Hi cybre.space followers. I am moving to @noracodes. This account is no longer in use. Love y'all. <3

@devurandom right now they are shipping laptops where that is the default, yes.

@alexandria @devurandom on most computers you can enter your own keys yeah

@ulPa illegal != doesn't happen. the us govt has essentially given up.

@krolden people already complain that it is too many steps. tons of research shows that every additional click, even on the web, massively reduces how many people complete the task.

Microsoft has asked Lenovo to make it harder to boot Linux on their computers.

obviously I know some really cool people who work at Microsoft but it's very funny to me that people have been harping on us FOSS types for not instantly forgiving them for 20 years of malice, and now we've got this. [1]

when Microsoft is asking manufacturers to prevent people from booting other OSes and not communicating as to why, they are positioning themselves as the enemy. it's that simple. if they want to be trusted by Linux users, they need to earn that trust.

we're about 2y away, by my estimation, from living in a bizarro world where x86 PCs are less open to free desktops than ARM Macs.

1: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/60248.html

"Guy<T> <--- a type of guy" is now my most shared tweet lol

on the one hand: yes, the fediverse has a lot of incidental complexity and some important governance issues.

however i cannot possibly see how people think "lol just trust us bro, we'll host everything and we PROMISE not to do anything shady" is a better solution

in the spirit of constructive criticism, what i really want to see is a social media platform that:

- allows users to curate comments on their own posts
- allows creating, annotating, categorizing, sharing, and subscribing to block lists
- permits easy syndication both in and out
- has a clear, human-readable and machine-readable data export mechanism
- has clearly stated moderation ideals and a clear strategy for scaling moderation
- has a legal status that prevents it from taking venture investment or going public, and/or is owned by its operators
- is open source and self-hostable

if it's not all of those things at launch that's fine but it should at least be somewhere on the roadmap and shouldn't be clearly financially impossible based on your business model

it's extremely funny to me that my fraternal triplet friends from middle school have turned out as follows:

- a disabled queer woman doing activism, journalism, and advisory work in the offices of Congresspeople

- a (queer?) woman studying nutrition at the Master's level at UIC and working in social media marketing

- an abled straight cis dude who has, so far as I can tell, done nothing for the last six years but post memes on Twitter about how salty he is that gay people can get married

he was so convinced that he was the Superior Male Figure in their family and uh. holy shit dude

Well, this request has gone about as well as you might expect on other places on the 'net, so I guess I'll post it here and see if I get anything more useful

I'm trying to regain some of my time for fitness, and I find that the easiest way for me to become interested in something is to spend a lot of time reading or listening to information about it.

Unfortunately, I tend to see a lot of glorification of disordered eating, blatant fatphobia, and generally pretty unsympathetic attitudes in a lot of fitness and "health" content, and I'd rather not take psychic damage every time I try to learn about what the best kind of sitting stretches are. If anyone knows of any YouTube channels, podcasts, or blogs that you've read or listened to that provide useful and interesting fitness information without this kind of toxicity, I'd really love to hear about them!

The Astound (nee' RCN) tech, Juan, came to my condo today and helped discover some Extremely Wack Shit in my walls.

There are four rooms which have coaxial jacks in them. The feedline comes in into _yet another_ room, and then goes to three of the four; the fourth is daisy-chained with that one.

My modem wasn't working because it was in that fourth room and neither that or the room it was chained off of were connected. Juan reconnected them and also put a MoCA filter in front of the feedline so I can use the other jacks for MoCA.

I'm hyped, homeownership is excellent so far.

@gendor no, it means that people shouldn't be required to use proprietary software to access vital things. There always needs to be a cash, phone, and/or in-person way to handle necessary life stuff.

If you make a piece of software, and people are required to use that piece of software in order to, say, pay for their housing or groceries or pay back a loan, you are on the hook to make sure that software works for _every single person_ who needs to use it.

All of them.

Every screen reader user. Every person with muscle issues who can't use a mouse. Everyone who doesn't speak English. Everyone with three first names, or no last name. Everyone who is Irish or Jewish and has a ' in their name. Everyone with slow internet.

EVERY person.

"Oh we don't have the resources to do that!" Great. Then you don't have the resources to make and sell that kind of software. Pack up and go home.

@sa2tms idk though like. just buy a thinkpad and throw ubuntu on there, you don't have to fiddle w it really?

the options here are

1. don't use computer (and thus be forced out of society)
2. use proprietary stuff (and be surveilled and controlled in many small and large ways)
3. deal with the various issues of free software

and like. none of those are good options. but i do know which one i'm gonna pick!!!!!!

and there's the avenue that's like, "why don't you make stuff _for_ the corporate desktops that's _better_ in these ways" but like

that really misses the point?? first of all I am making stuff that I want to use, so it has to at least somewhat support the shit that I use. but also like, those platforms are engineered to make that impossible!

how can i build a good free audiobooks app for iOS when it's nigh on impossible to transfer files to an iOS device without proprietary services? how can i build a Windows privacy protecting browser wrapper when the operating system steals clicks out from under the user?

yeah it sucks that we have to build our own from sticks and twine but like?????? how the fuck else are we supposed to do this??????

and please don't take this as me saying that there are no problems with foss, that there's nobody awful there. obviously there are, i obviously know that.

but it is me saying that like. there are only so many volunteers who can do the work necessary to get us to a place where free desktops are universally accessible, it's gonna take a while, and it remains better than the alternatives for a lot of people. i want that group of people to include you but i cannot physically drag the entire fucking loosely affiliated mass of "people who write things that are GPL licensed" in that direction.

"it's so annoying when {there are ads in my toolbar, my apps get uninstalled without warning, i have to update in the middle of an important moment}"

"ah well here's a thing that might solve that problem for you"

"this isn't exactly like the original thing i was using"

"yep, some of that is on purpose but some of it is being worked on. there's not a lot of funding for some aspects of it so it might take a while"

"wow i can't believe your community is so hostile to newcomers"