Americans: You’re not tired after eating Thanksgiving dinner because of tryptophan in the turkey, you’re tired because you ate a lot of food.
unnecessarily
joined 3 years ago
I’m really interested in the Meshtastic project. You do have to buy a physical radio, but it allows you to send encrypted messages over longer distances (and through a mesh network to extend range if there are a lot of devices nearby). I can see it having more utility, despite the upfront costs, than using your phone’s bluetooth.
Seems like all of the most sophisticated filters that the big social media sites use should be made open source. I’m sure they took a lot of time and money to develop, but lack of illegal images should not be an axis that social media are forced to compete on.
It really comes down to which narrative you believe about the current state of the war (not which side you think is justified).
If you believe the Russian propaganda, you think Russia’s control of Donbas is relatively solidified, Ukrainian forces are taking heavy losses and do not have the support of the population in the east. It makes sense for Ukraine to destroy the dam as an act of desperation in hopes that the disruption it causes will create an opening for them to exploit.
If you believe the Ukrainian propaganda, the Russians have been taking heavy losses and the rumored counteroffensive which is right around the corner will drive them out once and for all. If this is true, it gives Russia motive to destroy the dam, as they fear it will soon fall into Ukrainian hands, and its destruction will impede Ukrainian troop movements.
Personally, I tend to believe both narratives are heavily exaggerated, both sides are taking heavy losses, and that nobody is “winning” this stupid war anytime soon. But with how deeply both government/military narratives have penetrated basically all media, I’m not seeing any analysis of who benefits from this if no side is clearly winning.
Some of the Mastodon-focused clients like Ivory/Ice Cubes look amazing. It won’t be long until we get something like that for Lemmy if it gains enough traction.
This has the added benefit of holding the news organizations accountable to you, as you’re their main source of funding. If they start to go down a bad path, you can pack up and take your dollars somewhere else.
People intuitively understand you when you say you try to go to locally-owned co-ops/farmers markets instead of Walmart when you can, right? Or that you prefer to avoid Amazon and support your local independent bookshop, right? It's actually cool to care about these things, people respect you when you make little rebellious political decisions.
My advice is frame your decisions about what apps to use the same way. "I try not to use the big corporate-owned apps when there are smaller non-profit alternatives run by communities of normal people." Now you're not some paranoid weirdo who's afraid the NSA is out to get him, you're just socially-conscious and care about things like where your time and money is going. I almost never try to explain what "open source" is or anything like that.
A girl on a first date once asked me what messaging apps I used and I said something like "My friends and I have been using this smaller non-profit app, it has all the same features as Messenger but without all the Zuckerberg bullshit." and she downloaded it right then and there, thought it was cool.
Netflix’s disc-by-mail service is better and more convenient than streaming in basically every way. Instead of having to look for the films/shows I want to watch on various streaming services only to find out they’re not streaming anywhere, or on some obscure/expensive service, I can be confident that if they’ve had a physical release, they’re probably in Netflix’s catalog of 100,000 titles on Blu-Ray or DVD. The I can just add it to my queue, and movies will show up. Then when it’s time to watch a movie, I don’t have to waste time mindlessly scrolling my trying to find something to watch, I just pop the disc in the player. Easy. It’s really a shame that it’s going away. My public library has a massive DVD collection that I’ll probably use, but they’re lacking in Blu-Ray discs, and nothing beats the convenience of having the discs come right to your home.