Similarly I learned to properly type (which means using your pinkies) with Dvorak back in 2007. I stuck with it since anything is a gain beyond QWERTY & _ on the home row helps with programming & config.

If you haven’t learned to touch type, you may as well use a layout that is gonna strain you less in the long run.

Be wary of sunk cost fallacy. Sometimes you gotta bite the bullet & allow yourself to see it as some wasted money with the opportunity to start over with something with less lock-in or the boost in creativity of now having to work with new constraints.

FxOS only targeting low–mid-range phones in developing markets only seemed a bit odd. Basically no one had heard of it & these places largely choose used/old version of premium products to buying budget unless they have to. There was hype in the dev community about getting a B2G device, but there was hardly availability & specs were abysmal for an OS running a non-fast interpreted language like JavaScript. Not only that but the marketing was around openness & developer-friendliness—things average consumers don’t care about (even if they should).

Imagine in a parallel universe where the idea was managed properly & B2G left the phone sphere too—where school kids were required to get a FxBook instead of Chromebooks… 😶

A US corporation cornering the market then charging their own fees to use the service (surfing & scraping are basically the same action)? Never seen this before. Sounds uber evil—I couldn’t airbnbelieve it.

This assumes that just since abuse could happen means we should block access for everyone. Folks might make illegal photocopies of books so we should ban libraries. I & others have done general scraping for our own uses that isn’t done in some abusive manner. But to assume a company beholden to US shareholder is going to “to the right thing” would be to go against the history of US corporations.

And you know who is going to be able to afford to do the scraping? Big US-based “AI Bros” that can do it with venture capital preventing the average user or researcher from grepping the net.

They are precisely deciding who can scrape what by sitting in the middle of like 30% of internet traffic & denying access. There is no way to tell if this ‘scraping’ is for research, hobby, commercial, or “AI” purposes; conveniently if it can make Cloudflare money, they’ll let you charge a toll. If Cloudflare cared about AI issues, they wouldn’t be having unpaid users solve/train their hCAPTCHA models just for visiting a site from Tor, a VPN, or even just a non-‘Western’ IP address. The fact that folks/businesses bought into this centralization is frightening—with little open access to information or allowing folks to stay anonymous (whatever their motivation).

Also don’t dare call someone “dumbass” if you can’t be bothered to turn on spell check or understand how commas work.

The gall of Cloudflare to think they can be the arbitrator of scraping… this is what happen when all y’all give a singular publicly-traded, US-based major control of the general internet infrastructure by purposefully letting them man-in-the-middle your production sites. Now they get to sell access to what was once an open internet. Instead every time Clouflare or Fastly go down, half of the internet goes down with them.

Nostalgia is a hard drug. You can still appreciate games from you childhood & not buy games or consoles from a evil company.

Movim is another web UX option (comes with posts + feeds that can easily be crawled as well so you don’t have everything stuck in the black hole of chat).

I don’t mind a ‘phone call’ so long as it isn’t actually using a phone number where ISPs can spy, but using some encrypted service.

I wish we could stop with smart TVs. I want a dumb TV with a nice screen & my own hardware without worrying about the data collection

Fuck all CEOs. Stop giving them platforms & celebrity where they get to be the symbol of products/services—which discounts all the labor done into something by the real folks building & making decisions.

That I could prefer: using a remote VM for the work & being able to opt out of a company provisioned device if possibre. It’s much easier to not pollute a VM & you will want to disable it as soon as you are done anyhow to free up local resources/connections.

Thanks for confirming some of my suspicions about how it all actually operates & the reasons for doing so.

I really just don’t like this in principle as it is way too easy to accidentally do private stuff out of convenience on a machine which is why I do like I said with BYOD & will be present for all attempts to troubleshoot a device. I don’t really see a conceptual different in my digital desktop vs. my physical one & I wouldn’t let an employer install a camera at my desk just as much or would I think it is cool for a business to have cameras in the bathroom just because they own the rental agreement. It feels like there should be some form of privacy even in these digital scenarios that never happens & it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Is there a solution to allowing users privacy in their system or is it only considered fully private property?

Why do IT teams think being able to snoop any users screen is a good thing? Leave folks alone. Get authorized key consent to SSH into their box iff necessary.

This is why I only work with BYOD operations…

We would have that freedom with Android too if those stupid banking apps stopped trying to dictate what you can run on your hardware & Google giving them more features to do so.

Always online with kernel-level anti-cheat has a tendency to not work, but that is probably a red flag since there are thousands of different games you can play that don’t snoop around ring-0

I’m still salty my current laptop is sold at a discount in the EU without a pre-installed OS due to laws in place–but where I am, I had no choice but to pay a Microsoft tax & immediately wipe it. I used to not connect to WiFi & just look around for a few minutes out of curiosity before wiping, but since 11 moved to Microsoft Account + WiFi required & all the telemetry on by default, I don’t even bother with that anymore.

Honestly I think many consumers go buy “computer” & have no concept that it has an operating system or that you can change it.

If you know there is an alternative, then yeah… wtf

2.8k seems about the sweet spot on a laptop to be from your face & see no pixels or even have to think about font hinting & the like. The bigger wins are OLEDs for blacks & picking up something with 100% DCI-P3.

This is not so much as an edorsement or recommendation, but you might check out the DAPs by Shanling or Hidiz if you have coin to spare. They use Linux & don’t publish kernel mods, but they do have inexpensive, very small, lightweight options that may fit your needs. I have one & it has a place to have a dedicate device to not chew thru my phone’s battery as well as function as a high-quality USB DAC in scenarios where you don’t have a jack (like my old laptop) or the DAC is horrible (like in my dock for my laptop).

I had an inkling of hope the 5 would bring it back after so many complaints. Instead they launched wireless earbud & doubled down on it. Dead to me too.

Kinda wild these weren’t really a thing. A lot of these DAP/DACs were already running Android & many folks don’t like carrying a second phone-sized device (my DAP is small on purpose for this… well & my previous phone didn’t haze microSD for extra storage). Was it something to do with complaince for the cell radios?

The big question mark to me would be if they open source those drivers & what not or make any required apps downloadable & sideloadable. I would make something like this my next device if I knew I could flash LineageOS for microG on it & not, you know, lose all the audio stuff that makes it special. A lot of these Chinese brands haven’t even done the bare minimum GPL v2 compliance of releasing their kernels so we would have to see on that front. The ability to control your software is just as important as repairing your hardware.

It was the 4 that removed the jack not 5—despite user complaints about wanting it to return on the next model. But yeah, big L dropping the jack.

This is why self-hosting matters. Why distributed version control is more resilient. I haven’t yet used it but this is the sort of use gave for Radicle where folks seed the repo like a torrent & there is no meaningful centralized server that you could even go after.

Microsoft is not your friend. GitHub is owned by thah US-based, publicly-traded, for-profit megacorporation & will do the bidding of the other megacorporate wishes like taking down youtube-dl for the music industry and so on. Get your projects & communities on another platform.

I think folks bought into SUVs since they were bigger & selfishly less likely to take more damage in a crash. As such, with SUV tanks everywhere, being a pedestrian or in a small car on the road on in an SUV’s trajectory can often lead to lethal injury.

Read the Markdown spec where it says the > denotes a blockquote. There isn’t room to overload it without breaking that into something not backwards compatible (such as CommonmsMark which will follow the spec & render a blockquote—which, according to the HTML spec, must be text quoting a source). Just because some of the bigger players—namely the proprietary forks, Obsidian & MS GitHub—doesn’t mean it’s not breaking with the original spec. Go ahead & do it, but don’t lie & say it is Markdown or Markdown-compatible. Instead these entities try to push & sway everyone to adopt their syntax rather than working with say CommonMark with RFCs.

CommonMark has the ::: block syntax, but folks using this are relying on stringly-typed, not-well-defined options when they do ::: note as it just becomes a CSS class where anyone could style it.

As callouts are such an everpresent construct in technical writing, documentation, & so on, what you need is first-class support. Docbook as an output has first-class support, but sadly W3 shot down the last attempt at an element proposal (but can be properly by manually constructed with role=note & aria-labelledby). reStructuredText & AsciiDoc are both lightweight markup syntaxes that support first-class callouts & other elements (definition lists, summary/details, figures, etc.) as well as having first-class metadata (like basically every other creative work format for images, audio, documents).

All of this is to say what Microsoft is doing is no longer Markdown & only they hold the keys to the spec (you can complain in their forums, but you can’t submit an RFC or pull request). But also, Markdown / CommonMark are honestly ill-suited for the task of technical writing since it doesn’t support basic features for that task (embedding HTML defeats the purpose & portability)—and instead we have a lot of ad-hoc hacks & bad HTML output due to choosing the wrong tool for the job.

The real issue is the base Markdown spec is absolutely barren. Folks have tried to shoehorn Markdown into something general purpose so everyone & their brother needed to fork it to add some level of usability since base Markdown isn’t suitable for blogging, technical documentation, white papers, etc. which it was never designed to do

OP, if you want an arguably easier escape from MS GitHub, have you considered not using Git? The unfortunate current truth is these two are married to the point that a lot of new (& even experienced) folks think MS GitHub is Git & even if you start a project elsewhere, somebody will fork it onto the platform the the SEO bots will put their fork at the top of the ranks. You might be better off choosing a different DVCS all together as the interoperability will be much more difficult. That said, it wouldn’t just be to escape Microsoft, but also since there are a lot of interesting, less explored ideas in the space (like how learning functional or object-oriented code for the first time will broaden your perspective for tools & ideas you already know). Personally, I find the Patch Theory-based VCSs pretty compelling so it could be worth it to dig into Pijul or Darcs.

Due to a generation being taught only Microsoft GitHub’s system, many forges have seen it imperative to copy all of those patterns—including all of the bad ones. Being a clone of MS GitHub isn’t a very compelling reason to be on another platform, but so few are looking to actually fix the issues Microsoft would be too big/slow to adapt to—e.g. the entire pull request model being so slow for getting it merges.

Time isn’t the only thing you give up when creating accounts—there is the terms of service, data collection, and supporting a proprietary held by a US megocorporation service by participating on it which is not helping the change many would like to see. This also fails to mention that as a US service they must comply with US sanctions so a section of users couldn’t create accounts if they wanted.

You gotta consider the inverse as well. There are a lot of folks that would more happily create an account with a free software service but will only reluctantly use MS GitHub. It’s the same community-dividing tactic as putting all other communications on Discord/Slack which cut off a part of the community that wants to live the ethos by using free software/services to create free software/services.

Small aside: Microsoft GitHub’s proprietary Markdown fork is certainly not 90% compatible—most egregious IMO was overloading blockquote semantics with callouts which breaks semantics all over the web. Some providers & forks have had to support their fork due to the monopoly control MS GitHub asserts.

A little less lock-in is literally a little bit better

You’re supposing every tech/audio enthusiast here wants the same shitty setup as the masses? The fact is there is basically one brand still offering headphone jacks in a flagship that you can unlock … where the point of Android was all the delicious innovations of each OEM. But they saw how profitable selling branded earbuds could be so now you have next to 0 options.

When you plug in in to charge, the device is at rest. When you plug in headphones, there’s a high chance it is in a pocket or otherwise in a state where the device is moving which will be a lot more wear than just idling charging.

ANC makes the baby crying more pronounced & that’s more annoying than the rumble of a bus. +1 to passive noise cancelation on silicone tips. A bit more in general gets thru, but the it isn’t amplifying voices & other loud sounds. Brains are pretty good at turning out the rabble of a cafeteria or transportation.

Even the $300+ pairs are hardly ‘decent’. The sound signature is all over the place & overly bassy.

I use Guitarix to emulate effects when jamming by myself & the latency matters quite a lot when trying to hear the audio in my in-ear monitors. I couldn’t image using wireless from the bass guitar back to the laptop back to ear buds… would be too much lag to where you wouldn’t be hearing exactly what you are playing & a lot of folks mention using JACK & different kernel parameters for the latency, but I am no expert in these topics.