• 2 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I travel a lot, and spend time in a lot of random places, stay with friends and such like. My job means that I can set my own schedule most of the time, but sometimes I need to respond to something pretty urgently. So, there’s been plenty of times when I’ve been travelling light and suddenly been asked to pull a bunch of data from a spreadsheet and write some quick report on it, so usually I just ask whoever I’m with if I can use their pc for an hour and get it out the way.

    It’s certainly possible do it all on a phone, but it’s much quicker and more pleasant to just use a proper keyboard and screen. And there have been times (like after a ill-advised encounter with a fountain in Rome) when my phone is temporarily out of action, so if I need to deal with travel arrangements on a public computer it might involve accessing my emails.


  • Yeah, I didn’t find it particularly bizarre. Both are very natural ways to process verbal information. Anyone who’s ever tried to do arithmetic in a new language knows that we don’t just abstractly do math, a big part is that we know that seven plus eight is fifteen. That’s why they used to teach multiplication tables by rote. It would be lot more bizarre if an llm had independently devised a reliable mathematical algorithm.




  • Anyone got a any opinions (or a link to a review) of the different options? Proton and tuta come up, are there others worth considering?

    I understand that I’ll probably need to pay (otherwise I’m the product) and encryption / security is good, but the thing that keeps with Gmail (apart from inertia) is that it feels quick and easy to use. My only real experience of non Gmail sites over the last two decades have been terrible but mandatory work webmail systems that are slow, clunky and look a decade out of date. Or Hotmail, which sucks for a variety of reasons.



  • For sure, it’s worth letting people know if they aren’t aware. It’s been a while since I installed boost, but I remember there being very clear messages about the ads and tracking, explaining it was to compensate the developer for the time he spent converting the reddit client to lemmy, and with the option of a one time fee to completely avoid trackers and ads.

    While I love it when things are truly FOSS, I understand that I pay my barber and my plumber for their time, and I don’t have a problem paying a one-off fee to buy software I want. What is exploitative are many subscription models, and all software that takes your money AND still monetises you (looking at you microsoft).

    It’s good to make people aware of genuinely free alternatives. But I used jerboa, voyager and a few other lemmy clients and I’m much happier with Boost and it was worth every cent.


  • I mean, I agree, I’m not going to be losing any sleep worrying about the unsatisfied billionaires. But what he’s saying is that given the cost (losing 30 years of his life) the ‘reward’ ($35 billion) wasn’t enough. He’s not saying he doesn’t like or want the money, he’s saying its not enough to give up your life for.

    If anything, it would explain why rich people keep pursuing money long after any sane person would be content with their millions/billions. Maybe if you just get given a few million you could be satisfied with it, but if you’ve had to sacrifice your life, friends, morality and so on to get it… And you realise it doesn’t actually make you happy, so you keep chasing more, hoping that eventually enough will be enough. Better that than realising you’re an idiot who fell for capitalism’s big lie and gave up the stuff that actually mattered in life to get more numbers on a sheet.


  • I think it did effect things. SMS is weirdly popular in the US (i think it’s might be cause they didn’t use it much in the 90s?) but people I know in France and UK still use texts for some things, even if messaging apps are where most of communication happens (French people even use mms which is insane).

    I know that I managed to convince a number of tech-shy people (including parents) to get Signal by telling them replaced their sms app, so it wasn’t a whole extra app / network they needed to use. It was great for me because I could ditch WhatsApp completely. But when signal stopped supporting sms they went back to just whatsapping and texting, so I cracked and reinstalled WhatsApp to keep in touch with them.