Hutch

There are UI guidelines to make apps show something however useless it might be. https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/loading

I guess most developers go for a logo rather than a spinner. Maybe they worry that folk will forget what app they tapped on?

The rubber on mine turned sticky and I got rid of it. It was nasty to touch. I’d get another if it was a different material. Ended up with a G903 but not keen and want something new after just a year.

I do hope so. Temporary things have a stickiness that makes them semi-permanent. May as well go with 418 then :o)

CP is something that’s prevented me from hosting imaging solutions in the past, out of risk-avoidance so I’ve given it a lot of thought over the years. The lack of support from Cloudflare hasn’t helped, and making it USA-only weakens it as a general solution. That said, I’ll still run some sites via Cloudflare because I’m certain it tracks the content regardless without the mandate to enforce or alert, and that tracking may help lead to the original source [pure opinion here with hard facts, but I use CF for other reasons].

Now that I want to host fediverse things safely, it’s still a concern. I’m not in the US, I’m in the UK and host in Canada. Doesn’t matter greatly. They’d still take all my equipment while they investigate IF they had sufficient evidence to charge. But they WON’T because the CP is attributable to someone else. The main takeaway from all of this, for me, is to NEVER take backups of actual content, only settings/accounts. Holding archives is dangerous because only I would have access to their contents.

Defederate aggressively, block paths as needed, keep logs, don’t run it from home, etc etc. Keeping records gets most folk out of sticky legal situations.

451 or 403 would be more appropriate as it’s not available for legal reasons. 410 Gone would also fit well if it’s a permanent block. I’d steer clear of 5xx server side because it encourages retry-later. The client has requested something not served, firmly placing it into the 4xx category. The other problem with 503 in particular is that it indicates server overload, falsely in the case of a path ban.

I must have played with SUSE at some point, these words bring back horrors I’d long forgotten.

I can find faults in any of them, but mostly hate working with Redhat/CentOS/Fedora. Strongly prefer Debian over Ubuntu, and I strongly prefer Gentoo over Arch. SUSE is an unknown, not sure about that one.

I have a fondness for BSD, if that matters.

I know I’m probably in the minority here but… I’m a desk jockey.

I don’t use Lemmy on a handheld. I didn’t use Reddit that way either. The web interface works well enough for me, or rather whatever lemmy.ca uses is good when set to vaporwave-light. Try the different themes, some are better than others.

The pagination though… it’s a little short for my taste but I prefer it over doomscrolling.

kiro5hin

I seem to recall spending time on there, but that’s about all I remember about it.

I kinda dabbled in most of them, except 4chan. In no particular order: Various webrings, usenet, tumblr, stumbleupon, digg, kiro5hin, reddit, slashdot, twitter, lots of rss. More reading than posting.

I use ChromeOS because I use Google Workspace. It gives me a cheap portable machine for work, and for meetings I rather carry that than a £2000 overspec’d heavy 15" laptop. It’s the cheapest of the cheap, and it can run Linux in a VM with Firefox. It has fantastic battery life. I also run Linux on the laptop, and on a Desktop PC, as well as servers.

In my mind, ChromeOS works. It’s literally a browser with a screen, a keyboard, and some deep-rooted privacy concerns.

As for Windows, that I don’t understand the need in 2023. I switched to Debian, and immediately saw better thermals, less fan noise, faster boot, longer battery life, and all sort of other improvements. Given Linux/Windows/MacOS/DOS/iOS/Android are all effectively launchers for apps and provide broadly the same services I don’t really care which, but I will choose the ones that make me most productive.

This is good in some ways and I welcome the BBC to the fediverse as an important step to universal acceptance. It’s far better than using flaky bridges from other social networks.

What is disappointing is the very small range of content provided so far, Radio 4 & 5 plus some curiosities. I’d hoped for the excellent 6 Music channel. Let’s see if they keep up with the sports in particular on 5. I’m glad that it’s divided by station / topic so I can follow only what interests me.

I too would like more national broadcasters to get onboard. CBC I’m sure have some interesting content to share with the world, as do ABC, RTE, NZBC, others? I’d love to have culture from across the globe, which is the real value for Mastodon for me rather than as a news feed.

As someone who has had to actively contact an AI company and expressly deny use of digital images on our website, I’m confident there are no boundaries with what they scrape from the Internet. They don’t have any respect and slurp up everything in their path, which unfortunately leads to only one possible outcome - a culturally desensitised dataset. It will become the ‘neutral average’ of the internet, banal in many ways and biased in others. Don’t expect anything that resembles Canadian sentiment to come out of any non-Canadian AI (Same problem but different locale for me - UK/Eire).

Any that’s before it starts eating it’s own tail - there’s pictures of generative images where they fed data back in, and it’s as interesting as it is amusing and horrific. Keeping the data clean is an unsolved problem because it’s hard to differentiate organic and synthetic sources.

All of this pales into insignificance with (as far as I know) all AI lacking the ability to admit when it doesn’t know. It just makes it up from nothing.

I have access to ChatGPT, Bard, etc. I haven’t found a use for any of it yet (software engineering) where I trust it enough and the experiments I’ve run have proved this, for me personally. It’s a novelty, a toy, it will evolve. As for the Online News Act, I’m conflicted. I believe in a free and open Internet, which goes against both restrictive legislation and against the likes of Google and Meta who abuse their position in the online landscape. My instinct is I’d rather have the Online News Act than Bard as the publisher should own their content, so good luck with that.