909 karma · joined October 28, 2010
The local power co-op is considering the idea of considering burying the powerlines, so I'm keeping a close eye on that. I wish I could get them interested in the idea of adding fiber internet to their services, but I'm told they can't do it anywhere they have above-ground power because of an agreement stating that CenturyLink gets to be the only ISP on the poles.
And yet, when you try and talk to the ISP about problems with the 2.5-down-.4-up DSL line they provide their literal reply is "You're lucky you have a dialtone."
This is at a location 1.7 miles down the road from a school that has gigabit fiber.
The existing programs are a joke. Nothing short of competition is going to get the ISPs to fix their problems. Centurylink has lost about 7k/month on customers switching to StarLink just on this one road. Maybe someday they'll consider fiber, but until then Starlink is a godsend.
But my point isn't that they're "far left", just that they are reliably left of american center. They make no (or at least almost no) effort to present the center-right versions of the argument.
I, for one, would like to know a few things about flat earthers. Do they actually exist? How many of them really are out there? What arguments to they use to try and make their points?
These are valuable things to know, especially on issues that mostly settled. They make you, the reader, better understand the issue and better prepared to deal with people you encounter who hold this belief. I'm not Neil Armstrong, I don't have the cache to simply punch moon landing deniers in the nose, I need some true facts to use when talking to one.
As a consumer of journalism I'm way more interested in stuff like that than simple sneering scorn about people who clearly believe "wrong" things.
When it comes to topics that I don't personally understand, perhaps wheat tariffs, I'm going to be way more likely to agree to the "right" answer when I understand both sides and can see how exactly it is that the "wrong" side is wrong. But the very minute I find out that the story is being spun by omitting certain facts or arguments, I'm going to assume the author is lying about pretty much everything.
Thus, neutrality. You've got to show me both sides honestly for me to be able to believe that what you're saying is actual truth, not just your "truth".
If there were a per-story bias, or even a per-author bias, I might agree with you, but NPR has a very clear per-topic bias. And the goal of every reporter should be to eliminate their personal bias and report the facts. NPR's bias is so pervasive on certain topics though that one can only conclude that they too are taking dictation from some overlord, or are so caught up in group-think that they have fundamentally misunderstood reality.
I don't actually think this is too bad, as long as you know what you're getting and can correct for the bias.
Fact A) Carrots are healthy. Fact B) Carrots may be carcinogenic.
These are both inherently important facts to any story talking about the health, or danger, of carrots. To present a position on if one should be eating carrots or not, without including both of these facts, is to handpick facts to tell the story you want to tell.
They may not be, you know, outright communists or anything, but that doesn't mean they don't lean towards the left side of the American political spectrum a fair bit past center. In the standard distribution of political views calling them "left wing" is fair, even if they're not out on the long tail.
I'd hate to come out and say "NPR lies" as it gets people's hackles up and immediately starts the us-vs-them dynamic. "Non-Neutral" seems to have been the best way in recent years to indicate that their reporting is, at best, slanted and spun in order to present a view of the world that they prefer.
It's hard to notice it when they're talking about things you don't know about, perhaps wheat imports for example. But then they do a story about something you do know about that you recognize is absolutely a one-sided hatchet job. A Not technically "lying" perhaps, but certainly not anything close to "neutral".
What's the word for that? Low-quality news? Mis/dis-information?
Personally I like the neutral/non-neutral because it reminds us of what the goal should be: actual truth, without the agenda.
In the bay area though, that was just Thursday. No warning, could and did happen any time.
The difference was incredibly stark. I wonder if that's true for Starbucks in Seattle.
Outside the bay area, eh, 50/50, you're right.
When it came to the areas he wasn't as comfortable in, say the genius bar, he still deeply understood the customer experience, but never tried to do the job if he wasn't able.
Boy, I'm coming off like a fanboy here... It was just a truly impressive and inspiring thing to see as one of the regular employees. If I worked at Starbucks it's what I'd want to see, not some propped-up press tour.
One of the ones I personally witnessed related to the services that salespeople were expected to sell along with the computers. There was some kerfuffle going on about stores not meeting the expected "attach rates". He spent a whole day selling computers, and could not meet the expected attach rates himself. Couple weeks after that changes to pricing and program benefits were announced. I later learned that the need for changes had become a very high priority the same day as his visit.
Occasionally fairly major changes, both to the staff side and to the customer experience, were made based on his visits.
I don't recall ever seeing a press announcement about it. Saying you're doing it to win brownie points sure makes it seem inauthentic. Then again maybe it's better this way than leaking it to a reporter and pretending that it was discovered organically. Guess we'll have to wait and see if anything actually comes out of it to know if it's just a stunt, but I'd put my money on it.
"We're continuing to investigate" isn't really reassuring.
I'm a huge fan of both Avatar movies, not because they're great story or anything, but because they do 3D so well and the world so immersive and interesting. And I fear the fact that all but a slim minority of 3D theaters are so sub-par will be a huge setback for the format and discourage other filmmakers from investing in making 3D that's as good.
Metal: Hellsinger is another one that's just great on the deck. It feels way more kinetic to be on the deck with motion controls than sitting waving your mouse around.
As far as ergonomics go, I find it plenty comfortable to use, and so does my wife, and we're at opposite ends of the human size distribution. I don't really use it lying down like I used to do with my PSP, but that's not much of a loss to my mind considering how much more advanced games I can play with it on the go.
I'm a bit bummed that I haven't been able to find a good factorio-ish building/optimization game for it that actually works well without mouse+keyboard, but I'm sure one will show up eventually. I haven't really experimented with an external monitor+mouse+keyboard with it as I'd just switch to the computer at that point.
All in all super happy with it, it does what it's designed to do incredibly well.
DMR is essentially a commercial radio network, being run on amateur radio frequencies. This type of radio network is not designed to be understood by the user, it is designed so that the user can be handed a radio with a channel-select dial on the top and told "go to channel 3", and never think about how the radio works other than press-PTT-before-you-start-speaking.
Because so very little of it is actually user-controllable, many HAMs would just as soon never touch it. There's very little "amateur" in it at all, except for amateur network admins who think it's fun to have some gear on the top of a mountain.
In case you haven't deduced it yet, in my personal opinion: DMR is a blight on HAM radio. If you want a motorola trunked radio network, buy a motorola trunked radio network.
This is one area where, and I know what you're going to say, but Matrix actually does really well. My data, on my server, in my house, not tied to any specific single device I own but distributed across several and backed up in an encrypted manner.
But you've got me thinking about the data export option. Saturday is coming. Hmm...
Windowing rules for one. Simple example: Firefox picture-in-picture. On KDE I have a windowing rule so that if from any firefox window playing video I hit the picture-in-picture button the picture-in-picture window becomes a certain size, goes to a certain placement on my monitors, stays on top of all windows, and is visible across all virtual desktops.
Ability to control the layout of my virtual desktops is also incredibly useful to me. (I use a 3x3 grid, so switching from my "main" task in the center to any one of 4 sub-tasks up-down-left-right is easy, and my universal tasks (chat/email/etc) go in the 4 corners.
KDE puts you in control, and gives you a LOT of control. IMO GNOME feels much more windows/mac in it's design philosophy. "We know best, do it the way we let you."
And as far as an API, yes, also that. With the Plasma desktop plugin Firefox remembers which virtual desktop each window is supposed to go to, so I have no issue rebooting with 5 or 6 different windows open.
I apologize if it sounds over the top, but for my use-cases at least the level of control and "just does the right thing" really do stand out above the alternatives.
As far as I know the backup is encrypted.
> Are you not able to import these backups into the desktop client?
No, the desktop client is not standalone, and ONLY syncs with the a phone to get content. Moreover, if you don't use the client for a period (2-3 weeks in my experience?) it de-syncs that desktop client. Re-connecting that desktop to your phone will only sync messages starting as-of the connection, so there's no way to get the desktop app to pull your whole history. (This is another gripe I have about their sacrifice of actual usability for security that only helps a few very specific use-cases.)
You're probably rigth about hacking something together. Someone has created a library [0] allegedly for decoding the backup files. Friday night is D&D night though, so I haven't had the chance. :-)
This is one of the problems with Signal having a bit of confusion about what exactly it's use-case is. There are plenty of cases where locking down the ability to save/view/export messages are valuable, and Signal provides tools to be able to do that. Making that the mandatory case though means that it's harder to adopt as a general-purpose communication platform.
The need to decide if the goal is still to get as many people off of SMS/facebook-messenger as possible, or if the goal is to provide extreme security to dissidents and protestors, or if they're going to spend the effort to be able to do both effectively and let you choose which conversations or messages get which level of protection.
My ideal solution would be to export any message older than a month to an archive on my NAS, ideally in a format that the app could search on request. Keep my history, keep the on-device space nice and small.
I take advantage of the Android backup feature, and the backup syncs over to my NAS via SyncThing automatically, but that's only useful for restoring a brand new phone up to the latest state.
Rock solid and both works and looks great right out of the box. So customizable that using literally anything else feels like using a Fisher-Price computer for toddlers.
To be clear, Signal allows you to backup and restore back into Signal on android, which is great. What I meant is that it would be helpful to be able to export that content out of signal and keep an accessible searchable archive off of the device.
There's no chance I'm going to get her to install Signal, she doesn't need it, her circle is almost all blue-bubble iPhone users who don't value anything Signal adds over what iMessages gives them.
This doesn't kill SMS/MMS. Not even a little tiny bit. All it does is make MY life more irritating because I have multiple apps that I have to deal with now. The way to kill it is to make something better that people WANT to use, that offers the extra value to make it worth the effort.
As an android user myself, I much prefer having SMS built in because I use the search feature often to look back through all my SMS/Signal chats. I also regularly forward an SMS message to a Signal user, or vice versa. I'm already starting to feel like those iOS users who told me "I don't want another app"...
Signal seems to be trying to move further and further from "my preferred way to chat with people" and closer to the chat equivalent of "that protonmail account I only log in to when I need secrecy".
I obviously love having security on messages in transit, but I also like being able to keep my message history around and search my conversations for something that happened a year ago. It seems like Signal is on a trajectory to turn everything into disappearing messages. Are they the "safe for activists" communication app, or the "let's try to make as many as possible safer by default" app? Feels like they don't know.
And on top of it all the messaging is just frustrating. "we've taken away an incredibly useful and heavily used feature so we have development resource to better implement shitcoins and such" is such an irritating defense of the decision that I disabled my monthly donation.