A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.

Admin of SLRPNK.net

XMPP: [email protected]

Matrix: @prodigalfrog:matrix.org

  • 190 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Quite damning of Proton, but unfortunately isn’t too surprising after the CEO’s pro-trump comments.

    I would say they have proven themselves untrustworthy and mostly concerned with profit-seeking, and would suggest moving to alternatives if you use their services.

    Mullvad is a solid VPN (Tor is better), and Posteo, Tuta, or Disroot are good email providers (don’t use email for anything sensitive, private providers only give protection against survailence capitalism).

    EDIT: With more context provided by @[email protected], this recent action by them was, perhaps, not as cut and dry as it seemed. (Though I still am skeptical of their integrity, personally)


  • To be fair, Windows 10 has some meaningful upgrades compared to 7.

    1. Windows 10 can handle radical new hardware (such as swapping a drive to a totally different PC) much more gracefully, where as Windows 7 could sometimes freak out and crash or not boot.
    2. Windows updates were ungodly slow to install on Windows 7, but were much quicker on Windows 10.
    3. Windows 10’s ability to automatically download drivers was very convenient, bringing it more in-line with the experience of Linux, which generally has drivers out of the box.
    4. Windows 10 was generally quite stable, even more stable than 7, in my experience.

    But with all those advantages, came many downsides as well:

    1. Windows 10’s system settings interface is an absolute clusterfuck, making changing simple things like the refresh rate of a monitor difficult to change or find due to being buried behind so many sub-menus. The Windows 10 settings are usually a dumbed down version, with a small easy to miss hyperlink somewhere on the page to bring up the older Windows XP/7 era settings panel that actually adjusted the thing you needed.
    2. Windows 10 has a lot of annoying pop-ups for features that barely anyone uses or wants, but likely helps monetize the OS.
    3. Windows 10 incorporated ads into the start menu. Fucking ads!
    4. Windows 10 was a privacy nightmare compared to 7, and the privacy settings were in a constant state of flux after an update
    5. Windows 10’s automatic driver installer had a downside, in that it would automatically download an outdated version of your GPU driver automatically before you could beat it to the punch with the proper up-to-date one from the GPU vendor’s website.


  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.nettoPrivacy@lemmy.mlPayment privacy
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    2 days ago

    Since Taler isn’t operating in the same way as the wild-west of crypto, and needs to secure the adoption of existing banking institutions, its rollout is going to be much slower.

    It hasn’t been widely adopted yet, but the big change that occured is it only just recently released a stable 1.0 version that makes wider adoption possible, and passed some essential security audits, including for iOS.

    In addition to recently being approved and available in Switzerland, it is also planned to be added to a Ko-fi-like payment/donation system thanks to a grant by the NLnet foundation, which will hopefully enable it to gain wider adoption by creators or youtubers, as an example. In the future, it could become a replacement for Zelle if more banks adopt it (I suspect credit unions would be more likely to give it a try, if they became aware of it by their membership, and it was requested a lot).

    There’s a bit more discussion of it over at [email protected], if you’re interested.

    It likely does have more representation and mind-share here on lemmy since it aligns with the ideals of many users here in particular, we’re going to be more tuned into alternatives like that compared to the wider population.






  • My first tech was a Sega Genesis and the family’s 486 DX2 computer running Windows 95.

    While I had access to new genesis games by renting them, getting new games for the 486 was a rare event due to how expensive software was back then, and there were few places we would visit that sold it (mostly what Costco had available). That meant rotating through a lot of the same games for quite a while, which meant I would eventually get bored of them for a while until I would try them again a month later.

    The effect of that is it seemed to encourage me to find other ways away from the tech to entertain myself, like play with legos, or head outside to invent games with the neighbor’s kids.

    I don’t want to assume that type of exposure to tech is ideal just because it’s what I experienced, but I wonder if an artificial software limit may be a good idea today for young kids to encourage them to find new ways to solve boredom with their imagination instead of it being done for them exclusively.

    I’ve also seen parents start their kids off with 90’s tech and games, and slowly introduce them to newer tech/games each year, which is an interesting idea.

    I think I’d start them off with a raspberry pi running a retro emulation os and a small selection of the best games from the 90’s, a small camera, an mp3 player, and a Linux PC without internet access, but with access to some edutainment games (humongous entertainment, some point’n’clicks, etc), and programing tools with kids appropriate teaching material.

    Once they’re old enough, I’d give them internet access, and eventually a phone so they can keep in touch with their friends.









  • There are very few dedicated passenger liners left in the world that aren’t luxury travel cruises. The only one I’m aware of that has a US route only goes across the atlantic from NY to the UK.

    The only sea based options to get to China from the US would be to try to get passage on a cargo ship going the same way, or charter a small vessel for the voyage, which would likely cost thousands.

    It would be nice to tax plane travel heavily, and then subsidize sail travel to make that more viable, along with mandatory consecutive monthly vacation time for all jobs, like the EU has.