A lot of TV shows are direct rips from streaming services and they don’t use H.265 because of the ridiculous licensing it comes with.
I suspect AV1 will become much more popular for streaming in a few years when the hardware support becomes more common. It’s an open source codec, so licensing shouldn’t be an issue. Then we will see a lot more AV1 releases.
In my experience, you always gain space savings going av1 from 264 and 265 as well. For me its always been significant savings at the same quality level.
Ofc YMMV and use a very recent ffmpeg with the best av1 libraries.
I very much agree. Instead of complaining and isolating themselves and their users, they could be helping improve the moderation tools which benefits all of us, but instead they choose to self isolate, which hurts their users while the biggest servers that they defederated forget they even existed.
But if this community community isn’t flooded with tech business articles, where are people going to post insightful comments like “fuck Google” and “switch to Firefox”?
My bugbear is all the Linux circle-jerking. I get that the fediverse has a high nerd-count (I’m one of them), but the “switch to Linux” sentiment is so tedious. Yes, Linux is great for those that have the time or inclination to learn swathes of new terminologies and procedures just to achieve the same level of productivity that the equivalent commercial data-harvesters offer in a more readily-accessible UX, but the vast majority of users simply don’t care.
This old meme couldn’t be less appropriate on Lemmy.
Edit: Not wanting to poke the bear, but the accusatory phrasing in a couple of the responses below (“you obviously haven’t used Linux in 10 years” and “you don’t really understand the motivation behind FOSS”) go some way towards emphasising the point of this comment.
Since when do people need to take into account if anyone else cares when posting to social media? They’re not content creators serving an audience.
I get it’s obnoxious sometimes but people are going to sound off about the things they care about on social media. That’s the whole point.
i get that the fediverse has a high nerd-count (I’m one of them), but the “switch to Linux” sentiment is so tedious
I genuinely don’t understand why people think this is odd. Think for a second about what the fediverse is and what it represents.
Why are we here? Why are we on the fediverse and not reddit or twitter? They both have more content, more intuitive systems, and more mature (if terrible) UXs. So why are we here?
The fediverse represents the same basic thing as a Linux OS for the average consumer: an escape from corporate controlled, locked down, and increasingly bastardized ecosystems. An open source alternative that, while taking a little more effort, rewards the user with relief from the bullshit they want to escape.
Of course it’s popular here. How could it not be?
You’ll also find early adopters tend to be more willing to put in the effort to learn new systems, and we’re barely out of the early adopter stage for the fediverse.
Linux is great for those that have the time or inclination to learn swathes of new terminologies and procedures just to achieve the same level of productivity
You obviously haven’t tried Linux for at least ten years. It’s really not like that.
I am not a programmer or anything and I’ve been using Zorin full time for a while now after trying it as an experiment. I would go so far as to say it’s on par with Windows or Mac in many (not quite all) respects. Assuming you’re not dependent on some proprietary software the only switching cost these days is… learning to navigate a new system.
Just as an aside, I find it interesting that people using LEMMY of all things for social media would perceive FOSS systems as inferior. I guess that’s a testament to how far along ActivityPub development has come.
I wouldn’t disagree, and I’m not saying FOSS is inferior, I’m just whinging about the Linux evangelising.
There is no perfect OS that can have universal approval. However if I’d I said “Windows is a data-harvesting nightmare” or “Being locked in to Apple ecosystems is constricting and expensive” then I’m sure I’d see the upvote button hammered on Lemmy. But to seemingly question the validity of Linux as a silver bullet for the vast majority of desktop users is borderline heresy.
I won’t dispute that fanboyism is thing, but also I don’t think many evangelists as it were view Linux as a “silver bullet”, just as the most ethical option given the alternatives. And they feel very strong feelings about this, that come across as Weird and Scary to people not used to seeing software treated with the same enthusiasm as politics.
Also, I should add that many view open source software as having the potential to one day be the “silver bullet” in a way commercial software can never be due to it’s structure.
If your barometer for “potential” relies on market share, then you don’t really understand what motivates a person to contribute effort to a FOSS project in the first place.
What’s your barometer, bearing in mind you said it had the potential to be a silver bullet? Silver bullet for what?
I don’t want to sound defensive, but please don’t assume I’m not invested in FOSS. I’m on Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed and am the developer of half a dozen small FOSS projects on GitHub.
At achieving the task it was designed for. I do not think it’s correct to say that Linux can have “market share” in the market of commercial operating systems because it isn’t commercial software. By not using proprietary software we are exiting the market.
Linux absolutely does not exist “outside the market”, that’s absurd. Red Hat, Canonical, SUSE etc aren’t charitable organisations. These major contributors to the Linux kernel aren’t doing so out of love for their fellow man.
For you, yes, Linux is “free” if your measurement of cost is purely financial outlay.
There’s a great back and forth here, and the original thread on Mastodon, which nicely covers both the evangelism (my original issue) and the “cost” of Linux. There’s plenty of reactions in there from people talking about the same things, from both sides of the coin.
You obviously haven’t tried Linux for at least ten years. It’s really not like that.
This is the standard response I’ve heard from Linux advocates for the last 20 years.
I know it’s easy to assume off the back of my initial comment that I might not have, but I assure you, my frustrations with Linux are not borne out of inexperience.
I mean you are trying to poke the bear. And you’re pretending that people don’t constantly make recommendations all the fucking time. They do. Everywhere about everything. That’s how marketing and grass roots campaigning works. What I think is more interesting is why you’re doing these two things - is your shame of being nerdy so deep that you prefer to try and shame others for not being ashamed?
It really isn’t. I’m not supporting or promoting Linux, I’m not discussing the subject matter at all and I have no skin in the game. What occurred to me is why you needed to identify as a nerd and then drop trow and proceed to shit on nerds.
Your response is precisely the reaction I referenced by the edit. Why is it personal? “You don’t understand FOSS” “You clearly don’t use Linux” and now, beautifully, “You’re ashamed of being a nerd”.
I called out the behaviour you’re exhibiting. That’s not personal, it’s observation. Please clarify why you are allowed to make observations about people but they can’t make observations about you. Calling something “personal” is meaningless.
Nah mate, you can have this one. This is where I drop off. Jumping into a topic with “you must be ashamed of being a nerd“ is never going to provoke a worthwhile discussion.
IMO it’s not the “switch to Linux” sentiment itself that’s so tedious, it’s that it’s just so damn oversaturated. It’s like that guy who posted “if buying isn’t ownership then piracy isn’t stealing” like 20 times in one thread the other day. I 100% agree but OMG we get it, kindly stop saying the same damn thing over and over. It’s just annoying that every post even mentioning Microsoft or Google devolves into a sea of privacy complaints and FOSS evangelizing to the point it’s difficult to have any real conversations.
Completely agree, hence the reply to lolcatnip’s comment originally. It’s to be expected I guess, given where we are (as deweydecibel said earlier), but that doesn’t make it less annoying.
Which is it? Are you seeing this complaint constantly, or is it a spicy individual opinion?
I’d probably say my preference to have fewer default knee-jerk recommendations for Linux within various tech posts about other systems isn’t particularly unpopular, if only going by the up/downvote count. Even if it was the other way around, I’d stand by it, however antagonistic you might find my “bravery”.
98 for me. One day, it borked the file system one last time. Never looked back. Have to use Win 10 at work, though, and I hate how cumbersome and slow it is
I used a bootable Ubuntu usb to save the contents of my windows hard drive after it failed. I successfully brought the files onto an external drive and installed Linux after. It was so fun. It still is.
Much as I love that song, it doesn’t really apply to the OP question, which is more about companies exploiting their customers rather than their workers.
That's how our economy works, how it's always worked. Get on the hamster wheel and don't stop for 45 years but take breaks to spend what little money have to keep you in enough debt to stay on the hamster wheel for 45 years.
That is what people miss. This is “the system”. It starts and ends with government and “we” chose this (I’m Canadian, we have similar issues but not as extreme, yet).
By continually voting in sociopathic narcissistic social climbers as both public and private sector policy makers (think of shareholders and corporate governance boards) we ensure the system is rigged for the top dogs.
The truth is the system could work in the average person’s favour very easily but it would mean limiting some personal freedoms; mostly of very, very rich people. It also would require the average person to get off the “everyone is exploiting me, so I need to do that to them first” treadmill.
Many people have never been on that treadmill (never had the chance or donate excess income or time to local food banks, etc).
The very, very rich don’t care. They simply maximize the profit in any situation. Put them in prison and they’ll give out legal advice for cigarettes and turn that into a burner phone they use to call their Cayman Islands broker.
It’s the upper/upper-middle people who will feel the pain as income is redistributed to poverty stricken people. And if we just impose ubi without fixing the “CEO problem” it will simply lead to inflation. Sucess of ubi programs is entirely due to it happening in a local market. Expand globally without fixing capitalism and you get inflation.
A socialist approach that still allows significant room for upwrd mobility (e.g. CEO can make up to 10x minimum wage, as a non-expert guess) with some type of employee representation on the board of large businesses (state imposed labour union) would probably do it.
Then make ubi contingent on minor public service with free daycare that you can use when performing said services (exception if you have more than 2 kids under 12, or are disabled in some way) say two days a week (networking, activity, build resume) would be a brainstorming idea to workshop.
In a lot of towns your only grocery option is Walmart, unless you wanna drive 1+ hours. In small towns/villages you might only have a dollar general within that distance. Large corporation slaughter small businesses when they move in.
I think what this comment is trying to say is that we’re headed towards an age that resembles what that song talks about: An age of unfettered capitalism, with a small number of corporation owning so much of the market that they can do what they want with no repercussions.
Okay but that song is from like a century ago and mostly things haven’t changed much in that time. Certainly we don’t have company stores/scrip anymore, but the grim outlook that song has on the world is still fairly accurate.
Bro. We are already there. The tobacco industry sued Australia for fighting to keep graphic pictures and descriptions of lung disease/cancer on cigarette packs and WON. Against the entire fucking government of Australia.
the song was about company towns where the laborers were paid in store credit instead of wages. you’d work, but never pay off debts, since it all went back to the companies who set the prices for everything you buy, and so they were able to keep you on a tight leash.
That’s how it feels like things are going now. a few companies own everything, pay our wages, and set our prices. we cannot get ahead.
ublock origin is still one step ahead of them (at least on firefox) but you may need to go into the extension settings and purge then update all your filter lists. The copy of Invidious I installed on my NAS is even more steps ahead.
ublock origin is still one step ahead of them (at least on firefox) but you may need to go into the extension settings and purge then update all your filter lists.
It’s handy. The main downside, since I’m the only person watching videos on the instance, is that my popular tab and subscription tabs are the same videos in a different order. So there’s not much of a chance for discovering new channels.
I still act respectful in churches and other "sacred" places, not out of any fear of the Magic Sky Wizard, but simply because other people respect them and it seems like a useful thing to encourage, even if I don't agree with the underlying reasoning. Having a place which most of society agrees should be a quiet, comforting sanctuary is not the worst thing at all, even if the comfort is derived from extreme wishful thinking.
Also, Christmas. Christmas music is great. A Charlie Brown Christmas is one of the best holiday albums ever, though we always skip "Hark the Herald Angel Sings" 'cause it's such a tonal shift compared to the rest of the album.
This is really great. I too try to give sacred places as much respect as I can, simply because I know that matters a lot to folks and helps keep the peace. Atheists could gain a lot from the concept of sacred ground and regular communing, even if not from the same obligation.
You actually can buy quality dumb TVs, but you have to do the legwork and do research on what are often referred to as “commercial displays.” I see them everywhere in businesses for ads and showing the menu. They’re sometimes a little pricier, but they’re usually built a little “beefier” too, as they’re expected to deal with more rough usage in like a restaurant context.
However, the other solution is the one you’ve already mentioned where you never plug the Smart TV into the internet, and instead bypass the “smart” on the TV with your own streaming boxes.
I think as more people realize there is a market for dumb TVs, you’ll start to see that market grow more and more until they no longer just “commercial displays.” Just gotta get enough people buying them and not buying Smart TVs.
I feel like the market is only going to grow in the top end. Audio/videophiles sort of areas with large, high quality, top end feature sets.
The low end tends to be partly subsidized by the “smart” features. Think TVs that show ads in the menu, or Amazon or Google screens that want you to use their services because it’s “easy” and they’re “right there” so maybe people will subscribe. Couple that with the “feature” that it’s already built in so it saves you an extra box/purchase for people who want cheap TVs, and I don’t see it going away anytime soon.
Manufacturers are NOT INTERESTED in selling low-cost dumb TVs when they can sell smart TVs and get long-term returns. They are even willing to sell the TVs at cost because they will monetise later with ads and selling your data.
Manufacturers don’t want you to have a dumb TV, they want everyone to go smart - which is part of why business-targetted dumb panels are priced higher - to disincentivise regular end-customers from buying.
Normal manufacturing efficiencies and cost reduction is surely the biggest reason they are cheaper now but it’s absolutely a factor.
So many companies in so many industries are trying to move from being product companies (make money selling a thing) to being service companies (make money from subscriptions, user data and other monetisation) and I’m doing my damnedest to keep away from any of it.
There’s no down-side to selling a smart TV to someone who doesn’t want one/doesn’t use the features.
The features we “want” from modern TV’s like DolbyVision and all the shit they do the image to make it stand out in the store requires a significant amount of processing power.
It’s simply better business to sell smart TV’s to everyone than to make dumb TV’s that compete for a tiny fraction of the market when people buy Smart TV’s in every price segment.
The paradox being that if therr were “premium” smart TVs for people like us - with proper support, privacy, customization options and no crap like ads - we’d probably buy it, and pay a premium for it.
But that’s just too much work for them and they probably don’t even realize that kind of market exists.
I think they know it, I just don’t think they care. It’s a niche market. On top of that, they’d have to convince the people in that market to trust them.
If they can get a 10-20% return on 10,000 Smart TVs, why waste the effort on properly developing and supporting 3 PrivaTVs (patent pending, exclusions apply, see your local drunk for details)?
I could be wrong, I just don’t think the market is large enough that they’d be willing to throw manpower at it.
I think people underestimate the value of their tracking data. For a manufacturer, the benefits over the lifetime of the device, can be way higher than 20% the manufacturing costs.
They could still develop and support those 3 PrivaTVs, but the MSRP would easily be a few times higher than that of an equivalent Smart TV.
How many more times? If a regular TV costs $100 then they’re making $20k plus marketing data. The PrivaTV would need nearly a $7000 markup for the same return.
Obviously these are made up numbers for illustration. I think that for big manufacturers it’s not worth it for the return and amount of effort they would need to spend. Maybe a small manufacturer could do it. Maybe that would spur the big guys to buy them out and take it over once the hard work is done.
A TV manufacturer doesn’t need to develop that PrivaTV from scratch, they can get their SmartTV and just rip out the Smart part, for a much lower markup.
A big manufacturer is one who’d have it easier; just need to make “privacy” into a selling point, then slap a “Private” sticker instead of the “Smart” one.
Hopefully with the “right to repair”, we might see some people ripping out the smarts out of a SmartTV, possibly just flashing an updated firmware, so that might convince manufacturers to give it a go too.
I was specifically talking about what the original commenter said.
with proper support, privacy, customization options and no crap like ads
Dumb TVs are already a thing as mentioned elsewhere. Commercial Displays cost more but you can beat someone to death with them and they’ll still work.
I’m with you on hoping for more options. I’d hate for my next TV purchase (hopefully years from now) to be forced online under the guise of firmware updates to steal my viewing habits.
The other option is to buy the smart TV, turn off the networking, and hook it up to a Shield, Apple TV, or Roku. All those box makers are going to support the devices longer than TV manufacturers, and the streaming apps can’t ignore them.
Yes, because streaming boxes can be upgraded independently of the TV and so you can always have hardware that’s actively supported. My old Roku 3 was still getting updates as of a few years ago, while my “smart” TV from 2015 stopped getting security updates long ago.
Computer monitors should work too, and are more readily available. Just dig through the business oriented monitors and ignore the gaming ones, as cable providers aren't really going to have anything that can take advantage of >60 fps display rates.
My personal experience with computer monitors is that they work great except they always seem to cheap out on speakers if they have built in speakers. Tiny, tinny things whose volume is always way too low.
I don’t mind having separate speakers, but once in a while it would be nice to not need them.
Even on a high end TV the speakers are going to be bad. It’s just there to check a box. TVs are so thin that you cannot physically fit in speakers large enough to sound good.
A cheap sound bar will make a huge improvement to audio quality over any built in speaker system.
Since I’m going to be skipping the TV part with my HTPC, then why not simply use a computer monitor. Nowadays you can also get a 40+” monitor, and that should be big enough for most people. These things might not even have any speakers, so you might need to plug it into an audio system to make it all work.
This is good to know, thank you for the info. I am getting worried about my increasingly old TV (15+ years) and I do not want a smart TV to replace it.
However, the other solution is the one you’ve already mentioned where you never plug the Smart TV into the internet, and instead bypass the “smart” on the TV with your own streaming boxes.
I did this for a long time on my old Vizio TV, but the experience was notably worse with external devices compared to built-in, due to the limited framerate support over HDMI. This led to awkward juddering when e.g. trying to play 23.976fps movies with only 30hz or 60hz output. It also meant built-in video features like motion interpolation did not work effectively.
I guess this is less of an issue today with VRR support on high-end TVs, but still, a lot of devices you might connect to a TV don’t support VRR.
This is one of the downsides of the widespread adoption of HDMI, it has quite a few downsides. Something like display port would be better, but it’s far less common. Such is life.
Newer revisions of HDMI are perfectly good, I think. I was surprised and dismayed by how slow adoption was. I saw so many devices with only HDMI 1.4 support for years after HDMI 2.0 and 2.1 were in production (probably still to this day, even). It’s the biggest problem I have with my current display, which I bought in 2019.
GP’s problem probably isn’t even bandwidth, but rather needs to enable their TV’s de-judder feature or configure their streaming box to set the refresh rate to match that of the content being played.
You could still have your player device set to a static 24 or 30 without VRR, in theory, but none of the devices I tried (granted, this was ~8 years ago) supported that anyway.
You could still have your player device set to a static 24 or 30 without VRR, in theory, but none of the devices I tried (granted, this was ~8 years ago) supported that anyway.
That’s interesting. Pretty much every Blu-Ray player should support this. I can confirm from firsthand experience that Apple TV, Roku, and Android TV devices also all support this. I can’t speak for Amazon’s fire stick thingy though.
The feature you are looking for is not to manually set the refresh rate, but instead for the device to set it automatically based on the framerate of the content being displayed. On Apple TV it’s called “match frame rate”.
It sounds to me like the user’s TV or streaming box are configured incorrectly. DisplayPort doesn’t magically remove judder from 24fps content being rendered to a 60hz signal.
DisplayPort never saw widespread adoption in the home theater space because it never tried to. The standard is missing a ton of features that are critical to complex home theater setups but largely useless in a computer/monitor setup. They aren’t competing standards, they are built for different applications and their featuresets reflect that.
Your streaming box was either not configured properly, or was very low cost.
The most likely solution is that you need to turn on a feature on your streaming box that sets the output refresh rate to match that of the content you are playing. On Apple TVs it is called “match frame rate”. I know Rokus and Android TV devices have similar options.
Newer TVs can detect when 24 fps content is being delivered in a 60 hz signal and render it to the panel correctly, but this doesn’t usually work if you have the selected input set to any low-latency modes (“Game”, “PC”, etc)
My experience was from quite a few years ago (2015ish). At that time, there was no such feature in any of the devices I tried connecting, including a few brands of Android phones, Fire TV sticks, and MacBooks. I remember reading into the documentation on other devices at the time to find something better, with no luck. That said, documentation was pretty poor all around so who knows? The most useful info I found was in threads on VideoHelp or AVS forums where other users reported similar issues on various devices. Android TV was still very new and very shitty back then.
At this point I would simply not buy anything that doesn’t support VRR.
I think if enough people never gave them Internet access, the manufacturers would start adding in cellular modems to ensure they get the data flowing (that is, data on your viewing habits and sending you ads).
Having worked in this field, I can tell you how it usually operates: You want the most data for the least amount of investment. As soon as your operational costs start to eat into your already thin margins, the equation falls apart.
Complex solutions designed to capture data from that 1-3% of users who actively avoid it end up costing a lot more money than their data is actually worth. In order to make this particular solution work, you need to make enough money selling whatever tiny amount of data you get from those 1-3% of users to cover the cost of putting a cellular modem in all of your TVs plus the ongoing cost of paying various regional cellular networks to deliver that data to you. You are likely tripling or quadrupling the total cost of your data collection operation and all you have to show for it is a rounding error. And that is before we factor in the fact that these users likely aren’t using the built in streaming apps, so the quality of the data you get from them is below average.
The cheaper option would be to set up an ad-hoc tv-to-tv network. You might not let your TV talk to the internet, but I bet your neighbour does, or if not, then their neighbour will.
Device mesh (Androids/Chromes) to share suspicious behavior
The proposal is to use the consensus between devices on genuine and suspect characteristics
A device should be able to query from a safe and reliable source if another device has performed (within a defined period of time) some malicious action similar to the one it is going to perform, so it could make the decision not to perform that same action, autonomously.
…just in case you wanted to install an ad blocker malicious software, or something.
I mean our computers and phones already do something like this while looking for available WiFi networks, so maybe it wouldn’t be that farfetched. On the other hand, I just got a flashback to Jim Carrey in Batman and… “the box” for some bizarre reason! 😂
Since I live in a small space and game a lot, I have invested in a gorgeous 4k monitor and honestly love how all my movies look as well as games, so I have zero issues. It would be nice to someday buy a large tv that didn’t constantly search, scan, and update crap I don’t want or need, but I am not holding my breath they will reverse course.
1-3% of users might not be enough people, but what is the break-even % of people to justify adding a cheap cellular modem? 5%? 10%?
You are likely not even doubling the cost of the data collection operation. We’re talking under $0.50 in additional hardware per unit, with a relatively low data usage requirements. The servers to collect that data are likely already more expensive, and you can easily sell user viewing habits for way more than $1/month/user. You can use a prepaid low usage data-only eSIM with global roaming for less than $5/year, only renew it for the devices that don’t get hooked up to a user’s WiFi. If it was only needed for 5% of the users, or 1 in 20, you could still get a ROI of under a year.
With a device life of 5+ years, it’s definitely much more than a rounding error. Keep in mind the profits go directly to the manufacturer, so it’s a % of product cost in origin, not of MSRP… which is pretty much the reason why all manufacturers have jumped onto the data collection bandwagon in the first place.
Not bad, I’m in Canada I’m wondering if i could find it, but I’d like the 75" one, at about 2k US, I guess a Sony from Costco would have better pictures
They aren’t very good though. They are durable, but usually expensive and missing a lot of features you might actually want for that price tag. For example, I’ve yet to find any OLED “commercial displays” that support Dolby Vision, VRR, and eARC.
It’s way cheaper and easier to just buy the TV you want and not connect it to your wifi.
Check to see if there is a power differential here.
Are you an established adult with a Real Job and a nice apartment while she is struggling to figure out how to get out from under the thumb of her controlling family? Or is she happily making her own way in the world as a small farmer or boat salesperson or something while you have been futzing around painting skateboards and playing in a minor punk band?
Older people dating younger people can be wrong because it is easy for the older person to have too much power in the relationship. If you have something she really wants or needs that you can provide or withdraw at will or as a condition of the relationship, you should not date.
Wtfh why do you pretend like people can’t be nice if there is a power differential? A couple with a moderate power differential like you describe is only a problem if the powerful one decides to be a dick about it; it’s literally fine as long as they are a nice person and can commit to not taking advantage.
Plus in any relationship there are wants and needs being met by the relationship that would be withdrawn if the relationship were to end. Mutual benefit is why you get into a long term relationship in the first place.
I guess there is some of that but I think that if I take it slow and let her be her own person outside the relationship (as we all should) it should be less of an issue
The fact that you are talking about "letting"her be her own person outside the relationship sort of implies that she might not have already figured out how to do that on her own.
People are right to wave red flags here, but are also right that it isn’t necessarily the age that is the potential problem.
Make sure she knows how to be an independent adult with her own career, hobbies, and motivations, or you get into unpredictable territory.
I’m still salty about that broken Liberal promise to reform our elections. None of the parties care about it and it seems no one wants to try to change it.
The screenshots probably shouldn’t include copyrighted movies though, so it doesn’t get taken down from GitHub. You can replace them with Blender Studio projects studio.blender.org/films/
(Also there’s a small typo it says steam instead of stream on GitHub)
It’s even worse apparently. Apparently someone looked at where the coins are going, and the coins are going to the 1337x admins, and the uploader is just getting a cut of those coins. Which explains why the admins are unlikely to really care because they’re profiting off their users.
I have severe trust issues with any kind of pirated software so I basically never download it as a result, and shit like this is why. Even private trackers and “trusted” groups aren’t enough for me to download most software.
First, the fact that I have to download the whole blockchain to use it. I’m not on a super fast connection, so that took like a day. The difficulty and expense of getting Monero was also an issue; I had to buy Bitcoins, then move Bitcoins to an exchange that would let me buy Monero, because the exchange I could buy Bitcoin on didn’t work with Monero (due to the perception that it’s only used for criminal activity). At every step, there’s a transaction fee, and that fee isn’t entirely transparent up front, so it’s harder to estimate what the final price (in fiat currency) will be.
At the tiem I was trying to use it, there weren’t any user-friendly wallets, and I don’t think there was any capability to use it from a mobile phone; that makes it more difficult to use than other crypto.
I’m not sure how well it plays with Tails of Qubes; I never got far enough to give it a shot.
I’m not saying that any of these thigns are bad, but they do make it harder for a typical person to start using, and until more regular people are using privacy-focused crypto and operating systems, they’re always going to have the appearance of being used for crime only.
Ah thanks for explaining! Yeah the inability to purchase it directly on local exchanges is a bummer, although if localmonero vendors are available in your area, you may be able to pay them using your local bank account too.
These days you definitely don’t have to download the entire blockchain to use it; you can just connect to someone else’s node. But if you want to restore an old wallet, you unfortunately do have to run through each blockchain transaction after the wallet was created, to see if any of those transactions belong to you. There’s also a mobile app nowadays called Cake Wallet.
All in all, I agree that it’s not the friendliest crypto to use, unfortunately. Its main selling point is privacy, and criminals are more incentivized than others to protect their privacy, so I’m not sure how it’ll ever shake off that image.
I haven’t been following monero too much but… I would not count on their protections to matter all that much. Because you can bet the FBI/CIA/NSA equivalents around the world have put in the effort to de-obfuscate that. Because this is a relatively low cost grant to a few grad students that means they can do whatever investigations they want without needing the equivalent of a warrant and cooperation from other orgs.
I am an old fart. But I definitely remember getting some DOD grants to work on a specific architecture (that never had widespread release) with mysterious instructions that I now understand map to common operations in cryptography (of the era). I got some nice papers about graph analysis and they got some very valuable ability to handle complex networks of interactions.
Tangential, but Real Genius is probably still the greatest media portrayal of STEM grad school in existence. You have those weird social interactions (because people with people skills already have real jobs) and those fucked up relationships (… hopefully not statutory rape…). But you are either a dumbass Believer or you rapidly grow to understand the inherent ethical concerns of your field of study. And as much as you wish you could take the weapon you accidentally made for the military and blow up a prop house with popcorn… the reality is that you end up closer to Lazlo and live with the realization that people are probably suffering and dying for your work for the rest of your life. And it is up to you on whether that manifests as alcoholism or activism.
You can follow the wallet address , but unles you know who the address belongs to, you can’t follow it. So we ask again, where the proof that the coins went to site admins?
My older sibling did something similar - getting Ubuntu installed on my very first laptop (a 9" netbook) back in 2008 and replacing windows XP. But be warned: it is a slippery slope. At the time , I just wanted a computer that I could take class notes on (high school), and never wanted to touch programming or the terminal. Now I have a PhD in computer science. I still don’t use Arch though.
Tangent, what’s it like going for grad and post grad in computer science? I’ve wanted to try teaching for the longest time but I learned very little new material over the course of my Bachelor’s and the only thing that made it worth my time was the math content lol
The further you go, the more specialized it gets. There are people I know doing their PhDs in CS, but it was pretty much just straight math. I’m now an expert in a very specific area of robotics. But it’s only worth it if you have a specific reason to go to grad school, like for a particular career path. If it’s just because you like learning, it’s not worth it. There’s a big opportunity cost.
Same with me but it was 2012 iirc. My sister installed ubuntu on my first laptop(which was a hand-down btw). Never used windows in any capacity in my whole life except for school.
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