ViceCitySage

Though I prefer Monero ($XMR) over Bitcoin, it's sad to see a non-KYC Bitcoin exchange go away. Luckily, LocalMonero isn't related to LocalBitcoins so that is still around.

Space tourism is looking like an exciting market. Heard Blue Origin is doing the same.

I have a Sceptre TV that I bought a few years ago and couldn't be happier. Sceptre does have Smart TVs using Roku or Google TV, but there are many models such as what I bought that are modern (made within past 3-5 years) and non-smart. Quality isn't anything substantial but its sufficient and not horrible. Hate how bloated proprietary botnet is the norm out of the gate. Most people already have or will just buy their own media centers like game consoles or Fire Sticks anyway. Personally I have a SBC with LibreELEC (Just Enough OS for Kodi).

Apple's "privacy" is really just data protection from other competing companies. It was just another marketing campaign to maintain their positive image.

Hell no to more government force.

For those that missed it:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/17/vlc-india/

https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/04/vlc-developer-videolan-sen...

https://internetfreedom.in/videolan-issued-legal-notice-to-d... .

Weirdest headline that I have encountered here. Had to read it twice just to make sure.

Still on the fence on AI art. On one end, it helps people create images on the fly for their needs without much delay finding an artist. On other, it is a soulless creation. Artists won't die out but it will be forced into a certain niche.

Holy crap that was fast.

I hate how Big Tech is so adamant about viewing and interacting through algorithms instead of allowing you to do basic sorting according to a certain order you choose.

Don't really care for this but more feature parity with WhatsApp or SnapChat could hopefully attract more people and make it somewhat mainstream. Personally, I know a lot of people that use these messengers just to look at or post stories.

Or reject the partisan binary and vote third party. But in all honesty, I don't care how Elon or others vote. Just shouldn't project it onto users and try to sway people during election season as the owner of the platform.

Anyone with a good understanding of the internet and social media should come to the conclusion that constantly projecting what is happening in your life is idiotic. What's more dangerous is putting the minds of the young and undeveloped on display for the world to see permanently.

More reason to boycott the next World Cup. FIFA has been a corrupt organization for a long time with numerous scandals but this one is over the top. Qatar blatantly bought their way into the 2022 hosting spot and is using slave labor to build gigantic stadiums and towns that will definitely be abandoned right after the events just like the ones from the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. All because the same rich Qatari monarchs that own Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) and spend enormous amounts of money (iirc about a billion Euros) in hopes of winning a UEFA Champions League want to see their favorite players go at it in their backyards.

Most popular sport in most countries in the world. FIFA World Cup is the biggest sporting event in the world. The amount of viewers blows the Olympics, the next most watched after, out of the water.

The average person hasn't even put on a VR set and most of those who have don't have one laying around. Only a small dedicated amount of people use Virtual Reality and it;s mostly for gaming. Investing so much into Oculus and later on Horizon Worlds to somehow reinvent how we interact socially is idiotic.

This is honestly dystopian and I can't believe that I am reading this. It's as Orwellian as it gets. Generally speaking, avoid implementing government policies and powers that you wouldn't let the worst of your enemies use, even if its with "good" intentions. The federal government stepping forward to fight disinformation might seem benevolent to some at the surface but it is a terrible idea in practice. History has shown that the state isn't always trustworthy and we should be more cynical and cautious when evaluating them. A war on disinformation will turn into a war on information in general.

I suspected this since Day 1 and never downloaded the app. Don't have a problem with Chinese people, just the government. China is known for its callous authoritarian state that openly express their goal of surpassing America. By law, Chinese companies have to comply with authoritarian demands from their government (iirc there is even a CCP member assigned to each company) and at any time can turn into an pseudo arm of the state. On top of that, China has had numerous scandals where they send Chinese spies to various institutions like universities and companies and steal research and trade secrets. I also distanced myself from most social media in general as American companies are still horrible when it comes to privacy. Surprised by the amount of people that hate China spying on Americans via TikTok but say nothing about our tech companies. Big Tech hands out our data to our government so they can circumvent the fourth amendment as well as other nefarious acts.

YouTube is a constant strain for Google and its been that way for the past few years. YouTube itself is very expensive to maintain (https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...) and has had times when they operated at a loss. Alphabet has blamed YouTube repeatedly for years when they make losses in revenue. Feels like someone crunched up some numbers recently and got angry at what they saw. Almost like this time around someone set a strict revenue goal and are determined to find more ways to profit off YouTube.

Thanks for the heads up and resources.

Another turn off is the fact that like other streaming platforms you lose the sense of control over your media. You'll own nothing, be a renter, and forced to be happy and put up with it. You are essentially renting a game on someone else's platform therefore you will always play by their rules and policies, no matter how awful they may be.

Been very interested in OpenBSD for a while. Planning on installing it onto PCEngines' APU + antenna and using it as a router. Following this guide: https://openbsdrouterguide.net/ .

Crypto before going mainstream and investors getting involved was a middle finger to corrupt establishments that manipulate and steal the value of our money. Bitcoin was created and emerged as a reaction to the 2008 financial crisis and Central Banks like the Federal Reserve. Monero as a project is driven to go back to Bitcoin's original philosophy and improve on it. Also, not every law in the books is just and governments use plenty of our money for nefarious purposes.

Love this app. Not only is it one of the few podcast apps that is FOSS but it is a service that utilizes an open platform of podcasts. It uses the open, independent, free speech database called PodcastIndex (https://podcastindex.org/ \ https://github.com/Podcastindex-org) that is similar to gpodder but imo better. PodcastIndex was started by Adam Curry(https://wikiless.org/wiki/Adam_Curry?lang=en), one of the first podcasters ever, and a tech entrepreneur named Dave Jones. They also have an initiative called Podcasting 2.0 which attempts to create podcast standards with its own namespace.

This is actually a small proof of concept for the much larger project that is Arcan or Arcan-fe. Did a fair amount of research into it. Its philosophy is to move away from the traditional desktop experience and create fundamentally unique, new interfaces. More on its founding principles can be found on this site: https://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2020/08/10/principles.... The core of Arcan is written in C with a little Lua and takes inspiration from game engines, display servers, and streaming multimedia processors. It combines similar functionality of these traditionally seperate low level graphics to create an all-in-one graphical display engine. According to this slideshow (https://speakerdeck.com/letoram/arcan), the "last mile" for making any gui/tui can be as little as simple scripts. Writing scripts(mostly lua as of right now) can get you a tiling wm, audio/video playback, a libretro-based emulator running a game, and as this post shows a dynamic new command line shell. An interesting project overall to keep an eye on. Can see it used as another modern alternative to the aging X/X11/Xorg on GNU+Linux and BSDs.

Useful links related to Arcan: Website(https://arcan-fe.com/), Creator's Github (https://github.com/letoram), Arcan's Github Repo(https://github.com/letoram/arcan), Creator's youtube channel (https://redirect.invidious.io/user/arcanfrontend).

Wish more people knew about Monero. It pretty much replaced Bitcoin on the dark web and other markets where private, anonymous transfers of money is essential. Every crypto on most KYC exchanges exposes every transaction on its public ledger. Monero and minuscule amount of other coins use cryptographic techniques to hide wallets and their history. Most other coins won't add this as they will be blacklisted like Monero. Monero has an added bonus of having good tokenomics (cough cough PirateChain). It is pretty much what most people think Bitcoin is without being a scam.

its pretty much a modified instance of Gitea with a small, privacy-friendly German Gmhb behind it. Still like it a lot. Wish more developers at the very least set up mirrors on either Codeberg or Sourcehut.

The only project that I have came across that uses Crystal is Invidious.

I'm pretty indifferent towards Kanye. Not the biggest hater but this imo is somewhat stupid. It would need to undergo an overhaul and relaunch since it got banned off the app stores. Furthermore, the platform it mimics is potentially going to be overhauled by Elon anyway. Even if you're still at disagreement with Twitter, there is a sea of twitter alternatives out there. Some of which have policies that support free speech. For some reason, most alternative social media platform mimic twitter.

Like Arcan as a concept a lot. Wish it got more attention.