Really makes me try and catch myself complaining and just to stop it.

A lot of conversations revolve around ‘dont you just hate this one process, or people like x, or y never works’ and it’s always weary and exhausting, but much more so since I became the tech guy and realize how much people default to stories like that when they have nothing else to say about your profession.

If you want to say ‘ive noticed that x never seems to work properly and I’m wondering why it couldn’t be fixed with z’ and are genuinely curious I’m more than happy to problem solve and/or explain complexities, but most people never want to hear a complicated answer about systemic forces.

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Use this thing called empathy and try and imagine how a non-tech nerd thinks. If you lack the capability of empathy, then you’re never going to get a satisfying answer.v

You cant make anyone do anything, you can entice them over.

To do that they need to be simple and easy to use, what you’re describing is already more complicated than downloading signal or WhatsApp, signing up, and starting.

For start, search xmpp on the app store and notice how the first result is a paid app that costs $8 and isn’t clear whether or not it will connect you to your friends.

You can’t understand why? Are you incapable of evaluating a user experience?

Because the most useful communication apps are the ones that you can reach people on. XMPP’s lack of user friendly UX or long term support and commitment make it DOA for most normal people, which in turn makes it DOA for everyone who might want to talk to one of those normal people who are turned off by it.

From a long term environmental standpoint that’s not at all clear cut.

We objectively have too many humans in our biosphere for our current rate of resource consumption and we should significantly drop the overall number.

However, our current standard of living is mostly the result of a shared economy where we pool and share our resources and have a shit ton of people working.

Right now neural network algorithms consume a lot of processing power and resources, but they also solve whole new classes of automations problems that computers haven’t been able to solve before.

If we actually want to maintain our standard of living and reduce the population size, we may very well need AI automation utilities. They can keep scaling down in size and power consumption in the way that a real human can’t.

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Lol did it solve anything though?

If you actually watch the full episode, the timeline of events is:

• Someone rents a new house and finds a skeleton in the marsh behind it. It’s a ~30 year old woman who died in the winter and was bludgeoned and stabbed repeatedly.
• They send away for DNA sequencing but the lab doesn’t get back to them for like a year and half.
• In the meantime they look at missing persons cases (over 100 in North Carolina they state, though presumably ~half that once you filter for skeletal women)
• They determine that this woman’s case seems most likely based on all the other details about her case. The forensic tech who’s oddly interested in how much pain people feel as they die is interested in using “impose an image of a skull on a face technique” to see if it matches.
• She reaches out to a skateboarding computer science professor who uses gimp to paste a semi transparent layer of the skull on top of a picture of that victim’s face and thinks it probably maybe matches.
• They get fed up with the DNA lab and send it to a second one that responds in three weeks confirming it was who they thought.
• They talk to the victim’s friends who point out what party she was at the night she disappeared.
• The people at the party say that she was hanging out with this one big truck driver after everyone else. His story has been that she walked home after everyone else left, in January, for 7 miles.
• They interview him a few times and he eventually says that they had sex that night and she belittled him for not getting it up and he pushed her and she he hit her head on the nightstand and he left and she was fine when he left.
• He’s convicted of murder and dumping her body because that’s an obvious crock of shit.

Kinda feels like the whole GIMP escapade was just a waste of everyone’s time and all it took to solve the case was basic police work in terms of interviewing people who saw her last. By the time they tried GIMP they already had a prime missing person that they thought it was, and they wouldn’t have had to if they just went to a second DNA lab immediately.

Uh, yes there is, by the inherent nature of how addresses (i.e. public identifiers) work.

An IP address, email address, physical address, etc, is a mechanism to have a string of text, become a unique identifier for something, so that you can just share that piece of text to refer to it.

Once you give out that piece of text, you no longer have control of it. I can give it to someone and then someone else could ask them about it, and they pass it on, and now I have no idea who has this unique identifier that represents me anywhere out there in the world. I can ask the first person to update their records but I have no guarantee that they’ll do it successfully or that they’ll remember every single person who they gave it out to you update.

By the very nature of being an identity provider, you are inherently offering your users something that they should be able to fully own in perpetuity. In those circumstances, it’s problematic if an identity provider insists that you always have to pay for its services, just to have communication from your old identity forwarded.

I think OP is overblowing things, and is especially misguided in recommending gmail, but at the same time, they do have a valid point and I think you’re somewhat misrepresenting what they said.

For one, they specifically said that the proton domain email addresses are problematic (protonmail.com, pm.me), and weren’t talking about custom domains that sit in front of Proton mail.

For two, their point is valid. Auto-forwarding being paid, does create vendor lock-in and make it hard to switch away from Protonmail if you use the OOTB addresses. It’s something worth considering.

As you said, the recommendation should be to use a custom domain that sits in front of Protonmail rather than switching to Gmail, but paid auto-forwarding is a valid criticism.

Oh I’m sorry, did I express an opinion that wasn’t an overly simplistic black or white answer? Thank god the internet edge lord economy is still going strong to correct me.

Fell for what? From all publicly available information, Bill Gates is an objectively better person that is putting his money to far better good than Elon and is an example of how billionaires should behave.

Does that mean that he’s overall a net “good” person in the grand, karmic, life total sense? Hard to say, given the abuse that Microsoft perpetuated to become Microsoft, probably not, but that doesn’t change any of the first part.

Honestly, this is a pretty badly written and researched article for someone that likes writing so much.

Like, just the opening two paragraphs about Microsoft controlling document formats … They repeat the same information in both paragraphs and give a rather incomplete history of document formatting.

It’s also wild to write that many words about Markdown and never discuss its connection to HTML and its foundation in formatting via declarative intent rather than imperative formatting instructions (i.e. in markdown you dont style your title by saying bold / underling / font-size:20, you declare your true intent which is this is the top level title / heading, but that all comes from the underlying structure of HTML which markdown is basically just a simplification of.

It needs a decent UX, but most importantly it needs binary compatibility. No pleb will compile from source.

This is literally lemmy, a (relatively) niche platform where somebody is asking about a (relatively) niche subject. I dont think anything about this is a average person.

‘Average person’ was in quotes because it’s the language you used to describe someone not comfortable with the command line.

I mean what’s the point of “self” hosting then?

If you have to be a professional server administrator to host one of these services, then why even have a self hosting community as opposed to just a hosting community for server admins to discuss how to set and configure various services? Is this community dedicated to just discussing the uniqueness of managing a home server without a dedicated IP?

Self hosting is just an extension of open source software. It’s only goal is being able to run your own backends of apps to not be exploited by major companies. It’s goal is not to be a niche technical hobby, if that’s your goal in its own right, then get a model train or a Warhammer set.

Mainstream consumers don’t know words “Plex” and “Home Assistant” either.

Yes, they do lol. It’s flat out weird to think that the only people who have ever heard of pirating are software developers and server admins who use the command line.

You’re viewing this through an incredibly skewed lense. The average person will never even consider self hosting nor will care, if anything the average person prefers cloud services.

The only lens I’m viewing this through is one that dares to imagine that the Venn diagram of “computer users savvy enough to care about privacy” isn’t 100% contained within the circle of “computer users savvy with the terminal”.

Quite frankly your stance that the ‘average person’ doesn’t care, when this post is LITERALLY from an ‘average person’ who does, is the one that seems off base on its face.