noughtnaut

Oh man I love Cliff Stoll. His completely over the top hyper TED talk with his notes literally scribbled on his hand. 🤓👌❤️

I love the discourse here, it’s so nice to see. Not only because I, too, am a Mint user for practical purposes (MATE flavour, even, in spite of running on pretty modern hardware).

By the way, I am obligated to commend you on your username, cap’n. It’s not much, but it’s enough, right?

To be fair, changing your browser agent is on the technical side of things, in my opinion this goes beyond “refilling washer fluid in your car” but more like swapping out the licence plate light for a different colour - few people realise that’s even a thing you can do, and that it has any effect.

Moreover, users should not be blamed when it’s clearly the other party who’s being willfully obstructionist. But I understand your sentiment. It’s tiresome, right?

Companies are even worse. My girlfriend’s boyfriend was trying to buy a train ticket from Deutsche Bahn, and there just were none available. It was baffling. He asked me to check (because he was in a hotel room) and I, too, could not find any.

Turns out, they refuse to sell tickets to customers that use Linux!!?! Change the OS in your browser ID string, and magically all sorts of tickets appear!

Like wtf, how purposefully evil do you have to be to run a business like that? What is even the point?

And sad that, even so, Firefox has been a rounding error in global usage data. 😢

I’ve been using Firefox since it existed, never been disappointed. I just hope that it (or Mozilla) didn’t eventually go bankrupt and dies. You can say what you want about the politics and financing of Mozilla but we desperately need them to prevail.

Sure, you can not have a cell phone. Then you also can’t communicate with your kids’ teachers, or receive communication from them. Which will have… other consequences.

Please don’t underestimate how fucked “modern” citizens are. Privacy is no longer an easy choice.

You might see a banking app (including phone-based payments, using the phone as a card or using a payment app) as mere convenience, and to a large degree it is, but aside from that there are also national ID apps that are simply impossible to live without in some EU countries. There are exceptions for seniors and disabled folk, but even they miss out on some critical social access that’s just not realistic for eg. parents of school-age children.

Step two-and-a-half is to install Ventoy on a usb stick once and then you can simply copy over any iso files you’ll every need and get a neat boot menu (plus persistent storage position) from Ventoy. Like a scroll wheel on a mouse, there is no going back after having tried it.

It’s bloody magic. Super convenient, and tellingly the last iso I ever “burned” - now it’s all simple file copy operations from any device. 😎👌

Thank you for asking.

The theme can be answered a number of different ways.

• In one sense, I strive to at least support (if not outright focus on) minorities rather than simply catering to the mononormative.
• In another sense, one goal that doesn’t directly relate to dating is to offer a platform that is independent (of Match Group) and EU-centric in terms of both client focus and technical infrastructure.
• I want to bring back a lot of what has been lost to enshittification in other apps, things I’ve personally been missing and also seen being a common complaint when dating apps in general are discussed online. If you’ve been on, say, OkC more than a year, you’ll probably remember valuable, useful features that just aren’t there anymore.
• If you’ve been on any dating app, you know how icky and frustrating and just straight up annoying the apps themselves are (before you even factor in the behaviour of the users, and their reasons).

Ideally, a dating app should have massive amounts of transient users. If you have users who’ve been there for years, you’re not giving them what they want (but you might be giving them something else in order to keep them hooked…).

So as for the monetary goal, there are many gates that must be passed before finances become a critical issue. I’ve published things as open source, and if six users find you, you have six happy users. A dating app not only requires a massive amount of users, it also requires significant local user density for it to be useful. I am fundamentally aiming for low cost of upkeep with the goal of enabling the app to survive having relatively few users, even if they aren’t paying much.

I can say this much: I’ve done the math and am pretty confident in being able to deliver at a fraction of the cost of any existing offering. My plan is to offer no free tier (huge barrier, I am aware) but then offer a very-reasonably-priced paid tier that unlocks everything. I want the app to be transparent, helpful, and eschewing dark patterns and money-grabbing schemes. I don’t expect you to believe it, but I’m not doing this for the purpose of profit; I just don’t think a dating app that’s entirely free is going to work very well vis-a-vis attracting high-quality participants.

Do I think I’ve “cracked” or “solved” online dating? Absolutely not. There are things I know I will never do, other things I know I’ll be (almost) the only one to do, and a number of topics and issues that I don’t know even can be resolved in any meaningful way.

This is somewhat relatable: I’m building a dating app without blackjack and hookers. Well, at least without the blackjack.

Not gonna lie, it’s not a weekend project! And that’s before even considering the eventual launch and marketing.

I wonder if you would find Doctorow’s “Little Brother” more palatable. It’s set in “modern times” (ugh, depressing to admit that no, it’s more accurately set in recent past before things in real life went even crazier out of whack). Also, the main characters are teens and young adults, and while the target audience is “young adults” it can certainly be an eye-opening experience for adult “sheeple” too (not implying you’re one, to be clear).

I’ve never heard of this, that is very interesting and definitely goes to the top of my reading list. Thank you!

I do! I switched from KDE 3.5 (whenever that was current). I love KDE’s approach to making everything adjustable (as opposed to Gnome’s “you’ll get one button and you better love it”) but with KDE 4 on the horizon it seemed to bloat too much for my tastes.

I love how it’s a (for me) perfect mix of making a ton of things adjustable while appearing extremely no-frills. Easy on the ram, CPU, and eyes. 👌

I’ve been nothing but thrilled with every single OnePlus I’ve ever had. Some bought used, some new. My current 10 Plus Pro (stock OS due to banks and shit) I must’ve dropped 200 times before the screen finally cracked just the other day (too expensive to fix but it still works fine).

So you’re running bash “as if you’re on the host systen”. What’s the benefit?

Since the first time of seeing it on a Mac (Plus, probably), I’ve been in love with Palatino. It just seems to flow so nicely, and the italic is gorgeous.

I missed it for many years until I found TeX Gyre Pagella.

Adding to Vincent’s reply, if Firefox truly goes away then we’d be looking to (only) Ladybird to save us.

Notification led that is separate from the display. Custom per-app colour and blink pattern.

Yup. Screw thinness, I’d love to have one that’s twice as thick as any modern phone, but with a two week battery life. You know, like we used to have.

Stick a 5G phone into a Psion Series V or Psion Revo and I’d buy them for the whole family.