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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • Why do you consider telegram private? It’s a pretty bad option for that. They are only using true end-to-end encryption when using the explicit “secret chat” feature, which is limited to one-on-one still, afaik.

    “Normal”/default encryption gets resolved on telegram servers, so your clear text messages are sitting there for them to do whatever they want. Given that telegram is based in UAE and has knownRussian management influence,I’d be extra hesitant.

    It also is for-profit and closed-source for the servers ( only clients are open source), so nobody knows what the servers really do.

    If you care about privacy, go use Signal or any Matrix-based messenger such as Element. Especially because they lack zero of the comfort and usability that Telegram offer, but are much more secure.


  • Inherited a Hilti Hammer drill from my dad that was used for basically everything in construction and demolition he ever did since before I was born - around 4 decades ago. It was and is the tool he and now me always go to when cheaper drills can’t deal with the problem. Be it hammering through super massive concrete walls or enduring hours-long destruction sessions, it just does the job.

    Nowadays it looks like a utter piece of junk that got tumble dried with rocks, but it’s as reliable as on day one.





  • What’s your source on the reverify thing? I use matrix a lot, and this hasn’t been an issue I ever experienced anymore since they introduced cross-signing a couple years ago.

    Same goes for the common clients such as element. It has been clunky in the past, but after the past major overhauls ( also years ago now) everything has been silky smooth for me, if not better than others. The one thing left I prefer from Signal is the one-time photo share.

    Matrix is great, clients are great too, only the server part still is annoyingly complicated and messy. Would only recommend that for tinkerers, on that case it’s a great path to learning about the complexity of addressing lots of security concerns that others gloss over.

    Edit: to add - there’s a reason why the French government and the German military decided to build their secure internal IM infrastructure on Matrix. Obviously they are hosting their own private network, but if the concept is good enough for European government and military, it is an indicator for quality especially in terms of security and privacy.


  • Taste is actually a valid and very important identifier used for classifying minerals during geology field work when there is no access to advanced diagnostic tools. For health reasons, it’s obviously not the primary method, but it usually follows the “scrape test”. Scraping the mineral over a known hard surface tells a whole lot about hardness, texture, color, granularity…


  • My intent was just to provide a viewpoint from someone that loves and uses Linux aplenty, but spends a lot of time with Max quality gaming, using high end hardware.

    And while things have improved massively over the past years and probably will get even better in the next years, nvidia’s monopoly on top performance GPU means I’m being bottle necked by their shitty Linux support.

    Sure, I can play almost any game out there on Linux, but not with the performance and sometimes not even the same quality I can achieve with Windows. I know this is no fault of Linux, but it’s the pragmatic reality I’m confronted with.


  • Still a couple deal breakers for me, though most stuff otherwise runs fine. No HDR support. Sucks if you have a great monitor but can’t use it. No nvidia broadcast. Necessary for my mic+speaker setup, common alternative such as noisetorch are convenient, but don’t even come close to echo filtering quality from the speakers. Yes, that’s super subjective obviously. Performance tends to be noticeably to only slightly worse on max settings with nvidia on highly specialized, very demanding games. Some anti cheat tools struggle with compatibility modes.

    We’re getting there, but it’s tough with nvidia not caring. :/


  • How do you think they would verify or sanction an invalid ballot? Given that voting is secret and therefore there’s logically no personal information on the ballot, this would be rather tricky - or extremely worrisome for democracy. ;) So no, it’s definitely not illegal in any somewhat democratic nation. And yes, most countries do count invalid votes separately. This can be an important indicator that something went wrong. Eg if suddenly all districts report much higher numbers of invalid ballots, something might have gone wrong in the counting process or just the ballot design might be too confusing. Definitely worth looking into, though. And if a single district shows an unusual count of invalid ballots compared to others, that also is worth looking into.

    Many that intentionally vote invalid claim to do so to show their frustration with all party options. However, this hurts democracy. Even if do not love or even like any of the parties/candidates, you still should vote.

    Vote for the “least of the bad”. A vote for a democratic candidate that has a boring mix of policies planned that you don’t fully support is still a lot better than anything on the other end of the spectrum, with radical extremists working to undermine society or democracy itself. By voting invalid, your missing vote ends up being “shared” by everyone, and I’m certain there’s some on the list that you really don’t want to even have the tiniest shred of your vote.



  • That’s because Spotify shuffle by default is not a simple true randomizer as most would expect. It tries to be “smart” and mixes your playlist so similar songs play after another, while avoiding playing songs from the same artists back to back. And some more variables. In theory this is great and works well for some users and focused playlists, but can ruin playlists that cover a very wide range of genres and styles.

    You can better approach true randomness by disabling the “Automix” feature in Spotify settings. Not entirely sure if you then actually get true randomness (Spotify loves being opaque), but I hope it helps with your playlist at least.

    I would love if they made some enthusiast options available so we could customize our own Automix and shuffle preferences, but that will never happen…