Left lemm.ee due to inconsistent federation policy allowing extremist instances like Eheads and Lgrad but not Threads.

moved to: @misk@sh.itjust.works (which also kind of sucked)

currently at: @misk@sopuli.xyz

  • 41 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Building complex systems involving humans is hard because humans are flawed. The best thing we’ve come up so far are systems involving extensive checks and balances to prevent thing happening too rapidly and without necessary oversight and even then it’s a tricky part to balance.

    For the record, I’m not for entirely cashless society but organisations that are cash heavy have proven to be source of many headaches. There is a balance to be found on thresholds and barring some types of businesses from using cash and where digital money transfer is required. Banks and other money transfer entities will have to deal with scenarios where malicious parties will try to obfuscate their intent outside of those thresholds.


  • This is all technically true but cash is not the answer.

    Right now there are so many easily accessible ways for governments to spy on people (cell phone geolocation, call metadata monitoring) that I’m not sure that for the purposes you think of you aren’t screwed already anyway. From this perspective fight for cash use becomes a bit theoretical.

    The only people that I know of personally that are strongly for cash are either people that frequently skirt around taxes (“minor” stuff like car repair shops) and unfortunately conspiracy nuts. Genuine privacy oriented people exist but realistically the majority will be there for selfish reasons.

    The societal cost of tax evasion, money laundering and financing organisations that legally require transparency (political orgs, NGOs etc) are massive and immediate.

    What we really need is strong oversight of institutions, government transparency, rule of law and healthy democracy. Those are the things you want to enshrine in your constitution.









  • That part is annoying but I generally don’t subscribe to channels that overdo it. My remote has a button to skip 10s forward so I keep pressing it until I see sponsored segment is over.

    I’d love to be able to use sponsorblock on ATV but I don’t see how it could be reasoned that it makes morally ok to not pay Google and content creators for the service they provide (with cash, ad views or otherwise). Video hosting ain’t cheap.



  • Can’t reply to kbin accounts due to language bug so I’ll reply to myself:

    • Netflix 4k is 60 PLN / mo
    • HBO is 30 (but you could lock in 20 if you subscribed early on, which I did)
    • Dinsey+ is 29 / mo (24 / mo if yearly, which I did)
    • Prime is 49 / year (4 / mo), Amazon tries to fight local competitor on free delivery and for some reason they include streaming with that
    • Apple TV+ I’m getting as part of Apple One family sub (45 / mo but that’s Apple Music, TV+, Arcade and iCloud for my whole household)

  • As a person in charge of shared Netflix subscription for my friends I noped out the moment they started password sharing crackdown. Yeah, they added “small” charge to add more users to subscription but the writing was on the wall and I realized I was the frog being boiled.

    2 of my friends went for basic plan separately. The cost of 2 basic subscriptions is about the same as 4k / 4 screens one we were using before. So yeah, subscriber count up, now Netflix needs to do a rug pull on basic plan (which they already do in US and UK).

    I don’t even see a need to pirate stuff from Netflix these days, barely anything worth watching. I still pay for HBO, Disney+, Apple TV+ (part of family Apple One) and Prime - which in the country I live in cost together about they same as Netflix did lol.




















  • Back in the day, like many people then, I had a couple of different accounts across multiple messaging platforms. 2 domestic ones, couple of international ones. It was a fun mess but people were tired of running multiple apps and so loads of multi-protocol apps were developed.

    Usually messaging protocols were simply reverse engineered and some apps also used plug-ins so that niche protocols could be added by community. Some also did gateways that translated proprietary protocols to XMPP.

    By the end of that era many platforms opened themselves up with XMPP. It was nice because most of those multi-protocol apps didn’t have to support as many different platforms explicitly.

    But that’s about it. I had a Google Talk account too and found it cute that I can use it to add my friends on other platforms. I was a nerdbut barely knew any other people that were utilizing it. Realistically it didn’t make any difference because you still had to use multi-protocol app for the ones that didn’t open.

    Soon platforms that were never on or barely on XMPP started to take over. Messenger was the biggest in my country and it was always a PITA on third party apps.

    Google Talk doing a rug pull on XMPP didn’t to anything meaningful to XMPP itself. It was never that big and simply remains a niche to this day.

    I too get an impression that a single article on XMPP Gtalk drama made round on Fediverse that many made their opinion solely on it.