Well said, I agree with you. The politics/debates can be so intense that it can prevent Lemmy from being a place where people go to just relax and switch off. Even the meme communities have so much political content.

And I suppose it’s only going to intensify during the U.S. election later this year.

Just wanted to say that I found the description of your job really interesting, so thanks for taking the time to write about it.

There’s absolutely no way that I could do it - I’m far too squeamish. But I’m glad that there are people who can do a job like this, which increases mankind’s understanding of diseases.

I don’t think this should be downvoted. Brave Search is one of the very few search engines that is building its own index.

DuckDuckGo and Startpage are both great, however DDG uses results from Bing and Startpage uses results from Google.

We need proper competition against these big tech giants, and Brave Search is one of the few alternatives which is attempting to provide it. Mojeek is another search engine which uses its own index.

Just wanted to say that I like your username :)

OK, no worries.

(Also, I didn’t downvote your comment btw)

Are you sure that Feedly is open source? I can’t find any mention of it on their website.

Ah ok. That makes sense. Thanks for your reply.

Can I ask why you’ve taken this approach? I understand why you would use AdGuard at home, but couldn’t you just also use it on your phone/laptop as well when you are away?

Wouldn’t using the VPN to your home network just add extra latency? Or is there some benefit that I’m not aware of?

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.“

Haha. I thoroughly enjoyed this comment. It was so well-written. Thank you for writing this.

Better late than never :)

If you’re English, then you misspelt the word ‘colour’.

There’s a difference.

“A company may lay off an employee when it doesn’t have the resources to retain them, while a company may fire an employee who isn’t meeting the company’s expectations.”

Source: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/laid-off-vs-fired

Sure, they both suck because they both result in you not having a job anymore. However, if you are fired, then this looks worse when you’re looking for your next job. Potential employers may want to know why you were fired, and will likely view you as a risk.

Whereas, being laid off doesn’t carry the same negative impact to your reputation that being fired does. You haven’t done anything wrong to get laid off.

And in some countries, getting laid off (AKA made redundant) means that the company has to provide a payout, which is proportional to your length of service. You wouldn’t get this if you have been fired for wrongdoing.

I would say, if anything, the fear is likely under-blown.

Sure, you’ll find many users here on Lemmy who hate what Google are doing… but we’re not the typical internet user. I mean, we specifically found this niche platform called Lemmy rather than use one of the mainstream social media platforms. The typical “normie” who uses Chrome probably has no idea about the privacy risks of using it (either in its current form or when the Topics API is being used). We need to help others understand, and hopefully convince these people to move over to Firefox.

Except you’re giving your passwords in an encrypted format. So if the company is trustworthy, it’s safe to let them store your passwords because it’s encrypted in such a way that even the company who own the password manager couldn’t access your passwords even if they wanted to.

(Note the caveat of “IF the company is trustworthy”, which rules out Lastpass)

Now I accept that there are legitimate arguments against storing passwords in the cloud via a password manager… so in that case, you may wish to use a local password manager (like Keepass) instead. But realistically, a typical person isn’t capable of memorising lots of unique, secure passwords… so the passwords need to be written down or stored in a password manager, just to avoid weak passwords or password reuse.

You don’t need to apologise. The comment OP asked how Canada was doing, then the next commenter gave their opinion on the UK, not Canada.

It confused me as I read through the comment chain, as I was also expecting a comment on Canada (not UK).

It’s probably worth mentioning that the UK has a parliamentary system, not a presidential system. So the people elect a party, and the party leader then becomes prime minister (but the party can decide amongst itself who the next party leader should be, and this is usually done by a vote among party members).

Now there are legitimate criticisms of whether this is a democratic process, but the person who you replied to seemed to suggest that the recent change of prime ministers without elections was unusual and evidence of the UK “plummeting”. This user is entitled to his/her opinion, of course, but I just wanted to point out that this is actually constitutional and common practice in the UK.

“Far from being unusual, it’s actually the norm for Prime Ministers to enter office outside of a general election.”

Source: https://fullfact.org/news/unelected-prime-ministers-common-or-not/

Apple devices are only more “private” in the sense that the prevent third parties from collecting your data (don’t get me wrong, this is great), but then proceed to go and collect the same data for their own uses instead.

While I accept that Apple are far from perfect, my understanding is that even their data collection for their own purposes is still less than the data collection that Google use for their own purposes. And since their are only two major phone OS (Android and iOS), we can only choose between the lesser of the two evils.

After all, do you want to give your data to a company which is the world’s biggest ad company? Or instead give your data to a company whose business model is convincing people to buy $1000+ phone every year?

But yeah, I agree that Apple’s anti-consumer practices are awful. I wasn’t aware of the aftermarket parts re-using chips just for the serial numbers and I’m not even the least bit surprised. We need governments to bring in legislation to protect right to repair, because companies like Apple can’t be reasonable.

I hate the tribalism regarding Apple products. There are loyal fanboys who won’t hear a bad word about Apple, and then there are Apple haters who criticise everything about them.

I wish we had some more nuance in this debate. The reality is that there are advantages and disadvantages to Apple products. I’ll outline a few:

Advantages

• Long iOS support. Typically you can expect an iPhone to be supported for 5-7 years, which is well above the average in the industry.
• No bloatware or adverts on the iPhone
• Better privacy than Google Android/Microsoft Windows
• High-end hardware, e.g. M1 chip in MacBooks.
• User friendly design. Nice user experience.

Disadvantages

• Overpriced. Seriously all Apple products are more expensive than the competition.
• Anti-consumer business practices that influence the industry. They normalised removing the headphone jack and using non-removable batteries, which other manufacturers followed. Another anti-consumer practice is using their proprietary Lighting port, rather than USB (luckily the EU should be forcing them to adopt USB-C and removable batteries soon). Also, no SD card slot because they want you to use iCloud
• Walled garden. No support for side-loading apps
• Required to use iTunes to add/remove music to the iPhone, which is a problem if you use Linux (you’d have to use Wine to install the Windows version as a workaround)

However, this is of course annoying for people who don’t mind holding the phone vertically or who are watching videos on a widescreen device

I think you meant to write “horizontally” here :)