’t try it with China.
Because fluent speakers of a language know the rules even if they don’t understand them. Why can you have a big green dog but not a green big dog? Because that’s the way the language works.
To be slightly more specific, you can have a “green big dog”, but it does not convey the same idea as a “big green dog”. The latter is by far the more normal, and it conveys any dog which is both big and green. The former implies the existence of “big dog” as a specific known thing, like “big dog” is a category of its own more than merely a dog that is big.
As a general rule though, yes, follow the adjective order guidelines. There’s some fuzziness with it, but “opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun” should be used.
That’s werid because in french that’s not what we use in everyday life. We say “Un japonais” for example, not “Une personne japonaise” which kinda sounds unnecessary
My wife tells me that using as an adjective is just as bad and that I should always say “woman”, e.g. a woman politician and never a female politician.
I generally disagree and it seems fine and not disrespectful at all. But it’s somehat less up to me - I’m not a female.
My wife tells me that using as an adjective is just as bad and that I should always say “woman”, e.g. a woman politician and never a female politician.
Using a noun as an adjective is just weird, honestly.
I think that a good rule of thumb is: would you say “male doctor” or “male politician”? If not, is the professional’s gender relevant? Probably not, in which case it sounds pejorative to include it.
In some cases I would, and I would find it awkward to say “man doctor” or “man politician”. I don’t think it works at all, and I disagree with her that this really is the way most people try to avoid the naming.
But, kinda like pronoun; I guess I try to listen and be sensitive on things like how women and minorities saybtheyre sensitive about, including labels and etc.
Oh dear… And why isn’t “a male” just as bad? And what’s intrinsically wrong about those two as a noun? Why is it ok to call someone “a fire fighter“, “a journalist”, and not “a female”? Is it something to feel shame about? Bah. It’s really beyond me. Thank god i live in Italy, where this kind of stuff still struggles to gain traction, but alas it will do eventually, since hey, you know, we’re all living in america after all. What’s more, it’s not entirely true: now you can get scolded even for using female as an adjective (it happened to me more than once), my friend. And it’ll get worse, just you wait and see.
All of them would be weird as fuck, and yes, they’d sound demeaning. They don’t have the same weird-incel vibe, but that’s just an accident of culture.
Right. This is the best way to figure out if it sounds weird.
If you would use “man” then the word to use is “woman”. If you would use “male” then “female”.
So if someone asks is the doctor male or female? No problem. Even if they ask “is the doctor a male or a female?” Still no problem. Kinda odd but certainly not offensive.
The problem arises when someone says “men and females” that does sound weird and kinda insulting. As would “women and males”.
I think a big part that’s skeevy to me is that gender and sex are comparatively unimportant individual traits, referring to someone by their gender happens far more often for women and it’s a hold over of misogyny. There are much more interesting individual traits that identify us than our sex or presented gender.
I’m probably the only person to not use that word like a frat douche, I just like calling my guy friends bro and I tried calling my female friends bro and they didn’t find that funny so now everyone gets bruh’d
Unless you’re someone’s doctor, it’s almost never relevant to discuss someone’s sex. Gender is how we refer to people in most contexts, and when it’s important (e.g. discussing pregnancy) it’s not rude to make a distinction.
I personally hate all the reddit cross post stuff, and it seems like the majority of lemmy users do too. I don’t understand why people obsess over this as a way to “grow” lemmy.
It doesn’t contribute to active conversations, in fact it deters users who reply locally and then never get a response.
Just let lemmy grow organically by making good content and contributing, stop forcing it with mirrors from reddit.
I wonder if we could get the top admins to threaten defederation with any instance that doesn’t flag automated posts as bots. This way at least the users have some visibility.
It isn’t about “growing” lemmy. It is about “growing” internet points and communities. People see an opportunity to become the mods they hate (fucking pricks, how dare they ban someone for screaming forty slurs in every single post for six months straight!) while establishing themselves as power users. Because if it worked on reddit, it works on here.
Just block communities and, where possible, instances.
Of all criticism I am hearing, this is by far the most misguided one.
My goal with Communick is to become a mere service provider. I want to do as little as possible with the communities themselves. Sure, I am doing the moderation now because they are not big enough, but if/when they become a real alternative to current subreddits, I hope that the community steps up to govern itself as fast as possible.
If you don’t believe me, you can go the matrix channel used by the /r/selfhosted crowd during the protests. I offered them the selfhosted.forum instance for free. They didn’t take it.
I want the programming communities to be on programming.dev. I want the adult communities to be on lemmynsfw. I want the nix community to be on nix-community. I want the Brazilian communities to be on lemmy.eco.br, like the italians on feddit.it or the Germans on feddit.de…
These communities already have their place, so there is no need to recreate them. But what about the communities that don’t?
You are trying to paint my work in the worst possible light, as if I am trying to hijack the networks. Not only that is not true, it is against everything I stand for. And the really funny thing is that I already have written out quite a bit about how my “evil plan” is to get rid of ad-funded internet and that are alternative business models that can be more ethical without trying to capitalize on eyeballs.
A bit of cynicism can be good, just make sure it doesn’t become paranoia.
Those communities don’t want to be on those domains. So all you are doing is trying to force their hand because you think your desires override their autonomy.
I don’t have to “paint (your) work in the worst possible light” because… you are doing that yourself.
Also, I was not aware that not forcing human beings to talk about video games in the space you decided they should makes me a libertarian. I guess I need to rethink my life?
The spaces are being created because there are no alternatives. If they don’t want to use it and decide to love somewhere else, more power to them. Unlike Reddit, I am not able to kick out moderators and keep only those that pledge loyalty to me.
Unlike Reddit, I am not able to kick out moderators and keep only those that pledge loyalty to me.
You know what? I think you’ve made all my points for me, repeatedly. Like, if anything I owe you for making my argument better than I could. So I’ll just loop back to
It isn’t about “growing” lemmy. It is about “growing” internet points and communities. People see an opportunity to become the mods they hate (fucking pricks, how dare they ban someone for screaming forty slurs in every single post for six months straight!) while establishing themselves as power users. Because if it worked on reddit, it works on here.
Just block communities and, where possible, instances.
Feel free to continue to reiterate my points for me while pretending you are refuting them.
You highlighting the passage that says the complete opposite of what you are implying shows that you are not interested in honest conversation and just want to confirm your worldview.
yea people get drowned out by these bots and they feel less inclined to contribute. I know I was less likely to leave a comment on Reddit when there were already many comments. I was less likely to post on Reddit when a subreddit was already getting many posts. I post and comment more here on Lemmy because it doesn’t get drowned out. If we wanna grow then it needs to be natural, not via bots.
everyone do yourself a favor and go to your settings page and uncheck the option for “Show Bot Accounts”, it’s unfortunate that I can’t keep the few good bots visible but there’s just too much bot spam now.
it’s unfortunate that I can’t keep the few good bots visible but there’s just too much bot spam now.
As a moderator needing a daily thread created by a bot (!casualconversation ) it is indeed annoying that a lot of people do not see it due to this.
I got the bot banned a few weeks ago because I hadn’t flagged it as such. I could maybe reach out to the LW admins again, but got other stuff to deal with.
I escaped Reddit some months ago. Every day the same video of trashy girls, equal rights equal fights and his wife too (and my axe).
When I started I reacted on posts, but that was not a nice experience. I lurked and only downvoted posts that I thought were mean or hurtful.
In a sub about knitting I found out they started here new. So I followed.
I knit you not haha.
I’m still shy to react, but the reactions I got were supernice and almost allways with some clausule like : “but that’s my two cents” and that feels very comforting.
What I would like is more comments on posts. I would love to follow and perhaps engage with lots of people with different knowledge and views.
I miss the Wiki-dive, often multiple times on 1 post.
A while back I tried going to alien.top to as what the site was about and my adblocker completely blocked it. That was a sure sign I did not need to visit.
Alien.top itself is just a standard Lemmy instance. I could believe it if you said it was timing out (as it had a 5 day outage a couple of weeks ago) but to claim there are any ads or trackers there is a simple, verifiable lie.
It was such fun looking for kernel updates and holding off for dear life… Otherwise your system booted up to a command line prompt. Fine fine. I guess X will just continue to spiral plurally together as one big xmass.
The loss of the actual internet + The loss of actual search engines.
Let me explain. The internet used to be an open playground where anyone could post a website dedicated to their interests, and did so. There were websites about octopuses and electomagnets and all sorts of obscure niche interests. Free website space with plentiful, and everybody used it. You could see 50 pages of information about someone’s dog Fifi, just because they wanted to put it out there. Or hand loading ammunition if that was their bag. Or why the Communist manifesto was a better document than the declaration of Independence. Anything went on your own web page.
And it became massive; so big that we needed search engines to find the exact thing we were looking for. When we wanted to find information about octopuses, we needed to search through all those obscure websites and find what we needed to find about octopuses.
So the search engine wars began.
We also had things like stumble upon, where you could be surprised by some interesting site, and there were rings, where interesting sites of the same genre linked together so you could follow a threat of interest through a bunch of obscure sites.
None of this was forced on you.
Now we have possibly 20 to 30 large websites that account for 95% of all the traffic on the internet? We have search engines that show us what they think we meant by our question, but not the exact answer to our question.
It’s gone. We wondered how they were possibly going to tame the internet how they were going to close Pandora’s box.
Are you talking about perplexity.ai ? because it looks like a shitty LLM answering questions instead of an actual search engine. It looks absolutely atrocious privacy-wise, too.
That’s some rose tinted glasses, and misunderstands why we don’t do that anymore, despite being perfectly able to.
Those obscure websites you were referring to had a high barrier to entry, they required the person to know how to host and code some basic HTML. Sure, it had more personality, but that barrier meant there was far less people who could do that. So then platforms like geocities came out, where instead you now needed just an account and to fill out some forms to create your own little site, you didn’t even have to host anymore! That was the beginning of web2. Those people who now were creating pages on geocities didn’t have a voice before, they could have posted their own websites but simply did not have the means to, nor should they be required to just so they can post online.
Well, now we’re on geocities on crack, which the websites we post our content on have gotten much more advance, to the point that we are now. Those big internet monoliths exist because of web2, because people didn’t want to handle their own self hosting stack just to post some stuff to the internet, so no wonder we’ve reached this point. People then gravitated to the best places to post their content, and to explore other’s content. Because that’s essentially what the internet is, exploring other’s content.
That’s not right and I’ll tell you why. You’re not wrong about geocities opening up the ability to create websites to a lot more users. Geocities and other website creator sites like that were great, and did exactly that. Even MySpace did the same thing. But then here’s where corporations threw the control element in.
They added a social element. They took away a bare website presence, maybe a counter to see how many people came by, and replaced it with an upvote and downvote system where your thoughts were subject to peer pressure and social correction. MySpace, Geocities, all of those independent free website creator tools died in favor of Facebook, digg, Reddit, Twitter. The odd stuff, the weird stuff, the truly countercultural stuff, disappeared under the tyranny of the masses. People turned to blogs for a while. But soon those died too.
So now we have the new element of control. The control of what you get to see. What the web search engine shows you. What rises to the top of your feed. Hell a lot of the times you have to really work hard to find your own friend’s posts. I’m looking at you Instagram.
But by all means disagree with me. But you won’t convince me that this is better. Not in a million years.
What’s more, they created a standardized format for how people add content. Facebook has template, Instagram has a template and users just plug in what they want to contribute. It has made it easier for more people to post things, for better or worse, but it sucked so much creativity from the internet. The individuality of personal websites has been crushed by these entities forcing people to use their format.
Don’t get me started. How about “meme” templates? Just stick a few lines of text onto this well-known picture and everyone will have chuckle as they pass by.
MySpace actually let you put in custom CSS and it was a huge free-for-all, everyone’s page looked completely different, and usually it was a tacky unreadable mess of hot pink comic sans text over a bright purple texture background, absolutely horrible but very charming. Facebook very explicitly in contrast allowed no customization at all as a reaction to how bad users could make their pages look.
There’s only so far to go technologically speaking. Making websites and message boards was a solved problem a long time ago. Search engines were pretty much perfected about a decade ago.
Tech companies stopped being tech companies too. I dunno what they are anymore. The dystopian cyberpunk evil corporations.
Those obscure websites you were referring to had a high barrier to entry
Barrier for entry? I had a geocities page when I was around 11 or 12 (and it was free, geocities ran banner ads on my page. I could host something like 50mb-100mb in pictures). I learned HTML because I played a webgame called Neopets, and you could customize little webpages for your pets and your shopfront. I think it had CSS too (and it was the new thing!).
The barrier wasn’t making a website, it was visibility. How many human visitors do you think my geocities page got? Pretty sure just the people in the webring I joined, and my mom. But I spent a lot of my time looking at other people’s obscure geocities pages about pokemon or their doodles or whatever. Was my page very useful or interesting? No, but it was my little corner of the internet, and I was so excited to visit other people’s fan pages and add them to my links list or whatever. Or figure out how they pulled off some new rad html stuff that I had to do for myself.
I had to take my geocities page down. There was a form on my site so people could send me cool facts about pokemon (it would show up in my email which my mom had access to), and someone typed up some awful pokemon sex story, so my mom made me take it down!
Anyway, I’m not sure what I was trying to say, but no, it was braindead simple and freely available to make a website. The internet was more human. Other kids at my school knew how to do it. Not sure what kids would say these days if you asked them to put their doodles on the internet. They’d upload it somewhere, where people can comment on it, upvote it, downvote it. My geocities page was entirely mine, nobody was there to judge or monetize my shitty doodles (outside of banner ads)
I appreciate you responding, I loved reliving through your experience.
I neglected to mention in my long winded response that before Geocities existed, ISPs gave you free web page space, free web page builders, free templates, there was no barrier to building a web page.
I think about this constantly. I’m constantly very upset about it. I’ve lost friends to cancer and freak accidents, and the loss of the internet is still genuinely the greatest tragedy in my life. The internet is, in large part, nothing more than a series of very customizable and semi-niche subscription packages and big box stores now. VR, particularly VR Chat, is close to/reminiscent of what it used to be like, so I cling to that, Lemmy, piracy, archive.org, and a few other things very tightly, but VR is starting to enter an era comparable to when cable internet started to become commonly available (and full of obnoxious unsupervised children), so it’s on its way out; not to mention the continued attempts to ruin the internet archive, which will be, not hyperbolically, the greatest loss to our species since the destruction of Alexandria.
We had it all, and it got bought out from under us, and there’s nothing to be done about it. People en masse don’t even know what we’re missing. I hate it. I’ll never get over the obsolescence of specialized forums in favor of social media, in particular.
The good thing is that all the bones are still technically sound, and there's nothing stopping you from renting a VPS for $5 a month and returning to the good old days. The only thing is that you would have to convince others to do the same, which might ironically end up with you posting about it on Facebook to draw attention. Of course some of the more modern features we want now available with all of the open source decentralized goodness we always wanted with the rise of Federate social media but these Tech Stacks are still underactive development and you could argue we should try building something that doesn't have things like down voting. All hope is not lost and you care and know exactly what you want and you should fight for it
I still make little static sites on occasion. There’s still free options for hosting, I’ve got some on GitHub and used to use netlify til they changed their free tier. Sticking a static site into aws s3 +cloud front is super cheap if you don’t have much traffic. The nice thing is that they run forever without any intervention.
1993-2002ish was the golden age of the web. Now everybody just goes to the same handful of websites for everything. Even if you hate Spez, you still can’t find any quality answers to anything without adding site:reddit.com to your searches. Everything else is SEO-optimized blogspam generated by a bot. There are no real personal webpages being run by a single person or a small entity anymore. Everything is corporate and centralized.
I do (it’s my default search engine) but I more often than not have to go back to Google anyway cause DDG promotes those bot-written blogs to the top even more than Google does. Ironically Bing does better than both because at least it’s GPT-powered.
That said, none of these search engines can provide me the results I’m looking for most of the time. I need something different.
DuckDuckGo might be more private, but it won’t solve the SEO problem. I know they have some of their own trackers, but in practice duckduckgo is basically a front-end for Bing.
We need a good solution to the search engine problem. With that we can just metaphorically load a save at the last known point before everything started sucking
Here (.nl) it’s a minimum of 3 years for the lowest ranking cops (vocational degree), depending on rank/function there is also a 4 year bachelors degree and a 5 year masters.
An educated bully with a badge is still that. Look at how the Police in Amsterdam broke up peaceful protests at universities. You could see them very happy to swing their long hard batons at young women because they need to compensate for something lacking those attributes.
Sometimes I think the police is just a jobs program for those who can’t take the abuse in the service industry and don’t have the requisite skills to get through a vocational training program.
Plenty of counties in the US will elect you to Sherriff without any experience at all. Just say the right Tough On Crime rhetoric and you’re good to go.
And here’s a reminder that, following the horrible shooting at Uvalde and the police’s staggeringly bad response, they still reelected the local sheriff.
Depends on the level of cop. Our feds are 6mo, math- and psyche-heavy courses, and ruthlessly checked for background.
And, they don’t have immunity. They do a crime, they’ll do a time. Their oversight dept is rough as shit and there’s nowhere to magically transfer to unless ya emigrate.
I don’t consider the feds really cops though, like I know they are but at that point they’re a step above. I’m talking more about your average ticket nanny with a gun.
It’s less complicated than it looks like. The text is just a poorly written mess, full of options (Fedora vs. Ubuntu, repo vs. no repo, stable vs. beta), and they’re explaining how to do this through the terminal alone because the interface that you have might be different from what they expect. And because copy-pasting commands is faster.
Can’t I just download a file and install it? I’m on Ubuntu.
Yes, you can! In fact, the instructions include this option; it’s under “Installing the app without the Mullvad repository”. It’s a bad idea though; then you don’t get automatic updates.
A better way to do this is to tell your system “I want software from this repository”, so each time that they make a new version of the program, yours get updated.
but I have no idea what I’m doing here.
I’ll copy-paste their commands to do so, and explain what each does.
The first command boils down to “download this keyring from the internet”. The keyring is a necessary file to know if you’re actually getting your software from Mullvad instead of PoopySoxHaxxor69. If you wanted, you could do it manually, and then move to the /usr/share/keyrings directory, but… it’s more work, come on.
The second command tells your system that you want software from repository.mullvad.net. I don’t use Ubuntu but there’s probably some GUI to do it for you.
The third command boils down to “hey, Ubuntu, update the list of packages for me”.
I would have guessed that Ubuntu would install it by default since its a very common way to get stuff from the internet (when in the terminal), but apparently not (the other option is wget which is most likely installed, but that uses a different way to get the stuff).
You should be able to install curl with sudo apt install curl
Hmm… ProtonVPN team solved this in better way. They put the repo configuration stuff into DEB file, so it’s just a matter of double clicking it and clicking install on Debian-based and Ubuntu-based (I know Ubuntu is Debian-based) distros and then installing the ProtonVPN client through either GUI or CLI package manager, whichever you wish to use. More newbie-friendly.
Unfortunately, I also just learned they dropped support for Arch Linux :(
We’d love to support the new app for arch Linux but honestly we’re understaffed and don’t have the bandwidth to be supporting the same distros that we did before with the previous client (4 packages before vs 10 packages now). If anyone from the community is willing to make AUR packages for themselves and publish/maintain them we’re totally fine with that, as long as people keep in mind that it would be an unofficial version because we currently don’t support arch Linux with the new v4 app.
Hmm… ProtonVPN team solved this in better way. They put the repo configuration stuff into DEB file, so it’s just a matter of double clicking it and clicking install
I was wondering how they’d solve signature checking and key installation - and looking at their page they seem to recommend skipping checking package signatures which, to be honest, isn’t a super good practice - especially if you’re installing privacy software.
Please don’t try to check the GPG signature of this release package (dpkg-sig –verify). Our internal release process is split into several part and the release package is signed with a GPG key, and the repo is signed with another GPG key. So the keys don’t match.
I get it’s more userfriendly - and they provide checksums, so not a huge deal, especially since these are not official Debian packages, but the package signing has been around since 2000, so it’s pretty well established procedure at this point.
The curl that ships with apt is ubiquitous enough that I trust doing sudo curl xxx yyy more than enough if it means avoiding typing curl xxx /tmp/yyy && sudo mv /tmp/yyy yyy
Frankly in this case even a simple bash script would do the trick. Have it check your distro, version, and architecture; if you got curl and stuff like this; then ask you if you want the stable or beta version of the software. Then based on this info it adds Mullvad to your repositories and automatically install it.
I like them, even for software installation. Partially because they’re lazy - it takes almost no effort to write a bash script that will solve a problem like this.
That said a flatpak (like you proposed) would look far more polished, indeed.
i feel like an adult when people any younger than me speak
folks be making up words nowadays im like a month behind every trend but i keep it hip and classy by using the words ironically until its in my lexicon unbeknownst to me
This. I’ve got a family, a mortgage, debt and everything else that goes with adulthood. My aching joints are the only thing that makes me feel like an adult.
Useful services like Real Debrid need a credit card, but nothing a virtual card (from Privacy.com or similar) can’t solve. I think there’s other ways to pay too.
Also, I’m pretty sure this ad is targeting IPTV services, which are almost all paid services. There’s a big IPTV crackdown underway in several European countries at the moment.
You signed the agreement, now we get EVERYTHING! I recently enabled duckduckgo's app tracking protection and it has been eye opening. In the past 7 days it's blocked 4200+ tracking attempts.
12,627 blocked attempts for me in the last 7 days. The worst offenders are MLB app, and Sync. At least I’m using Sync. I haven’t opened the MLB app in over a week, but it has still tried to report personal information about me up to 762 times per day.
Discord is pretty much the worst thing that happened to readily available information on the internet (when it comes to games and tech in general at least). No, I don’t wanna join your very specific niche server and use a search function worse than any forum back in the days had in hope to find the information I want.
That‘s not even all. The process now is something like:
Search on Google: no answer -> search on Google with Reddit.com appended: no answer -> search on Google with Reddit and Discord Server appended: click through 3 expired invitation links -> finally find a working one: scroll through pages and pages of memes and rule34 content to find the answer you wanted
I want my searchable forums and bulletin boards back ffs.
People falling back behind closed or private barriers for guaranteed human to human interaction and information as AI rises is more and more likely in the future … IMO.
you can search specific channels on discord. if you’re seeing memes and r34 while searching for something in a hub server for a game or something then you’re not searching correctly. or the thing you’re trying to find info on is so niche and poorly organized they have 1 channel.
I love Discord for gaming with friends. I don’t mind some programs using it for releasing things. Like I play Session(skateboarding sim) a decent amount. It’s usually used for people throwing up custom maps and mods.
But anytime people talk about going to a discord to really discuss things and keep up with them, I’m just gonna move on.
Discord is just not suitable for any group larger than a WoW guild. I don’t understand why anyone would ever think it’s a good idea for software/mod projects. Anything that needs to be searched should not be on discord
Discord is like using SMS to run something like Stack Overflow. When subreddits were moving off Reddit (which is good), some were talking about moving to Discord and I could not understand why anyone would think that was a comparable migration option.
Two months ago I started using Kagi as a Google alternative. It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes not having to wade through a list of sponsored links first and actually getting the results I want.
I am on kagi’s free trial right now actually. Honestly i thought i searched more than i have so far. I have been on the 100 search trial for like 3-4 days now and have only used like 11 or 12 searches. I never paid attention to how much i searched before. The great thing is that they accept crypto now.
Many good answers in this thread (and some stupid ones) but there are a few critical issues that the current British government will not accept.
First, currency. GB does not want to give up control over the pound, and their previous agreement did not force them to adopt the Euro. There are several other EU countries that have not yet adopted the Euro, but all except Denmark are obligated to switch over once certain criteria are met. GB might be able to negotiate that privilege again, but the EU is in a stronger bargaining position now.
Second, immigration. For as much as their country is suffering from their own strict immigration policies, the conservative government is still making political hay out of xenophobia and bigotry. Reopening the borders would be a tacit admission that their rhetoric was bullshit.
Third, taxes. Joining the EU means contributing to the EU, and while their nation may save money overall due to improved trade relations, the conservative government has made the cost of admission another talking point.
Basically, the current government would have to renegotiate readmittance to the EU, and they would get a worse deal than they had before. Doing so would make it obvious that leaving was a mistake, and their government could only be consisered an objective failure. So they won’t do it, even if it is the best option available.
Every country that joined the EU after the 1992 Maastricht treaty has to adopt the euro. Denmark signed that treaty, UK as well, but if they rejoin, they’d more than likely be treated as a new member.
I disagree - on paper sure they would, but at the end of the day the UK is the ≈2nd biggest economy in Europe (UK and France make up 2nd & 3rd and who is bigger changes every couple of years), unlike Georgia or Moldova or whoever else where their joining is barely noticeable.
That means that the EU is more likely to want the UK to join, vs smaller countries wanting to join the EU, although it would be mutually beneficial of course - the UK would likely increase the EU’s power a little more than the EU would increase the UK’s power, but saying that hides the fact that it’d probably be a 10+% increase in both cases.
Of course the EU could make an example of the UK if they were want to rejoin, but if they were to look at it objectively then they’d most likely reach the conclusion that the negatives of making the concessions they made before are far outweighed by the additional collective power of having the UK as a member.
The UK has proven itself to be a very fickle partner. If they want to join, we would need some serious proofs of good faith. Those proofs are called Euro and Schengen.
That’s a fair point, however it’s hard to see the EU making an example when it’s so in its interest not to… Chances are they’d end up getting some hard proofs in terms of legislation commiting the UK to the EU for a lengthy time period and maybe some other “commitments” which don’t boil down to anything but look firm to members and citizens (as loved by governments everywhere who want to look like they’re doing things while also not wanting to do those same things)
I’d disagree - it hurts both the EU and the withdrawing nation to have a nation withdraw, so saying “if you withdraw you will end up coming back, but on terms more beneficial to us” is a good move for the EU to further decay eurosceptic movements around Europe. Letting places rejoin on the same terms would encourage eurosceptics as they’d say “we can always rejoin on the same terms”
Why would we let the UK join on the same terms when the terms aren’t conducive to the current aims of the union AND HAVE NOT BEEN SO FOR DECADES?
The UK just doesn’t fit in the EU. They were barely a match for the EC. If they find a Time Machine, they are free to join the 1990 EC under the same terms as they had before. They are not free to join the 2023 EU under those same terms because it’s a different organization that does different things.
Yes the UK is a large powerful nation. But if it doesn’t share the aims of the club, why should we let it in?
And everyone in Britain knows this. They have been banging the “political union vs economic union” for decades. You can see it in this very thread. Well, the EU it’s a political union. You join it now, you become part of a political union.
Or you don’t, and define a different relationship, like Norway or Switzerland or Canada.
It depends on the news you read. If you look at the polls, Scotland isn’t in favour of independence and NI has never been in favour of joining the Republic.
If you’re reading news that says the UK is about to fall apart I could point you in the direction of some equally wrong news saying that Italy, Poland etc. are about to leave the EU
it’s hard to see the EU making an example when it’s so in its interest not to…
Why would it not be in the interest of the EU to make an example? Poland and Hungary were (led by extremist right political parties) playing with the idea of leaving the EU, too. I think it has become mighty quiet on that front now that they have seen how much of a pain it is for the UK to empty a whole magazine into their own feet.
I don’t think EU has any reason to “make an example” by being hard on UK, but they also have no reason to bend the rules to be soft on UK. It would be a really bad signal to send to other joining countries to let the ex-country in easier.
Yeah well, I’d like them to rejoin before they run the country further down. I’ve visited London several times and I’m shocked to see how it is noticeable falling behind already. If this keeps up, it won’t be great for EU to accept a “Mississippi” state. The sooner they rejoin the better it is for both UK and EU.
I wholly agree, but as long as the political scene is like it is, it will be quite unlikely. I guess it will take at least a generation to get over this in the UK alone, and then it will be questionable still.
This is exactly the mentality that made Brexit come true and the post-Brexit agreements such a mess: “The EU needs the UK more than the other way round!”. Now look at it and tell me who needs whom more?
Neither truly needs the other - both are hurt by Brexit but they’re both getting along ok without the other (although brexit was far softer than people tend to realise - aside from a few very major things the UK is still de facto in a lot of EU institutions, and not including issues caused by Russian invasions)
Making the same concessions and signal to every other country that you can just hop in and out on a whim? Uhhh I have a bridge to sell you if you really believe that.
It was in regards to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which was sort of the founding treaty of EU. In order to complete the transformation from European Communities to a European Union, all involved countries had to sign the treaty.
Some of the countries just couldn’t legally give off this amount of sovereignty without a domestic election. Denmark being one of them. So, even if it’s a small country, it had the same power as any other country to obstruct the founding of the entire union.
So when the election turned out a narrow “no”, it was a bit of wrench in the wheel. Denmark then negotiated having a few opt outs before they were able hold a new election which then gave a “yes”.
The EU didn’t exist at all back then. Today, the EU can make such a demand of a new joiner, say for instance the United Kingdom, because it’s the entire EU vs UK. In 1992, it was Voltron coming together, and they needed that left leg lion to keep him upright.
First of all, all the politicians that would look bad after propagating Brexit. Then those few select rich who gained a fortune from Britain’s misery. And those people who fell for their lies, and simply can’t admit that they had been had. This is the one side.
The other side is the EU. Brexit has cost the EU a fortune, and a lot of work. Re-admitting the UK would be put them in a bind to make sure - absolutely sure - that such a shit show will never, ever, happen again. Basically “Fool me once…” And they would have to convince all current EU members that this time, the UK really means to join and stay and take the whole EU stuff seriously, and not just like they did when the UK joined for the first time: To be in just to be able to easier weaken them.
I think they do, but probably not guaranteed everywhere. Denmark might not, but I don’t know for sure. I know Czechia does close to the borders, but I haven’t been to the other countries myself to know.
It is up to the shops whether they want to accept euro or not (or any other currency), but the official currency is kroner. I know that some supermarkets (Netto) used to gladly take euro in exchange for a horrible exchange rate
For as much as their country is suffering from their own strict immigration policies, the conservative government is still making political hay out of xenophobia and bigotry.
The funny thing is that the UK now gets way more refugees than before, as France no longer sees the need to keep them back.
Not just that, all these trade deals we cut with other countries means visas for their citizens. Net immigration to the UK has tripled since Brexit from countries like India. I’m sure the racists and xenophobes are really happy with what they voted for.
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