I’m certain that if someone did collect data from the Fediverse; it would become a hot topic

I’d assume bad actors (or at least chaotic neutral actors) are slurping up the entire fediverse already. It is trivial to do, and nobody would know.

I mean, the whole point is that anyone can spin up a server and federate with others. I could start my own server, which would by default federate with almost all other servers. That means I wouldn’t even need to write a scraper. All that data would be sent straight to my server. All I need is access to my own database at that point. With Lemmy, I’d even get users’ upvote/downvote history, which is not visible in any clients AFAIK. The only barrier would be to subscribe to communities on different servers to kickstart federation.

As long as you don’t run obvious spam/bot accounts, nobody would block your instance.

Alternatively, if you want to write a scraper, that’s also pretty easy. Most servers are publicly accessible. Every community has an RSS feed. You don’t even need an account in general. Again, the whole point is to be open and accessible, in contrast to closed-off data-misers like Facebook, Reddit, and X.

The fediverse is friendly to users, with very little regard for what those users might do. I believe this is the correct philosophy, but I won’t pretend that it doesn’t leave us open to bad behavior.

So probably there will be some systems other than Linux that do use Rust

There’s one called Redox that is entirely written in Rust. Still in fairly early stages, though. https://www.redox-os.org/

Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?

The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.

In theory, phones would be cheaper if they had longer shelf life.

Similarly, we don’t need new cars every year, but the beast must be fed, right? Right?!

We’re comparing it to gen 1 to emphasize how far it is from being competitive.

Not really new; this has been the case with all the Tensor chips. I kind of assumed Google was going to step up their game at some point, but I don’t think Samsung can produce chips on par with TSMC. Google is switching to TSMC for next year’s Tensor 5, so maybe we’ll see a big jump then.

That said, I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker. I’m running a Pixel 7 and it’s “fine”. The Pixel 6 had bad throttling/overheating problems, but the 7 and 8 are better. We’ll see what the Big Problem is with the 9 series. There’s always something.

Installing Linux after Windows should be fine without disconnecting drives.

The reverse is troublesome. Microsoft’s installer is all too happy to shit on your drives, even the ones you’re not using for installation. But Linux installers are much more friendly to dual-booting and all kinds of complex setups.

I explained why that data does not contradict what the previous commenter was trying to say.

Speed is less of a factor than endurance in a persistence-hunting scenario where we’re much slower than our prey anyway.

I don’t know the facts for this specific claim, but the logic is fair. One group can be better suited for endurance without being faster. One group could also be faster on average without having the individual fastest performers. Not only because of cultural factors, but also because the distribution curves might have different shapes for men vs women. There could be greater outliers (top performers) among men even if the average is higher among women in general. It’s not necessarily as straightforward as, say, height, where men’s distribution curve is almost the same shape as women’s, just shifted up a few inches.

I don’t have the data to draw any real conclusions, though.

One of the problems looking at athletic records is that it’s really just the elite among a self-selected group of enthusiasts, which doesn’t tell us a whole lot about what might have been the norm 100,000 years ago, or what might be the norm today if all else were equal between genders. These are not controlled trials.

I’ve read that the top women outperform the top men in long-distance open-water swimming, supposedly due in part to higher body fat making women more buoyant, helping to regulate body temperature, and providing fuel. This is the first time I’ve read that women might have an advantage in running, though.

I wish the article provided citations. The reality is probably too complex to fit into a headline or pop-sci writeup.

Same on macOS. Apple has “case-sensitive HFS+” as an option for UNIX compatibility (or at least they used to) but actually running a system on it is a bad idea in general.

What part of this is misinformation, exactly? Seems pretty well-supported.

Haven’t heard of Hiren’s BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it’s still around!

I keep seeing this claim, but never with any independent verification or technical explanation.

What exactly is listening to you? How? When?

Android and iOS both make it visible to the user when an app accesses the microphone, and they require that the user grant microphone permission to the app. It’s not supposed to be possible for apps to surreptitiously record you. This would require exploiting an unpatched security vulnerability and would surely violate the App Store and Play Store policies.

If you can prove this is happening, then please do so. Both Apple and Google have a vested interest in stopping this; they do not want their competitors to have this data, and they would be happy to smack down a clear violation of policy.

I agree completely.

I understand the motivation here — apps that lack location permission shouldn’t be able to get backdoor access to your location via your camera roll. That makes sense, because you know damn well every spyware social media company would be doing that if they could.

But the reverse is also true: apps that legitimately need to read photos and access all their metadata shouldn’t need to be granted full location access.

I have a different Boox product, the low-end Poke Lite (I think version 4?).

Pros:

• E-paper display is easy on the eyes
• Customizable backlight temperature and brightness
• Runs arbitrary Android apps
• Battery for days
• Can install open-source reading apps like Librera
• Still receiving software updates after a few years

Cons:

• Only runs Android 11
• Installing Google Play requires jumping through some weird hoops, because it’s not Google certified. I recommend using F-Droid instead, or using a throwaway google account to avoid this security liability.
• Built-in apps kind of suck in general
• Home screen strongly pushes their own ecosystem, shoving regular Android apps into a different section
• Most apps look like ass on a B&W display
• Most apps look like ass on a 4:3 display (not applicable to the Palma)
• The various display refresh modes are unintuitive

The newer models, from what I understand, use faster-refreshing display tech, and some even support color.

This is why I refuse to buy e-books with DRM. Amazon should have no say in how, where, or when I read my books.

ebooks.com has a searchable DRM-free section, so that’s my go-to: https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/drm-free

For anything not available without DRM, I will pirate it without a second thought.

Yeah, I had to disconnect all my SATA HDs to stop the Windows installer from shitting all over them.

I’d be worried about Windows updates doing the same thing now, after the the recent glitch that broke bootloaders.

F-Droid link for the lazy: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.junkfood.seal/

Definitely going to check this out. I’ve been using yt-dlp via command line in Termux but that experience is less than ideal.

It was bought out and cleaned up a few years ago. It’s legit again now, though I don’t think it’ll ever really recover from that fiasco.

Totally agree. Their product line was an absolute mess back then. Their current lineup is getting a little bloated too. I don’t know why they bother having two laptop product lines anymore when they are so similar.

Apple tried to allow clones, but ran into the same problem because the clone makers could make cheaper machines by slapping together parts.

Yeah, this is exactly what happened, although some of the clone brands were perfectly high-quality (Power Computing in particular made great machines, usually the fastest on the market). In the Mac community at the time, a lot of people (myself included) wished Apple would just exit the hardware business and focus on what they were good at: software.

Then Steve Jobs came back and did exactly the opposite of that. First order of business was to kill cloning. Then came the iPod.

To be fair, the next generation of Power Macs after that were about half the price of the previous gen.