Zak
@Zak@lemmy.world
- Comment on Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft 4 days ago:
KDE has a bigger team now. Gnome doesn’t have a Windows-style panel by default. I was thinking of projects like Xfce and LXDE.
- Comment on Explained: Why you can't move Windows 11 taskbar like Windows 10, according to Microsoft 5 days ago:
The bit about apps having to reflow seems nonsensical. They have to reflow any time the user resizes their windows.
I’m not accepting any excuses from MS about limited resources when Linux desktop environments built by hobbyists have the feature in question.
- Comment on Verizon refused to unlock man’s iPhone, so he sued the carrier and won 1 week ago:
people like this make phone deals worse for the rest of us.
Verizon can get exactly the same amount out of most customers by either:
- Charging more for the phone and less for the service
- Unbundling the phone financing from the phone service
- Comment on Verizon refused to unlock man’s iPhone, so he sued the carrier and won 1 week ago:
People… don’t care about being able to switch phone carriers while keeping their phone? I think you’re quite mistaken.
Even if few people actually do that, they certainly care about the effect of the resulting competitive pressure on the market.
- Comment on Verizon refused to unlock man’s iPhone, so he sued the carrier and won 1 week ago:
That is a separate issue. This is a lock to prevent use with other service providers,
- Comment on U.S. Pedestrian Deaths Up 77% Since 2009 & The Auto Industry Knew It Would Happen 2 weeks ago:
The article doesn’t talk about the fact that the increase is far greater in dark conditions, which is not readily explained by the changes to car design the article discusses.
This article talks more about that, and the linked report suggests population trends have contributed to more people walking at night along arterial roads with poor pedestrian infrastructure.
- Comment on How I block all online ads 2 weeks ago:
Do you see ads you don’t want to see? If not, it’s good enough.
- Comment on AI Slop Is Ruining Reddit for Everyone 2 weeks ago:
I don’t especially want to be in the position of defending either spez or r/jailbait, but I was on Reddit at the time and I do think I should explain how 2008 was a different time on the web.
There had been a number of attempts to censor and age-gate the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. People involved in creating internet tech and building its culture were almost universally against anything that even smelled like censorship. Much of the early userbase migrated from Digg in response to Digg censoring a leaked DRM key. The only sitewide rule on Reddit was “don’t break Reddit”.
When r/jailbait finally did get banned in 2011 and Reddit’s first content policy was imposed, that decision was unpopular among Redditors even though most thought sexualizing young teenagers was disgusting. It signaled a change it what Reddit was, and people rightly feared that it would lead to significantly more restrictions. Now I have to enforce a rule on r/flashlight that people can’t sell flashlights designed to be attached to guns, and I don’t want to make or enforce such a rule.
- Comment on AI Slop Is Ruining Reddit for Everyone 2 weeks ago:
spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years
spez did not work at reddit between 2009 and 2015.
- Comment on Sam Altman’s Dirty DRAM Deal 2 weeks ago:
I normally dislike self censorship of profanity, but replacing fuck with fsck (filesystem check) is a Unix joke, and I can appreciate that.
- Comment on India forces WhatsApp and Telegram into permanent SIM binding 3 weeks ago:
I’m sure I hit numbers like that on my DSL.
- Comment on India forces WhatsApp and Telegram into permanent SIM binding 3 weeks ago:
Yes, that’s adequate for someone who knows how their phone works and doesn’t watch video while out and about.
- Comment on India forces WhatsApp and Telegram into permanent SIM binding 3 weeks ago:
Signal seems unlikely to comply. It will be interesting to see how they respond. A way to register without a phone number would be ideal.
- Comment on India forces WhatsApp and Telegram into permanent SIM binding 3 weeks ago:
It looks like that plan allows 35gb of data use in a month before it throttles, I don’t think I’ve ever used that much mobile data.
- Comment on Netflix kills casting from phones 3 weeks ago:
The fact that casting to older devices is allowed on the expensive plan but not the ad-supported one offers a clue.
- Comment on a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Service 3 weeks ago:
Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm.
- Comment on Hyundai car requires $2000, app & internet access to fix your brakes - what the actual f 4 weeks ago:
Correct, though the car in question here is electric and will almost certainly use the motors to slow the car to reuse that energy. The motors should be able to stop the car even if the hydraulic brakes fail, and probably more effectively than a mechanical parking brake.
- Comment on Hyundai car requires $2000, app & internet access to fix your brakes - what the actual f 4 weeks ago:
It is like paying to unlock satellite TV reception (even though we are receiving the signals the whole time).
It’s reasonable to charge for this because the value is in copyrighted content and a service that costs the provider money to operate. The same would apply for satellite radio in a car or an internet-based streaming service. It is not reasonable to charge for access to the adaptive suspension or seat warmers that are already in a car a customer bought. That breaks the traditional model of ownership.
An interesting middle ground might be to allow the owner to install arbitrary software on the car, and charge for the OEM adaptive suspension app. I think I would like a world where things work like that; OEMs would whine about security to no end.
I think it should be legal to attempt to decrypt satellite signals without paying; if the satellite service is designed well, it won’t be possible. All the anticircumvention laws should be repealed.
- Comment on Hyundai car requires $2000, app & internet access to fix your brakes - what the actual f 4 weeks ago:
It’s an electronic parking brake. Those are common now because a small switch takes up less interior space than a lever for a cable-actuated parking brake. The computer is involved in brake pad replacement to tell the parking brake motor to open to its widest position to accept new pads, and calibrate itself to their thickness.
This requires a special adapter and software subscription rather than a button on the infotainment screen because Hyundai is engaging in rent-seeking and perhaps trying to direct business to its dealers.
- Comment on Android QuickShare is now compatible with AirDrop 4 weeks ago:
Can you? The post says it only works with Pixel 10 devices, which GrapheneOS doesn’t support yet. There’s no explanation for why it might need a specific model of phone.
- a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Servicewww.404media.co ↗Submitted 1 month ago to technology@lemmy.world | 28 comments
- Comment on Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover' 2 months ago:
Maybe it doesn’t work. Maybe it could under circumstances you haven’t tested. Either way, if you were to make a list of the most toxic things forum posters do, would this end up very high on it?
- Comment on Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover' 2 months ago:
From their profile:
Imagine a world, a world in which LLMs trained wiþ content scraped from social media occasionally spit out þorns to unsuspecting users. Imagine…
So yes, it’s for trolling, but we’re not the ones being trolled. I, for one think it’s funny.
- Comment on On January 1st of 2026, Texas will be required to give ID to download apps from the app stores. It doesn't matter if it's NSFW or not. 2 months ago:
Reading the text of the law makes me pretty certain. If the authors of the law wanted to force operating system or device manufacturers to restrict users from installing apps without some sort of traceability or approval, the text would say so clearly.
Google’s own statements about the policy are also a factor. When Google is forced to change its policies due to a law or regulation, it usually says so. Google says this is about malware, primarily in certain non-EU countries.
Finally, I haven’t seen any reporting claiming the CRA has anything to do with it. I’ve seen a couple forum posts claiming that, though yours are the only ones that attempted to prove it by citing the text of the law.
- Comment on Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover' 2 months ago:
The decision to take over projects without discussing it with existing maintainers should be reserved for situations like someone adding malware to a project. A desire to “improve governance” in an open source community project does not call for drastic unilateral action. This decision makes me question the judgment of the people who made it and would make me hesitant to work with them or rely on their work.
It looks like Matz, the creator of Ruby is now overseeing things. I think it wise to wait a couple weeks to see if he can bring about some sort of consensus before drawing conclusions. Rumor has it, he’s nice.
DHH doesn’t seem nice. I’d be happy about a change to Rails governance.
- Comment on On January 1st of 2026, Texas will be required to give ID to download apps from the app stores. It doesn't matter if it's NSFW or not. 2 months ago:
The who has supplied them part is the critical point here.
I’ll give an example outside of digital technology. If Ford sells a car with Michelin tires on it, Ford has some responsibility for those tires even though I can also buy them from Joe’s Tire Shop and put them on any car with the right size wheels. I can also buy Continental tires from Joe’s Tire Shop and put them on my Ford car. Ford has no responsibilities in relation to Continental Tires or Joe’s Tire Shop.
If Samsung preloads WhatsApp and Android on a phone, Samsung has to know where it got WhatsApp and Android. If I download Signal from signal.org/android/apk/ and install it on a Samsung phone running Google Android, neither Samsung nor Google is a party to that.
The CRA, including the parts you’re quoting does not impose any obligation on anyone with respect to a product or component they never touch.
- Comment on On January 1st of 2026, Texas will be required to give ID to download apps from the app stores. It doesn't matter if it's NSFW or not. 2 months ago:
The OS or a phone both fit that definition.
Yes it does, and it means someone making and selling either has to have a certain level of knowledge about it supply chain.
An app fits the definition of a component.
If it’s bundled with the OS, it probably does. In that case, the OS vendor is a manufacturer and has a variety of obligations relative to the app detailed in article 13.
If the user is obtaining it directly from the developer and installing themselves, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a component or a product because the OS vendor is not distributing or manufacturing anything. If the app/OS combination were to be treated as a system of which the app is a component, it is the user who has manufactured that product by combining the two. If the user is not selling that system, they have no obligations under the CRA.
- Comment on On January 1st of 2026, Texas will be required to give ID to download apps from the app stores. It doesn't matter if it's NSFW or not. 2 months ago:
Apps definitely qualify as products with digital elements. The term that determines whether Google has obligations is this scenario is ‘economic operator’ Here’s the definition for that:
‘economic operator’ means the manufacturer, the authorised representative, the importer, the distributor, or other natural or legal person who is subject to obligations in relation to the manufacture of products with digital elements or to the making available of products with digital elements on the market in accordance with this Regulation
When Google distributes apps via the Play Store, it is very obviously the distributor, which is defined:
‘distributor’ means a natural or legal person in the supply chain, other than the manufacturer or the importer, that makes a product with digital elements available on the Union market without affecting its properties
If someone else distributes apps using other infrastructure that happen to run on an OS that Google made, Google is not the distributor and does not incur any obligations that apply to distributors. (For completeness, Google is obviously not the manufacturer, authorised representative, or importer either.)
- Comment on On January 1st of 2026, Texas will be required to give ID to download apps from the app stores. It doesn't matter if it's NSFW or not. 2 months ago:
I’m saying there’s no reasonable interpretation of this provision where a dev would be seen as supplying to Google by distributing an app that runs on Android without using Google’s store. Given the broader context of the CRA, it should be more clear; the CRA is about supply chains, and generally imposes obligations on entities acting as links in the supply chain. Google can’t sell apps if it doesn’t know where they came from.
The fact that Google plans not to forbid installation of unsigned apps via ADB would be a huge loophole if the intent was to force OS vendors to control all app distribution for those operating systems.
- Comment on On January 1st of 2026, Texas will be required to give ID to download apps from the app stores. It doesn't matter if it's NSFW or not. 2 months ago:
What I quoted was CRA Article 23.
It clearly doesn’t impose any obligations on an OS vendor with regard to app installation where the OS vendor isn’t a party to the transaction.