hendrik

I think judging something really depends on the requirements. No one said using technology was going to be simple and easy. We should make it as easy as we can do, but no more than that. There’s still a lot of room for improvement. But in the end the commercial services are geared towards convenience. And they’ll always outpace us. We have to set up servers and jump through a few hoops so it’s us in control of the network. There is no other feasible way to do it.

Though I really wish we had some messenger that makes encryption foolproof. And rock solid, and with a resource footprint of IRC when concerned with text messages, but not limited to that.

We’ve had the discussion a while back here in selfhosted. You can find it here: https://awful.systems/post/5029223

Main points: Continued drama around people, and tuwunel is tied to a single, (paid) developer and I figure once there’s anything wrong with that, tuwunel might die instantly. While continuwuity is a community effort and maybe that’s a bit more sustainable. Though I don’t own any crystal ball and I don’t know how things will turn out.

Sure, I believe that is supposed to be uWu or maybe some kind of puppy talk. It’s certainly originally started by June, who turned conduit (which is a sane name) into conduwuit.

I figured I’ve lost all shame anyway, back when we discussed nerd topics in the school bus or the 5 'o clock train, like Linux lore, anime, Star Trek concepts and technobabble. I mean people were staring and I’m aware of that, but I’ve really lost all F*'s to give. And that turns me into the person who I am today, and I’ll happily write sentences like the one above. Or still talk about Star Trek in a crowded train. And these days it’s the mycelial network and that really makes people question my sanity. 🫠

If you want a conduwuit sucessor, I’d choose the continuwuity project over tuwunel. The legitimacy as the sucessor is mainly self-proclaimed, and continuwuity is a community effort. The entire thing is kind of a shitshow, though. If you want to do it like 99% of people, make friends with Synapse.

I think what you describe still holds true. You need a few correct DNS entries and an open port. Once you want VoIP, some more ports and a TURN server will be necessary. And that one took me some effort, but the server itself (including federation) was well within my comfort zone. And I run continuwuity these days because Synapse wastes way too much resources for what I do and their other efforts went nowhere. But I’m not sure about the future of those smaller Matrix server projects.

And if you don’t like Matrix or can’t get it to run, maybe try something like XMPP.

I liked the nipple mouse on my old Thinkpad, pretty much no effort to do a few things with the mouse in between, and the fingers are still on the keyboard.

Probably capacitive touch buttons. Some people likely have elegant stainless steel bell panels with flush, modern touch buttons… Though they have to be rare. All I ever see are push buttons and there is no way a slug can do that.

Ah, thanks. And are those people then connected to the same network and can follow each other, or are those entirely seperate? Pardon my lack of knowledge about Bluesky and ATProto.

The Pixel devices certainly lost some of their appeal lately with Google cutting down on the superb GrapheneOS support we had up until now. And they’re now missing the device-trees and so on and more recently Google has shifted development to not be transparent to the public any more until a new version gets properly released. So updates will be more difficult and won’t happen as instantly as we had them in the past.

Lol. I bet the AI also “personalizes” the facts it teaches to individual pupils. Has anyone checked whether they’re able to read and write? Can people enroll in college in America without? Maybe measure if they did well in college and not just whether they tried (and maybe failed), or if they had to pay another $200,000 for private lessons to some other hedge fund manager to pass college?

Since we have Mississippi as an example… Why not just look how it turned out for the people there? Do or don’t they have a communications platform now that connects them to a network of other people? I feel that’s way more helpful than discussing what should be discussed, or talking about theoretical details.

Techniker Krankenkasse

Lol. Your heart horoscope, now for just £199.99 a month… But seriously, we should have some standards and medical certification for things. Because we already have esoteric pseudo-medicine and charlatans. People come to a proper doctor for proper treatment.

But it would mainly hit medium-sized companies, he said.

Unsubstantiated claim. Why would putting a tax on wealth of billionaires affect mid-sized companies? And why do we tax income but not wealth? (Eigentum verpflichtet.) And is 26% much for a billionaire if middle class pays 43% and it’s up to 47.5%? And I know the usual tricks of the richest people on earth regularly lead to Jeff Bezos for example paying zero taxes unless it’s a year he sells some shares. Though that’s not Germany.

Sure. I mean I don’t think a songwriter should have exclusive rights to sing about the struggles of growing up or the concept of living in a bad neighborhood… I’m more with copyright and they should get protection for the exact song they wrote and nobody can take that without properly licensing it. It’s a bit weird with protecting abstract concepts. At least they should make it a bit more alike patents where protection runs out way earlier after like 25 or 30 years or so and after that characters and such get to be used by everyone. But that’s not an absolute truth, just my personal opinion. (Plus sometimes it’s difficult to separate the two things in a way that makes sense. It’s certainly not easy. I’m immediately against all the piracy AI companies do. But I think this is a bit more complex. And Batman is like 86 years old and I’m not sure if it’s the right thing either that a company gets to milk that forever. At least the original artists are long dead.)

Tbh I regularly fail to emphasize with Intellectual property advocates. It’s kind of a weird law that people can be convicted of drawing a Mickey Mouse and Batman or writing fanfiction. I think they put it out there to become part of culture and IP isn’t really a good thing at all. Though it’s kind of problematic in this case if they used Scooby Doo to advertise for their own services.

I think most of the inflated value of Tesla is due to Musk. Not because they’re a good car manufacturer or have the kind of turnover that makes them worth more than most other car companies combined… So whatever the cost is, they need to keep Musk and live off of his charlatanism.

Sure. I mean we all know the stories on how denazification turned out. And how proper processing of the nazi past didn’t start until much later. I feel some people invested quite some effort into the entire thing, at least in West Germany, but that’s a different story and doesn’t include those people.

Idk. I recently watched a short documentary about Merkel and the war in Syria. And seems she has some moral integrity. And she still thinks it’s a christian thing to help people and not steamroll them at the border or something. Also she’s very pro-Euroean. And she wasn’t a 70yo man when she assumed office… But yeah, she also did a lot of …nothing… to address issues. And the same neoliberal politics that is the core issue of everything.

I always welcome if people refrain from calling everything nazi and devaluing the term. Now that we need it to call out the proper fascists. But I don’t think there’s a single reason to vote for the CDU either. That’s not a path forwards. And I bet the lines are blurred sometimes.

Heute show did a similar take on the rise of populism, rich buddies and neoliberalism and fooling all the idiots out there. (German language): https://youtube.com/watch?v=LZLZJWVFZvs (piped.video)

Conservatives dominating isn’t a new thing, though. We had them be in power for like 70% of the time modern Germany exists. We started out with Adenauer after WW2… I’d say more recently with Merkel we had quite some leftist and green things happening under conservative government… So yeah, I don’t want to defend them. But lumping all of them together with the far-right idiots isn’t helpful either.

Yes. I’m always amazed how people constantly find ways to jailbreak Apple devices, and they’re a massive company and not that bad at locking down their stuff… Or how we hacked most of the gaming consoles out there, while Nintendo/Sony/… are super incentivised to make it impossible. Sometimes it takes quite some time, but someone will find a way. Though that’s a bit more common with widespread devices. Sometimes I’ll try to find a privacy-respecting tablet and there isn’t even a single aftermarket operating system at all for a recent model and then I’m a bit disappointed in what we can achieve as a community.