Melody Fwygon

I’m suspecting these companies are trying to use Data Caps to “Deter Piracy” without saying as much.

Unfortunately; the reality now is that these Data Caps do not just affect rampant pirates or people who download a lot of things. They are trying to justify an outdated policy that no longer works as intended; and hoping customers won’t notice them taking a bit more profit off the top.

They’ve been more than caught now and the practice must stop or customers will get federal regulators involved

I think not.

We’ve been bathing in private for the past 200 or so years hereabouts. It is difficult, if not improbable, to reverse such a trend in society and culture so quickly.

While I may actually feel this is a thing that society might benefit from; I don’t see this happening outside of nations with a lower societal taboo, and more robust cultural norms and practices on the subject of nudity. It works in Japan simply because that’s how their entire society has been structured from the start, and their society largely agreed that communal bathhouses made much more sense logistically and economically; largely due to the fact that it is an island nation, and land space is more precious there.

Furthermore; I personally also prefer privacy. As a trans individual; that privacy is strongly necessary to me for many valid reasons concerning my own safety and health; and for ensuring others do not feel unsafe; regardless of their reasons for feeling that way.

Society is not ready for this kind of thing anymore and has mostly chosen to abandon the practice to antiquity.

I don’t think this app is problematic. I think it’s attempting something interesting. Whether that will work or not will remain to be seen.

As with many “untested” dating app concepts; “May the user(/buyer) beware.” My advice to people who doubt the app is to ‘avoid it’. There’s plenty of valid reasons why you may feel that it won’t work. I’m not going to invalidate those feelings nor those experiences.

Enough people will vote with their feet; either by using it, using and quitting it, or not using it at all; that we will probably see within a few years if it works or if it quickly dies and languishes in obscurity.

I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing how well things performed in 5 years from now for this concept. I do feel it could help, especially if the boilerplate rejection text is designed intelligently enough. I certainly feel like enough people struggle with mental health that what they are trying to do could be beneficial to encouraging people not to act impulsively. I think providing mental health resources right there in the app may allow rejectees to seek help they need; instead of pinning their hopes on finding a potential mate to address their issues, then lashing out at, or stalking, those potential mates when they’re rejected.

To be clear; I do understand that many kinds of scary or bad experiences are a thing for some dating app users. I simply feel that, for those people who have not had such an experience and might feel safe or safer with such a messaging mechanic in a dating app; I do not see the harm in it.

At no point do I recommend this app anyone who feels that it’s unsafe to do anything but ‘ghost’ a bad match-up.

^{Please, do not try to change my mind.}

Agreed; when an AI is used to bring things to the attention of a qualified human handler; the two working in tandem can be pretty effective.

AI alone should never make decisions; and humans should always evaluate an AI’s findings carefully before acting on them.

We can no longer trust anything that is specifically sent to us via digital means.

Technologies like the Document Scanner and even the Photocopier will now have to encode secret data to authenticate that a real, functioning machine has digitized the document.

This can in fact, cause a great amount of trouble for people.

People will be required to never digitize themselves handwriting all letters of the alphabet; lest their handwriting be vulnerable to an AI learning it.

Firefox is open source. It’s not going anywhere; even if Mozilla Co. goes broke and closes down the Mozilla Foundation.

Most reasonable consumers won’t go for this. it’s a greed play.

Give me mice that I own; not mice to rent.

Disgusting. Utterly disgusting. This idea belongs in the garbage bin.

No.

It is hard to have both; but not impossible. You can still be privacy friendly without sacrificing necessary functionality.

It will require that the “provider” of such a dataset constantly scrub, sanitize and remove data that would cause privacy hazards as quickly as reasonably possible however. That in and of itself is a technical challenge; though not impossible.

Ideally there’s not a whole lot of data that needs to be kept.

Legitimately all that needs to be stored is a few things:

• Location (GPS)
• SSIDs (Wifi APs only)
• Cell ID & MCC/MNC (Cell Towers only)

and things they MUST NOT STORE OR SHARE like:

• IPs of contributors for longer than a few days
• un-hashed BSSIDs (Wifi/BT)
• MAC addresses (Wifi/BT)
• IMEI/IMSIs (or other cellular identifiers derived from them)
• APs that don’t exist in a fixed location (Think mobile hotspot SSIDs) for longer than a fixed amount of time.
• BT devices
• Non-unique SSIDs or IDs that may indicate no user config took place and manufacturer did not differentiate device ID. (Things like “SETUP” with no unique number (SSIDs like"SETUP-be3fd34d" would be valid) or “[ISP]@HOME” or “[ISP]Wifi” which provide no meaningful discriminators)

Linux must achieve 100% compatibility. Otherwise the doubters will not shut up.

I should point out that this isn’t always “Google is trying to block adblockers” again!

Google can, will, and does simply change how the YouTube watch pages look, feel and operate behind the scenes quite regularly.

Thankfully we have people like those at the FreeTube, NewPipe and yt-dlp projects to sift through those changes and update the code to cope with the new output.

In general; I strongly don’t recommend anything on the Google Play Store except the Google Dialer.

If the Google Dialer is not to your liking; I strongly recommend only trying Dialers you will find on F-Droid.org

I like that he is being decisive about it. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the feature was only being delayed because of internal project politics or quirky policies that normally make sense, but don’t in this specific scenario.

I’m not being harsh; they bungled that initial transition badly too; despite it being a Google action.

Unfortunately they left a lot of users in the lurch when they left the Play Store as well and that too left a bad taste. It’s not exactly easy to migrate across versions and packages and software differ wildly as they allowed both versions to do their own thing without relabeling them so you could run them side-by-side.

I don’t blame them for Google’s actions; but I do blame them for how they handled it.

You might be confusing my transition into a rant against Google as blaming Termux.

They could certainly “clearly pass the cost” of this on to the user by not offering Audiobooks to users who didn’t pay for the “+ # of Audiobooks” tier of Spotify Premium; instead of this horrible enshittified crap where it cuts you off midsentence like a greedy telecomm provider would. Or perhaps their limitation should be on how many titles you can listen to concurrently in a certain time period. (So if you open X books; that’s it; you have to shelve one or wait it out)

It certainly means that Spotify did a bad job at negotiating their rights to these audiobooks as well. That matters too; because that makes the product worse; and that should never have been allowed to happen. If they couldn’t have offered it nicely, they could’ve just not offered it at all or added it to a higher service tier so that the cost is diverted better.

I stopped using Termux in general because of this inanity where they moved off and stopped supporting the Play Store Version; now this happens where they’re unable to keep things from conflicting across the different APK sources?

Yikes. Seems like a good time to continue staying away from Termux and not recommending it.

It’s a shame since I really love the concept of the app; but each increment of Android has been rough on it and I can’t imagine it being useful with Google being stupid about their policies.

…Unfortunately they’re often quick to blame apps they dislike for problems in the ecosystem, and they often directly attack them through nerfing APIs and system calls that the apps tend to use; which I think is absolutely a dogshit thing to do.

Please, stop enshittifying our phones Google.

It isn’t AI itself, it’s AI as a vector for corporate recklessness.

This. 1000% this. Many of Issac Asimov novels warned about this sort of thing too; as did any number of novels inspired by Asimov.

It’s not that we didn’t provide the AI with rules. It’s not that the AI isn’t trying not to harm people. It’s that humans, being the clever little things we are, are far more adept at deceiving and tricking AI into saying things and using that to justify actions to gain benefit.

…Understandably this is how that is being done. By selling AI that isn’t as intelligent as it is being trumpeted as. As long as these corporate shysters can organize a team to crap out a “Minimally Viable Product” they’re hailed as miracle workers and get paid fucking millions.

Ideally all of this should violate the many, many laws of many, many civilized nations…but they’ve done some black magic with that too; by attacking and weakening laws and institutions that can hold them liable for this and even completely ripping out or neutering laws that could cause them to be held accountable by misusing their influence.

13 billion Euro British Franc Moneys?

That’s pocket change to Google.

Note: the above message is satirical. Do not reply.

Gabe Newell knows that any potential buyer will run Valve into the ground. Thus he already promised too long ago that he would never sell or let Valve go public.

Considering how many game studios that Microsoft just killed off in the last 3 years alone; they’re never going to be worthy of buying Valve.