Wild ass comment.

Unless you really really need portability between devices

Who doesn’t??? What do you do, copy 20-char randomly generated passwords manually all the time? That’s the whole point of password managers…

I use firefox’s local, inbuilt manager

Browsers are NOT a secure storage for sensitive data, if you want a local password manager at least please use KeePassXC.

The thing that pisses me off the most is that they are disingenuous almost to the point of lying in interpreting that survey’s results. They say that 75% of users are interested in GenAI, when actually what they asked is whether people have used any GenAI at all in the recent past. And that still doesn’t mean they want GenAI in Proton. That’s a pretty significant sleight of hand. The more relevant question would have been the first one on what service people want the most. In that case only 29% asked for a writing assistant, which is still not the same thing as a full LLM. The most likely answer to “how many Proton customers want an LLM in Proton Mail” seems to be “few”.

They’re insufferable commies who keep attacking other parts of the Fediverse by… uh… commenting on posts and… ehm… responding aggressively to bigoted content. They’ve got all these sick ass stickers that we don’t and they keep flexing them in our replies which drives me crazy.

Their instance is an authoritarian distopia where queer people feel safe and they don’t waste time debating the same wrong liberal talking points every time. Also you can just call someone a dumbass if you disagree with them: a totalitarian nightmare.

Worst of all they go around straight up bullying other Fediverse users: right now I’m locked in a bathroom stall that a Hexbear user shoved me into. I’ve been here for an hour missing my maths class, and I’ve had to drink the toilet water. My tummy is starting to hurt. Stay away from Hexbear users…

This is such an amazing article, The Verge’s staff is still capable of some excellent journalism.

I had high hopes when I tried it out but frankly it’s been almost unusable for me. Terrible performance, laggy UI, plenty of bugs, long loading times for songs…

I don’t know if something in my mobile environment was messing with it but I use quite a few indie FOSS apps still in beta and none of them worked as badly as Spotube did. I’d love to go back to it if it improves, but for now it’s just not worth the UX pain.

Edit: forgot to mention. The idea of sourcing tracks from YouTube is cool but causes loads od trouble in practice. I’ve found remixed versions streamed as the original, tracks with the intro from the music video, tracks with sound effects from the music video, and tracks that just cannot be streamed cause they aren’t on YouTube. I know there’s a feature to pick which version to stream, but it’s quite a bit of UX friction and it didn’t work often enough to be a showstopper.

Other people in that thread have pointed out that it isn’t showing posts being delivered to Threads despite the block. That should be testable with other instances, but not Threads since it’s not receiving any content from Mastodon at the moment. The concerning thing there is the user still being able to view content from people they’ve blocked, but that seems to be a bug if it’s reproducible.

In the EU companies can’t scrape personally identifiable information without consent, even if it’s already publicly available. IANAL, and there’s probably ways they can sneak around the GDPR, but at least it’s not a free for all. It’s unclear though how it works for federation. It’s definitely not the same legally though.

The reason for not directly federating content to Threads isn’t so nobody there can ever see my amazing posts, it’s so Meta can’t easily profile me. Scraping public posts on a different platform would probably be illegal, at least in the EU, and reposts don’t give them a lot of data about me. Federating content, however, would give them most of the same data that Mastodon has on me without even having to ask.

This post from Eugen Rochko mentions that blocking Threads at the user level “stops your posts from being delivered to or fetched by Threads”. Basically, the user-level instance block is bidirectional.

Limited federation mode is a different feature, at the admin level. It doesn’t really affect the delivery of posts in either direction, it just hides the blocked instance’s content from the global feed. Defederation on the other hand is indeed bidirectional, but again it’s on the admin level rather than users’.

Mastodon instance blocks are already bidirectional AFAIK: if you block an instance your content does not get federated with them. I was actually surprised that this does not seem to be the case for Lemmy. I don’t think this break any core abstraction of AP…

Oh yeah, you’re right on that. If I’m looking for privacy from the subscription manager signing up with a service like this is a terrible choice, because it is fully a financial institution.

I wish they were all on the same day of the month…

Dates aren’t a big concern though. What I was hoping for is something that would update automatically to some extent if (say) some amounts change, or a payment is missed. But I guess indeed that’s basically impossible without access to my payment data.

Given that I have to update it manually though, I would at least like it to be synced remotely. So that I can, say, check it from my laptop on a webpage or desktop app without redoing all the manual data input.

I thought I heard they were rolling out some material you theming in beta a while ago. Did they revert it?

For my use case yes, that would defeat the purpose, but for what it’s trying to do it kinda makes sense… At least, they have to do it to comply with payment regulations. And you’re still only exposing your identity to one service with a decent reputation, rather than plenty of possibly shadier ones. It seems like a fair tradeoff if what you’re looking for is privacy from services you want to pay for.

I’m not American, it seems to be available in the US only…

I guess you’re right, yeah. I was hoping someone had figured out a different solution, perhaps integrating directly with the individual subscription providers. But I guess that’s way too broad of a scope, integrating with countless individual services.

At least a cross-platform, cloud backed “spreadsheet” would be nice to have though.

I don’t have the same phone and it’s in general pretty difficult to fix a brick without being able to tinker with it. I can give you some pointers though…

First off, this guide is for a model A525F, but your title says your phone is an A526B. If that’s correct there’s a chance the files you tried to flash were for a different model number and that’s what went wrong. Make sure you download the right files for your exact model number rather than trusting the ones your guide provides.

Secondly, to be honest, this guide does not seem very trustworthy. When doing this kind of thing every little step matters, a single misplaced reboot might screw up the whole process. Also, you’re downloading and installing on your phone some files from some random website, that’s a big risk. The thing is: you don’t need a shitty guide for your exact model. For future reference, you’re better off with a good, detailed guide for your general vendor (Samsung). XDA forums are usually the place to look. Always find the files you need by yourself, don’t just flash whatever some random website makes you download. Go to the official download pages for Samsung stock OS or TWRP and get the files from there, making sure they match your exact model number.

If you’re 100% sure that the firmware you’re trying to flash is the correct one for your model, you can try avoiding Odin and use adb flash directly. There’s plenty of guides on how to do that going around. You might not need TWRP either at that point. Getting familiar with adb is always useful.

Oh sure, didn’t mean to imply that Chinese people weren’t smart enough to think for themselves. I was just making the point that neither western media nor Chinese media is helping at all to create space or goodwill for critical exchange and debate across boundaries and firewalls (which, to be fair, is not surprising).

Glad to see there are actually Chinese netizens on Lemmy, by the way.

[…] I set up a cloud service where my VPN service would be located on Amazon’s web services, a reputable and widely trusted cloud provider. […] After about an hour, I set up a VPN that worked flawlessly. The best part? Not only is it free to use […]

Sorry, what? Last time I checked AWS VPSs were very much NOT free to use, and I’m pretty sure the lowest tier is still more expensive than your average VPN.

Also, this article seems to be arguing against its own points: “you probably don’t need a VPN, but I have one anyway”…

This is just straight up true. Besides the belligerence and racism it pushes, it also makes it near impossible to have an actual, reasonable and critical comparative discussion of Chinese and Western societies. It closes any space that might exist for Chinese people to take part in any discussion of international affairs, since the attitude is so strongly against them. This pushes any open minded Chinese netizen back into the arms of their own government’s propaganda, rather than inviting them into an open discussion of the good and bad sides of their and other societies.