deweydecibel

I know some artists don’t mind it, but I just can’t hear the word “creatives” as anything other than silicon valley speak for the source of the content they sell. It feels dehumanizing.

Particularly in this case, it’s Adobe, so you can just call them artists, designers, photographers, etc.

Or, ya know, just users.

Do I trust them? Sure, I guess, when it comes to privacy from other entities.

Do I trust that I will have privacy from Apple? Hell no. What does “local” even mean on an iCloud connected iOS device anymore? Because there’s nothing on that phone Apple can’t access remotely if they want to, and if any of the AI cache is backed up on iCloud, that’s not local anymore.

Do I trust them with the data they’re absolutely gathering? No, but I don’t trust anyone with it. But I also think that data would be relatively safer with Apple than their competitors.

If Apple announced Recall? Apple wouldn’t announce Recall, that’s the whole point. Apple wouldn’t be so brazen and stupid to push a tool that is so obviously invasive and so poorly implemented. Apple earned its trust by not making those mistakes.

But if they did decide to say fuck it and implement something like Recall, of course people would trust them. That’s what trust means: consumers take them at their word. But if it’s as bad as Microsoft’s Recall, Apple would burn all that trust when people found out.

People don’t believe Microsoft because they have long since burned any trust and good will for most of their consumers. They have proven time and time again they don’t give a shit about users’ wants or needs, and users have felt that. So when they announce Recall, they have no earned trust. No one believes their assurances. There’s no good faith to cushion this. And it turns out everyone was right not to grant them that trust.

Does that mean I’d ever use an Apple device? Hell no. I value my privacy, but I value it on my terms, not Apple’s, and I will never use a device that creates privacy through taking power from the user.

Maybe the central problem is racing to put other people out of work period, regardless of who they are. Maybe putting people out of work is not a net benefit for society, it’s actually negative in the long run, and only truly a benefit for shareholders. They don’t need any more of those at the expense of the working class.

filling in the gaps in parts of town where it is impractical or cost-prohibitive to install a water fountain.

As usual, if it’s a gap in our public services, the answer is not “let a private company do it” it’s “tax the fucking rich and use that money to improve our public services”.

Those water fountains didn’t even need to be water fountains. This was basically just a bastardized version of what they do in the UK. There’s a program over there called Refill, that businesses and public places participate in. You use a free app that shows you the locations of participating places, and those places have refill points, all for free.

This person probably saw that and thought “let’s ditch the free and the volunteer participation part, build unnecessary fountains in unsustainable areas, and try and make some money off that sweet public utility”

No, it’s going to make assumptions about what was important in that meeting and try to bullet point it. And that won’t actually work well enough to count on, and if it misses something, you won’t know.

I also can’t imagine many managers will be happy about this, because the whole point of calling a meeting is that they want your attention. After a manager ends up lecturing a meeting full of bots a couple times, and someone misses something that was brought up in a meeting they ostensibly attended, they’ll complain, and IT will be instructed to block it.

And I can’t exactly blame them, honestly. I’m not fan of unnecessary meetings but if I’m managing a team of people, I’d want to know I’m engaging with them, not Copilot.

And as an employee, I’m not about to let an AI be caught doing any part of my job, because that’s just giving management “ideas”

You also shouldn’t keep using software with known vulnerabilities. You can find a maintained fork of Chromium with continued Manifest V2 support or choose another browser like Firefox.

It’s disgusting how this exact idea is used to push users away from things they want, and no matter what they claim, you can’t convince me this isn’t part of how they design certain updates. When the customer has no choice but to update, the company has no reason to make the update appealing. They can actively make it all worse and worse and worse, while continuing to scare users into accepting it.

I’m tired of companies hiding behind “security” to mask anti-consumer shit, and I’m tired of the security community helping them shovel that shit while acting like the consumer is a fool for not wanting to eat it.

Are Microsoft a big, evil company?

A. No, that’s insanely reductive. They’re super smart people, and sometimes super smart people make mistakes. What matters is what they do with knowledge of mistakes.

I have no doubt there are smart employees, but they don’t call the shots. Case in point.

The dude set up a strawman argument, then didn’t even bother to burn it down properly.

Bad enough I have to let Microsoft constantly run on my phone, no way Adobe gets that privilege too.

Affinity Photo is on another planet compared to photoshop.

Other than 32 bit, what else have you got that actually sets it apart?

Because the single purchase license thing doesn’t look like it’s sticking around.

And the fact they provide those configurations is important in and of itself. Configurable software is falling more and more out of fashion.

The value is likely that they’re selling it. Because they’re a non-profit, and they have to make money somehow. Or they’re using it to develop some kind of ai search function.

But the important, critical fact here is that Mozilla has routinely demonstrated that they can be trusted when they tell you “You can turn this off, and if you turn this off, it is actually off, and it will stay off.”

You will never see that from Google or Microsoft or any of the others.

Look at the part where they mentioned that if you already disabled telemetry, this new telemetry is also disabled. Think about how rare that is nowadays with any consumer software from most big for-profit tech companies. New bullshit is always on by default, even if you disabled it previously. The fact Mozilla respected that puts them miles ahead of any of their competitors.

As for the “path they’re going on”, I don’t know what to tell you, man. Every company is on this same path right now. The economics of the internet and the tech industry have gone to absolute shit, where privacy, user choice, competitive markets, and non-profits are all dying a slow painful death to enrich wall street. Mozilla will probably get caught in it too, but the best we can hope for is they hold out the longest.

Are we ignoring the part where you can disable it the same way you always could?

They even when out of their way to assure you if you already had telemetry disabled, absolutely nothing is changing for you and no data is being collected now.

reply guys surfing in from elsewhere

I love this term.

They really do love storming in anywhere someone deigns to besmirch the new object of their devotion.

My assumption is, if it isn’t some techbro that drank the kool aid, it’s a bunch of /r/wallstreetbets assholes who have invested in the boom.

I understand your feeling, but I think massive advertising is needed.

Why is it “needed”?

This is high level marketing, basically telling the general public there is another way other than big tech

Why do they care about attracting all these people?

Every one of them increases their operating costs, and doesn’t provide revenue if they stay in the free tier. Why do they want to increase their numbers so badly?

Why isn’t it enough to just make a good product and let that be what brings people in?

The only reason for this kind of aggressive advertising is because they’re making a push for growth. They want to become one of those “big tech” companies.

Let me be clear, I’m not shaming them for advertising their services. But I’m uncomfortable with the scale and aggression with which they do it. They are putting money into this, and a lot of it. It’s not like they’re a non-profit, the end goal is pretty obvious here.

We’ve been through this before with so many other tech companies, Proton will be no different. It’s just entering the honeymoon phase, is all.

This is honestly what puts me off using Proton. They advertise way too much and way too aggressively. It’s just a bad vibe for a company that’s trying to set itself up as an alternative to Google.

I use Tutanota but I’m looking to find something else because I’m sick of platforms that lock you into their ecosystem, and the fact they don’t provide any means of using other mail clients like Thunderbird has become a deal breaker.

Problem is there doesn’t seem to be consensus on third place.

At any point in the process, does it warn you about setting up recovery with personal email addresses?

Feels like with as much as Proton advertises nowadays as a privacy protecting service, they need to be taking into consideration that a lot of their customers now are going to be average users who don’t know anything about proper OpSec. They should be much clearer about what things they can’t protect you from.

It shouldn’t be in a press release like this, they should be explaining the difference between privacy and anonymity to the customer. It’s not like their marketing team isn’t aware of the fact most people don’t know any better.

It’s in their best interests, too, because it doesn’t matter how many times you say “we provide privacy not anonymity”, the headlines are a bad look.

I know it’s not the point, but I love the completely arbitrary bit where they’re walking down a road together, and has absolutely no bearing on anything the happens.

My Jellyfin is also running media from recycled HDDs from work. No where near this impressive haul, but it was nice to be able to get a solid 10 TBs for free to get my server going.

It is shocking because they did it after the investigation had started, which is monumentally stupid.

You can destroy any records you want at any time, unless there’s an investigation underway or you have good reason to believe one will be starting. At that point, you’re destroying evidence.

Other problems include newpipe having an old material interface

That’s a selling point for me.