MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DoctorOW | 2025-08-26 00:49:14+00:00
So many of these examples don't hold up if you stop and think about it. The first example staying that Google's shitty results is "our" fault for using SEO. But it's SEO spam that's the problem, not SEO itself. When I search "Dentist <CITY>" someone is optimizing to be at the top of that specific search, but that person is usually a dentist in my city which is what I want.

Similarly, I'm well aware I'd spend less time on sites not deliberately engineered to be addictive. That's not because I'm having a miserable time, I'm just balancing it with other stuff.
by rzazueta | 2025-08-26 00:51:44+00:00
Perhaps not so much "wholesome" - because I can definitely provide a handful of historical and current examples that definitely aren't - but certainly more "community minded".

In that regard, your experiences match mine. I've been in the online community space since the Compuserv, GEnie and Prodigy days. Those platforms were more or less self-limiting - you needed to have access to a computer with a modem in the early to mid 1980s - but it was still a bit of a mess for trying to make any real, lasting online connections.

When I discovered my local BBS community, it was a massive game changer in terms of the quality of connections and conversations I had. It even inspired me to run my own BBS for a while.

I don;t like Bluesky's approach to decentralization because their system requires a TON of resources to run an independent instance. ActivityPub - upon which Mastodon and others is based - is mature, flexible, and allows for true decentralization. I can self host my own instance, or I can host an instance for one or more of my communities. I actually host my own Mastodon instance just for myself, and it;s remarkably easy. I imagine adding accounts would not increase my effort at all.

The right approach to decentralization is for those who can host instances to do so for themselves and for those in the communities that matter to them. That way, those who can't self host should still be able to find an instance they can trust. Then, those instances should be allowed to communicate with one another - only blocking instances if they go rogue and affect performance, but letting individuals have fine grained control over the messages they receive and the individuals with whom they interact.

This creates a world of alternatives for anyone seeking connection. Mastodon already works this way - you have art-focused instances, infosec focused instances, erotic content focused instances, etc. I can follow folks from any of those instances on my own account and engage directly with them. I'm seeing more folks start up PeerTube instances - which also use ActivityPub - as alternatives to YouTube. I can follow everything from my self-hosted Mastodon account. It's awesome.

I eventually plan to launch my own ActivityPub implementation so I can host others in my communities and provide a workable alternative to the centralized social media companies - e.g. I'd like my kid's school PTA to stop using Facebook Groups.
by kelnos | 2025-08-26 00:51:45+00:00
I love how so many of the responses in this thread are "it works for my particular bank" or "my bank's website is good enough" or "I'd only need it to deposit checks, but I never need to do that"... as if those are actually helpful responses to this general problem.

Many many people have banking apps that will not work on non-Google-blessed devices, use banks that have mobile websites that are terrible, and need to do mobile check deposits (which is usually only available in the app, and not the mobile website, if the bank even has one). And no, we're not going to "change our bank".

The reality is that there are so many things that break, sometimes in subtle ways, when you try to use an alternative Android OS. Some people may not have any problems, and that's great! But many -- I would dare to say most -- will.

And there's also a ton of uncertainty: I don't really want to wipe my phone, install GrapheneOS, spend hours messing with it and setting it up, only to find that something critical doesn't work, and now I have to flash back to the stock OS, and hope I can restore everything the way it was.
by al_borland | 2025-08-26 00:52:06+00:00
This is why centralized social media took off. It is easy to understand and use.

Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing.

I know people like to compare it with email, but with email I’m sending from server A to server B, I’m not sending from server A to hundreds of other servers and seeing that it doesn’t always make it everywhere. And if I edit or delete a post, maybe those changes will propagate out, but maybe not. Conceptually it’s hard, but even as a user who doesn’t care as long as the magic works… the magic doesn’t work all that well. So where does that leave decentralized social media?

Bring back blogs + rss as the norm. It makes sense, it works, the user is in control, and it never feels like it is trying to substitute for human connection.
by tensor | 2025-08-26 00:53:44+00:00
Texas gerrymandering with an overt publicly stated goal to bias the election is enough evidence. But if you want more: sending the military to intimidate politicians (Newsom), deporting and arresting people with permanent residency or other forms of legal immigration, arresting citizens without cause, intimidating law firms, journalists, and news companies by using the power of the executive branch to punish individuals and organizations, illegally dismantling congressionally established governmental organizations and branches.

This is just a small summary. Foreigners are not visiting the US, not because they don't want to or don't like the US, but because they are afraid of visiting a non-free country. It's not worth the risk of getting detained because you posted a negative comment online about a government official.
by bigiain | 2025-08-26 00:54:04+00:00
If you become of enough interest to the sort of people who will interview everybody who was any a party at a bar to try and identify who someone that's left the country gave their SIM to, you're probably well beyond fucked already.

Amateur opsec can help prevent you getting identified if you leave footprints in dragnet surveillance - like if you were at or near a protest. If you're planning on committing crimes serious enough to have "basic police work" set loose attempting to identify you individually? Good luck with that. I hope you're getting better advice than posts from randoms on internet forums.
by l72 | 2025-08-26 00:54:44+00:00
Until you kids school uses it for organizing information for parents or that’s the only place a niche group you like is.

Getting banned from Facebook means loosing access to all of that. Kinda like getting banned from YouTube could mean loss of access to email, groups, drive and a bunch of other services. Hell I’ve heard of company contractors getting banned from Google Play’s Developer and everyone in the company then getting banned from all Google services!

If I get banned from a Lemmy community that doesn’t ban me from other communities or other servers and I can always run my own if I need to.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-08-26 00:55:23+00:00
I didn't even know it had happened. I can't say.

But if I was to speculate ... The ACMA effectively killed email spam originating from Australian businesses years (decades?) ago. The government passed legislation allowing ACMA to impose big fines on companies that sent spam, they then set set up a web form you could upload spam emails to, and a couple of years later there was no email spam ... from Australia. It didn't reduce email spam much, as most spam originated outside of Australia. The other possible choke point was email Inbox suppliers like Google and Hotmail, but they are also located outside of Australia, beyond the ACMA's reach. Still, it did mean when I set up an email / web server for a local club, if I black listed most of the world's IP addresses outside of Australia, it killed all email spam.

The question in my mind was: if they could do it for email, why couldn't they do it for phones after years of trying? They had stopped Australian business from sending phone spam of course, so it all came from internationals just as with email. But this time they did have jurisdiction over the equivalent of the "inbox providers" - the Australia telco's. Most of the overseas spam did come from Australia phone numbers. If it didn't people would just ignore it.

I can only guess those telco's fought the good fight to be allowed to send and charge for spam successfully for a long time. I don't know why they were successful in that fight for as long as they were, but the timing does look suggestive. The USA equivalent of the Republicans run the place federally during most of that time. Now, partly due to example set by Trump, they lost in a landslide to our equivalent of Democrats. These "Democrats" won three years ago too, but now they look to moving as if they have a mandate to do whatever they want.

While this mob speaks in woke tones, there looks to be an iron will fist behind their "kind" words. They are getting the ACMA(?) to enforce age verification scheme internet access for example, something I think is worse than a waste of time. But they are hard and determined taskmasters, so they may make it stick.
by kelnos | 2025-08-26 00:55:39+00:00
This is a good start! I think we need something like a ProtonDB for this sort of thing, but that covers all apps, not just banking apps.

I do see five banking apps I use listed there as working, which is great. But -- and maybe I'm being unnecessarily overly worried about this -- what about the future? What if I've been using Graphene for a year or two, and one of the ones that's critical for me changes how they operate, and Graphene no longer passes muster as a platform it will run on. I'm not afraid of this happening at all running Google's stock OS image, but once I do my own thing, I get to keep the pieces when it breaks.
by ghqst | 2025-08-26 00:55:49+00:00
Gruber seemed like an Apple sycophant for a while because his values and tastes aligned very closely with Apple's (though he still criticized them from time to time). Now, Apple is drifting away from those values and tastes and so Gruber and others in that sphere of Apple blogs are coming down harder on Apple, especially after Alan Dye made such a mess with "Liquid Glass".
by bri3d | 2025-08-26 00:55:58+00:00
Most ES/9000 series and earlier stuff had water to water SKUs. I remember seeing an installation with one that exchanged heat into a facility loop which went through another water to water exchanger to a pond-fountain chiller system.

Starting with S/390 G4 they did a weird thing where the internals were cooled by refrigeration but the standard SKUs actually had the condenser in the bottom of the cabinet and they required raised floor cooling.

They brought water to air back with the later zSeries, but the standard SKUs mimicked the S/390 strategy with raised floor. I guess you could buy a z196 or a ec12 with a water to water cabinet but I too have never seen one.
by halfcat | 2025-08-26 00:56:40+00:00
> With almost every one carrying smartphones we should be seeing a lot more high resolution videos of these objects.

This is a well meaning take but it’s not a good scientific argument. It’s correlation, but doesn’t say which way the arrow of causation is pointing.

Suppose the phenomenon being observed is cloaking tech. By definition, it’s something that is forever on the edge of what photon-based digital recording devices can observe, remaining consistently “blurry” despite massive increase in quantity and quality of recording devices.
by hitekker | 2025-08-26 00:56:47+00:00
It's true. Or rather, it's the emergent behavior of the community. Other languages typically don’t openly say, in writing:

> Then [Anti Rust person] should have been perma-banned long ago [on an open forum]. Until this is done, we'll have to warn people about engaging with him…

You can hate kristoff, ignore him or attack his arguments. You can also love a piece of software and treat it as sacred. But other people should not be subjected to that love nor should they be canceled on account of it. Flag it or downvote. Beyond that, it's outside of our control.

I do agree though that kristoff should focus on Zig and not indulge in provoking old enemies. His valid points— deferring premature documentation for newbies until concepts are ironed out— are being lost in programming language holy wars.
by beefnugs | 2025-08-26 00:57:19+00:00
Is that a jab at grapheneOS ? Because thats just another thing that google is borking up. And a little bit more so the banks themselves.

GrapheneOS is the way that all phone operating systems SHOULD be made. Layers and segregation between your banking apps and all the privacy breaking trash and malware you can get off the app store.

It is the banks and google making weird rootkit shit to try and lock down things that is the problem here.
by derefr | 2025-08-26 00:57:20+00:00
> be replenished with air from the outside

I live in an apartment above a busy road, and my building has no central HVAC. Opening my windows makes the air (much, much) worse.

It took a while to figure this out, so from the ~1.5 years I've lived here, I've accumulated huge, thick coats of brake dust on my windowsills, in my carpets, on the blades of my air-circulation floor... and so on. Probably am half-way to developing COPD.

I do still "replenish air from outside", though! ...through a three-stage filter. (I put an industrial air scrubber on my balcony, and fed the exhaust from it inside through the same kind of doorjam seal you'd use for a portable AC unit.)

I still get noxious fumes coming in sometimes, though. I had to set the thing up on a timer so it wouldn't pull air in during rush hour.
by theahura | 2025-08-26 00:57:53+00:00
> someone is optimizing to be at the top of that specific search

Sorry, I disagree. I think it's antisocial behavior to specifically optimize to be on the top of a specific query. No one thinks they are the bad guy. Everyone believes they are just trying to help people out. There isnt any hard distinction between SEO and SEO spam, just gradients and subjective opinion about the content
by abeyer | 2025-08-26 00:57:59+00:00
You can quibble over degree and the path taken, but wealthy insiders using money to control politics and ideological insiders using political control to amass wealth feel like two sides of the same coin, both leading the same way.

Your definition of class also seems to be very different from a traditional Marxist take -- hereditary systems were mostly seen as a symptom and not the problem itself, and were mostly orthogonal to any understanding of class.

I _hope_ there is hope, but I don't have much confidence that it lies in century old tropes of "rise up and throw off your chains."
by rgovostes | 2025-08-26 00:58:25+00:00
Apple enthusiasts like John Gruber believe in an ideal Apple. (See his reference to the Founder's "backs of the cabinets" quote.) The real company is distinct from this ideal. Believers support the company's actions so long as they can be plausibly squared with the ideal. But when the company strays—by phoning in design, or being stingy (iCloud's 5 GB free tier)—they respond with equally vocal criticism.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-26 00:58:30+00:00
> I thought the same until I googled "blue and orange tie-dye." I'll be honest, more white and black than I expected!

Putting white or black in between adds another anchor point.

And looking more around examples of blue and orange tie dye, most aren't really gradients overall, they have big splotches of solid color with small gaps or overlaps in between, and at least half the time the gaps and overlaps don't even have a gradient inside them.

> We may have to agree to disagree that tie-dye isn't a quintessential example of a gradient. Would you argue that rainbows aren't either?

Hmm. How about this. I would say a rainbow is not a gradient between two colors, and the color space discussion is about a gradient between two colors. The exact border of "quintessential" is not something I really want to spend too much time on.
by bluedino | 2025-08-26 00:58:43+00:00
> super-dense HPC data centers have used liquid cooling for at least 20

Hasn't this just been for things like rack doors and such?

In the last ~two generations of servers it seems like now there's finally DLC (direct liquid cooling) into the actual servers themselves (similar to the article). Intel kind of forced that one on us, with their high-end SKUs. This has been a pain becuase it doesn't fit into legacy datacenters as easily as the door/rack-based systems.

I won't say which server vendor it is, but I've put in more than one service ticket for leaking coolant bags (they hang them on the racks).
by rzazueta | 2025-08-26 00:58:46+00:00
Naw, decentralized means not having everyone on one platform. ActivityPub-enabled sites (Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, etc.) can be run by just about anyone, and can serve multiple users.

So, if you have the technical skills and the willingness to host an ActivityPub-enabled instance, you can serve it for others who either don't have the skills or ability to manage it themselves. If you keep it limited just to the folks in your own communities - people you know, friends of friends, etc. - then you limit a lot of the issues that arise from running huge instances - moderation, privacy issues, etc.

We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.

We need to decentralize as much as feasible - it's not all self-hosting, but "just let the money perverts run things" has not worked out so well for us. The solution lay somewhere in the middle, where cooperative groups serve the needs of the communities that matter to them in exchange for fair compensation.
by lucb1e | 2025-08-26 00:59:03+00:00
I have Android 15 on my work phone and 10 in private. I don't really see the difference besides that they've made it more annoying to turn wifi off (requires an extra tap now, first the general internet menu and then a small slider for wifi or mobile data). Genuinely not seeing any significant changes from a user point of view (I'm sure there's lots of new SDKs for the developers, but while I've made apps before, I'm not a mobile dev keeping up with the latest things)

That Fairphone has 13 just tells me they don't waste employee time in their small business on useless upgrades just for the sake of it. Their point is fair wages and ethical mineral mining: better that they have a workable phone without even more fluff, it seems to be tricky enough already in this world :(
by JimDabell | 2025-08-26 00:59:26+00:00
> I know people like to compare it with email

There is another, closer comparison to be made: Google Plus. With Google Plus, I suddenly had multiple social media accounts on Google Plus – I had the Google Plus profile associated with my personal Google account, the Google Plus profile associated with the place I worked, and the Google Plus profile associated with my freelance business. And to make it worse, it didn’t roll out all at once, so I added people I hung out with and worked with on my personal account, then had to re-do it again when my work account happened. And people were randomly adding me on whichever one they found first.

I don’t think Google Plus got this right at all, and it feels like federation is making a lot of the similar mistakes to Google Plus.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-26 00:59:50+00:00
That's a great find.

I'm not sure though that G.W. Bush had a lower IQ than Al Gore, but certainly G.W. Bush related to people who didn't think that they were so smart or at least educated.

I found a lot of people in the early 1950s for instance who thought Dwight Eisenhower was a lightweight I think because of his image

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP7WaUPACuY

and that he worked hard to come across as relatable to "the common man" whereas his opponent in the 1952 election was the opposite type.

Anyhow I'm sure that you've seen many of my favorite sources on this but I'll point out both C. Wright Mills The Power Elite and the Tom Wolfe books The Pump House Gang and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

Mills defies the reductivism of 2025 in that he says there is not just one power elite but multiple power elites and just analyzes those in a great amount of detail. Those two Wolfe books pursue a theory that people can't all compete in the "master" status hierarchy but we can all be a star in our own little sky and that it's OK to find meaning in little things -- he explores a bunch of entertaining case studies and I like it so much better than that Acid Test book that gets read to death.
by spc476 | 2025-08-26 01:00:49+00:00
Set a default ringtone to silence. Give each contact on my phone a custom non-silent ringtone. If a non-contact calls and it's important enough, they'll leave a voice message. The first year or so some spammers would leave a message (usually half a message as my outgoing message caused their canned robot to start speaking), but the past year or so, no bad voice mail messages.