Yeah, after seeing plenty of “quirky”/“edgy”/“ironic” culture in 2010s, and given the absurdity of current world and tech leaders, I cannot tell if something like this is genuinely delusional or just satire.

And its neighbor, WSTB 88.9 The Alternation, with local bands, indie/emo/pop-punk, sometimes clueless DJs, regular news and weather.

IMO it had all the content and users some time ago. I follow mostly specific interest/hobby subreddits, but lately even they have devolved into illiterates asking the same exact questions repeatedly; some strange attention-seeking posts such as pictures captioned “getting started”/“this just arrived" or “what should I do with this thing that I got?”; and really dumb stuff such as “I inhaled solder fumes, will I get lead poisoning?” (These are at least entertaining in a way)

IMO Snikket (XMPP) is the easiest all-in-one solution with audio/video chat at the moment. Pretty good on resources too.

I currently host a Matrix Synapse server, but:

• Matrix seems to be expanding in the corporate / institutional direction, more services are expected for regular functionality
• Element X (upcoming client) breaks calls compatibility with old Element, now requiring Element Call. It’s kind of a mess, I presume this is to support group calls, but makes it a PITA to use currently.
• Even with small number of users, Synapse DB grows in size due to state_groups_state table, non-deletable users, and copying ALL data from other servers’ rooms (this one is by design but still…)

AI is a tech debt generator.

Any programmer who worked with legacy code knows a situation where something was written by a former employee or a contractor without much comments or documentation, making it difficult to modify (because of complexity or readability) or replace (because of non-existing business documentation and/or peculiar bugs and features)

AI accelerates these situations, but the person does not even exist. Which, IMO is the main thing that needs to be called out.

I ran prosody server and used Siskin IM as a client, it worked pretty well. But as others mentioned, since this is Apple, the client developer has to run a push server, no background processes and long-polling allowed. Some other XMPP clients (Secret Messenger I think) did not have that set up and do not have notifications.

Profanity for XMPP and gomuks for Matrix are both neat ncurses clients that work pretty well.

Looks like BM818 in Librem5 supports VoLTE, but might have issues with some networks.

PinePhone’s (and one of Mudita’s phone’s) EG25 modem technically supports VoLTE, but was very flaky for me (in a mid-low signal area)

FuriLabs (FLX1) seems to have VoLTE working.

Ubuntu Touch explicitly states that it does not support VoLTE.

Nice! Writing a similar converter was my first step when I set up my parallel site-capsule.

Love gemtext, it’s so simple yet pragmatic. (And there is just one version of it, unlike Markdown)

When I last used Dino (a few years back, on a PinePhone), I had to build it with notification sounds flag. Not sure if this is still the case, or if that is the same for calls.

./configure --enable-plugin=notification-sound

While looking for above, also found a GitHub issue with your problem

Could someone please enlighten me on what is the companies’ endgame with putting AI chatbots everywhere in their products? (Especially generic ones like this) What are they looking to gain by doing so? And if money, how? Injected ads?

Honest question.

WDYM soft-bricked?

Here’s what I did: I had a OnePlus (before there was a Lineage image for it), rooted it, disabled Google Play, which made all apps scream at me repeatedly (although still worked), then installed MicroG, which made the screaming stop, and most apps continued to work fine (except a specific one that used Google Maps API on a page - MicroG was not enough for some reason)

I am not sure what you mean. Is there a different way to connect a USB-C hub to a smartphone other than the only USB-C port?

I know you are being sarcastic, but that is pretty much how many people buy phones and cars. It’s a gas guzzler with barely 20MPG, requires premium gasoline, is unreliable and can only be serviced at specific dealerships for a top dollar? But it has a premium feel

The entire luxury market would not exist otherwise.

Hardware is nice and all, but how is the software? The 2020 Nord 10 I had was way too eager to kill any background processes, and had a very bad bug consuming all storage space.

I assume the bootloader will be unlockable, being a OnePlus?

“Android is Linux” is a bit oversimplified.

What the is issue, still simply, the way I understand it:

• Linux kernel contains drivers for the specific hardware used in devices (processors, modem, memory, display, camera, etc.)
• Each Android smartphone has different hardware configuration
• Hardware manufacturers want to guard their secrets, so they sign contracts and NDAs with phone manufacturers
• Phone manufacturers create a unique, dead-end fork of a Linux kernel that contains drivers and is configured specifically for that model. (There are exceptions, but generally)

So yes, Android uses a Linux kernel, but in most cases, a very specific one.

Why not replace it? This requires:

• Access to the bootloader and ability to read/write to internal storage on low level, and manufacturers lock it down.
• Knowing the hardware and the drivers. As mentioned, manufacturers will provide drivers only to their contracts. So someone would need to write a driver.
• Once someone writes a driver, it can be added to mainline Linux, available to all.
• That is why “mainlining” a device is a big deal - that means that the kernel for that device can be built, and going forward, that device will be supported for all future kernel versions.

Those are called pivots, and what you are saying seems plausible: there are vision algorithms to recognize and selectively spray weeds (see Bilberry ), recent prototypes with light-pressure grabbers to gather fruits and soft vegetables.

Even for harvesters, there are projects to automate harvesting and swapping the grain trucks (see Outrun ). GPS-guided (or assisted) tractors are already a thing.

Agriculture has some interesting innovations, but it often gets bogged down in corporate acquisitions and monetization.

DOJ did denaturalize many members of the German American Bund due to their ties with the Nazi party.

Source: You Are Not American by Amanda Frost, great book.

Osmin on PinePhone was… Tolerable. I’m just pleasantly surprised it worked okay with GPS being integrated into the modem.

Takes a long time to get a GPS fix (like old standalone GPS units), but it’s possible to provide A-GPS data to it.

Likes and up-votes on posts, achievements, streaks, levels, and so on… Somehow, we figured out that the human brain likes the meaningless number to increase, and humans will spend more time on a site, game, or app, and often do dumb things just to trigger a reward pathway from seeing higher numbers.