psycotica0

joined 3 years ago
[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 hour ago

Other people have said some things, but I'll say some things too:

  1. I think it's easy to look at the titans of success and assume it was inevitable, but in the middle were lots of corporate failures. Google failed to beat Facebook with Google Plus, MySpace was massive and is now basically dead, Vine started up and died, Vimeo failed to defeat YouTube, and while I can't quote their names there were other "Facebook but...", "Twitter but...", and "YouTube but .." companies out there that sprung up with VC backing and died irrelevant. Meta currently has threads as an attempt to compete with Twitter, and probably that'll be gone and forgotten soon. So in a sense the fediverse is beating MySpace and Threads and Vine and GooglePlus by having an alternative that's running at all. Not all victories are assured simply by existing or being "better"

  2. A lot of it is Network Effects. People go on PeerTube, there's nothing they want to watch, they leave. Twitter has been around in the tech space for like 20 years, because other tech people at the same conference as you were on it, but most normal people weren't on it until celebrities started signing up. Because otherwise they'd show up on the home page, not see anything they cared about, and then leave. Most platforms these days explicitly prevent interoperability, and the law allows them to, so it's hard to migrate slowly.

  3. The fediverse is explicitly anti-control and anti-centralization. This means it's aggressively and purposely fragmented, which normal people don't care about, but does bring a host of UX problems. Any attempt to paper over these will likely be met with hostility by the existing community and projects, because the solutions to these "problems" tend to involve central authority of some kind or another, and with centralization comes power, control, and attack vectors

  4. The fediverse, similar to above, is pretty anti-profit. That's why it's an alternative to the big popular ones, but it also means it's harder to have solid paid maintainers and disk storage and stuff, compared to something like YouTube or Facebook which are among the most valuable companies on this Earth. It also makes it hard to buy ads, or airtime, or grassroots astroturfing, or celebrity endorsements, etc, which might reach a broader audience and draw people in. That all takes money that the fediverse simply doesn't have.

  5. The fediverse is pretty anti-algorithm, or at least the way the other platforms characterize "The Algorithm" which is to say anti-dark-patterns. We do this both because we are care about our own health as people, so if we're running something for ourselves why would we dark-pattern ourselves, but also because we aren't driven by profit motive, and so usership costs money and gains us kinda nothing, so there's no incentive to "addict" our users. I've seen multiple accounts, and also seen first-hand, people join Pixelfed from Instagram and bounce off pretty quick. And it's not just the network effect, it's also that Instagram and its algorithmic feed is constantly trying to trick you into watching more and more and more. Pixelfed says "what do you want to see?" and the user goes... uh... I don't know. Maybe cats? And Pixelfed says "okay, here's some cats and nothing else. Let me know if there's anything else you want, otherwise bye thanks for coming". Like, people want a firehose of attention, but the platform doesn't want to subject you to that, and doesn't benefit from it, so it goes "that's all I have for you now. Come back later" which other social media never will.

That last one I think is really a big part of it. You have to ask "Why are so many people on Twitter? What do they do there?" and then wonder if them doing that on Mastodon is better? It's obviously philosophically better for them to spend their time on a freedom-respecting platform than a for-profit exploitation machine, but they could also use neither and that would probably be better too. They could go to a library, a cafe, and a park. Is Mastodon essential? Why do you want it to be used by millions and millions of people? What do you get out of it? What does Mastodon get out of it? What do the maintainers of the instances get out of it?

Would the world be a better place if all Twitter users were Mastodon users, or if all Twitter users simply didn't use either?

Also, people today have a Facebook account, and a Twitter account, and a YouTube account, and a Reddit account, and each of those services does a different thing. You mention how there's no events built into Mastodon. Sure, but there's no events built into Twitter, Reddit, or YouTube either. There's no marketplace integration into frendica, but there's no marketplace integration in YouTube either, Reddit doesn't have hashtags, Facebook doesn't have playlists of videos, Twitter doesn't tell you people's birthdays, etc.

Just because different fediverse tools use ActivityPub, it doesn't necessarily mean they all must interoperate. It can be neat sometimes, and sometimes it basically happens by accident, but a lot of the time it just doesn't make sense.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 1 points 14 hours ago

You mean being torn apart by dogs?

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 1 points 14 hours ago

For sure, someone needs to build stuff. What feels weird to me is less that there's a new codec, but rather that it's so closely on the tails of AV1. There will only have been a few years of hardware that ever had AV1 but not AV2. Seems like they should be more spaced out? But maybe that's nuts.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What does it mean access to the chapel and East Wing? Are those... not included? Is it a museum or something?

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

Yeah, like other people covered, it's unfortunate but also very important. It's easy to tie "visible wifi networks" to "surprisingly precise location on globe" in many places, so the permission is named for the worst case scenario. Yes, the app might just be looking for a wifi, but it also could use that same information to locate you, so it's the location permission. Sensible.

If they wanted to support just this one feature without requiring a location permission, they could maybe have an API that is "are you currently connected to this opaque token" API where the app can ask "am I connected" and is just told "yes" or "no". That's probably safe enough. And then I could register the app with my wifi without the app even knowing what my Wifi is, it just gets a unique but random string.

The same is true of bluetooth. If I can list nearby bluetooth, I can see that speaker and this TV and guess location. But there could be an API that hides that, there just isn't currently

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Right, okay, I definitely haven't bought a new computer in the past 5 years. I wonder if anyone has "how old is the average computer" percentiles, because I have a feeling most people haven't bought a new computer in the past 5 years, so it seems surprising to supercede a codec after so few years, but maybe I'm the weird one?

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 9 points 2 days ago

Ugh, those garish folks are New Horror, we Old Horror would never stoop to those levels.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 days ago

Yeah, I think it's just the way the blog post was written. When I was reading it I saw the first few paragraphs was basically "here's how to do Cron with it", and then everything after that was "here's a bunch of other features it has that cron doesn't and how to use those"

I don't think that's the wrong way to write this kind of article, but I could see it feeling overwhelming on a skim, because it may feel like you need to read the whole thing in order to get anything working. But actually only the start was necessary, and the rest was tasty feature pitch.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 days ago (5 children)

I think I'm just getting old, but I thought AV1 was still new too. Do I even own any devices that can decode it? I'm not sure I've even got h265...

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 days ago

Sorry, I'm team gold. We're real! I've never seen blue in the original image.

 

Hey folks! I know a while back there was a kerfuffle because syncthing-fork for Android went dark, and then a new person showed up and claimed everything was cool and they'd been privately given the keys or something, and people were concerned. I pinned my fdroid version to the at-that-time-current release until we got clarity.

Well, it's been a while and I just noticed I'm still on that old release. So... how'd it turn out? Do we like the new person yet? Is there a promising fork y'all are using? Or is the project dead? I'm sure I could just go look at the repo, but I'm also sure the repo would tell me "yeah, we're all cool" no matter what, so I'm curious what the community feelings are. Have there even been any useful new releases since then?

Thanks!

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

These answers will be theoretical, because it's possible some browser or system will do things stupid and negate these positives:

It shouldn't make things less anonymous, because different websites get unique passkeys made for them. This also makes them more secure, because if one site has a complete DB leak, that doesn't impact other sites at all.

Also, the passkeys are used for auth, so there's already no "anonymity" here, you're logging into a website. They know who you are, at least which user you are, maybe not which human, which is as true as it was before with passwords.

Also they should require your device to ask you if you want to use the passkey, they're not supposed to be automatically leaking to every site you visit without your knowledge.

Also, they are not stored via cookies. Unless you mean the login session, in which case that part is stored via cookies, but just the same way that a password login gets a session key via a cookie to use after you've logged in. So if someone can steal your cookies that's already a huge problem, but they don't get any extra information with passkeys. The actual secret material for a passkey is stored outside of the browser entirely.

The biometrics aren't supposed to leave the device, they're prompted for by the hardware on the device asking if you'd like to allow the keys to be used. The browser asks the passkey hardware "I'd like to sign this thing please" and then the hardware pops up the biometric thing as part of its decision making process on whether it should do that or not. Crucially this is not the website asking for biometrics, it's your device. And if you unlock it, then it chooses to sign what it was asked to sign, and all the browser gets back is the signature.

In theory.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

To anyone reading this that's red-green colourblind, the joke is that the word "Red" is green coloured, and "Green" is red coloured.

 

Hey folks! Back in the PS2 days I had Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and besides the quests and stuff I also loved just driving around and going on little road trips and stealing planes.

And then in the PS3 era I had Just Cause 2, and the voice acting was terrible, and the quests were kinda dumb, but wow was it fun to just drive around and go on little road trips and steal planes. And your dumb little hookshot was nearly immersion breaking it was so unrealistic, but instead it was a ton of fun zipping through the air from 150 paces to kick a dude off his motorbike...

Anyway, I'm wondering what people's opinions are on these kinds of games these days! I know Cyberpunk has some driving, but I don't know if people enjoy cruising in it. I really liked Breath of the Wild, which is not really the same but had some screwing around times. I know there's a GTA 5 which I never played but it's probably good, I think there's a Just Cause 3 but I haven't looked into it. Some people love Red Dead 2, which I mostly bounced off of but maybe I was wrong.

Do you folks have any favourites in this "genre"? Things I should check out? Stories of worthless hijinks? Thoughts?

 

Hello! I've just started using StreetComplete, and I want to make sure I understand the answers before I go through and make a bunch of garbage data.

In this picture, is the kerb a ramp, or flush?

The sidewalk deflects downwards, but it's not a ramp ramp like the example picture.

How about this one?

The kerb itself dips, but the sidewalk on this one looks more flat and does simply run into the road. And then it has the texture, obviously. Is this one different from the last one?

Also, just to check, I marked both of these sidewalks as "concrete". That's correct, right? I wondered about "concrete plate", because they're segmented, but the picture made concrete plate look much more substantial.

My other question was based on the "lit" tag for a bus stop. This bus stop has a street light near it, but there's no light on the bus stop itself. It sounds like that means it is lit? Would a non-lit stop just be one that is fully dark at night, then, with no kind of lighting anywhere near it at all?

This one is further from the street light, but still has line of sight. Lit?

Thanks very much for any help you have!

 

Hello folks! I have these switches in my bathroom.

The rightmost is the lights, and the middle one is the bathroom fan, and I'd like to replace that middle one with something I could load tasmota on (or some other open source firmware), without replacing the other switch, the sockets, or the faceplate.

I haven't seen any smart switches that have a form factor that would fit through this faceplate, though; they seem to mostly want to be the entire electrical box.

If it weren't for the electrical plugs I could maybe replace this with some kind of 2-gang thing, which isn't really what I want but could be fine, but as it stands I'm not sure what my options here are.

I don't need the new switch to necessarily look like the old one, I just want it to fit in the same box and use the same faceplate. Do you folks have any recommendations?

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