you live, you learn https://writingexplained.org/coliseum-or-colosseum

what’s this coliseum shit, this is the second time I’ve seen this, it’s colosseum. is this another aluminum/aluminium shit?

because things moved forward in the last decade or so and it’s not viable. the same way matrix and element and those ridiculous things aren’t viable and never will be. can you use it today? absolutely. can you convert normies to it and make it an actual widely used comms platform? no. fucking. way.

this is coming from a guy running their own prosody instance and utilizing rocketchat on two separate client instances. yeah, I know how to set it up and deploy it; but the amount of absolutely credible complaints I get from normies forced to use it staggering.

to me it looks and feels like shit, compared to Durov’s spyware it’s like a PoC from 2015 looking for funding. fine demo you got there, now bring us the real thing.

but, to practical things, I lose/sell/buy/switch devices frequently. with telegram, I can lose all my devices, log on from a fresh one and all my shit is there - a decade+ of convos with 100s of people with valuable info. no juggling around with the crappy electron desktop app that doesn’t give me access to convos or the inane procedure to replace a lost device and restore chat history… the other day, I successfully retrieved a piece of info from a convo from a decade prior.

I realize there are people out there that need that sort of security, but I don’t. I just want Telegram with an OTR plugin (OMEMO nowadays) that prevents any nascent mass surveilance and LLM ingestion and I’m golden. but that shit’s explicitly against Telegram’s ToS; the only logical conclusion is they’re adamant about leaving all your shit unencrypted in the cloud for some specific reason.

I can’t think of any such reason that’s not malevolent.

regarding its UX, nothing close exists; when it comes to converting normies, so you have someone to actually talk to, then there are no alternatives. that’s a pretty shitty state of affairs for something that shoulda been solved a long time ago.

lesson learned, I guess, don’t put all your eggs in one basket and have multiple fallback solutions. I’ve begrudingly moved to Signal and I’m cursing it out at least once per day, can’t believe the navel-gazing, self-righteous cluelessness behind it; but that’s the best there is at the moment. it’s beyond shitty that we’re having trouble achieving what we had in like 2012 by way of XMPP and friends, let alone surpassing it.

any way to read this without a telegram account?

air tags function by utilizing the ad-hoc network all Apple devices create - if you run an Apple device, you’re involuntarily part of this P2P network, even when your device is supposedly off. otherwise, said tags wouldn’t be able to send you status reports from the other side of the planet. that’s just how they and find-my-shit apps work, there are no alternatives to global availability.

all that’s kinda antithetical to the whole privacy thing, so you’ll have to balance the good with the bad and determine how much spyware you will tolerate to gain this sort of convenience.

I’m sorry for being slightly off-topic, but ONE THOUSAND clams for an easily breakable/losable thief magnet is just bonkers to me. my desktop, laptop, tablet and phones cost way less than that in total.

you sure you separated your “needs” from your “wants”?

my god… thank you GloriousEggroll for all your hard work, but please find someone else to write the documentation. it’s hella confusing and explains nada, despite your best efforts.

deleted by creator

I wrote about a software KVM solution for the same setup, desktop and laptop with dock here.

the parts are cheap, the prices are low

recently I got me a pair of Soundpeats Air4 Pro; initially wanted to repurchase a pair of Air3 HS Pro that I had and was very satisfied with the sound but lost one earpiece and found out that replacing it is nigh impossible. so, Air4 was like $5 more and I wanted to try the ANC part of it. none of those models are in-ear headphones, I’m done with shoving things in my ear canals.

so the sound is OK to me (I have tinnitus and don’t hear that well to begin with, so I’m not an expert on judging these things) but the ANC is not what I expected it to be. to me, what it does is just flood my ears with bass. the music i listen to and the occasional podcast sound OK to me but I don’t perceive any noises to be “cancelled”, i still hear all irritants (buses passing me by, dogs barking, people talking, etc.) but they’re somewhat droned out by the bassy sound.

the way I understand ANC, it uses multiple mics to generate an inverse sound that cancels out the ones reaching the microphones. so this should work without music, i just turn ANC on and I “hear” silence. nothing close to that is happening.

anyhow, both of those have some app that you need to get from google play and I haven’t done so for either of them. judgging by the screenshots the app doesn’t do anything of value, so you’re safe to run it without.

edit: I just checked and it appears I was the victim of wanting things to be true; the website lists the feature as “Hybrid ANC” (emphasis mine). I’m not even gonna bother with reading up what their definition of it is, so I guess it was a con job from the start.

I feel the 50 years support claims, whether in hardware or software, should be of little concern; you’ll grow tired of it, no one is going to rock the same phone for 10 years, replacing components as they fail and whatever Fairphone’s delusion is.

as to concrete recommendations, take a look at Xiaomi phones (Mi/Redmi/Poco/etc.). they ship with a bloated spyware called MIUI which is such a horrific mess on so many levels I can’t begin to count the ways it sucks. even moderately competent phones have trouble keeping up with the bloat, they glitch out, drop frames, freeze, etc. so people just get rid of them and upgrade to something snappier. as a consequence, they can be had for cheap on the used market.

the good news is, they have snapdragon models with super competent hardware and a good portion of them have lineageOS support (and by extension, many other derivative OS) - Poco F1 is one of the rare semi-modern phones that also has postmarketOS support.

the bad news is, the bootloader unlock process takes a week, just because; do yourself a favor and don’t connect this monstrosity to your LAN while you wait for the timer to expire. also, they’re chaotic (to say the least) with their model naming, with zero consistency what each suffix means (T, Pro, etc.) and it’s not rare that they do a model “refresh” where they replace snapdragon with mediatek in the “updated” version.

first off, if you plan to scan the storage for bad “sectors”, that’s gonna take eons if the disk is of any considerable size. what’s more likely is you running the SMART self-test and that will work over any medium.

the cables absolutely can and do cause corruption, whether it’s plain SATA-SATA cables or the USB-SATA with their own controller on it; however, if you don’t have reason to suspect this particular cable/adapter is faulty, it’s not a worry vector per se.

looking for “privacy issues” in iOS is like wondering if the sandwich you found in the sewer has healthy and organic salami, as if that’s the only issue preventing you from eating it.

you’re being spied on from the moment you activate it, including when it’s “off”, so does it matter if there are seven or actually nine things invading your privacy?

what’s this “probability” based on?

wine exposes the user’s home directory as drive Z: and has full read/write access to it. so, the user’s proper fucked.

edit: I misspoke, Z: exposes the entire root file system, whereas only the /home/user/ has full r/w access.

you’re not mentioning which Pixel you’re getting for $200 and also that’s only twice the stated budget. anyhow, the cheapest Pixel 7 I have locally available is $310 (“lighty used”), which I think is the lowest rung; sixes are like three years old and that’s a no bueno for phones with fixed batteries. as an aside, if I’m buying something someone rubbed their face on, spat on, and rubbed all over, I’m paying half price max, not 15% less than NiB ($355 here).

last week I bought a Poco F1 (SDM845/6GB) in not great condition for $60; excellent LineageOS and PostmarketOS support though and easily replaceable batteries. a month or so prior, a Mi 9T Pro (SDM855/6GB) for $80. those are on the high side, there’s a ton of LineageOS supported Xiaomi devices for $50 or less if you go down to SDM6xx/4GB, which is plenty for everyday use. they can be had on the cheap because their MIUI operating system is bloated and hella slow so people just upgrade, whereas unlocking the boot loader and flashing an alternative nets you a super useable device.

I’m not saying any of those is as good as a modern Pixel device, but for my use cases they are more than enough.

it was pretty bad. the “protagonist” was as irritating as they come. evacide, doctorow and co. were super-underutilized, I imagine a huge chunk was cut out to make enough room for mr. annoyance and his forced parables and non-sequiturs.

I understand some things had to be dumbed down, but this was really, really bad from every angle you look at it.