cobysev

I can’t speak for individual instances, but when I first moved to Lemmy, I used the Sync for Lemmy app. Every time I came across a deleted comment, it gave me the option to read the comment anyway. If the user hadn’t edited it before deleting it, I could still read their whole comment, even though it was marked as deleted.

I’ve since moved to the Voyager app and it doesn’t give me this option, but I know that my deleted comments are likely still readable out there.

I block ads too, but a bunch of YouTube channels I follow slip in their own custom-made ads in their vids, and like 70% of them were NordVPN. I couldn’t escape it for a while.

This is why I’ll never use NordVPN. Their ads are everywhere, which makes me not trust their product.

Besides, the most popular products are the most targeted by malware, hacking, adware/spyware, etc. Lesser known security tools are generally better, as long as the product itself is quality.

When I was a civilian, everyone called it military time, because only the US military used it.

When I joined the US military, they called it International Time, because the rest of the world used it and we were just meeting international standards so there’s no confusion with our global allies.

Fences

I live in the countryside, so for decades, my area just showed up as a few main roads and a lot of empty map space. I’ve had delivery and mail vehicles fly by my house because they didn’t know where exactly to turn in. Inviting friends over was always a challenge because I need to describe distances and landmarks. Everyone misses the mailbox.

With OpenStreetMap, I’ve not only been able to put in driveways and outlines of houses on the map, but I put in the fences between my property, the 40 acres of conservation wilderness next to me, then the neighborhood on the other side. Now you can actually see the local neighborhoods out here! And every house has an address associated with it, instead of just a number next to the empty road that doesn’t quite match up with driveways.

And since updating it myself, I’ve noticed those details populating on Google and Bing maps too, so deliveries have been more accurate lately. I’m no longer getting mail for my neighbors, or having neighbors drop off my mail that was left at their house.

I volunteer for my town’s parks committee. Lately, I’ve been marking and labeling our parks and trails on OpenStreetMap because locals are always asking where they are. And my town’s homemade maps are ancient and awfully drawn. I spent my whole childhood living here and I’m only now learning about some of these parks and trails in my 40s!

I’ve spent a lifetime irritated with how little information is available on maps for my region, and now I get to update it myself! It’s been wonderful. I’ve even edited details in my local town as construction changed the street layout and no one updated public maps. It’s so convenient!

Fellow millennial here. I’m in the same boat. Zero subscriptions except for Curiosity Stream, which is like Netflix for educational documentaries, and it’s dirt cheap.

I bought the lifetime subscription to Nebula. It’s been worth it; I have a few channels I follow and I appreciate the extra content and freedom of video producers to say/do whatever they want without platform censorship. YouTube has so many restrictions, no one can post content without bowing to Google censorship.

Parody laws should allow people to actually review or poke fun at other media, but Google will demonetize or block any content that they arbitrarily decide is copyright infringement. Most film review channels I follow have to be extremely creative in how they show clips of movies. Most of them mute music scenes, and some will insert their own public domain (or homemade) music over scenes to avoid a ban. It’s ridiculous how far the MPAA and RIAA have gone in locking down media from public consumption.

I always build my computers with a minimum of 64 GB RAM, so at first I didn’t see what the fuss was all about. But the article claims the Windows OS technically only needs 4 GB?!

And I see the push for more RAM is most likely to accommodate AI/Copilot, which needs a lot of resources to function. “Gaming” is just the excuse Microsoft is using to get people to upgrade.

This reminds me of a video I saw recently about how old computers didn’t have the space to waste code, so every line of code was micromanaged to perfection. But today’s computers have so much room on their hard drives, programmers don’t care how efficient the code is, as long as it runs. Which leads to your computer seemingly performing as slow (or slower!) than computers used to back at the turn of the century.

Our computers are more powerful than ever, multitudes more than the beginning of the Internet Age. And yet, we have so much wasted code because we have room for it, so our modern computers crawl. Imagine how fast our computers could perform if modern coders programmed like they did in the '90s and earlier.

Sync for Lemmy has a paid version that gets rid of ads. Its developer was one of the most vocal when Reddit started charging developers for access to their API. Sync for Reddit was one of the most popular third-party Reddit apps before then.

Its developer is also absent all the time. They poke their head in every few months, fix a bunch of problems, then disappear into the nether for an indeterminate amount of time.

I actually switched to Voyager because I was annoyed at how difficult it was to get anything fixed on Sync. And of course, Voyager is free.

I just got an email from NETGEAR about this. (Yes, they insisted on capitalizing every letter of their brand name)

Which was concerning, because I haven’t bought a NETGEAR product in well over a decade and a half and am adamant about blocking ads and junk mail. How did I get on a mailing list for their company?

Personally, seeing a message like this immediately tells me they’re no longer a brand I can trust. I’m gonna keep using my old routers as long as I can.

Interestingly enough, my ISP forced me to upgrade my modem to theirs last year, claiming that I can’t use a commercial modem because none are made that interface with their company’s technology. Once I installed their modem, my VPN refused to connect over WiFi to the new modem. And several of my WiFi devices just refused to connect in general, including security cameras around my house.

Thankfully, I have an old WiFi router that I use internally in my network and my VPN still works with that. So I’m basically routing all my Internet traffic through an old router, which is set up as a bridge and physically connected to my new modem. It’s the only way I can get reliable, stable, secure Internet in my home. Here’s hoping the old router lasts for a very long time.

Note for those passing through and not reading articles:

This is not a summary of the article, but OP’s suggestion for a solution. The article talks about creating a yeast product that’s lacking in bees’ diet due to climate change and a lack of diversity in flowers.

OP suggests combatting the effects climate change has on biodiversity by planting your own diverse flowers. Which may work, or climate change may just kill those too.

When I became a sysadmin 24 years ago, I figured the general public was still adapting to the rapid overnight advancements and integration into the tech industry. I assumed that as people figured out how to use software and computer technology in their daily lives, help desk support would practically disappear and we’d be able to move our efforts toward fully maintaining systems instead of customers.

I had no idea how resistant the general public would be to actually learning and understanding technology. We went from recommending customers avoid certain bad programs and hardware, to being forced to incorporate them into our infrastructure because the general public didn’t want to give them up.

My professional opinion was overruled many times because someone higher up the food chain wanted to use a device or app that hurt our client base or mission parameters, but was familiar to them, so they wanted it included in our suite of tools.

I’m grateful to see a lot of public resistance to AI, even if corporations are doubling down on their investment into the technology. But I don’t have any hope for the future of technology or the general public who use it daily. AI is just the latest excuse for people to not learn how to use technology efficiently.

I expected younger generations to be raised on this tech and be absolute wizards in its use, understanding it even better than I do! Instead, they were raised on slop and ad-riddled ADHD-promoting garbage apps that rotted their brains and prevented them from learning basic tools and functions. As a millennial, I’ve spent the better half of a decade teaching boomers how to use this tech, and then the next decade trying to reeducate zoomers on how to properly use tech and break their life-long bad habits.

I retired from the IT industry after only 20 years. Now I enjoy tinkering with technology in my free time. I always enjoyed teaching people how to use their personal computers and smartphones, but I can’t spend another minute on a help desk, fielding calls from people who still don’t know how to read error messages that pop up in their face. AI will be the death of the industry if integrated into everything and left unchecked. Maybe it’d be for the best.

I have a Firefox extension called “Hide Shorts for YouTube” that keeps the vertical shorts from showing up in my feed. I totally forgot that YouTube still has those.

I only use YouTube for long-form videos. I really hate vertical videos. And my ADHD is bad enough; I don’t need to feed it short-form content all day long. I’ll never get off my phone!

TL;DR: “Making democratic threats legible,” i.e. spreading the word about how every action Trump takes is a threat to our democracy. It has been proven in several other countries run by authoritarian governments to be effective at stomping out fascism before it can take hold.

Saved you a click.

I saw this article with a giant photo of Trump’s face and the line, “Later found dead” and I got my hopes up for a moment.

Good to know. I’m always on the lookout for a better, more secure option. eufy is my best option at the moment, but if you (or anyone here) knows a better choice for home security systems, I’m all ears.

This is why I a.) live out in the countryside, and b.) replaced my dad’s old Ring cameras with eufy security cameras.

eufy doesn’t require a subscription service (although you can get one if you want to trust their cloud service). If you buy a HomeBase, you can store all your security footage locally on a small box. Easy to hide and/or grab if you need to get out.

Sure, there’s a security risk of storing data locally. But I trust myself to protect video recordings of my property over some company’s cloud service. Ring complies with police when asked for your video footage, and they don’t even notify owners most of the time. Cops could be looking through your video feed without your knowledge, which is a nightmare if you have cameras inside the house.

And now, apparently, so can your neighbors. Fuck Ring.

My introduction to Tim Curry was when he played Rooster in Annie waaay back in 1982.

It’s always been wonderful to see him pop up in movies and shows (and video games) over the years, even if he’s just doing voice acting. I know it took him a while after his stroke to be able to talk normally again (he was slow and slurred in his speech for a while), but I’m surprised he hasn’t done more voice work since 2012.

I can’t vouch for all East Asian countries, but in Japan, it’s a matter of formality. When you meet someone, you always refer to them by their family name and an honorific. (Like we would say, “Mr. Smith.”)

Once you start to get more friendly and familiar with an individual, you’ll move on to more intimate honorifics, until you’re allowed to call them by their direct first name, no honorifics. That’s a sign that you’re very close with someone.

It allows people to refer to you without being too direct and familiar until you’ve gotten to know them well. And you can tell what relationship two people have by what names they use to call each other. Heck, really close friends will probably make up nicknames for each other too.

When I was in the US military, it was kind of the same mentality. Everyone was referred to by rank and last name only. As you got to know someone of the same rank or lower than yours, you could refer to them by last name alone, no rank required. But only the closest of friends would refer to each other by first name.

Depends on how much milk you add to it. Personally, I see it as more of a breakfast stew; more solid food in the bowl than liquid.