There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

Vlyn

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

That’s not unpopular, that’s based.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

I totally get that, same here.

But ultimately you can’t just blame people. There is literally an entire industry trying to sell you cheap carbs and fat. Down to the sound a bag of chips makes when you open it (this is not a joke).

So on one hand you have evolution, your body still being stuck in the past where food was scarce. On the other hand you have too much food and it’s highly engineered to be addicting on purpose.

It’s no surprise most people are going to lose that challenge.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

What is actually your problem with Android FF? I use it every day on my phone.

Yes, it’s not as snappy as Chrome, but besides that everything works perfectly. In addition to that: Fully fledged ad-blocker like on desktop, one big reason why I no longer use Chrome on my phone.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

I already knew that we’re fucked. But scientist said more around 2050 or something. The way things are progressing right now the next 10 to 20 years are going to be dicey.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

Who wants to bet they got Russian money in their pockets?

Do you use the swipe to type feature on your phone?

Is this how most people type on mobile these days, drawing lines all over a keyboard instead of tapping the individual keys? I've never had an iPhone so I don't even know if they can do this natively, but I know you can switch keyboards at least, so it should still be an option if not.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

At first I never used it, always thought typing with two fingers was the fastest (and actually got me the result I wanted).

Nowadays I swipe 99% of the time on my Android phone and it is a lot faster. Especially when your phone learns the words you like to use. It’s not perfect of course and you will have to correct some words down the line (it still sometimes refuses to swipe “Fuck”), but overall I’m faster with it.

Also super comfy for long and complex words when you just roughly swipe it and get the full word written there without errors.

Overall though I prefer to touch type on a proper keyboard on the PC, that’s still the fastest :)

Twitter, Threads, and the misunderstood nature of engineering (beehaw.org)

Complex internet services fail in interesting ways as they grow in size and complexity. Twitter’s recent issues show how failures emerge slowly over time as relationships between components degrade. Meta’s quick launch of Threads demonstrates how platform investments can compound over time, allowing them to quickly build on...

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

This is a shitty take. Twitter ran perfectly fine before Musk took it over.

Turns out if you don’t pay your hosting bills, or your office building bills, fire most of your engineers (after annoying them with bullshit) and making rash decisions without consulting people with technical know-how your service goes to shit.

Musk was stupid enough to DDOS his own service because he doesn’t understand it. Blocking public access to tweets while having tweets embedded in millions of websites turned out to be a really bad idea. Simply because Twitter engineers always expected Tweets to be publicly available, so they kept retrying to fetch the data. There’s probably a hundred+ developers at Twitter who could have told Musk that little tidbit.

This is 100% on the egomaniacal billionaire and has nothing to do with the technology.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

It’s also a shitty take because it hypes up Meta. Which basically took Instagram (handling billions of users posting text, images and videos) and creating Threads by turning images and video off. It’s the same user accounts too.

That’s like Google creating YouTweet by taking their YouTube platform and reducing it to video comments only. Then praising them that they managed to launch a text based service in 2023.

Why not actually talk about Mastodon instead?

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

That’s a weird question, you are comparing a desktop OS with a phone OS (except you are talking about Windows phones, but I don’t think you are?).

All it takes to kill your Windows installation is double clicking a random .exe file (and being unlucky that Windows doesn’t warn you about this particular file). And nope, if it is a custom program your antivirus won’t detect it either. Every time I hear of a company getting a crypto locker on their systems it was over a Windows PC (mostly by email). I haven’t heard of your average company getting compromised by a phone yet (but those phones usually don’t have network access to shared drives…).

Android is relatively locked down, a lot more than Windows. Even if someone sends you malware per email, there is no easy way to execute it on your phone. It’s also not true that you can just install a rogue APK in two clicks, you have to do the following steps:

  1. Open the Settings app on your Android device.
  2. In the Settings menu, tap Apps.
  3. Tap Special app access (or Advanced > Special app access).
  4. Tap Install unknown apps.
  5. Select an app to use to install an APK file—your browser and file management apps are the best option here.
  6. Tap the Allow from this source slider to allow APK files to be installed via that app.

Definitely not something that happens by accident :)

Overall for your average user I’d say Android is safer.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

Ever heard of .bat files? There is no need for admin rights to steal company and user data. All it takes is opening the wrong file. Windows is also terrible about file names, per default extensions are hidden. So you can have a file named “report.pdf.bat” for example and it will show for most users as “report.pdf” with a funny icon. It’s a terrible default setting security wise.

Btw. you’re still comparing a desktop OS with a phone OS. You have to compare Android with iOS. Or Windows with Linux and macOS.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

From the view of a small team that actually paid for GitLab Bronze: Their pricing is a mess and they keep changing things. We went with GitLab at first, Bronze tier, everything was great.

Then they removed Bronze tier (which was $4 per user per month) and only offered a premium tier from then on, $20 per user per month. Which is insane if you look at GitHub pricing.

So instead of paying that much we went with the free tier afterwards. Then GitLab limited free tier repos to 5 users max. Which was yet again annoying and we had to act on that.

In the end the company moved to GitHub, all we wanted was a stable solution we pay for and be left in peace. GitLab kept messing with things and wasting developer hours (Damn meetings with management). GitHub still has a $4 per user per month tier, GitLab… wtf… just raised the price again to $29 per user per month. Are they insane?

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

Yeah, I have no clue how they make software that’s so damn inefficient.

Don’t even get me started, for example I bought a personal license from Jira (Atlassian) to run on my Linux server. Tiny university project, 5 users (with no one using it most of the time) and the thing ate up all my memory and used half my CPU cores just by idling. That server also hosted Minecraft, which used less resources than that…

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

I tried that after already having about 2 years experience with Ubuntu desktop and an Ubuntu server (but still mostly a Windows user). I’m also a software developer.

And I failed to install Arch on a laptop the last time I tried it out. Ubuntu ran flawlessly, trying to go step by step through the Arch installation I hit a random error (at a step that was very straight forward and easy in the documentation) and got stuck. Messed around with it and at some point gave up.

I mean that’s years ago, it probably works a lot better nowadays and especially on more modern hardware, but even so for someone new to Linux I’d never tell them to go with a do-it-yourself install. Slap Ubuntu on that bad boy, let them install a few packages, do a handful of terminal commands and they’ll get much farther. Instead of giving up three hours in because a random command (that they still don’t understand) is broken.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

But as OP said, they already failed several times. That’s like telling someone who nearly drowned in the shallow end of a pool to go jump into the ocean.

See here:

So what would be a good distro to look into for a novice and where should I look for a tutorial?

For me it feels like they do want to learn, but aren’t comfortable yet as a day to day user. They want to use Linux, but struggle with commands and how to use it. Having a stable and easy to use system you can use each day without trouble would probably be a better start than telling them to fiddle with Arch. Give them an easy distro and when they want to learn more they can use the crappy old laptop and try to install Arch on there (while leaving their daily driver alone).

I think I learned the most when using Ubuntu for school, 90% of it was easy and straight forward. 10% of it was hell, like back in the day getting HDMI or audio to work. But because the 90% were there I just dug in and spent a dozen hours to troubleshoot the rest.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

Use one of the scripts that overwrites your comments first. Just deleting doesn’t help one bit.

They also rate limit you to one action every 1.5 seconds or something.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

There are several ways. If you want to overwrite and delete:

greasyfork.org/en/scripts/…/code (This runs as a script in your browser over a plugin, like Greasy Fork, you install the JavaScript Plugin, add the script code, navigate to your comments and let it work).

For just overwriting without deleting… haven’t found something good yet. I adapted the script above for it and it took a while.

There is also shreddit, but it has more setup: github.com/x89/Shreddit

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

👍 can also be sarcastic, like your contract is so dumb, I’m not even properly replying to it. Such a dumb ruling.

Mastodon's Founder & CEO Gives His Thoughts on Meta's Threads (blog.joinmastodon.org)

Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

Marketing and content boost for the start maybe? Mastodon has come up a lot recently (hell, even in local radio), so Meta can use this to promote their own product. And already have content right there for users joining Threads, it’s not a blank slate.

After the initial boost and when sucking up millions of users they can just defederate and have their Facebook (or rather Twitter) 2.0.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

They might dip their toes in at first. But then you’ll have 9 out of 10 big communities/users on Threads (or probably 99 out of 100 if we’re realistic). And at that point if Meta defederates nobody of those users will care. Threads will become Twitter 2.0 and be its own thing, while Mastodon will be crushed with a tiny user base in comparison (which will get even smaller because most content is on Meta servers, so users switch over to Threads).

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

Just don’t vote then? Reddit also told advertisers what you’re into, it was just over backchannels with money involved.

Or create an account that has no links to your private live, then you can vote as much as you want.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

I mean I didn’t upvote or downvote porn on Reddit either. It’s all personal information.

On Reddit there were plenty of people with access and the data was sold to advertisers.

Here it’s public, not great but not terrible either. Also makes it easier to battle vote brigading?

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

The moment you make votes anonymous (which would theoretically be possible) you open up a million ways in which votes can be manipulated. So congratulations, that ad post from some random company has 12k upvotes now.

Only alternative is still connecting it to a user, but only registering that they voted (but not if it’s an upvote or downvote, that’s anonymous again), but then you can never change your vote again afterwards. So if you misclick the downvote button there is no way back.

With the current solutions in place, if you want to remain anonymous: Don’t create an account, just lurk. Or don’t upvote/downvote/comment on things. It’s as easy as that.

Just like putting your real name online and then complaining when others can see it on Facebook… your account is as anonymous as you want to make it.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

But that has always been a thing. Just like Reddit mods banning you from their subreddit just because you posted in another subreddit they didn’t like. It sucks, but it’s nothing new.

If either a server admin or a community mod doesn’t like you for what you’re doing, they can kick you out. It’s the same as if this was an old time forum and you pissed off the admin.

With lemmy you have to watch two things:

  1. Trust the instance admin you sign up with, this is where your account data lives, the admin can read everything on your account. Hell, even your password if they manipulated the instance code, so use a random one
  2. Trust the moderators of the communities you interact with. If you interact with a community and the mods there don’t like you, they can just remove your posts for example. Same as with Reddit

A random person outside of your instance or communities you interact with can’t do much. They can “steal” your posts and comment data and see your votes. But that’s it. They can’t block your account or kick you out of your favorite communities. They could obviously harass you (just your account, not your email), but then you can block them. Or ask the admin to block their entire instance.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

Bluetooth doesn’t make much sense, as you usually only have one device active. But you can easily rule this out: If you have Android for example, long press the Bluetooth button, then check paired devices. Is there any device you don’t recognize? Remove it. Done.

Bluetooth is usually encrypted, so if you didn’t accidentally pair your device with your neighbor’s there is no way they can listen in.

And even more important: Check for carbon monoxide in your home. You might be having health issues and are hallucinating or making things up.

Besides that: It might be possible your neighbor hears you talking on the phone (through the walls for example or with a bug in your home), but there is absolutely no way they’d hear the other side of the conversation. So either your side alone would already give them all the information or something else is up (see above).

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

That’s why I just use my own KeePass database synced over Dropbox. Zero issues, it’s free and nobody is targeting it. Even if someone got access to my Dropbox they’d still have to crack the encryption.

Vlyn ,
@Vlyn@lemmy.ml avatar

Just your browser already gives away a ton about you. See here: amiunique.org/fp

Out of 2,000,000 fingerprints my browser is unique (well, I do use Firefox). So in theory a website owner could identify me just based on that. No IP needed.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •