True story: I bought my current printer from a homeless man. I had actually found the printer in a box that someone had left on the curb across the street the night before, so I knew it wasn’t stolen. I was going to take it home but was walking away from home at the time and didn’t get a chance that night. The next day I saw it with the homeless man across the street and offered to buy it.

This is the first I’ve heard of “a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues” and “Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute”.

Can you give a summary or examples? I’m not trying to argue, but would just like to know more. I don’t follow Lemmy development more closely than reading the dev summaries they post, so wasn’t aware of any of this.

I saw a comment, probably on Mastodon, from an author saying that (I believe) ChatGPT had plagiarized some of his work verbatim. I don’t recall if it was a work of fiction or not, although for the purpose of copyright it doesn’t matter.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s trained on works of fiction just as much as non-fiction though. I think that from what I’ve heard, you can ask ChatGPT to write something in the style of particular writers? If it’s possible to give a very specific prompt for it to write something with the same plot points as a Stephen King story in the style of Stephen King, I wonder just how close it would look like the original?

I had heard some mentions of this before too, but didn’t recall the exact references. I went searching and found this recent study.

There are lawsuits everywhere

It’s not just style. From what I understand (I’ve never used any of the generative AI tools), they supposedly can and do output chunks of text verbatim from copyrighted works.

Good point. I had forgotten that I had briefly looked at the 3rd party keyboards on iOS, but I think I either decided to give the built-in keyboard for a while and then forgot to try the others, or if I didn’t see any caught my eye. Gboard would be out since I’m trying to degoogle, but I need to look into this again. Thanks for reminding me.

I see, thanks. I’m letting iCloud do it, but I want to have a local copy on my PC as well. I remember that on Android I had heard of apps that would automatically transfer to PC over WiFi as soon as it connected to the network, so I wonder if there are apps like that for iOS too.

Thanks. I’m not trying to fight either, but just relate my experience with the switch so far. I would be happy if I could feel that iPhones were all around superior to Android like some people do because my general views on Google have become very negative, but I’ve run into too many silly issues that prevent me from feeling that way. I presume that the people that post that iPhones are great and Android is terrible either haven’t run into any similar issues (limited uses of the phones?), haven’t used Android at least in the last few years, or are trolling, or are brainwashed. I think anyone giving an honest comparison (like I think you’re doing) would say that they are both completely mixed bags.

Just to add some clarifications and new points:

My keyboard usage is very basic. I don’t use swipe gestures, didn’t use any custom keyboard apps on Android, and don’t do anything out of the ordinary. I continue to struggle with editing functionality on iPhone, like once it highlights a partially written word and gives a wrong auto-correct suggestion, I have a super hard time undoing that selection. I have to tap all over the place to get it to unhighlight. Could be user error though. I also continue to hit those app bar buttons at the top of the keyboard in the middle of typing, causing a big interruption in the process.

AMR files are or at least used to be what Google uses for audio files embedded in SMS/MMS messages. I found out that iOS dropped support for the format years ago. Seems like a big interoperability issue to me.

How do you do the Wi-Fi photos transfer from your phone to computer? I would like to do something similar.

Your experience with PDFs may have used an internet connection when it came time to open them, if one was available. When I tried to do the same by using I think the Apple Books app (for the first time, which may have been my issue) it said it needed a connection. Maybe the connection was only required to set up that app. Maybe siri would actually be useful in getting things properly set up. I’ve avoided doing anything with that so far.

One other issue that I forgot to mention in my previous post: serious overheating issues on iPhones. Like my phone has shutdown in the middle of maps navigation (while charging and also playing music), and also in the middle of a video call. I have a TPU case on it, which apparently is a problem? But this never happened with my Moto X4. Admittedly that was a mid-range phone at the time it was released, while these iPhones are near the top of the range if not at the top. Maybe top range phones run hot because of faster CPUs. It still seems odd though.

I recently switched myself, my wife, and my mom from old Moto X4 Android phones to slightly newer, but not current iPhones (X, XS, and 11 Pro). It’s been a few months now (maybe 3 or so?). Honestly, I’m not that happy with them. I think I’ll stick to it mainly for privacy, security, and environmental reasons - iPhones are supported with security updates for way, way, way longer than the vast majority of Android phones. Like two or three times as long, in some cases. This offsets the price factor, maintains security for longer, and reduces electronic waste by making the phones viable for longer. By my calculations, I actually come out ahead with iPhones with regard to price. I like that iPhones let you remove most, maybe even all the built-in apps that come pre-installed. I also like that they give you an actual indication of your battery health.

Having said that, many other aspects of iPhones have been a hassle or just plain sucked:

The keyboard sucks. Poor editing, poor layout without a number row, not able to turn off the stupid app bar or whatever they call it on the top row.

The messaging app sucks. First, don’t forget that it’s Apple’s intransigence now that’s preventing iMessage from being interoperable with Android, and I say this as someone who has come to dislike and avoid Google as much as possible. I hope that the EU forcing them to make messaging interoperable will yield some real improvements with this. Second, the messaging app doesn’t show dates and times on messages by default. I have to pull each message to the side to see this info. Third, there appears to be no search function within a message thread, what a pain. Finally, I also found out that iPhones aren’t able to do anything whatsoever with certain common attachments from text messages. I had messages received from Android phones with AMR files in them (audio recording files). The iPhone was completely unable to open them, I couldn’t find even an app that could open them, and the damn phone wouldn’t let me forward the text message to an email! I ended up having to go back to the Android and forward the text to email in order to be able to open the attachments. Completely unacceptable.

The connectivity with PCs sucks. They allow you to see your photos (only the photos and videos, nothing else) when connected through USB, but it barely works. My photo transfers fail most of the time, and it seems to be impossible to let my photo manager delete the photos from the phone after transferring them. Yeah, iTunes is supposed to work, but you can’t manage two different phones with different iCloud accounts on one Windows login. Besides, iTunes itself sucks. Their replacement app for this, Apple Mobile Devices I think it was called, only supports Windows 11, not Windows 10.

The offline PDF storage and reading sucks. I was going to an event that I knew was going to be away from mobile networks and prepared for this by jumping through all the hoops (I’m not kidding) that it took to actually download PDFs locally to the phone so that they were available offline. These PDFs held the map and event guides. I get there, offline, and try to open the PDFs that I painstakingly had downloaded offline. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the damn built-in app for reading the PDFs needed internet connectivity! Thankfully it wasn’t a life or death situation, but still, how frustrating and disappointing.

The official community support site sucks. The impression I’ve had in researching the issues above is that someone will give some incredibly lame answer that doesn’t really resolve the issue and instead papers it over, that answer will be marked as the correct answer, and it’s end of story. You need to find discussions on other unofficial forums for real discussions of technical issues.

This is all I can think of for now. There’s probably more, but you get the idea.

Haha, nice! Here, I found the post, in the old “R” site. I try to avoid posting stuff from there, but this is in the interest of science: https://i.redd.it/idl8jj50fg6b1.jpg

I guess they were red, not bright orange.

In the old days, a friend of mine would carry some paper(?) stickers(?) (labels?) that said something like “I park like an asshole” and superglue it to one of the windows of someone parked like this.

If you wanted to be nicer, you could get some proper pre-printed stickers (most online print/sticker shops should have them) and place them. Wouldn’t cause any damage but would maybe make them think about it a little bit.

I also saw a post recently where someone replaced all the tire valve caps with bright orange or pink little dick shaped caps. This would cause more inconvenience and embarrassment, but not be damaging or dangerous.

.com, .org, and .net are three old TLDs that are considered general purpose nowadays. I still feel that they have the most “cachet” as well as long-term stability. On top of that, from what I recall when I was looking with a similar question, I found out that many of the other TLDs have much more stringent rules about various stuff that can result in your losing the domain name if you violate them. For instance, .io doesn’t allow porn, some others (I don’t remember which exactly, but a lot of them) have strict rules against copyright infringement / piracy, and so on and so forth. In the end I decided that .com, .org, and .net were still the best gTLDs for me. They also generally have some of the best pricing for domain names, with a few exceptions.

If you decide to go with one aside from those three (or any of them, really), I recommend researching not only the rules of that TLD, but also the background of the registrars to try to get an idea if they seem like they’ll be around for the long haul and know what they’re doing.

Edit: I should have said registries instead of registrars above. I also found the original article where I learned some of this stuff about which TLDs offer better protections for domain owners, from the EFF: https://www.eff.org/wp/which-internet-registries-offer-best-protection-domain-owners

I would have agreed up until about a week ago. There was a news story a few days ago about how there are people in LA renting various vehicles parked on public streets for people to live in. Then another story about how there are actually thousands of such “rentals” in LA. I think highrise slums might be a notch or two down from the current dystopia.

Saving this post because it’s right up my alley so now I have many new games to check out. Project Zomboid is still going strong for us, but here are some others that our group has enjoyed:

Heave Ho: super crude 2D graphics, but absolutely hilarious gameplay

The Ascent: beautiful cyberpunk-themed isometric shooter

Broforce: very entertaining pixel-art 2D platformer/shooter - we played this through to the end, which is rare for us

Overcooked: very entertaining 3D game, not sure what I would even call the genre - a “work” game?

Unrailed: similar to uncooked, but a different kind of “work”

SWAT 4: old 3D FPS, but still good

Agreed with everything you said. The anti-Lemmy posts over there are starting to smell like astroturf. Although who knows, a lot of it follows similar anti-Mastodon posts I’ve also read there, so either some people really dislike federated social media that much or Twitter astroturfers were busy on Reddit after the blue bird was “stunned” by Elon.