Yeah only other option I’ve seen in the open source space is Revolt, but I’ve only seen issues with that platform and the dev community around it seems incredibly toxic.

Honestly just surprised no one has figured out something better in the open source space. Discord has valuable UX that makes it appealing, but as a closed source, corpo owned piece of software, it has an enshittification date that keeps approaching closer as they keep talking about going public.

Has been an issue for literal years. Samsung knows about it and refuses to do anything. Its one of the biggest reasons I regret giving them another chance after like a decade of not using their devices. Will never give these fucks money again.

Thats why I suggest phone number exchanfe for texting. Its not the most secure but RCS is at least a security boost.

Events is definitely harder, so I understand that. My wife still uses facebook and tracks that stuff. Ive actually resorted to finding events in local news sources that I put into an RSS feed. If anything Ill make a burner fb account so I can access that kind of stuff, but thus far I have not needed it. Hopefully events become less of a problem as FB becomes more of a problem

I kept telling myself the same bad excuses for why I wouldnt leave FB. Friends, Family, etc. In reality, I barely used the site, so it acted more as an easy connection to others that I didnt even really have connections with anymore because I didnt use the site.

Once it became abundantly clear they were willing to be a surveillance tool for fascist govts, I deleted my profile. I reached out to everyone to find alternative means of connecting, and the irony of that process was I connected with people I hadnt spoken to in literal years, and still talk to them now.

If you think you dont have other ways to stay in contact, you are probably incorrect. Sharing phone numbers is the easiest way to stay in contact, nearly everyone has one. I also connected on signal and discord with a variety of them.

Facebook has convinced people it is essential, but it isnt. You do not need social media to maintain social connections. You just need to be social with the connections you value.

Operating in other countries means you do need to follow their laws in order to operate in them. Being a swiss company doesnt make them exempt from the laws of other countries, and not complying risks them losing business in other countries. Their products do work, but the user needs to use them correctly to not put themselves in a position where they can be traced. The activist clearly wasnt using a vpn when accessing their email.

I do agree, dont trust proton, never trust any corporation, but i also know enough about how their tech works and how to manage my own online privacy that I know they arent just blowing smoke. I would much rather have proton comply with the law and continue to be accessible for most of the world, than have them fight for a single user who could have done more to protect themselves and potentially lose the ability to run their services for other countries. Most people arent self hosting, so they cant run their own secure services. Proton is a much better option than the fascist bowing corpos who run most of the tech world. Until self hosting becomes accessible for regular people, I will continue to recommend proton as the easiest option to have secure services with.

This happened years ago afaik, but lemmy keeps sharing it around for some reason.

For context, proton encrypts the traffic, not the IP Address. While I dont remember how long IP Addresses stay in their logs, you can easily avoid exposing your true IP address by using a VPN, which is clearly not what that acitvist had done.

Proton is still compelled to follow government laws in order to operate, and will hand over what info they have when compelled to. If that info is something their service can encrypt, such as emails, cloud storage, passwords, and so on, then it will look like jumped data when handed over. You IP address can’t reasonably be encrypted, and neither can your primary email that is associated with you proton account. If your primary email has revealing info, then thats on you for not obfuscating it more. If you arent using a VPN to access services, then your IP address will be indicative of where your traffic might be coming from. The end user does need to take extra steps to make sure their traffic is secure, and proton does talk about this in their documentation.

Proton is one of very few companies Ive seen pass third party security audits. They may not be perfect, but they are secure, and I’ve yet to see that truly disproven.

To my knowledge no. Theres also the issue of hardware. For example, I stupidly gave samsung another chance about 3 or so years ago, and you basically cannot put another OS on their devices without bricking them.

I am either misunderstanding your post or you might be misunderstanding mine.

Vim is not the command line. It can be used in a command line, which is a nice feature, but I use Vim because it makes editting text a far smoother and more reliable experience than most text editting GUIs have provided.

I also would not say command line is superior to GUI. Both have their trade offs, and like you said, use the tool that works best for you.

As a developer though, I do fully believe devs should be taught how to use command line, and I believe they should be taught how to use Vim. Command line is near mandatory, because sometimes you cannot easily do something using a GUI, especially if that GUI is just buttons that run command line prompts like a lot of Git tools are. Solving Git issues without using command line frankly feels like a horrid scenario because you dont have the finer level of control required to unfuck yourself out of a Git issue.

Vim should be taught because it improves navigation and editting of text in much more efficient and faster ways than a GUI generally can. This is very useful in development, as editting code is often a bit tedious with a mouse and common keyboard shortcuts, and not needing to take your hands off your keyboard really lends itself to keeping focused on your code. It improves productivity while also being a useful skill to learn, as a lot of apps support Vim bindings that don’t necessarily involve code, such as Obsidian.

For other keyboard based professions, Vim would be useful but not mandatory.

If I misunderstood your post as bashing my post, then thats my bad. The way I read it felt like it was bashing my view of Vim by connecting it to the viewpoint of command line being better than GUI, which is not how I view Vim or command line at all.

For me, its the massive range of editting manipulation it provides, and the reduction of dependence on using a mouse. For context, I have some level of wrist injury, so my complaints around mouse usage mostly stem from that.

I would love to explain in detail what makes Vim great, but I think noboilerplate on youtube did it best with this video: https://youtu.be/sqm4-B07LsE

But if I had to explain one of my favorite parts of vim, its the fact that I keep finding new solutions to improve my ability to edit code with an ease I had never felt before. Using ‘vf’ in order to easily highlight from where my cursor is to whatever character I want to get to has saved me so much time when rewriting variables or cleaning up code. Ive barely learned about what EX mode can do, but being a lot of work involves correcting other code or duplicating it for use with a different part of the code base, being able to use the substring command is drastically more helpful than your standard ctrl+H will do. Easy example :.,+5s/foo/bar/g Colon is what puts you in EX mode. Period is the current line, comma indicates this is a range, +5 means the next five lines, s means substring which is the command that we are using. “foo” is the word to search for, “bar” is what “foo” will be replaced with, and g means to replace all instances. Drastically more robust and useful than what ctrl+H does.

Vim just makes it easier to manipulate text. Its drastically reduced strain on my wrists, and puts me in a flow state far more often than I ever experienced before I used it. Its kind of like aiming in a first person shooter with a mouse instead of an analog stick. Both will get the job done, but a mouse is drastically more capable at being accurate. Thats what vim feels like for coding for me.

After diving in and learning it this year, I fully believe learning Vim makes you a better developer and it should be commonly taught to developers. It has done far more for my dev skills than any single AI tool ever has, and I dont have to worry about it hallucinating.

Personally, I think Vim should be made into standard knowledge for anyone who consistently uses a keyboard for their work. A lot more software than I expected supports it, and it makes any form of text editting tremendously better.

Also a friendly reminder that if every US church were to house 2 homeless people, homelessness would be ended.

Would love to have this run when i clear the trash bin on whatever OS

Only remaining windows devices in my house are my wife’s gaming rig, my gaming rig, and my work laptop.

Gaming rigs are using heavily debloated windows 11 installations, and if I ever figure it out enough they will act a lot more like game consoles than PCs eventually. The moment Linux can reliably play all the games I frequent, Windows will be purged.

Work laptop is non-negotiable sadly. My work uses Windows 10 and an absurd amount of permission controls over it. I am a web developer and every time I need admin permissions for UAC, I have to send a ticket to IT and wait for them to remote into my laptop just to enter a password. Dumbest shit I’ve seen, but this company is the masters of time wasted. But at least it isn’t Windows 11 I guess.

Other devices are mostly linux. Wife’s work laptop is MacOS.

I dont really think this is an actual problem. Yes, theres a lot of games now, far more than ever before and more releasing in a year than some consoles had in their lifetime. But this is actually a good thing because it means this industry is more accessible than ever and we have very little limit on what experiences we can have.

The actual problem is the diversity and quality of those games due to muddy motivations. Like any entertainment industry under capitalism, artists are not just performing their art because it is their passion, its also to make a living. At the start, the core motivation is passion, a desire to create and innovate and expand on what that medium can be. When that medium reaches a point where a newbie with great talent can become an overnight sensation, then the motivations for creating art in that field become tainted because individuals start to believe that they dont need passion for the art in order to make massive amounts of money. The market will start being flooded with greedy, talentless people who are looking to cash in on the craze.

Ive been gaming since Sega Genesis, and have followed the industry closely most of my life. To this day, I believe everything in modern gaming can be connected back to the insane popularity of Call of Duty 4. Before that game, nearly every game that came out was trying to do something unique. They might share a genre, but they always did something to stand out from the crowd. Very few games were ripping off a competitor, and the ones that did normally did it so poorly that they immediately got ignored. But after the success of CoD4, that changed massively. Everyone was releasing a first person shooter with pvp multiplayer. Games that didnt need multiplayer had it tacked on per publisher demand. Japan went full on stupid and stopped making games that had that particular vibe that only Japanese games had, and even went as far as hiring western studios to redo franchises that absolutely did not need to be redone, with Capcom coming to mind as particularly bad about this. The market was flooded with low quality, cheaply made games trying to get a part of that bag that CoD4 made.

But we actually got lucky during all of this. Xbox and Steam were both platforms that attempted to lift up independent developers. Unlike the film industry, a space was created for low budget game development, and tools to make games were permitted to be accessible for very cheap. What this did was allow those artists who actually have passion in their art be able to take a pathway to creating high quality games. The ripples of that are felt to this very day, with Silksong being a perfect example of why accessibility in a medium is important.

There are a lot of games, and a lot of them suck for sure. A lot of them are rip offs, overpriced re-releases, clones, and even scams. But with that we’ve also gained so many great games, in so many genres, with new genres being molded like every month. The AAA space is arguably in a state of painful saturation, where budgets are bloated, dev times are too long, quality is poor, and prices are absurd. This will end up in whiplash against the AAA scene in time, probably sooner than later. But unlike when a similar phase happened in the Atari era, almost killing the games industry, that just wont happen this time, because the industry is not reliant on giant corpos to carry it.

What i would recommend as a gamer is to give up on the old notion that you can play all the games that come out. Especially as you get older, you wont have the time and you shouldny try to make the time for all of that. Treat games like people treat music. You cant listen to all of the music, and you shouldn’t try to. You find the type of music you like, and search that space to find more things to enjoy. Do the same with games. Dont rush through them, play them at a pace that is fun for you and lets you soak them in, and play the games that specifically appeal to you. Even if its a single game you play on repeat, if it brings you joy then it shouldnt matter.

A more controversial recommendation is stop being averse to spoilers. If your friend plays a game that you dont know if you will ever bother to play, let that friend tell you about the game. Studies have actually shown that players enjoy a game more when they go in knowing spoilers. This might not apply to all games, but from personal experience I can say letting a friend ramble about a game they love that I only have a mild interest in has not only caused me to actually play those games, but games are so rich in detail and varying experiences that I will end up having a very different experience than them that I now get to share with them. Being less averse to spoilers both helps you be able to communicate with more people about gaming, as well as gain new insight on games you might be on the fence about. This can help reduce the amount of games you feel an urge to play but cant make time for by acting as a social filter, or “word of mouth”.

Realistically, change your approach to how you use your phone.

A majority of apps are not actually apps. They are a web app packaged in an apk so they can get elevated permissions and more data. Dont download apps, instead just install them from your browser as the web app they are. This is far more secure and far less invasive as generally a web app is containerized, at least thats my understanding in regards to firefox.

Instead of google maps, explore the world of open source navigation apps. Osmand has worked great for me, and tends to provide better info so im not panic merging at the last second. Theres a lot of them out there, and google maps has stagnated for so long that many of them are caught up in features. While its not open source, ive sesn a lot of people praise Magic Earth as well.

Buy phones on the premise of being allowed to use a custom rom. As much as i dont want a pixel because it is google, graphene os is battle tested and much more secure than stock android. But theres also lineage OS, eOS, and a few others out there.

If you need google play services, containerize it. I keep all apps i dont want having special permissions on a work profile. Funnily, i also keep my work apps on that profile, so if google wants my works data then they can handle the lawsuit if something bad happens lol.

I think a lot of people have forgotten that phones are tiny computers. The only real difference is the cell network, but we already have devices that can use those networks that arent phones, so it isnt an exclusive feature to phones. Android can be forked, but also we can emulate android on linux and there are already linux phones out there. If we grow the linux space for phones, then we effectively lose nothing of value while gaining increased freedom. For now, change how you use your phone, and only download apps if you have no other choice.

More proof that anti-cheat and bans just isn’t a working approach.

Almost every cheater I’ve talked to or seen interviewed has said they do it because they like winning. If thats the case, pushing them away isnt getting rid of them, its making them try to win harder, and they are literally spending money to make that happen.

This means, there is a market for cheaters, one that publishers and devs simply assault instead of realizing they could replace it entirely.

Create a marketplace in your game for cheats. When a player buys a cheat in game, they can turn it on but only in a specific playlist that cheaters get to play in. You dont need to own or turn on cheats to play in that playlist, in case you feel like challenging yourself, but cheaters can use them as much as they want in that playlist. If a cheater wants to go into cheat free playlist, their cheats get turned off by the game and they have to play like everyone else. Cheat free playlists can have cheat detection, and if you are caught cheating then you get banned from cheat free playlists permanently, but you arent banned from the game or the cheat playlist.

This deters cheaters from paying third parties for cheats, gives them a space to experiment in, makes money for the company running the game, and reduces the amount of cheaters in regular public lobbies. It also creates a space of challenge for people who don’t cheat, sorta like how people will do no death runs in souls games.

Sure, it isnt a perfect solution, but its far better than punishing every player with invasive tech, while simultaneously letting a market of cheat sellers thrive. For a bunch of capitalists, its wild they haven’t realized they are missing out on money with cheats.