Luke

This kind of confusion illustrated by Telegram users is exactly why it was the right thing to do for privacy when Signal removed support for SMS because it’s not encrypted. People still whine endlessly about it, but most users are not very savvy, and they’ll assume “this app is secure” and gleefully send compromised SMS to each other. All the warnings and UI indicators that parts of the app were less secure (or not at all in the case of SMS) would be ignored by many users, resulting in an effectively more dangerous app. Signal was smart to remove those insecure features entirely.

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point here (I have no idea why people engage with shorts, maybe they do love that format) but I wanted to push back a little on the idea that a product must be popular simply because corporations continue to offer them. Especially with social media, where users are actively discouraged from making their own decisions as much as possible by The Algorithm.

I think there are plenty of examples of things that people continue to use (and often even pay for the “privilege”) despite major aspects of those things being generally reviled by everyone who uses them:

• ad infested apps and websites
• gaming microtransactions
• a new phone every year
• cable service
• insurance
• HOAs
• gasoline
• Amazon
• pants and dresses without pockets

Right! It’s definitely fulfilling the purpose OP stated here in this post, as long as that’s what you’re using it for. I’m just pointing out that it doesn’t do the other things it claims to do in the readme for the repo, so that’s something to be aware of.

This seems like a valuable utility for concealing writing style, though I feel like the provided example fails to illustrate the rest of the stated goal of the project, which is to “prevent biases, ensuring that the content is judged solely on its merits rather than on preconceived notions about the writer” and “enhance objectivity, allowing ideas to be received more universally”.

The example given is:

You: This is a demo of TextCloak!!!

Model: “Hey, I just wanted to share something cool with you guys. Check out this thing called TextCloak - it’s pretty neat!”

The model here is injecting bias that wasn’t present in the input (claims it is cool and neat) and adds pointlessly gendered words (you guys) and changes the tone drastically (from a more technical tone to a playful social-media style). These kinds of changes and additions are actually increasing the likelihood that a reader will form preconceived notions about the writer. (In this case, the writer ends up sounding socially frivolous and oblivious compared to the already neutral input text.)

This tool would be significantly more useful if it detected and preserved the tone and informational intent of input text.

OnlyOffice can also be integrated with NextCloud or WordPress or a bunch of other stuff. I believe it can also be used standalone. Personally, I found it’s interface much more polished and usable than Collabora, though it’s been a couple years since I compared.

Next up: Discord!

I think you underestimate how oblivious many users are when it comes to using software.

Your statement did leave some wiggle room to quibble over what exactly “very popular” means, though I don’t see how popularity is a useful metric when we’re talking about free software which doesn’t rely on user purchases for revenue. Ultimately it comes down to how funding the development of each software is accomplished, and whether that can be done effectively without selling out.

However, if we must compare funding strategies based on popularity, then we can. I’m not sure where you got your usage numbers from, but I’ll use your percentage to normalize for the number of employees paid through the funding strategies of both examples to compare the effectiveness of the approaches:

• Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation together have roughly 840 employees as of 2020 (the latest numbers available on Wikipedia). I’m not sure how they split up who does what for developing the software, but I seriously doubt the vast majority of those 840 employees are developers.
• Blender Foundation has a team of 31 people (as of 2022). Most of them are developers/engineers/designers directly involved with improving the software.

For purposes of discussion, I’ll assume that you are correct that Blender has 2% of the popularity of Firefox. Normalizing that for comparison, 2% of 840 Mozilla employees is 16.8 employees (round down because you can’t have 0.8 of a person).

In other words, if Firefox were only 2% as popular as it is now (thus making it equally as popular as you say Blender is), Mozilla would be paying 16 developers with it’s funding strategy.

Conversely, Blender is able to pay 31 developers using their funding strategy. This means that, even when accounting for popularity, Blender’s funding strategy is 2x more effective than Mozilla’s at paying developers to work on their software.

Again, I don’t agree that popularity is an important metric to compare here, but even when we do so, it’s clear that it is entirely possible to fund software without resorting to tired old capitalistic funding models that result in the increasingly objectionable violations of user privacy that Mozilla engages in lately. They could choose to do things differently, and we ought not to excuse them for their failure of imagination about how to fund their business more ethically. Especially when perfectly workable alternative funding models are right there in public view for anyone to emulate.

it’s simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation

Please don’t excuse unethical and exploitative behavior by pretending that it’s unavoidable.

There are examples of other funding models available; for example, what the Blender Foundation does. It turns out, if a FOSS effort focuses on their community, makes users feel involved and important, asks in good faith for contributions and suggestions, treats people with respect, maintains funding and organizational transparency, and has consistent ethical standards… it can work out very well for them. No selling out required. No data harvesting required. No shady deals with Google required.

It’s better than Season 8, which is of course just about the lowest bar in existence, but worth noting when talking GoT.

The plot was kind of just a borderline uninteresting version of Downton Abbey with way more blood and incest, but the characters felt correct for the world and the acting and production was on point. Definitely worth a watch, but just don’t expect it to be anything on the level of Seasons 1-4 of the original show.

You got all that when you didn’t even finish the first episode? Damn, you are a tough audience.

I thought the show was pretty decent. It wasn’t literally perfect, but it was entertaining and beautifully shot. Some of the acting was kinda underwhelming, but some others did a great job IMO.

Especially Morfydd Clark, Joseph Mawle, and Ismael Cruz Córdova as Galadriel, Adar, and Arondir, respectively. Sophia Nomvete as Disa gave one of my favorite performances yet of a Dwarven character, and I enjoyed her scenes immensely.

I’ll probably rewatch that show more often than I will the Hobbit movies, which makes it a solid entry by my reckoning, and it’s okay that it wasn’t perfect.

Wasn’t that the Loki show, where all of time is run by a boring dystopian corporate bureaucracy?

Now that I think of it, I guess you’re right, that show probably did do better than Black Adam.

AdGuard has a list of trusted DNS providers, which seems like a good source. Many of the ones in that list are free as well.

Looking through their comment history, they proclaim their honesty quite often, it’s pretty funny when you’re looking for it 😆

I’ve now tagged them so I’ll remember that they are very honest:

I’ve been enjoying Apostrophe:

No idea if this is a useful suggestion, but I saw it spoken of in another thread about CAD software: there’s a free and open source plugin called BlenderBIM that is apparently a decent option.

Vortex seems to work fine using Lutris now. I’m not sure when it changed, but at some point recently I figured I’d give it a shot again and just downloaded and ran their installer exe and it worked.

Anybody who buys one of those vehicles is someone who sucks also. Fuck em all.

I think you need to take a break and get some perspective.

Besides, the Twitter link was already posted by the OP, why would it need to be posted again?

There’s no more funny malware.

That depends who gets infected.

You or me infected by malware? No thanks!

Egon Mark infected by malware? Absolute hilarity!