pound_heap
@pound_heap@lemm.ee
- Comment on Anonymity for Everyone: Why You Need Tor 1 week ago:
It’s not a very bad idea. Tor browser provides good tracking resistance in clearnet, but there are more chances that uneducated person leaks personal information there and at the same time will have a false feeling of safety because they are using Tor, not Google Chrome.
- Comment on GOP Proposes $4.5 Trillion Tax Giveaway to the Rich While 'Ransacking' Food Stamps and Medicaid 3 weeks ago:
The title of this is a misleading simplification. $4.5 tn is not “Tax Giveaway to the Rich”. It’s a maximum cap on total tax cuts that could be in this budget. It is likely to include renewal of 2017 income tax cuts and increased child tax credit - both of these were popular and not just “for rich”.
They may also raise SALT cap which benefits higher income people from states with high property taxes. Living in one myself, I can tell you that you don’t need a mansion in a top school district to pay much more than $10k in property taxes. So this one is not just for billionaires for sure, but maybe from upper middle class.
There are promises Trump made to eliminate income taxes on tips and social security, which are obviously not beneficial only to rich. But I heard it would cost a lot, especially SS one. Not sure if $4.5tn is enough.
Unfortunately, it looks like proposed spending cuts to Medicaid and food stamps are favored by GOP and may be easy to pass, but they don’t cover tax cuts by a big margin. So they can hurt people in need, and still have to balloon national debt even more.
- Comment on Onboarding experience needs to be simpler for mass adoption 3 weeks ago:
I think this should be baked into client apps.
The popular email analogy works here too. When you are setting up a new phone, you get a default email client app that offers you to log in or sign up to the default email service. And usually user can choose to log in with their service if choice, for which they have to sign up in advance outside the client app.
Having a default Fediverse client on new phones is not happening anytime soon, but if someone’s mother installs a client app from the store link sent to them by a family member, she can get similar default onboarding experience.
Default instance can be picked by geo location, or maybe the less used out of 3 most popular instances. Or even maybe an instance ran by the client app developers.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 3 weeks ago:
FAKE NEWS!!! Why would you want to pull an ancient lever mechanism if you can do it in a few taps on the touch screen. Sure, unless you have a premium subscription, you’ll have to watch a short video from our partners, tailored individually just for you.
- Comment on Seeking feedback: how should lemm.ee move forward with external images? (related to frequent broken images) 4 months ago:
I really don’t see broken images often, it doesn’t bother me at all. I’d prefer to keep Option #2, especially if we could increase the period of how long the images are stored in the local proxy.
- Comment on U.S. approves mega geothermal energy project in Utah 4 months ago:
Cool! This makes more sense now
- Comment on U.S. approves mega geothermal energy project in Utah 4 months ago:
I don’t know enough of this technology, but the article says they do fracking to “release geothermal energy, not oil and gas”. So I imagine it will have the same ecological damage as fracking. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can explain where I’m wrong.
- Comment on A millennial couple who make $250,000 say they can't find a home in their budget: 'We refuse to become house-poor' 6 months ago:
Well, they are saying they bring home $11k, not $17k a month, not sure where you got that number. With $11k of income, spending $5k on mortgage is less appealing. Especially if you consider a risk of layoff.
- Comment on Why fed ship do not have dedicate landing team, but send bridge crew on dangerous mission ? 8 months ago:
Because we all know that a sergeant and soldiers can’t even hit a starship from 10 meters. Yes, Stormtroopers, I’m talking about you. What, this is what community again?
- Comment on Privacy services and non privacy payments options 9 months ago:
No, I didn’t say that. It depends on your risk model. If you are an average Joe don’t worry that services are charging your credit card. If you are hiding from government then better use less online services, and if you must then find ones that accept crypto
- Comment on Privacy services and non privacy payments options 9 months ago:
TLDR: “privacy” services can’t be bothered and you shouldn’t too if you are not doing illegal stuff.
These “privacy-oriented” services are businesses that need to earn money, not scare away potential clients and avoid legal issues. Accepting cash or crypto is a risk for legal and accounting reasons. They just don’t think it’s worth it.
Now, to link a particular activity on a particular service with you via your payment is not a trivial task. Government can do it, but it really matters if you think you are or will be targeted by it. Data miners can correlate bank payment with an account at a service provider only if both bank and service provider sell or leak data, which is less likely if you are using a privacy a oriented service.
- Comment on Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT 9 months ago:
Well, reddit is doing fine so far. Shareholders are happy
- Comment on How Apple tricks people into believing the iPhone is cool 11 months ago:
I’m not sure how viable this is for the court case… but totally agree with sentiment.
Maybe in US it is different with very available loans and phone plans that include top of the line iPhones, but in the country I grew up having iPhone was a big thing. Especially when you are teenager or in your 20s. It was a symbol of wealth.
My friend owns a small business in that country and he says that he had to buy an iPhone. His partners were looking down at him because he had a Samsung phone.
I guess it’s not like that nowadays, as Samsung has phones that cost the same or even more…
- Comment on Proton Mail says that the new Outlook app for Windows is Microsoft's new data collection service 1 year ago:
A company would use a Microsoft 365 plan that includes Outlook for Office 365, not a Windows Mail app. An the MS365 agreement would come with protections of company data from sharing with advertisers.
In other words, I wouldn’t worry if my company used Outlook. But never log in to your private mailbox from a corporate device.
- Comment on Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession 1 year ago:
Sublime is not FOSS
- Comment on Child psychiatrist jailed after using AI to make pornographic deep-fakes of kids 1 year ago:
Your first passage about criminalizing art is 100% correct and 100% irrelevant. You cannot call porn art. Porn with adults, children, dogs, pumpkins - all that stuff is made for people to get off, not enjoy the emotions that real art provokes in people. Therefore we cannot compare criminalizing porn with criminalizing art.
There are edge cases, of course, when art might be provocative and considered immoral, and maybe even illegal sometimes. But that would be edge cases, highly debated.
- Comment on Privacy respecting language learning tool? 1 year ago:
Yeah, I see many suggestions to do just that. Might be a good time to go check a local library.
- Comment on Privacy respecting language learning tool? 1 year ago:
OMG that’s the one! Thank you! I need to review the article and discussion though
- Submitted 1 year ago to privacyguides@lemmy.one | 14 comments
- Comment on Apple’s Decision to Kill Its CSAM Photo-Scanning Tool Sparks Fresh Controversy 1 year ago:
Here you go: