• WayeeCool [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      For surfacing news, it’s terrible. It’s useful for saving articles in a way that doesn’t clutter up your bookmarks. Bonus is that unlike bookmarks it has automatic tags that make saved articles you vaguely remember easier to find.

      • SpiderFarmer [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Using this chance to vent: it’s wild what Chrome or Mozilla will choose as the search term when brining up your bookmarked pages. It will consider a guitar pick website I visited in 2019, but not a site I bookmarked a week or two ago, and only based on some random keyword unrelated to the site in general.

  • Juice [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    26·
    1 year ago

    I use Edge at work, have you ever seen the ones on Edge? “10 things gen xers have ruined for millennials” “how to tell if your boss is getting ready to eliminate your position” “How much self care is too much?” “Eight ways that generation Z thinks that Gen X should be castrated”

    Its just naked attacks on consciousness. And we absorb it all day, every day, first thing in the morning until before we go to bed

    Also, use librewolf, its just an opinionated version of Firefox with all this toxic shit, trackers and anti privacy stuff turned off

  • glans [it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
    24·
    1 year ago

    Anytime i have a new firefox install i immediately go throught the settings and turn that shit, telemetry etc off, switch from google, install ublock origin and enable find in page when you start typing. Anytime i am too lazy to do it, i hate the internet immediately.

    But this is funny maybe i have been in error all these years.

    • EatPotatoes [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      Web browsers are just another adware/spyware ridden operating system running on top of the original adware/spyware ridden operating system. For as much as possible we should go back to more dedicated protocols and clients that have a very limited scope that volunteer developers can actual keep up with like gemini for blogs or for lemmy - desktop clients like Alexandrite or Neon Modem.

        • EatPotatoes [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I guess, but that’s just half the problem. Like most people now use google docs not just because it’s super convienient but kids are also conditioned to do so on chromebooks now. That creep RMS was right about somethings lol.

          • glans [it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Yes I have heard several independent sources (all personal anecdotes only) that many teens/young adults are not framiliar with basic computing tasks such as navigating the file system. Because their experience has primarily been this kind of mobile-first “cloud” stuff. Design is streamlined enough that you don’t need to know where your file resides. It is all hidden from the user.

            I can understand why schools distribute chromebooks but it is a terrible disservice to the students to allow such a limited experience of computers to pervade.

            • EatPotatoes [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Teachers are their own IT department too in all this so keeping simple where possible is important.

              With the way everything else is going I don’t know if learning libreoffice is really a worthwhile priority over growing and storing food, metal shop, construction and permacomputing.

      • glans [it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        What are u talking about. Alexandrite runs in a web browser. Idk these others but the premise is insane so not checking.

        U should at least get a browser like w3 or elinks if u r gonna be weirdo like this.

        Dont go around posting that ppl should prefer clients vs web bc most clients ppl have r 1000% worse for privacy and tracking than web version of same site. Someone will read this and think fb app is better than fb in browser which at least can be configed to send less tracking.

        • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          What’s wrong about the premise? We have been stuck with Windows and Unix for decades and instead of writing new systems capable of integrating fully into the internet instead “we” (mainly corpos) wrote an entirely new system (the system of web servers and web browsers) on top of current ones that is easily as large, complex, and featureful as any other operating system and forced everyone to use it. It takes enormous amounts of resources to maintain this infrastructure and stave off the flood of security vulnerabilities and bugs that are constantly discovered as a result of this system’s complexity and the interaction between this system and contemporary operating systems like Linux or Windows.

          Even with modern protections built into web browsers now it is still a security and privacy nightmare. You are right though that it’s usually better than an app on Android or something but I don’t think that’s what they meant.

          • glans [it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            The premise is wrong because

            99.9999% of “clients” are way worse than any browser for same service — so just throwing such advice around is wildly irresponsible. Examples given were

            alexandrite for desktop - does not exist and if it did it would be what, an electron app?

            Gemini - impossible or unweildy to use web browser anyway. gemini is a revamped gopher. You can access gemini via a web proxy but i doubt that is substantially worse than using a client https://geminiprotocol.net/clients.html either a proxy or client could contain malicious or sloppy code

            neon modem - a github project with 9 contributors https://github.com/mrusme/neonmodem. it is a TUI interface for an itty bitty nichy part of the web. Cool to find out there is a tui for lemmy i will try it because i am a total weirdo not a normal person. It took me years to learn enough to be able much less willing to try a tui for fun.

            So we have zero examples. Better but still not great example would have been reddit with 3PA prior to the API changes. Or mail cient vs webmail. Or usenet vs forums. Or bittorrent streaming vs netflix. Ytdlp vs youtube. Rss vs most other options.

            Web is universal and low barrier. If you want to move to clients for everything youd have to rework every kind of function done on the web. Personally i like using special FLOSS clients when i can (like the lemmy client i am using right now) but i dont want it for everything. And a lot of the coziness with volunteer small groups of devs would vanish with any degree of popularity. A lot of the vulnerabilities that persist are pervasive to the internet and need systemic solutions like net neutrality and enforcement of regulations. Same problems could easily reproduce themselves with the proposed solution. Security thru obscruity sux.

          • glans [it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            @PaX & @EatPotatoes I tried neonmodem. Was eventually able to login to hexbear.

            username and password stored plain text wtf

            • who needs spyware with such abysmal security?
            • you are much better off with a web browser
            • no mention of this in the installer, the --help, the readme, the application
            • I only found it because I was trying to troubleshoot another bug so I looked in the config file
            • PR open since June 2023; no work since July
            • another PR by different user attempting to solve the same problem but it was closed due to existing (still today unmerged) PR
            • The devs are aware since many months. Have not even bothered in any way to alert users.
            • Lack of notice demonstrates total lack of concern for users which I’m sure is manifested in lots of other ways

            Lots of people share computers, they have unencrypted hdds, they have auto cloud backup etc. Hopefully no need to describe all reasons why plain text credential storage is Bad.

            Like the advice to prefer clients over web, this project in its current state is plain irresponsible.

            Clear from the github/website that this is intended primarily to adhere to devs’ aesthetic tastes and nothing more.

      • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        BASED

        Are you familiar with Plan 9 or the Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol (9P)? It’s a simple protocol for representing system resources (any resources, remote or local) as a tree of files. The protocol itself doesn’t do much but it can be a common language for all kinds of systems to talk to each other with. It can be very efficient and robust to represent resources as a tree of files and better than the alternative of bespoke protocols and abstractions for every resource. The Plan 9 system uses this abstraction everywhere and it results in a very tightly integrated system that can be more capable than other operating systems with a fraction of the code. And since almost all operations on the system are operations on abstract files it doesn’t matter if the files are local or remote to the system :3

        I thought you might be interested because web browsers partially arose as a result of the poor integration of systems like Unix or Windows with the internet. But Plan 9 was written from the start as a distributed operating system. I want to write a 9P fileserver for lemmy sometime. I hope this doesn’t come across as too rant-like. I got no sleep lol

    • christian [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I think I can literally spend a good hour or two configuring firefox on a new install. I don’t doubt it’s an easy process to automate but I can go years without needing a new linux install so I don’t care enough to learn a better way, especially when I’m going to want to configure stuff that isn’t firefox on a new install as well.

      • glans [it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        If it makes you feel better i dont think automation is worth it for infrequent tasks like this because a) youll forget where your automation is + how to use it, and b) what you want to configure and possibly how it is even accomoplished will change.

        I looked into this specifically at one point and iirc its some sort of js file but seemed like it wasnt going to work.

  • Kultronx@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    unfortunately these a reflection of the liberal masses that use pocket. I still use it, useful for me

  • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    I look at pocket—like the NY Times, CNN, NPR podcasts, and late night comedy—as a kind of morphine for panicking liberal professionals. Whatever these articles say, it seems like the labor aristocracy / PMC DSA bug-eating karens are feeling the opposite.