Ferk

Most of those 90% of vendors are not big enough to pull it off. The ones with the muscle to do it successfully are apparently offered special deals by Google that make it not really worth it for them to spend the effort to try and invest in building their own store. Specially if doing so compromises that deal.

Add to that the technical hurdles of trying to run a store in an OS managed by the competition and with increasingly tight security restrictions for functionality that is considered “system level” (eg. automatic updates on F-droid don’t work unless you root/flash the firmware…), to the point that you need to make your own OS/firmware if you want to be a real alternative with the same level of user friendliness.

Then add the technical hurdles of installing/managing an alternative firmware for several phone models, to the point that it might be easier to become (or partner with) a phone manufacturer.

Then add to that how competitive and ruthless the phone manufacturing market is, with very thin margins, and how reluctant people are to trying something that isn’t already mainstream and doesn’t have the fancy apps from the remaining 10% of successful big companies in the Play Store.

A giant as big as Amazon tried to pull it off at a few of those levels (from running their own installable store on regular Android to making their own devices with their own firmware) and even with all the pull from Amazon it isn’t making much of a dent. And in some of the device categories (like the fire phones) they already gave up.

This is further crippled by how the increasingly tight security measures in Android make harder and harder to add functionality that is considered “system-level” and is as deeply integrated as the Play Store.

You can’t simply install F-droid and expect the same level of user friendliness and automatic app updates as in the official Play Store. Without esoteric, hackish and warranty-voiding rooting methods, you need to give manual user confirmation for every small update. You need to update 30 apps that accumulated because you forgot to manually update each of them? get prepared for going 30 times thought the same process of pressing buttons and giving confirmation for each of them.

If your grocery store “willfully acquired or maintained monopoly power by engaging in anticompetitive conduct”… then you’d be actively and purposefully affecting the ability for anyone to “try to build an alternative to compete with [it]”.

They aren’t asking Google to use a specific price, what they are asking is for them to stop offering special custom-made deals under the table for some of the partners with the intent of preventing competition. Nobody is stopping Google from offering the same fees to everyone indiscriminately… the issue is when they pick and choose with the purpose of minimizing/discouraging competition. Particularly when they are already the biggest one in their market by a wide margin, so they have a higher power/responsibility than a Mom’n’Pop store.

Would it help turning on the setting to have the links always open in a new tab?
It’s been a long time since I used ddg, but I believe they have the option in their settings page, most search engines do.

Will you be notified and asked permission before the page is loaded?

I mean, even for self-signed/invalid certificates, most browsers allow you to optionally access the page anyway… it’ll show some error page first, but it’ll allow you to load it if you explicitly request to continue in the error page itself, right? and you’ll get an eye-catching red icon indicating the website is untrusted… why can’t browsers implement something similar to that? Just use a different icon and a different page/dialog to opt-in on first visit. Something that isn’t as strong as the error page, but that makes it clear to the user which organization/government is responsible for authorizing the access.

But then again… why not simply have that website registered under .id.eu (for example) and have the EU use that DNS for registering/signing subdomains using eIDAS certificates? then there would be no risk for it to potentially poison other top-level domains if it’s compromised. And imho, it would be great if when a citizen gets their eIDAS certificate it comes with a personal domain that they can freely use.

I feel I’m not fully understanding here neither what exactly is being asked nor the purpose for asking it.
Is there some more clear and unbiased information on this? …the way they wanna call it “secret” is also very confusing to me, that smells of FUD… in which way is it “secret”? are there no public details about the request? “secret legislation” feels almost like an oximoron. I feel that what they want to say is that the controversial sections were introduced very late in the process, following some closed-door meetings, but that’s no the same thing as the legislation being “secret”…

Yes, I agree that it feels unrealistic that there will be something stable and good by the time the law actually takes effect. But the regulation (the Digital Markets Act) has been already approved since 2022 and we already have a deadline for Whatsapp set by the EU: March 2024 (6 months from 6th September 2023, which is when the Commission designated Meta as “Gatekeeper” and Whatsapp as a “Core Platform Service”).

So, while I’m very skeptical that the result will be satisfactory, I’m very curious to see what will Whatsapp come up with when the deadline hits, because, allegedly, they are already working on it.

With the new European regulations Whatapp will soon be forced to offer some compatibility towards 3rd party apps, so there are chances that perhaps bridging in this way will become easier in the near future, or at least have some level of official support. But we won’t know for certain how will it work until it happens. All we know is that Whatsapp is currently working on a way for 3rd parties to connect with them.

Personally, I’d hold for a bit to see where does that go and then decide what method to use.

be nice

What niceness level exactly?
The most nice I can be in my system is -20… but being too nice to one process leaves others with less time and resources in their life.

Yes, I got your point. Mine was that many of the things we do (specially online) cannot be protected by trying to keep it “secret” in the way you previously described. Because they often involve a “Bob”, even if it’s one we sometimes don’t even notice.

So it makes sense for someone to try and look for ways to at least get some level of protection from Alices in other ways than just “don’t tell Bob” even if they might not be flawless (you gave some examples of such ways in that last response).

That’s true, though personally I find a sort of warm feeling about the idea of my messages and content I produced being available for my descendants, beyond just my bank account.

I wish I had a way to see how my great-grandparents were. What their life was like. That I could check out conversations they had in a public forum. Or see what hobbies they had… but life back then left no traces, so their thoughts were lost to time after my grandparents and my father went away. If they wrote any letters they were lost. So I’d be ok if one day one of my descendants has a way to see what accounts I used and they come upon this message when wondering about me. Like a time-traveling high-five from past-me to my relatives.

When Bob is active part of what you don’t want Alice to know, it doesn’t matter whether you “tell” Bob or not, he knows.

You can try and hide it from him, add layers like an onion, but even that isn’t necessarily a failproof guarantee that you left no trace, even onions can be peeled or holes pierced.

Systemd “enabled” services are literal symlinks… whenever a target runs, it tries to start also all the service files on its “wants” directory.

You can literally enable any service for next boot by making a symlink in /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/ (or whichever other target you want it to run on) as root (and installation scripts are run as root).

ln -s /usr/lib/systemd/system/whatever.service  /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/whatever.service

Personally, while I appreciate when people add a “snippet of explanation”, I do prefer that to be in the comments. Not as the main text of the submission.

Making it part of the submission can feel like editorializing. If I want to read the artice, I read the article, if I want to read opinions / interpretations of the article, I read the comments.

Using the “text snippet” for opinions or interpretations can cause bias… and it also might encourage people to repost the same content multiple times just so they can post with a different bias.

I think the comment section is a more organized and suitable place for that. It also allows people to use their votes to decide whether the opinion/explanation deserves the upvote, separatelly from whether the link itself deserves promotion.

I think it’s also safe to presume that in the ultra future tech advanced society of Star Trek, they can remove the bacteria that causes body odor in humans.

A lot of odor-causing bacteria are actually beneficial for us though. And what causes Vulcans to experience that “odor” might not be coming from bacteria to begin with… for all we know it might be one of the thousand of compounds that leak into the air we exhale directly from our lungs.

Virtually every gas or volatile liquid is susceptible to cause odor. The only reason we interpret pure water as odorless/tasteless is because water is everywhere so our senses evolved in a way that it doesn’t trigger a response. There are many other compounds we don’t really perceive because we are used to them at the concentrations that exist in our breath.

If let’s say an alien species is not used to having 78% Nitrogen in their atmosphere, and they happen to have receptors sensible enough, then being in a ship with breathable air similar to Earth might just make them puke in disgust after having a sniff of what we might consider “clean air”.

I’d argue it’d make more sense for everyone to wear the equivalent of a high tech mask (supressants?) rather than having to re-engineer the biology of the species every time they encounter an alien that might have a different set of compounds they might find unpleasant.

deleted by creator

Me neither? That’s why I was hoping they might have added some markdown extension.

I have done it in the past with mardown-it-wikilinks npm package, for example.

Also, I’d argue the wikilinks (internal links) using [[any term here]] from Wikipedia, that optionally allow automatically inferring the link, is much more comfortable (and less error-prone) for the usecase of a wiki system, than the [text required](/link_here_also_required_even_when_redundant) from markdown.

I was hoping they might have added some markdown extension to do something similar, but it seems not.

Yes, the way his hand is positioned, it would not have worked if they had wanted to make it hold the wooden stick. They’d have needed to edit the hand too much and it would have likely been noticeable / even weirder.

Probably they decided: f*ck it, let them grab it however they want. Maybe it’ll even become a thing.

And it looks like it worked, since we are talking about it and spreading the ad. Smart advertising, imho.

I mean, it would technically be possible to build a computer out or organic and biological live tissue. It wouldn’t be very practical but it’s technically possible.

I just don’t think it would be very reasonable to consider that the one thing making it intelligent is that they are made of proteins and living cells instead of silicates and diodes. I’d argue that such a claim would, on itself, be a strong claim too.

Note that “real world truth” is something you can never accurately map with just your senses.

No model of the “real world” is accurate, and not everyone maps the “real world truth” they personally experience through their senses in the same way… or even necessarily in a way that’s really truly “correct”, since the senses are often deceiving.

A person who is blind experiences the “real world truth” by mapping it to a different set of models than someone who has additional visual information to mix into that model.

However, that doesn’t mean that the blind person can “never understand” the “real world truth” …it just means that the extent at which they experience that truth is different, since they need to rely in other senses to form their model.

Of course, the more different the senses and experiences between two intelligent beings, the harder it will be for them to communicate with each other in a way they can truly empathize. At the end of the day, when we say we “understand” someone, what we mean is that we have found enough evidence to hold the belief that some aspects of our models are similar enough. It doesn’t really mean that what we modeled is truly accurate, nor that if we didn’t understand them then our model (or theirs) is somehow invalid. Sometimes people are both technically referring to the same “real world truth”, they simply don’t understand each other and focus on different aspects/perceptions of it.

Someone (or something) not understanding an idea you hold doesn’t mean that they (or you) aren’t intelligent. It just means you both perceive/model reality in different ways.