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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Yes they are, UX designers are not asked to make more efficient or usable designs, they are asked to make designs that “look good” in marketing, support ad integration, hook people into others services provided by that same company, make it more difficult to incorporate with workflows that include third-party applications, etc.

    This is deliberate UX design, which is part of the enshittification process.


  • People spend lots of money to buy big screens, only for apps/websites to use a fraction of it.

    I cannot control how every application or website I have to use looks, but where I can, I try to find solutions.

    When I am occasionally on reddit, I use old.reddit. I use addons for youtube, to remove unecessary stuff, or open videos directly in mpv.

    I use reader mode to make many sites easier to navigate.

    Mastodon and Lemmy have a much better design than Twitter or new Reddit.

    On the one windows machine I still have, I use the classic shell, to replace the start menu with something more usable.

    I use Libreoffice, and many other Software with sane functional UI.

    I don’t want to use old software, because the older software gets, the more hostile the environment becomes for it.

    A lot of UI decisions on the Internet seem driven by the need to create empty spaces to put advertising into, and with adblocker it looks just bad.








  • The reason is to protect the physically or mentally weak from the strong while also having rules that are easy to follow and to enforce, that don’t require psyche exams, which depend on the examiner.

    Age might not be a good metric of evaluating maturity, but it is the best and most practically useful we have. (I use “maturity” here as having reached certain physically and mental level where they can operate, think and decide independent, and the risk of being manipulated is low.)

    Because age is not a good metric, that means that we have false positives and false negatives on a maturity tests based on age, which we need to balance. And I would rather have more false negatives (wrongly ascertained immaturity) than false positives (wrongly ascertained maturity).

    If someone comes up with a better and still practical maturity test, that would be interesting. “Solutions” like every citizen has to do a yearly physical and mental exam in order to keep their rights as an adult, seem much to harsh and easily manipulatable. Especially around blurry lines like disabilities.

    Wherever certain thing needs a maturity test or not and where that should be, I cannot say. Just if the age limit is too high, then mental decline will raise the false positives, which would be bad as well.


  • Right, they saying “We are just following the law.” as if that was an apolitical statement. While they still get to choose whom laws to follow by deciding where to make business, which are political decisions.

    As you see with Twitter or starlink, they decided to be do business in Brazil, but when the country actually have laws against uncontrolled mass propaganda and hate speech, they are suddenly against the law, and do not try to stop or limit doing their business there, when they do not want or can’t abide by these laws.




  • cmhe@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlRecommend me a scripting language
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    1 month ago

    What about Lua/Luajit?

    In most scripting languages you have the interpreter binary and the (standard) libraries as separate files. But creating self-extracting executables, that clean up after themselves can easily be done by wrapping them in a shell script.

    IMO, if low dependencies and small size is really important, you could also just write your script in a low level compiled language (C, Rust, Zig, …), link it statically (e.g. with musl) and execute that.


  • E2E is just one part of the puzzle, you got to have a open source P2P or federated architecture as well, otherwise you have to trust a nebulous company or person intrinsically. People change and companies can be bought, but you will be stuck with their platform in order to contact your acquaintances, and changing that means loosing your contacts.

    That is why the DMA is important. But you will be even better off just directly choosing a chat platform, where the users are in control.


  • Yeah, the whole article is a bit fishy:

    In addition to generating clean electricity, the new ITO-silver window coating creates a cooling effect by allowing only the visible part of the light spectrum to pass inside. Other parts of the spectrum are reflected outside.

    So how would a room actively cool down, when you let only the visible light spectrum inside? Sure it might not get as hot as if you let all light inside, but it will also not get colder.


  • I started using Fedora Silverblue on a tablet, seems to work fine so far, but requiring a reboot in order to install new system packages is a bit cumbersome and the process itself takes a while, but ordinary Fedora also doesn’t win any races when asked to install a new package

    I think switching to FCOS or Flatcar on servers that just use containers makes sense. Since it lessens the burden of administrating the base system itself. Using butan/ignition might be unusual at first, but it also allows to put the base system configuration into a git repo, and makes initial provisioning using ansible or similar unnecessary. The rest of the system and services can be managed via portainer or similar software.

    I also do not have long term experience with FCOS, but the advertised features of auto-update, rolling-release, focus on security and stability makes it a good fit for container servers, IMO.

    An alternative to Debian on servers might also be Apline Linux. Which also has more a focus on network devices, but some people use it on a desktop as well.

    If you have many different systems, and just want to learn to operate them all, maybe NixOS might be interesting. Using flakes, you can configure multiple machines from just one repo, and share configurations between them. But getting up to speed on NixOS might not be so easy, it has a steep learning curve.


  • What’s ACC?

    ACC - Advanced Charging Controller, which allows to set charge limits, thus extending the battery life, which should have been part of Android from the beginning,

    Anyway I would strongly discourage using root under Android as it breaks the security model.

    Security isn’t a binary, security works like an onion, you have multiple layers of security and multiple decisions to make on every level. Currently you might be right, that having root access to a device might compromise it in some ways, but that isn’t necessarily so and depends on how it is done.

    You should find ways around using root and if you can’t you probably shouldn’t be doing on your phone anyway.

    This kind of thinking is the ‘I know better than you’ mentality, that I sometimes see around people advertising GrapheneOS. Having ‘root’ permissions to the device is owing it, I want to decide what to do with it, not the vendor of the ROM, or who ever else. They aren’t me, they don’t know what I want to do with it.

    The goal of security models is allowing me, the owner, to do what ever I want with my device, while preventing others, non-owners, un-trusted applications or the internet from doing what they want with my device. If the security model doesn’t allow me, the owner, to do what I want, then it failed its job at least partially.

    Root is very dangerous as it can survive a factory reset.

    Why is that dangerous? The first thing I do, when I get a new phone is boot into the boot loader, and overwrite the whole partition, then the system is trusted again, at least if I trust the vendor of the boot loader. When I want to do a factory reset, I do the same, overwrite the flash with a fresh OS image.

    IMO, there are other reasons why the current implementation of root are dangerous: They currently considered binary and I think they could be implemented more gradually. Like one application having root over individual other applications, e.g. accessing their files. Allowing/Disallowing individual privileged system calls, or access to specific system files, etc. All of this could be hidden behind a switch in the developers menu. Maybe only allow applications to gain root access when using a registered hardware token, etc.

    As for MicroG, it is sandboxed but it does require device admin for full functionality. It isn’t running as root but it requires a lot of device permissions. You can turn off the permissions you don’t need but that could break things.

    In order for MicroG to work full, you need to fake the signature, which requires a patch to the system, or root privileges.