Orion (awooo)

  • 20 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • I think what they mean is that someone unfamiliar with your line of work might even read the entire post and come away with it with the view of “Okay, and?” since the title told them this was going to be about “What Does It Mean To Be A Signal Competitor?”

    The problem there is that what Signal is is different to different people, someone might for example use it like any other chat application, in which case even something like Telegram (ew) or Discord could be an alternative to them.

    Again, if someone is familiar with your blog, they’ll know what you mean, but the blog post can be viewed by someone in isolation, in which case it won’t be so clear, especially since it’s also in relation to moving off of Telegram, which is not an E2EE platform at all by default
















  • Hmm I think my main concern would be lack of kernel/firmware updates, running something like postmarketOS could partly solve that and still be nearly as easy to set up (just unlock and flash a prebuilt image)

    But firmware is still almost entirely dependent on the vendor, since it’s all signed and unpatchable.

    Next issue would be lack of connectivity on a lot of phones, which have gone backwards and include USB 2.0 now. WiFi is an option, but less stable, I personally decided to just go 100Mbps and suffer.

    As for the battery, it would help a lot if phones were designed to boot without one and they were removable, it all worked well for about half a year until I found out I had a spicy pillow and had to replace it with direct power to the board, which made the whole setup much less elegant and required soldering.

    It all comes down to how devices are designed in the end. If someone took the time to make a computer instead of just a phone, and included features that make it useful past its initial life that aren’t that popular (display output, microsd, headphone jack), mainlined all the drivers and maintained firmware, that would be a different story.

    But that’s not a very profitable model, because it’s all about reducing waste and thus selling less. A lot needs to change.















  • Swapped bicycles with a classmate, it was a very old one and he wasn’t familiar with how the brake handles were positioned, so he slammed into my side and the wheels got bent and locked up, sending me flying into the grass on the side of the road lol It wasn’t that bad besides a few scratches and bruises, but the bikes were a bit worse off…

    A more recent contender is when I slammed my right thumb into a door frame at full speed and almost broke it, I had to get an xray to confirm everything was fine.




  • I could imagine it functioning as a tax-funded budget, but coordinating such a thing globally and coming to a consensus seems impossible, that’s something we’re really bad at, and it would have the very same underfunding problems as other even more urgent expenses have.

    As an existing alternative to ad-funded sites, I’ve seen non-profit news survive on donations and tax deductions, so maybe strengthening that model could work, but it would only help with larger entities that can be registered.

    We need something to replace ads, that’s for sure, or at least decrease their influence.


  • I feel like that’s where online payment systems really let us down. If there was an easy universal way to pay a few cents to view content and it wasn’t a privacy and fee nightmare, I’m sure people would have no problem doing that. Digicash systems come to mind, I hope they could make a comeback one day.

    But I also fear a lot of the damage could’ve been done already, kids who grow up with the internet now will probably only remember big tech platforms and may not be very eager to try out something more complicated.



  • Not really (I wasn’t using Google directly anyway), I think it fills a slightly different niche than search engines.

    It’s good as a fuzzy search for the sum of public knowledge, since it can understand quite complex queries and point you in the right direction, then you can go to regular search engines to find more specific stuff.

    Bing was fun to exploit, but I don’t really see why it’s useful, it tends to always look up information which means it provides less of its own knowledge, I can do the searches myself better than an LM. Maybe it can provide more concise answers than all the SEO crap everywhere, but that can be avoided by searching on specific websites like reddit.