Yeah, if they need you, but maintaining friendships is hard enough work if one doesn’t actively exclude oneself.

I have a bunch of friends from most corners of Europe, most highly educated, all of them use WhatsApp. I use Signal with those who are on there, but 90% are only on WhatsApp, so I am too.

Worse yet, my friends and family in my home country are almost all only on Facebook Messenger. I stopped using that entirely, and clumsily reach out on SMS whenever necessary. It has absolutely made it harder to stay in touch with people I care about.

I also avoid a lot of other social networks that would have been nice in order to keep in touch with my friends in other parts of the world, which is pretty much all of them as I travel. Pixelfed is nice, but my friends are still on Instagram. Or even Snapchat, even though I’m in my 30s.

Not all my friends are privacy nerds, and I wouldn’t want them to be either. So I just gently push for Signal whenever I can while I hold my nose and continue to run WhatsApp.

That’s part of enshittification I’d say. It’s all about squeezing your users for as much money as you can, and surveillance is part of that.

Yup, the nightly builds are already getting pretty good. Obviously not ready for prime time yet though.

Yeah, content is quickly being hidden behind all sorts of walls, and even governments are now passing laws to render content inaccessible without ID verification

I have just come to accept that the internet has shrunk. I liked it better back when it was smaller anyway. But it is frustrating whenever I have a problem that has been carefully solved by some random person on Reddit or some middle aged man on YouTube 20 years ago, only for it to be rendered inaccessible without giving up all kinds of privacy.

Atom to Pulsar?

I thought this tool was retired. But no,

In December 2023, he came out of retirement to lead Alphabet Inc. into the new era of Artificial General Intelligence, after the launch of ChatGPT. (wiki)

At least it seems they are on course to make their AI competitive with Grok.

I would also be careful citing transparently antisemitic organizations like the UN Wikipedia in relation to these issues

Really works as a counterargument against anything!

Notepad++, fucking what hahaha.

And yeah, it really does not take much research online to learn about gsconnect.

I don’t understand the hardware support part, but I also don’t understand “peripheral software that runs with many keyboards and mice”. If I had to install software to use my keyboard I would riot. Maybe I’m just too primitive.

Sometimes it seems to know that the paths are not the best, and I really force it to take the path I choose instead of more convenient ones. So it only suggests the rugged paths when I insist it goes “there, but via there there and there”. Generally I can make it through, and how overgrown a path is can change by the season, so it’s a bit tricky. At one point in Italy though I ended up at a Via Ferrata, at which point I obviously had to turn back.

I have Street Complete installed, so I’ve started leaving notes using that whenever I notice any issues. And to make contributions now and then, of course. :)

Organic Maps is fantastic. I particularly use it for hiking, and it’s fantastic. It finds some amazing trails that I would otherwise never have gone to. Sometimes they can be challenging or overgrown, so you have to know what you’re doing and be prepared to turn back if necessary, but I owe a lot of truly incredible experiences to this app.

It originates as a fork of Maps.me, from when Maps.me changed to closed source. Since then Organic Maps has grown to become a lot better than the project it originates from, at least according to my preferences.