Far too thoughtful, gracious, humble, and empathetic.
Start by removing all references to “Joe” and “you” and maybe this is something!
Far too thoughtful, gracious, humble, and empathetic.
Start by removing all references to “Joe” and “you” and maybe this is something!
It’s like if Bennett Foddy created a playable Excel.
Well, you see, now we are having a conversation about the difference between “carrier unlocked” and “carrier agnostic,” which only seems to prove my point.
Honestly, I’m with you - I’ve had people here even get indignant about how “easy it is” to install and use. Yet I have never seen someone here share clear, simple instructions. The official install instructions have phrases like “high quality standards compliant USB-C cable” or “Get a carrier agnostic device” or “4th and 5th generation Pixels only show the first 32 bits of the hash so you can’t use this approach.”
How do I know if my USB-C cable is compliant? How do I make sure my device is carrier agnostic? Hash? I know for most people here, these are trivial questions, but they are opaquely technical for 99% of the people out there. That’s fine, by the way - there is nothing wrong with a quality OS meeting the needs of a hobbyist community with the technical know-how to use it. Just don’t pretend that it is not a niche OS or that it is simple and user-friendly. I say this without any criticism, just as a basic reality check.
PS, in case it was not obvious, please do not answer the example questions. I know that they have answers and that many people here have that knowledge at hand. They are examples of just a few issues that require a base technical knowledge that not everyone possesses.
I’m currently about halfway through setting up a home server on an old/refurbished Dell PC. It has enough compute to transcode if needed, but no more. I’ll have to upgrade the storage to set up RAID. For software, I am running xubuntu, which offers the benefits of the great community and documentation of Ubuntu. It is very beginner friendly, but is a bit simpler and lighter than gnome. I’m running everything I can as Docker containers.
I used to work in sales and I did a lot of cold calls. The world-weary senior sales guy would always just shake his head at me when I got frustrated. “It’s a numbers game,” he would say. “It’s just a numbers game.” In the beginning I would waste a lot of time researching each individual call, but that didn’t help me make sales. The truth was a certain percentage of people that I could call would have a need for the product I was offering. Of those people who had a need, a certain percentage would choose us over a competitor, because we were the best fit.
Looking for a job is the same as sales. Your product is your labor. It can feel personal, as though the product is you, yourself. But you’re not selling yourself, you’re selling your work product. A certain percentage of buyers (employers) will need the labor that you can provide. A certain percentage of those will choose you over a competitor because you are the best fit. It’s a numbers game. It’s not personal, it’s just a numbers game.
Hi, I’m your customer base.
I’m a complete novice, no network or coding experience, but not afraid of computers either. I’m pretty worried about messing up something serious due to lack of knowledge.
In the end, I didn’t choose Synology or the like due to:
lack of robust community support. I’ve noodled around with Linux for years and learned that community support is essential.
price. I’d pay 10% or 50% more for a good pre-configured system, but not 3-4x more (which is just the general feeling I get from Synology)
lack of configurability. I’m still not sure what I would like to do (and be able). I know I want to replace some storage services, replace some streaming services, control my smart home, maaaaybe access my files remotely, and probably some other stuff. I may want to have email or a website in the future, but that’s not on my radar right now.
If there were some plug-and-play hardware/software solution that was still affordable and open, it would be a good choice for me.
I can think of a few apps that do this. It is certainly possible. I think it is ethical; if someone is not participating in the open source community, they miss out on the benefits. I think most people involved do contribute in some way. If someone just wants to use Google for the benefit of ease and discoverability, then they can pay for it. You’re still offering an ad-free app (presumably) and adding use value. It’s perfectly reasonable to suppliment the cost of development in is way.
If you live in a big liberal city with a lot of tech people, then you probably have a really well organized team creating detailed maps. In that case, there’s no reason to think that Google is any better than osm. In a lot of cases it’s worse, especially for walking and cycling.
If you’re in a smaller, poorer city or a rural area, there’s a good chance that 80% or 90% of the addresses are just not there yet. Compare this random park in Berkeley, CA with labels for individual trees to this neighborhood in nearby Stockton, CA, which is assuredly more than 3-4 houses.
OSM usability really depends on where you live.
Image tool box doesn’t seem to be able to arbitrarily rotate or add text. Some nice features, though.
Open Video Editor doesn’t seem to be able to combine videos. I’m thinking something like CapCut, which allows combining photos, videos, and audio. It would be an ambitious project to be sure, but it seems like it should be doable.
Great to hear! Can you name one for me?
If you live in an area that’s missing the data, it doesn’t matter how good the app is. I regularly upload in my area, but it will be years before it is reliable as a primary app. I usually search in Organic Maps first, then in Google Maps. OSM gets me where I need about 10-20% of the time at most. Google Maps is about 99%.
There are multiple front-ends for YT Music. Song Tube is good, Libre Tube is good, Inner Tune, Musify, Vibe You, etc. I haven’t used them all so I can’t testify to them, but it is a deep bench.
Some apps that I don’t understand why no OSS exists:
Teleprompter app that allows you to read a scrolling script while recording video
basic photo editor to crop, rotate, color correct, add text
basic video editor to crop, clip, and combine video
visual voicemail
And just for fun, here are some OSS apps that are better than any non-free alternative: SD Maid, Firefox/Fennec, Aurora Store (OSS front-end for a very proprietary Google store), RTranslator, Syncthing, OSS Document Scanner.
This is bordering on misinformation but I’m not going to act on that.
The Iron Dome is primarily used to protect civilians, although it may also incidentally or occasionally be used to protect military targets as well.
Israel does not use its own citizens as cover for military operations. Here is a map of military bases in Israel, which are separate from civilians as required by international law.
There is no similar map of military sites in Gaza because Hamas uses civilian cover for military operations, including launching international attacks, from schools, mosques, churches, and hospitals.
So basically, your perspective is that a system that protects Israeli civilians is immoral because every single Israeli is immoral? Yeah, that seems very sane. /s
It essentially prevented a full scale armed conflict like this past year from 2011-2023. How many lives has it saved over that 12 years?
Generative AI has allowed us to do some things that we could not do before. A lot of people very foolishly took that to mean it would let us do everything we couldn’t do before.
Its rare enough to be trivial, and when it happens, it’s usually someone who doesn’t realize that they are not eligible. For example, if someone came to the country at a young age and mistakenly thought that they could vote.
But as it turn out, policies that require people to verify their citizenship are also very good at disenfranchising eligible voters who are poor, young, immigrants, disabled, or non-native English speakers. Neat, huh?
Edit: I forgot LGBT folks who may have changed their name or lack access to their childhood documents.
Just getting started but yeah, I have basically no technology background. Mostly I’m too stubborn to know when to quit something so here I am lol.
https://fosstodon.org/@organicmaps/112976308191001762