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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • Beware, there’s a difference between “push notifications” (which is what your links are talking about) and “notifications”, specifically with the “notification history” feature.

    Push notifications are a mechanism to transport messages over google services. What that does is that the backend service of some app (e.g. the Signal server) can send a message to an app that’s currently not actively running to tell it that there’s something new happening, e.g. a new incoming message. This goes via Google services because that way, the app doesn’t need to be constantly running. Google services then wakes up the app and allow it to do something with that info, e.g. display a notification.

    The alternative is that the app is constantly running, constantly actively checking for new messages and thus constantly consuming power.

    This can be e2e encrypted by the app, and then Google can only see metadata.

    Notifications, on the other hand are the things that show up on your phone when you swipe down from the top navigation bar. These notifications can be read in plain text by any app on your phone, including the OS. If you have Notification History enabled, they can be backed up (again in plain text) to Google’s servers. And any old app you have on your phone can silently do the same. That’s why Signal allows you to hide the text content and/or sender name for notifications.









  • Be really careful with Fedora or Bazzite.

    I’ve been using Fedora for the last few months, because of all the recommendations, and it’s been a constant struggle. Fast updates means I can always enjoy the newest bugs and issues. That’s ok for a toy system I use to tinker, but not for my main system that I just need to work.

    Ubuntu was much more stable and worked better. People hate on it because of their semi-proprietary app delivery system (snap). They feel that Canonical is betraying the open source spirit with it. If you don’t care about that, Ubuntu is pretty nice.

    Btw, Bazzite is immutable, Fedora is not.


  • Totally correct.

    XYZprinting didn’t fail because of the DRM per se. They failed because they had an expensive priter with average quality, average learning curve, average reliability, and on top of that, they had stupid, expensive DRM cartridges that would frequently tangle and that you couldn’t untangle without breaking the cartridge. And they didn’t even have a decent selection of filaments and colors.

    They were a below average product to begin with, and being the first company to slap DRM on the filament was just the nail in the coffin.

    If it had been one of the big players of the time (Ender, Prusa, …) who slowly snuck in DRM, it would have been much more likely to succeed.




  • Yeah, especially in peace time. When war heats up and resources get scarce, you use the cheapest thing that does the job. But in peace time you feed your military contractors to keep them happy and to keep them researching and developing so you don’t lose out on modern technology development.

    (For clarification, with “war time” I mean “being in a war that actually threatens the country”. The US hasn’t been in a war like that for a very long time. They’ve essentially being in “peace time” while having military training and testing facilities in the middle east.)



  • 10 years ago I got into RC planes for a summer, and me and the guy were talking about how ridiculous it is that the milirary is spending so much money on simple drones, when they could just strap some explosives on a cheap hobbyist RC plane/drone for a fraction of the price, and just create swarms of them.

    The technology had been widely available for some time already back then. Turns out, it was just lacking a war to do so.

    (Just to be clear, we were all anti-war in general, this was just idle speculatiok back then. But if our country was attacked at that time, I’m sure some of us would have ended in a newly created drone force like what happened in the Ukraine.)