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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • The problem with this question is your friends, if whatever you decide on isn’t something your friends have or are willing to get, then it’s not useful for you. Signal offers probably the best mix of adoption and security. It however misses a few notable features, for example the iOS client has no way to back up or restore your messages. I’m a big fan of matrix, which seems very extensible and has good security, but if you are in a sensitive application like an authoritarian country, it wouldn’t be my choice. All the messages are stored on the server and while they are encrypted it’s still not what I would use for a chat I never want to see in court.



  • This is 100% it. That and a lot of managers think they are somehow more effective if they can physically see their employees.
    Commercial real estate is in for a significant correction. All those workers who went home? They’re not coming back. A great many would rather quit than go back to the daily commute.

    Workers now know remote jobs work. It’s now a significant perk when job-hunting- a company can get better candidates for less money by offering remote work. And for many workers it’s become financially essential. You can work for Big Tech and make $130k, but that means moving to a very high cost of living area where $130k gets you a tiny apartment and a middle class lifestyle. So why not work remotely for a startup and make $90k, but live in a lower cost of living area where $90k gets you a MUCH nicer lifestyle and way less traffic?

    It’s also telling how the return to office policies are implemented. They want people in office X days a week- doesn’t matter which days, doesn’t matter if your team is there also. Just make sure you badge in 12-15x/month. That’s not a ‘team building’ thing. That’s a ‘please don’t make me tell our shareholders I wasted $100 million on a worthless building’ thing.

    Of course landlords are loathe to reduce rents because unlike apartments, commercial leases are long term- 10-25+ years. If they do cheap leases now, the worry is they’ll be locked into those rates. And they themselves bought the buildings expecting full rate leases (so their own payments are structured as such). And of course mayors see their business districts and tons of support businesses (coffee shops, drycleaners, transportation, etc) dying due to lack of commuter foot traffic and that’s no fun.

    But a correction is both necessary and inevitable. The downtown business district metropolis, where everyone commutes in from miles around to sit at desks, is dying and it’s not going to come back. There ARE businesses where remote work isn’t practical. But the vast majority of desk jobs can be made remote or pushed to cheaper satellite offices without a problem.
    If cities accept and embrace that- turn much of that commercial space into apartments, recognize and embrace that rents will come down, property values will come down, but the PEOPLE of the city will benefit with lower cost of living and greater diversity, it will be a good thing. Some cities are doing this.
    Cities that don’t do this will have their once bustling downtowns turned into ghost towns.




  • I love this whole cyberdeck thing.

    I remember back in the early 2000s, there was a lot more innovation when it came to portable devices. There were gadgets that sort of resemble modern smartphones just clunkier (iPaq), ones with keyboards below the screen (BlackBerry), ones with slide out keyboards (HTC and others), ones that flipped open like laptops but could fit in your pocket (HP Jornada), etc.

    Somewhere along the line all that innovation went out the window and now every single phone or gadget looks more or less exactly the same. Like take the top 10 or 15 smartphones, debrand them, and put them in a box, and 99% of people couldn’t tell the hardware apart.

    You would think there would be a market for some level of variation, or just have one company that makes the phone 5 mm thicker but the battery lasts for 3 days. But we don’t even see that.

    Foldable screens seem to be spurring a little bit of innovation so I have hopes. But until then, I would love to see some of these cyberdeck designs put into production. I would happily pay a couple hundred bucks for a raspberry pi equivalent of a Jornada 720 (as long as the keyboard is touch typeable like the old one).



  • I agree with this 100%. That affects both the types of interactions, and the types of users.

    When Reddit really took off 12 or so years ago, it was primarily a forum for discussion. I loved it because there would be in-depth, respectful, quality discussions on almost every page. I spent hours debating science and politics and technology and relationships and other things of substance with other intelligent respectful open-minded people.

    For a few years now, Reddit has been trying to become a quick content scroll app- bombarding the user with page after page of memes and videos and low effort crap that only holds attention for 12 seconds but results in another page load and thus another ad impression. In ‘new reddit’ and the apps, there’s very little focus on discussion or comments. Just quick content to flip through.

    And that affects the discussions on Reddit (quality discussions are now the exception rather than the norm) and also the people who join and stay at the site. There’s a lot more animosity, assumption of bad faith, etc.

    But I also think that because Lemmy’s design DOESN’T push people into quick content, but IS focused on discussions, that trend can reverse. People who want quick content will quickly grow bored here and leave. And we can keep the discussions respectful and open-minded.

    I also think that the ‘welcome to lemmy’ posts should talk more about community and culture; what sort of interactions users should and shouldn’t expect here. That should include an explicit warning that if you’re going to start arguments and assume everyone else is an idiot, this probably isn’t for you, but if you want to have good respectful discussions this is your new home.