Free, sure. There is only one app that does it, with huge dependency on Google and/or carrier (whoever runs the servers), which could just… stop working one day, like it did for me.

Just to add to the fun confusing acronyms, in 3D printing circles, IPA is isopropyl alcohol, not beer (india pale ale)

What specifically do you mean? If you are asking about you = u, to = 2, OK = k, and such, it’s text speak - faster to type and can fit more in 140 characters (SMS character limit IIRC)

But I agree that there is no reason to use those, especially on non-mobile devices.

Here is one of iPad reuse projects

And here is a crazier and thorough project on replacing internals

TBF I considered using my old iPad2 as in-car navigation or just as permanently-on weather display or picture frame. (If battery doesn’t swell from being on all the time)

IOC is just bending over for bigots.

In these winter olympics the IOC forbade a Ukrainian athlete to wear a plain grey helmet with 12 portraits on them. There was no text or symbols, but it was deemed “too political”. (The helmet was to honor athletes killed in war)

If that doesn’t sound idiotic enough, Ukrainian paralympic athletes were not allowed to wear the outline of Ukraine on their gear. Again, “too political”.

Smartphones and tablets manufactured circa 2015 were powerful enough to run many apps and software, and not yet locked down as much as they are now. So there were a lot of custom ROMs and kernels being made for Android and jailbreaking tools for iDevices, allowing you to customize much much more than the manufacturer intended.

And it’s just fun to make something that most people consider “obsolete” perform well, or well enough to be usable.

Not sure what role gender plays into that though.

Large companies can do / have done that (dumping) to drive out smaller competition.

Small companies usually cannot afford this.

Unless you can pitch this as a disruptive idea to gullible investors (looking at all tech startups that burn trillions without making profits)

I have a geographic one for you:

Friend: posts some statistics map
Me: Czechia is an interesting outlier here, weird.
Friend: [sic] its czechoslovakia, not chechnia

All countries/regions that start with “ch” sound are the same i guess. Also Czechoslovakia split in 1989.

My friend at the time watched some documentary about chess computers (Deep Blue etc.) and was telling me about the “super advanced algorithm called Brute Force”. I told him that brute force is means trying every possible combination, is the least efficient approach, and does not generally work for chess. He was adamant it was some genius algorithm. The only time in my life I remember saying “I have a computer science degree, I know what I am talking about”.

Who are these smooth-talking scammers that can guide a regular-ass user to jump through hoops in settings to install a malicious app?

Maybe I should ask them how they do it, because I cannot convince my family to download and use Signal. You know, the legit app from the official app store.

That is fair, and I appreciate the explanation.

Edit: Author says GenAI was not used for code, see below.

Original comment, observing signs of GenAI project:

What’s up with these brand-new “Discord alternatives” being cranked out en masse? Would be easier to contribute to XMPP or Matrix IMO.

Initial commit 14,203 files changed +2872320

AI? Or “i worked on this for 10 years and uploaded just now”? /s

Overabundance of emojis in description. Probably AI.

Would be cool to see if anyone manages to get it running.

Were you able to run it yourself? What.

There is a recent book/report called Scam, about these scam compounds. Despite being illegal prisons / forced labor, they create a lot of economic opportunity in nearby towns and villages providing supplies and (paid) labor. Also, scam compound victims often get little sympathy, with notions such as “they are gamblers”, “they want easy money”, or plain old discrimination because they are foreigners.

We had “coding without coders” in late 90s (maybe 2000s) with VB and Access databases. Some of my coworkers maintained such “software” previously written by not-a-dev.

And then there was “low code” fad about ten years ago? There was “coding” with diagrams and such, like Scratch but for serious people.

And what will regular developers do? Probably the same old shit, digging in decades-old, hastily-written, and now LLM-generated code, making it all work, and adding functionality. While “architects” and management will draw diagrams (with AI now!), and try to abstract everything into the cloud (and now into AI probably, somehow)

Neat project, but

we set an intention to have a healthy relationship with technology in our home.

Followed by photos of these schedule-reminder screens all over both homes.

Wiki says the model is from 2011, and all that functionality was implemented on Android 2.3.x, impressive! Google is only 14 versions behind.

Like desktop mode on Librem5 in 2020, convergence on PinePhone from 2021, or Samsung Dex from a few years ago, too.

I knew of some of these issues with the protocol, but this article definitely gives an impression that Matrix was built as a “cool protocol” first, with messaging applied on top as an afterthought.

It’s possible to run the services without Kubernetes, but official ESS Community uses Kubernetes.

ESS Community works ‘out-of-the-box’ on a single machine or existing Kubernetes cluster using the provided Helm charts.

TLDR: bare Synapse was fine on 1CPU 1GB RAM VPS, but uses lots of disk space (from large rooms). Current/future ESS requires Kubernetes and several services to be functional.

More info in my blog post