sefra1
@sefra1@lemmy.zip
- Comment on YSK: Little Free Library is a group that promotes local access to books on a more micro level, to build a stronger community of readers across the world 1 day ago:
It’s widely accepted among pediatricians and psychologists that you should delay introducing your kids to screens as long as possible.
Well, when I was a kid my favorite things where always electronics, TV, radio, music, so if I had children I would never deprive my children of electronics, no matter what the “experts” say.
A lot of children’s books in the 0-4 range are also tactile, include lift-the-flaps, have mirrors or noisemakers, and are safe to chew on. The other thing is that in order to teach independence, the kid needs to be able to access and choose books on their own which is something a physical books and a shelf is really good at and an e-reader is really bad at.
That is fair, for those kind of books I guess I have agree that they can’t replaced with digital alternatives.
Physical books are preferable when dealing with images or large formats. I can’t imagine reading a coffee-table book or art book is as effective on e-reader.
That is a good point, for those kinds of books in particular I guess physical copy is preferable.
Physical books are also better options for complicated texts, especially ones that the reader needs to quickly refer to multiple sections of text while reading e.g. indices, appendices, or that chapter where a character is first introduced. I know there’s digital analogues, but they don’t work for everyone.
Well, I have to disagree on this one, if I’m dealing with complicated texts where I need to quickly refer to multiple sections then nothing beats being able to crtl + f. Also scrolling is much faster than turning pages. But I guess it can be a personal thing.
Those formats also impose technical and financial barriers to access (you may be savvy enough to access thousands of books for free and maintain your own e-reader that respects your privacy, but the majority of people to whom e-books are marketed to cannot). I can lend or give away a physical book to anyone I meet and they can immediately read it; the same cannot be said for digitally reformatted texts.
That’s a fair argument, still, I think the financial barrier to acquire physical books overall is much much higher acquiring the same book physically. Yes you can lend a book from a library, but in my experience libraries never have anything worth reading, which means the only viable solution is paying full price for a book.
I think you are also greatly exaggerating the technical skills needed to download a book, sometimes even just searching “book name pdf download” is enough to download a book, which can be done on a smartphone that most people already own.
As for privacy, it’s true that most people don’t have devices capable of downloading and reading the book on a private system, however, buying a physical book online or lending it from a library also means the book is registered to the reader’s name electronically, in this case tied to the user’s real name and payment details.
Now I actually favor reading on a screen, over paper or e-ink, I find much more comfortable reading from an uniform light source that I can regulate and select the background and foreground color, over having to rely on natural light, which more often than not, it’s either too dark or too bright. But even if hated screens, an used e-reader can be bought for the price of only 2 or 3 physical books.
Still, it’s down to a matter of personal opinion, I understand that some people prefer to read paper the same way if I could afford and had extra space I would enjoy listening to some vinyl records, still from a practical/economical standpoint, I still think digital advantages greatly outweighs it’s disadvantages.
- Comment on YSK: Little Free Library is a group that promotes local access to books on a more micro level, to build a stronger community of readers across the world 2 days ago:
No I don’t.
If I had children I would teach them to download books, unless they were too young and couldn’t understand the steps, then I would download for them.
Give a man a book and he will read for a day, teach a man how to download books, and he will have literature for the rest of his life.
- Comment on 24.04 2 days ago:
I would agree if you had said Mint or Debian, but a Windows user trying GNU/Linux isn’t going to have an easy time installing and maintaining Arch.
- Comment on YSK: Little Free Library is a group that promotes local access to books on a more micro level, to build a stronger community of readers across the world 2 days ago:
That’s nice, but do people still read physical books?
IMO the best community library one can have is the internet, and sites like Anna’s Archive allow for access to pretty much every book in existence from the comfort of your own bed.
People hate me when I say this, but in my opinion physical books are a novelty of the past, sure it’s useful in an apocalypse for preservation and whatnot, but physical books are just limited and unpractical.
- Comment on Move Fast and Break Nothing | Waymo’s robotaxis are probably safer than ChatGPT. 3 days ago:
Wouldn’t that sort of material also double the frequency of any other light source? Like a street lamp or the sun?
- Comment on Head of the Signal app threatens to withdraw from Europe 4 days ago:
Well, that is fair, also simplex has some serious bugs which I don’t mind because I value freedom, security and privacy over reliability, but sometimes the app just stops receiving messages until restarted and I need to message them via other means telling them to restart the app.
- Comment on Head of the Signal app threatens to withdraw from Europe 4 days ago:
Simplex is really easy to install and use, unfortunately it’s still kinda buggy, specially with public relays, I personally don’t mind buggy, I’m willing to make sacrifices for the same of freedom and privacy.
I just keep a second chat app as a failback so I can send them a message saying “ur simplex broke again, pls restart”
Xmpp has been stable for decades, tho I guess otr/omemo is hard for family to install, also doesn’t support e2ee calls (or rather, it does, but it’s complicated). But I haven’t used xmpp in a long time.
- Comment on Head of the Signal app threatens to withdraw from Europe 4 days ago:
My personal experience is that if I can convince someone to install signal I can also convince them to install simplex, the process is the same. If I can’t then they aren’t going to use anything but the popular spyware anyway.
- Comment on Head of the Signal app threatens to withdraw from Europe 4 days ago:
Simplex, xmpp, deltachat briar, matrix, even session.
Anything is better than signal that relies on a centralised proprietary server and requires a phone number.
- Comment on Is anyone NOT steaming their Music? 6 days ago:
Even tho i have a several TBs library I still stream, because I always went to find and listen to new things that aren’t in my library.
Generally if something is on my library, I’m already tired of it.
So I endup streaming from YouTube music free + unlock origin. If I want to listen to a whole album without having half of it’s songs replaced by a low fidelity music video version I open the album link with mpv or listen to the album from telegram bots like @deezload2bot or @linemusicbot
- Comment on Google's shocking developer decree struggles to justify the urgent threat to F-Droid 1 week ago:
Idk about GrapheneOS in particular but I find the sandboxing solutions for GNU/Linux like bubblewrap to be much more granular than standard Android.
“give us access to manage phone calls or we won’t you me answer internet calls (which have nothing to do with actual SIM calls)”, “give us access to all your files or we wont let you share that file via the share function (which doesn’t need fs access to work)”.
On GNU/Linux I can only give a program exactly the resources it needs, I can disallow dbus, I can block it from accessing potentially troublesome things like /dev/dri, can overlay filesystems and pretend that’s my real home dir. Or can just mount the whole / to some other system.
- Comment on How do I stop sleeping through everything? 1 week ago:
Have you tried getting a louder alarm clock?
Like plug your phone to a powerful speaker system that reaches 100dB. That should wake everyone.
Doesn’t have to be expensive or HiFi, just loud.
May not be an option if you have neighbours tho.
- Comment on Is Star Trek Discovery that bad? 1 week ago:
Discovery is my least preferred star trek I’ve watched so far, I mean, it’s not “bad” per se, it’s just different from the rest of star trek and has a different formula.
The thing with discovery is that everything happens really fast, there’s always a sense of urgency and hurry, but actual plot development happens really slowly.
Conflict takes a whole season to resolve, instead of standard one episode which you expect from a star trek show.
Also, I hate how the actors mumble instead of talking.
It’s not bad, it’s just not my favourite format.
- Comment on How do I keep a 9 year old from constantly licking erasers and putting them in his mouth 1 week ago:
Don’t all children do that?
I used to shew on everything, my friend used to literally destroy pens by shewing them too much. I think it’s normal.
- Comment on The search for anti-gravity propulsion 1 week ago:
And I would be one of the few people who wouldn’t go on vacation and would have to refuse must jobs because of some absurd believe that even if a copy of me is made after I’m dead, that’s irrelevant for me since that’s still not me and I don’t want to die.
Or maybe I would take the teleporter as an alternative to suicide, and whoever would take on my life wasn’t me, so my problems where their now.
- Comment on Samsung phones embedded with 'unremovable' Israeli spyware 2 weeks ago:
That website is an excellent resource, but they can’t just expect everyone to have money for a pixel, even if privacy is a priority for me and many people, a pixel is just beyond the reach of the large majority of internet users.
Instead they need to make a curated list of less than ideal but still better than stock alternatives, or else people will just give up and get stock android instead.
- Comment on EU to block Big Tech from new financial data sharing system 2 weeks ago:
For now, get ready for chat control…
- Comment on There are no laws! We made the whole thing up! 2 weeks ago:
There is no property! They made the whole thing up!
- Comment on Why is it called linux phone? 3 weeks ago:
Maybe we should start calling it GNU/Linux again, I myself am to blame of starting to call it just Linux in recent years.
- Comment on Are Cars Just Becoming Giant Smartphones on Wheels? 3 weeks ago:
So you will if you pay a loan for a new car…
- Comment on What would stop you from switching to a flip phone (or dumbphone) in 2025? 3 weeks ago:
No decent (local) music player, no DSP, no music streaming with newpipe, decent video player to watch series in bed, screen too small to read books, no e2ee messaging, no web browser, useless camera, operating system without security updates.
I honestly couldn’t care less about calls and SMS, I only use that like few times a year.
- Comment on 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' & 'Doctor Who' Crossover? Watch Finale Sneak Peek 3 weeks ago:
The overall lore is that humans in the future build empires and enslave several species like the ood.
Humans conquer planets and dry all it’s resources with no regards for native life, they drain the swap and enslave the swamp people to mine toxic minerals.
Companies are all powerful, and the government extremely corrupt.
- Comment on 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' & 'Doctor Who' Crossover? Watch Finale Sneak Peek 3 weeks ago:
There are many ways they could make it match, they could pass it as a parallel universe somehow, or maybe make some god from the pantheon of discord together with some Q bridge the worlds.
I always found quite funny how Doctor Who’s universe is much darker than Star Trek. Doctor Who’s universe is more akin to Star Trek’s mirror universe where are human empires that enslave smaller planets, while on Star Trek there’s the federation and all.
- Comment on Spotify is finally launching support for lossless music streaming 3 weeks ago:
The fuss is that every time you transcode to a new format you accumulatively lose quality.
So for example if you have an 320kbps mp3, but then that takes too much space so you transcode it to 192 mp3, but then you discover the opus codec is more efficient so you transcode it again, but then you want to make a fan video of the same song, so your video player transcoded it again into video friendly aac.
The quality on your final video is going contain the faults of all the files upstream.
Meanwhile if you edit the video from a lossless source, it will only get encoded once.
So it doesn’t matter for streaming, but it matters if you want to download and convert to other formats.
- Comment on ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way 4 weeks ago:
Completely unrelated, but I just remembered that I have a server too. It’s funny how often I forget this.
It doesn’t run apache but I haven’t updated nginx in months…
- Comment on DDR4 costs soar as manufacturers pull the plug — panic buying and stockpiling impact DDR4 spot pricing as supply dwindles 4 weeks ago:
Last time I did a simulation few months ago, DDR4 motherboards (and memory if I recal) were still considerably cheaper than DDR5.
- Comment on Inspiring. Innovating. 5 weeks ago:
Nice, now the techbros can finally achieve their lifelong dream of paving all the forests and selling tickets for the tree museums.
After that they can plant trees on Mars.
- Comment on Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward 5 weeks ago:
Because not everyone has the skills, the know how and the time to learn a new operating system.
Most people if they were to try to install Linux would probably endup breaking their systems somehow, most don’t wanna risk it.
It may seem simple to us, but think of it from the perspective of someone who is afraid to install a program because thinks it’s going to make their computer explode, have no idea what a bootable USB is, and have never used a command line their whole lives.
With modern computers with UEFI and secure boot installing Linux is even harder, no average user is going to mess with any of that.
For the average person, the computer is just a very secondary thing in their lives that doesn’t get any attention besides the average “my phone is full, I need to copy my photos to the computer”. Tech companies know this so they exploit the user’s ignorance.
- Comment on Google plans to begin verifying the identity of all developers who distribute apps on Android, even if it's outside the Play Store, starting September 2026 1 month ago:
Unfortunately $300 is still the double if what I’m willing to pay for a phone, I paid 150 for my spyware phone, and while I hate the lack of privacy and freedom such device provides, it does everything I need it to do with the apps from f-droid. I just don’t use it for anything that requires secrecy.
I guess I will just stop updating when the new “feature” rolls out and see what happens.
- Comment on Google plans to begin verifying the identity of all developers who distribute apps on Android, even if it's outside the Play Store, starting September 2026 1 month ago:
I did my research before buying my current phone, but turned out all phones that could run lineage OS were too expensive, not a single affordable phone was supported. (With the exception of really super old discontinued models that are too slow to even open a webpage and battery past it’s useful life)