I had an on site interview with the owner of a small IT company. He was 30 minutes late (and I’d arrived 10 minutes early to be… ya know, punctual).

He offered no apologies and had this whole arrogance surrounding him. Complained that he had to drive to the office for this. Then after 5 minutes, it was obvious he didn’t even bother to look over my CV and was completely unprepared for the interview. … and somehow this was my fault.

Of course, the interview didn’t go well (for either of us). He offered a lowball 30% less than the average salary, I was looking for 30% above. I rolled my eyes, shook hands and left.

Later, I got a call back from the recruiter “I had no idea you were asking that much. From what X (the owner) said, this was a complete disaster.” I said, “I agree” and politely hung up.

In hindsight, I should have probably insisted on rescheduling (or just left) after 20 minutes. But, I was young and didn’t have many interviews under my belt. So, I took it as a learning experience.

Facebook, now it’s your turn…

It’s the “stringing it all together” that could be problematic.

If you have multiple clients (desktop/cellphone) modifying the same entry (or even different entries in the same “database” ). You need something smart enough to gracefully handle this or atleast tell you about it.

I did the whole “syncing” KeePass and it was functional, but it also meant I needed to handle conflicts - which was annoying. I switched and really appreciate the whole “it just works” with self-hosted bitwarden.

I quickly skimmed the title and got:

“What is the first… mind… reading… question?”

answer: “Do these pants make me look fat?”

From the OP

The China-backed intruders, referred to as Storm-0558, broke into Microsoft’s network and stole a digital skeleton key that allowed the hackers unfettered access to U.S. government emails stored in Microsoft’s cloud. According to a government-issued postmortem of the cyberattack, the State Department identified the intrusions because it paid for a higher-tier Microsoft license that granted access to security logs for its cloud products, which many other hacked U.S. government agencies did not have.

Following the China-backed hacks, Microsoft said it would start providing logs to its lower-paid cloud accounts from September 2023.

Oh great! Until this incident, security is considered a “premium feature”. I really want off this “up sell to premium” ride.

Roku is horrible. I bought a Roku Soundbar (speakers) for my TV and for reasons unknown, I had to (temporarily) hook it up to the internet to “activate” and download the firmware.

It’s such a horrible glimpse of the consumers future.

In addition, you can force your cellphone to GSM/2G (ie: super slow internet).

Depending on what your TV does when it “activates”, if it just needs to “activate/register” - it should be fine. If it needs to “update/upgrade/add a bunch of crapware” - Your internet will be so slow, you can turn it off before it’s finished (note: there is a slim chance that, this could also put your TV in a broken state - if it does, simply do a factory reset and try again)

Oh, I absolutely agree. Licensing is where the big difference is at, but that makes sense though, as ARM and RISC-V are both RISC based processors.

It’s loosely akin to comparing AMD vs Intel. Of course, you cannot pop-out an RISC-V and replace it with an ARM. However, the PCB’s should contain all the same parts, meaning they’ll have both have a similar price.

Unlike Intel/AMD, which you’d need extra capacitor, heat sinks, whatever - to help it handle all that extra power those CISC processors need (which results in heat).

Yeah, but RISC-V also costs 1/10th the price of a Pi.

I don’t want PCs to be like smartphones. I don’t want locked bootloaders.

I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but since Microsoft made TPM mandatory for Windows 11+, locked down bootloader are on their way.

Basically, TPM allows (Windows) software to validate/verify the integrity of the OS and hardware. This also (could) include the bootloader/bios if Microsoft chooses to do so.

TPM is the equivalent of attestation on Android, which is the exact reason why your Banking App won’t work on your rooted/custom Android Phone.

That being said, we should embrace ARM. X86/AMD has 30+ years worth of “history” baked into each ( CISC) chip. This complexity is why your PC draws soooo much power and generates soooo much heat.

Windows Mixed Reality (ie: Windows VR) was deprecated and removed from Windows 11.

So, if you have a WMR VR Set, you’re going to be stuck with Windows 10 (or an even lesser supported Version of windows 11 - v 23H2).

It really sucks, given the price point I’ve throughly enjoying my Odyssey+. I’ve had it for 4 years, but now I’d need to decide if I dual boot (which sucks) or see if another VR headset reaches my price point (which is also dumb, because I don’t find the O+ to be “that bad”).

I’d proposed a potential solution.

I’ll paraphrase : Currently, every Lemmy instance (ie: Lemm.ee, Lemmy.world, etc) is an island. This is one of the strengths of Lemmy (Federation) as we don’t have to worry about information being restricted, censored, manipulated (ie: Reddit).

However, as things are currently, this Federation comes at the expense of splitting the community between instances. [email protected] vs [email protected] is a perfect example. Posts are either duplicated (which creates noise) or it fosters a “Lemmy instance death by starvation”. Meaning, more and more conversations will eventually drift towards one of the two asklemmy communities, leaving the other one to “starve out”. This defeats the entire purpose of federating.

There has to be something better.

For example, instead of “every instance is an island”. Meaning the current hierarchy is “instance” - > “community” - > “post” - > “threads”. We could instead have “community (ie: asklemmy)” - > “post (ie: this post)” - > “instance (Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world, etc)” - > “threads (this comment)”.

From a technical perspective, it would mean that each instance (that’s interested in hosting this supercommunity) would replicate the community names and posts (Not the threads).

Lemmy already kind of does this, when a user pulls a post from another instance. For example, I’m on lemm.ee but when I view posts from [email protected], lemm.ee will retrieve and cache it on lemm.ee. As long as each instance would share a unique identifier to associate the two communities/posts as “the same thing” (and this could simply be the hash of the community /post name). Everything else would be UI.

Each instance would take ownership of the copy of the community and post, which means they could moderate it according to their standards.

As an end user, you’d view a community and post, but the comments/threads would be grouped by the instance that hosts it. If there’s an instance you don’t like, you simply unsubscribe from it.

For future iterations, it might be nice if the instance itself would auto-subscribe or suggest other instances that host the same community to the user. Meaning, if I subscribed to [email protected], I’d automatically be subscribed to [email protected]. However, as the user, these are all separate subscriptions, so I can customize it as I see fit.

I think OP is referring to the fact that bad actors, who are exploiting facets of SEO (rather then providing “meaningful” content), use to need to programically generate content (pre-AI/LLM).

For a real reader, it was obvious (at a quick glance) this was meaningless garbage. As they would often be large walls of text that didn’t make sense, or just lists of random key words.

With LLM/AI, they’re still walls of text and random key words, but now they grammatically/structurally correct and require no real effort to generate. Unfortunately, it means that the reader actually need to invest time in reading it. You’ll also notice a growing trend in articles (especially in “compare X vs Y” type articles), the same content is recycled and rephrased to “pad” the article and give it a higher SEO ranking.

“… be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”

I expect to have some website compatibility issues with Firefox/librewolf, as it does have a 3% share of the global browser market - so, website development energy is focused on the chrome/safari experience. However, 8+ years ago I felt I needed to use chrome at least every other day to view certain websites - it was frustrating.

I’m hoping (and willing to try it out) to see if this has improved.

Neato, I’ll check it out. I’m also trying out mull for android (as I’d like to keep my desktop/cellphone bookmarks/browser-history in sync)

Thanks for the comprehensive write-up. It convinced me to migrate back to Firefox.

I was on Firefox (8 years ago), moved to Chrome (I liked the non-admin/transparent update feature and Websites didn’t break like they did with ff), then moved to brave (basically chrome + more privacy), and now I’ll go back the Firefox (I hope I won’t encounter too many non-FF websites)

Microsoft creates thousands of tons of ewaste for no reason…

Of course there’s a reason, you said it yourself: TPM.

With TPM, Software will be able to cryptographically verify that the OS and Hardware are all unmodified. This’ll be an end to piracy and end to unauthorized modifications to your PC (“We’ve detected that you’ve installed an Ad Blocker, please remove it before accessing your banking website”)

This won’t happen overnight, but the forced hardware upgrade is all about control (Microsoft over you) and creating a walled garden to drive profits (like Apple).

You can take a look at Android’s attestation and how it prevents running your banking apps on a rooted cellphone as an example of things to come.

Illegal stuff? Sure block it, I totally respect the need to CYA.

Blocking lemmit.online 'cause it’s a bot, which yields low content and pollutes “All”? Block lemmynsfw, cause of NSFW content? … well, as an adult I’d prefer I could make that choice for myself and have it governed by my own tolerances.

The defederation topic and how it impacts me.

I’m an adult, if I find something offensive I’ll either block it or ignore it. However, not giving me the choice offends me and IMHO goes against what Lemmy and the fediverse was suppose to deliver.

I understand (and read) the reason’s why site owners defederate and I view it largely as “Lemmy isn’t mature enough to support more granular blocking - yet”, so I wait patiently and hope this trend towards defederation doesn’t turn into a powertrip by site owners “for the good of their users…”