Huh... well, if I'm interpreting your situation well, this might be your lucky day! There's a whole universe of software that isn't in the Apple App Store. The thing is, releasing software in the Apple App Store costs developers $100 a year. And some people, on principle, don't want to be tied to the Apple App Store.

So what's the alternative? It can be daunting, because the App Store seems to guarantee safety and quality, right?

But there is an alternative that is used by millions: package managers. This type of software will fetch software for you, install it taking into account your computer's hardware and software, and keep it updated (like an app store). Even better than that, there are some package managers that stand by the same values and use the same software-building process as Lemmy: they're open source. This makes them community-oriented, and —by many accounts— safer.

The most popular open source package manager for MacOS is Homebrew. Once you install it, you can run brew install --cask thunderbird to install Thunderbird. Then, whenever you want to update it (along with all of the software that you install through Homebrew), you can simply run brew upgrade.

This is how package managers work: they help you manage software. And they have made me excited about managing my software, as well as relieved from how simple it all is once you understand them.

Thanks for sharing! It's interesting to see what other people use.

As to email, I was recently looking to de-Google my life. I was looking into ProtonMail and CTemplar (I was oblivious to its recent scandal!).

In researching this, the internet lead me to this article, which I didn't really read. But it lead me to this other article. Now, it's worthwhile mentioning that ProtonMail did respond.

Anyway, all of this, including my lack of interest in doing the thinking needed to parse through the whole discussion, lead me to join Posteo. It's much cheaper than CTemplar and ProtonMail for the basic functions I need, and it's widely commended by the privacy community.

To use that account I use the local client Thunderbird.

ah, yes. superb execution. sublime

I'm learning with Java. I like that I don't have to think about memory management compared with C or even Rust. I dislike how slow it is.

I'm also using HTML, CSS, and Go for a bunch of static websites I'm building with Hugo. I love HTML. I like CSS only in the context of Bootstrap. Otherwise I dislike the way my style-sheet documents turn out. And I haven't really tried to understand Go's whole "context" thing because I want to use Rust. This last comment is why I want to finish my current projects and then immediately leave Hugo for Zola.

I also just finished learning about and using R and the Tidyverse for a couple of statistics projects. I really dislike R... On the other hand, I love the Tidyverse with my whole heart. It's been one of my favorite experiences with any language.

I like that this avoids the sometimes-problematic wisdom of the crowds. But at the same time, this solution empowers 'wise' users only. And, perhaps more importantly, reduces the burden of work on mods. Moderating is work that we can all help reduce, I think.

This is so relieving

I don't know them by name, but I know there are forks brewing. To 'name' one, there's the CookieMonster Engineer one that will get a new maintainer soon.

Ah. Thx for clarifying.

Hmm. Sorry, I'm having a bit of difficulty understanding what you're saying. Do you mean that there were larger community efforts to first decide upon what to do and then act, but this maintainer ignored the community?

The maintainer created a poll to rename the project. 4Chan came up with Sneedacity. Apparently it's a Simpson's reference. It's a silly name. The maintainer didn't like it, and started saying things about 4Chan that others (see thread mentioned below) have characterized as exaggerated. 4Chan responded with threads full of mockery and bullying. The threads are available in the post where the ex-maintainer explains why they're stepping down.

In summary, the 4Chan people who care care because they had an opportunity to do something silly and because they saw an opportunity to bully the maintainer.

Man I just spent too much time reading about this, going down the rabbit hole, and I'm just glad that I'm part of a community (Lemmy) that is so clear about how we're supposed to treat each other. We not only care about each others' experience, but we're able to avoid reproducing tropes that reinforce awful ways of understanding and treating each other.

Others can claim that the ex-maintainer of the fork at hand fanned the flames, but the flames would have never been there to begin with in a more humane context.

What is this bullshit. Please leave our community.

Man, this for sure shows the technical abilities of the Chinese team behind it.

This makes me think of Mariana Mazzucato's work. She shows that States are the ones that drive innovation, radical innovation. Rarely is it companies, since companies have dividends to pay. On the other hand, States have missions.

Once States have done the investment and the research, companies can come in and profit from these innovations (which opens up a debate regarding State compensation). But the hard science was done by the States beforehand.

This is one of the reasons why Space X is not that impressive. It is standing on the shoulders of giants, and its innovation has been minimal compared to the work (think of the absurd combined budgets of the Space Race) that was necessary for Space X to exist in the first place.

I am not saying the achievement that this short article points out is commendable (I wish that many other States have such capabilities). I am putting this achievement in a broader context.

When I went over there and liked Lemmy, a pop-up appeared that asked something like "Is this the alternative you prefer the most?". So maybe my like appears as a single like in the sum of likes, but weighs more towards pushing that particular alternative up in the rank.

Conveniently, someone just asked for a Reddit alternative in /r/AlternativeTo. They would probably like to hear about this or something 😉

Y'all are amazing 🥲

@ajz@lemmy.ml, can I just say I think you're amazing? Yeah, maybe this thread was not the most epic feat, but I'm speaking in general. Your technical prowess, your level-headed responses, your pro-privacy, pro-social values. I'd ask for an autograph but I ran out of space in my notebook :( ✌️

What @kimjong_ill@lemmy.ml says is spot on, regarding how you should be consuming (reading, hearing, ‘watching’) stuff that is comprehensible for the most part. The bits that you don’t know will gradually settle or you might find compelled to search it (e.g. “What does “indoctrination” mean? I’ve been seeing this word again and again in this series but I still don’t get it”).

That covers the part of internalizing the language. At least in an intuitive sense. Studying grammar will make it sturdier [edit: only after having internalized the language intuitively!]. I don’t really have resources for this though… I think I remember Oxford University Press having some grammar lesson books? I’d generally trust that…

But there’s still the part of speaking. The finding and stringing of words shouldn’t be the issue, if you’ve internalized the language enough by consuming it. Rather, pronunciation becomes the bottleneck. Here you can grab a small fragment of a video of an actor you like or a character you like and copy the mouth movements as well as the mouth sounds. Be aware of accent differences. Choose an accent you’re interested in learning to speak in.

I will cite this tomorrow, when I’m back in my desk.

Edit: @dessalines@lemmy.ml's reference is exactly it :)

Ouch. Do we really need this? 😬 I mean, yeah, understanding others and empathy... but I can't help but think this will become a problematic community. I hope I'm wrong.

I really liked how the story was told by Laxman. This is well written. Also, based on the story, what a shit move from Apple for giving incentives for unethical hacking by not compensating properly.

What a coincidence! Just last night I started reading this book! https://pragprog.com/titles/bhhugo/build-websites-with-hugo/ I like that the chapters are short and that there are exercises :)

Perhaps ironically, Reddit. It just has so many people that there's loads of novelty, serendipity, and people that can relate to what I post...

Stack Exchange. Sometimes it's wacky, but most of the time it's super interesting to see how people solve personal and professional problems. Also, I like seeing small slices of specialized fields. Like reading stuff about space or math or chemistry...

Do GitHub discussions for bugs I'm hoping will be fixed count as a forum? 😅

Hopefully this doesn't result in mere "get an iPhone when you get [re-]hired", but rather higher wages. This exact 'running out of people to employ' is what leads to higher wages in capitalism.

omg. my lifelong fear. thanks for calming down my nerves

This sounds like a good way of getting a better idea of who you're talking to.

But I dislike the idea of things becoming parochial. For example, "He just joined the community two days ago! What is he talking about?" Or "Keep out of this community. If you're not part of it don't bring your uninformed opinion here!" In my case, I like the idea of pseudonimity being the only thing people know of me. Not even my karma is immediately visible to people. Just my pseudonym.

Similarly, sometimes I want to comment on something without up-voting it. The reason is that up-votes mean different things to me at different moments. Sometimes I up-vote because I like the content and I want to signal that.* Other times, I'm not particularly pumped by something but I think it's important, as in it's important for others to see. And yet other times, I am part of discussions and yet I actually down-vote the post because I think it's not a topic that I'd like others to see (don't worry, I didn't do this with your post! Nor do I with the vast majority of posts). Other times I don't do anything; I comment without touching votes.

But when I do vote, part of why I do it is because I know my vote will be aggregated. I trust that it's kept private.

* Funnily enough, I don't think I've ever encountered a post I straight up dislike. I guess I've found them all interesting or haven't bothered to down-vote? However, comments can sometimes be sour— those I do down-vote when I dislike them, mainly the style, not always the content.

This is a great space for FLOSS and federated software to fulfill a need.

What I mean is that Tinder and otherwise for-profit software uses drop feeds, so they deliberately give you only a bit of what you like in your feeds. How do they know what you like? The same way Facebook (via Facebook.com, Instagram, and WhatsApp) and all other for-profit social media companies do: they collect absurd amounts of data from you based on your behavior on the platforms. They then build predictive models to know what to show you, when to notify you, how to ask for money in the forms of "boosts" or "unlimited superlikes". For example, "you found some attractive people today but didn't kick it off with anyone just yet? Well, come back! Tomorrow we'll send you a notification telling you someone liked you! Oh, you could also just boost your profile by paying."

In effect, this keeps you on the verge of finding someone you would really kick off with quickly. This doesn't have to be the case at all given what we know of how humans develop relationships and how algorithms can be used to arrive at clear-cut goals.

So FLOSS and federated software has the opportunity to actually define those algorithms in such a way as to satisfy people, either in a hookup-y sense or a relationship sense. That incentive, and not the one to maximize engagement and profits, is what could make stuff like Alovoa flourish.

I do think any FLOSS (and federated) dating app should leverage this as a marketing point: people are really kicking it off quickly.

He portrays himself as incredibly smart but also quirky and relatable. Given the monetary stakes, I don't doubt for a second that he has a public relations team guiding him. He's a living advertisement.

So I guess I sorta like the persona he embodies in the sense of being smart and relatable. But I also really distrust that image and dislike the fact that it's in the service of guiding consumer (and perhaps regulatory and worker) behavior to maximize profits.

Because Lemmy does not have karma. If it did, and it was like Reddit, it would be based on the popularity of your posts and comments, with every vote being the same weight. This is different to Stack Exchange, where people who are already well established in the respective community are able to boost correct answers even more than with a single vote. This could sound like a recipe for parochialism, but in effect you end with a high probability for high quality answers.

This doesn't mean that a reputation (and not "karma") system couldn't be implemented in Lemmy.

A fun anecdote.

When I was struggling to get my friends to join Signal, the main bottleneck was a friend whose friends used Signal to cheat on their partners 😳😔🤌🙄. Since my friend had a partner, they didn’t want to give off the wrong signal...

What did the trick was Elon Musk tweeting “Use Signal”, 40 million people downloading it in a day, and, perhaps critically, me deleting our WhatsApp group chat.

Hopefully switching to Matrix once easy native stickers are added to the main clients won’t be as hard.

You’re right! It’s sort of odd... I guess it’s sort of a ‘browsing outside of a store, looking inside and wishing you’d be able to fully participate’ kind of browsing. I just go in, see what people are saying in the rooms I care about, and leave...

lol I haven't seen it. I mostly use Element as a leisure browsing app... I'll make it a daily chat app when Element/other-clients add native stickers that aren't hard to customize.

But that emote sounds cool

What could possibly go wrong? This is clearly a policy for freedom and nothing else!

I agree that he's corrupt, in that his administration was filled with scandals of corruption —not to mention the whole Operation Car Wash. But, to the two questions I asked previously (why Lula would want to kill Tancredo and why Lula would be of interest to the U.S.), I also add now how Lula is a tool for the Marxists. I'm sure you have legitimate reasons to think this.

I replied elsewhere, and I would've liked to reply the same here. But I didn't wanna spam, so here's the link: https://lemmy.ml/post/68696/comment/58928

I see how calling it "hate speech" is more intuitive for lots of people. It totally makes sense. However, "hate speech" is narrower than "oppressive speech" because it is limited to legally protected categories. This expands upon the phrase "the law is not necessarily moral", adding "the law may ignore some categories and systems of oppression".

For example, take the United States. Its supreme court has ruled that statistical evidence cannot be used in the court system to show that there are racial disparities, no matter how overwhelming that evidence is.

This only covers racial disparities, but you can expand that to see that many other categories of discrimination —no matter how overwhelming the evidence of their existence is— become invisible by not being considered or protected by the law and therefore not being considered hate speech.

This shows that "hate speech" covers certain categories, but it's much narrower than "oppressive speech".

That's why "oppressive speech", as a phrase, is necessary, but it doesn't define it. The explanation given by @dessalines@lemmy.ml seems good!

This sounds like a way of getting a common identity here. And that is something I agree should be cultivated!

However, I think that the common ground so far is tacit, in that users seem to appreciate FLOSS and decentralized software. That is exactly how I found Lemmy in the first place.

But more importantly, the points of disagreement are fundamental! By that I mean that they reflect different world views that sometimes clash inevitably because they arise from different basic understandings of what the world is like. In effect, this makes it so that searching common ground (or at least in the way that I think you’re proposing) doesn’t change those fundamental schemas.

This is not to say that it doesn’t create a common identity, but it misses the mark as to what people care about.

But your sentiment is still laudable! And in that line, what I think can be done is discuss those fundamental differences in a kind way and use effective rhetorical tools to have people clearly see and perhaps identify with your view. This, as the practice that could become part of our Lemmy Identity™️©️®️, could arrive at the common ground that you rightly want.

This excites me so much. It also relieves me. Bolsonaro is a terrible joke, a joke that costs too many lives.

“who died in 1985 of intestinal disease before taking office as Brazil’s first democratically elected leader”

So the U.S. killed Tancredo in favor of Lula?

Knowing America's history of meddling in Latin American politics, this wouldn't surprise me. However, why would the U.S. want a working-class and clearly leftist politician like Lula in power in the middle of the Cold War? Especially since this president advocated for agrarian reform, the very same policy that just 30 years earlier got Guatemala on the U.S.'s sight.

More broadly, by the time Tancredo was elected, the U.S. had spent the last ~30 years supporting rightist military dictatorships in Latin America, of which arguably the most infamous were Guatemala, Chile, and Argentina. These were set up to protect American interests.

And so a question arises, how could a leftist president represent American interests in the middle of the Cold War?

But perhaps more pragmatically, Lula supported Tancredo in the 1985 elections. I don't know the exact reasons why, but it's not hard to imagine that it has to do with the fact that Tancredo was a social democrat.

This doesn't exclude the possibility of conflict, which is why I'm asking both (1) why Lula would want to kill Tancredo and (2) why Lula would be of interest to the U.S..

Interesting. I didn’t know this. How did America make Lula president?

✅ Self-awareness

✅ Being prosocial (although I wonder if people would see the "I had to do it" as prosocial, but still)

Thanks for those two things.

I'm sure you'll be able to discuss your genuinely interesting views in an effective way (apart from continuing posting interesting stuff!)