nonserf

joined 11 months ago
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There are at least a dozen FOSS platforms for phones now. Off the top of my head:

  • Replicant
  • Jolla
  • Sailfish
  • Lineage
  • PostmarketOS
  • Graphene
  • e/os

Several more were mentioned in a recent FOSDEM talk. It’s becoming unsurmountable for someone to search on which OS works to what extent on what device. These FOSS platforms all have wikis and various ad hoc scattered datasets that are not in a proper importable format, like JSON or XML.

As always with FOSS, it’s disorganised. We need every portable platform project to publish a dataset in a standard format and ideally in somewhat standardized tables so folks can grab all the datasets to search more sensibly. I should be able to run an SQL command to show, e.g., what all platforms are available on phone model X which have wifi capability. And the reverse.. I might want to say which phone has wi-fi support on the most linux-based OSs.

Personally I wouldn’t even need an app. Just datasets to import into SQLite. But an app would make the data useful for more people.

 

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/865880

Conceptually this seems like it could be a quite useful app for getting web pages. I learned about it from @morphite88 @thelemmy.club in this thread. It’s implemented on Android and Windows (not linux? wtf).

I installed the AOS version, which is ~100mb compressed and over 500mb unpacked. Wow.. wtf that is huge. It’s based on Firefox so I wonder if that’s where all the fat comes from.

In any case, the app simply does not work. When I launch the massive thing, it tries to contact a “bootstrap server”, and fails. I do not trust the clearnet and thus force CENO over Orbot (Tor). Perhaps that’s the issue.

CENO gives an option to enter a custom bootstrap server, but my searches come up empty. Perhaps this app it too unpopular to have alternative public servers.

[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I think it must be quite complicated to implement. Torrents traditionally work on static data. An ISO image or mpeg4 doesn’t change, so the hash locks in the content and makes it possible to share pieces and assemble them with integrity checking. I have no idea how they are doing that with a webpage, which could potentially change every second. I don’t know if they have a way to add updates to a torrent of an existing page, or if they construct a new torrent on a snapshot basis.

[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Looks like not exactly the same thing but it appears to solve the same problem.

Ceno is apparently for mobile devices ~~and no mention of using torrents~~(spoke too soon; indeed it uses torrents). But thanks for mentioning it because I will be eager to try it out.

(edit) after looking deeper it looks like there is a Windows version (but no linux?) In any case, I’ll try the android version.

[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 1 points 6 months ago

I believe credit unions are more centralized than commercial banks. CUs are tiny operations, which means they cannot afford to do everything in-house. CUs outsource like crazy. All CUs use the same couple of billpay services. They use the same statement printing service. They’re not generally competent enough to do their own website, so they outsource the website. Most of them centralize further by putting their website on Cloudflare. They never write their own smartphone app, so a few app makers serve all credit unions nationwide.

It’s a disaster really. No matter which CU you choose, the same giant outsourced entities process your data. Commercial banks tend to be more decentralized because they do more in-house work (depending on their size). It’s rare for a commercial bank to MitM their website with Cloudflare, but hard to find a CU that does not do that.

 

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/786769

FOSDEM presenter Jah Kosha will pitch the idea that the web can be made inclusive by introducing some middleware called #akoopa to share websites using torrents. This is severely needed. I cannot even read legal statutes that I am bound by because the gov publishes law on exclusive websites.

It’s similar to my youtube-torrent idea:

https://libretechni.ca/post/420147

 

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/786523

Not my idea.. I just saw this on the FOSDEM schedule. Seems like a great idea.

GUI web browsers are too fucking monolithic. This has enabled just 3 big corporations to dominate everyone’s web experience worldwide. The presenter (David Thompson) makes the reasonable claim that giant browsers block liberation and shrink competition. But if we break the browser up in to many small pieces, we have a fighting chance at liberation from web oppressors.

 

FOSDEM presenter Jah Kosha will pitch the idea that the web can be made inclusive by introducing some middleware called #akoopa to share websites using torrents. This is severely needed. I cannot even read legal statutes that I am bound by because the gov publishes law on exclusive websites.

It’s similar to my youtube-torrent idea:

https://libretechni.ca/post/420147

 

Not my idea.. I just saw this on the FOSDEM schedule. Seems like a great idea.

GUI web browsers are too fucking monolithic. This has enabled just 3 big corporations to dominate everyone’s web experience worldwide. The presenter (David Thompson) makes the reasonable claim that giant browsers block liberation and shrink competition. But if we break the browser up in to many small pieces, we have a fighting chance at liberation from web oppressors.

 

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/715575

There are many manifestations of this way of thinking that people must conform to behaviour, methods and styles that differ from that of bots and criminals. For example:

  • Countless websites falsely accuse me of being a robot based on whatever faulty logic is making poor assumptions. I cannot access publications of laws or my own credit history because Cloudflare benefits financially from crude and cheap access decisions.
  • The Tor community is collectively targetted for opaque adverse treatment despite a vast majority of Tor users being non-criminal.
  • Countless email servers falsely refuse my mail server on the crude basis of having a residential IP address - mandating that I conform by hiring a 3rd party relay service which then becomes an additional MitM.
  • A landlord’s email system accepted my email but then silently directed it to a spam quarantine that the landlord never reviews. When a dispute errupted, the landlord claimed it was my fault he did not get my msgs. My fault, as if I have control over his mail server (which signalled to me the msg was delivered).
  • Creditors refuse cash payments under the faulty premise that cash is used by criminals and thus non-criminals must change their lifestyle & give up using cash in order to support the faulty logic used in targetting criminals.
  • Public libraries have removed or disabled ethernet ports (or neglect to install them) based on the faulty logic that cybercriminals use ethernet and legit users only use Wi-Fi.
  • This nutter believes humans should not use emoji because he thinks bots use emoji and he would like his crude AI detector to work.
  • We cannot buy lye in enough bulk to make our own biodiesel and bar soap from waste oil because lye is also used by meth labs.
  • Asylum seekers cannot cross a national border because they are presumed criminal.
  • (update) Cannot send email directly from your dynamic IP address because lazy email admins use that as a flag for spam.

All these scenarios represent different manifestations of the same oppressive paradigm: that it is okay to control people’s innocuous behaviour in order to support the convenience of a simplified and unsophisticated distinction from nefarious actors.

From a human rights standpoint, the result is a form of oppression that violates:

  • autonomy
  • self-determinism
  • privacy
  • consumer protection
  • the right to a presumption of innocence

What do we call this?

  • “Collective punishment” is somewhat fitting because a whole demographic of people are punitively targetted. But unlike the traditional meaning, it’s not a response to a particular incident. It’s more like a preemtive strike.
  • “Collateral damage” is somewhat fitting because innocent people are damaged by the oppression. OTOH, collateral damage implies the victims are comrades aligned with the aggressors. But in reality the victims do not necessarily agree with the mission that causes the sloppy assault. I do not necessarily consider myself on the same team as the oppressors.

Neither are quite right. We need a term to express “pusher of forced lifestyle comformity to assist lazy baddy finders”.

 

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/689223

Most DAB radios I find¹ have text-only displays. Some even have no display at all and you must tune in blindly with arrow buttons. Apparently color graphical LCDs increase the cost of the radio enough to omit them from the design.

And yet at the same time people are throwing away quite functional smartphones in mass quantity (thanks to capitalism and designed obsolscence).

Also note that (most?) DAB radios have a USB port for attaching a drive holding music.

Wouldn’t it be sensible to create a DAB radio with no display, but with the possibility to connect a smartphone which runs an app to show station metadata? (Would also be useful if it could connect to the LAN to feed metadata and even accept commands, but that’s another discussion)

I also suspect existing radios could be hacked. That is, radio flashed to decode the signal metadata and (for ease) write it to USB mass storage, which a smartphone can mimick while running an app to display the data that lands on the SD card. The problem would be phones refuse to simultaneously mount external storage that is externally mounted. Could a rooted phone read-only mount an SD partition that is externally mounted? Perhaps the mass storage hack is a broken idea, in which case we would need to invent a protocol for this. Or does a suitable protocol exist?

¹ I say this as a locally buying (usually 2nd-hand) type of consumer. Online consumers might have a different experience.

 

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/689223

Most DAB radios I find¹ have text-only displays. Some even have no display at all and you must tune in blindly with arrow buttons. Apparently color graphical LCDs increase the cost of the radio enough to omit them from the design.

And yet at the same time people are throwing away quite functional smartphones in mass quantity (thanks to capitalism and designed obsolscence).

Also note that (most?) DAB radios have a USB port for attaching a drive holding music.

Wouldn’t it be sensible to create a DAB radio with no display, but with the possibility to connect a smartphone which runs an app to show station metadata? (Would also be useful if it could connect to the LAN to feed metadata and even accept commands, but that’s another discussion)

I also suspect existing radios could be hacked. That is, radio flashed to decode the signal metadata and (for ease) write it to USB mass storage, which a smartphone can mimick while running an app to display the data that lands on the SD card. The problem would be phones refuse to simultaneously mount external storage that is externally mounted. Could a rooted phone read-only mount an SD partition that is externally mounted? Perhaps the mass storage hack is a broken idea, in which case we would need to invent a protocol for this. Or does a suitable protocol exist?

¹ I say this as a locally buying (usually 2nd-hand) type of consumer. Online consumers might have a different experience.

 

Most DAB radios I find¹ have text-only displays. Some even have no display at all and you must tune in blindly with arrow buttons. Apparently color graphical LCDs increase the cost of the radio enough to omit them from the design.

And yet at the same time people are throwing away quite functional smartphones in mass quantity (thanks to capitalism and designed obsolscence).

Also note that (most?) DAB radios have a USB port for attaching a drive holding music.

Wouldn’t it be sensible to create a DAB radio with no display, but with the possibility to connect a smartphone which runs an app to show station metadata? (Would also be useful if it could connect to the LAN to feed metadata and even accept commands, but that’s another discussion)

I also suspect existing radios could be hacked. That is, radio flashed to decode the signal metadata and (for ease) write it to USB mass storage, which a smartphone can mimick while running an app to display the data that lands on the SD card. The problem would be phones refuse to simultaneously mount external storage that is externally mounted. Could a rooted phone read-only mount an SD partition that is externally mounted? Perhaps the mass storage hack is a broken idea, in which case we would need to invent a protocol for this. Or does a suitable protocol exist?

¹ I say this as a locally buying (usually 2nd-hand) type of consumer. Online consumers might have a different experience.

 

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/617678

The shitshow is largely described here. That’s LaTeX-focused, but the whole FOSS infra is a disaster.

We need an app that can harvest bug reports from multiple sources and build a local database that aggregates all bug reports. That is, it harvests bug reports in github, gnu.org, Salsa, as well as distro-specific reports (e.g. Ubuntu bug reports from launchpad and Debian bug reports from debian.org).

Rationale

  • Dupe reports (due to lazy people)-- Some trigger-happy testers/users do not bother to lookup whether a bug is already reported. And most of the rest only check one db, not all.
  • Dupe reports (by design)-- The Debian guidance is to report bugs to the Debian bug tracker (to some extent, even if the bug is already reported upstream). If not upstream, it’s the maintainer’s job to mirror it upstream. It’s a good policy but diligent testers who check multiple trackers see some distracting redundancy.
  • Query limitations-- searching for bug reports is limited to the GUI search form for each DB, each of which is limited in different ways. Just let me fucking grep.
  • Offline users fucked-- Bug DBs are naturally online, so air-gapped/offline users have no access to the bug DB. A local DB that can be sync’d from bug trackers when the user is momentarily online.
  • Full searching-- a local copy of all bug tracker datasets enables testers to search all records with a single query.
[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

people are brainwashed to believe you should forget the existence of your 1st language when learning a new one.

Citation very much needed

No it’s not. Just take some language classes and take your own survey. It’s trivially verified.

It’s quite rare for a language class to use one language to learn another. Every single person I have surveyed believes (without evidence) that it’s better to learn a language without exploiting your mother tongue to learn a new language. Many language teachers are themselves instructed to avoid using the student’s mother tongue.

This guy’s full of shit. 6000 words is what, ~B1-B2 level of fluency?

zaphod answered this well but I should add that 6k words are my count (from a dictionary), not the person who gave the tip. No one claimed that 6000 nouns results in “fluency”. (I scare-quoted fluency because B1 is where I’m at in French and I am nowhere near fluent; and I doubt B2 would get me there).

IIRC, “this guy” is Thomas Michael, a brit who produced audio tapes that teach French to English speakers. So there’s your source if you want to chase it up.

Does anyone else think Thomas Michael is full of shit?

While it’s a neat idea, there are a lot of words in French that resemble English words but don’t mean exactly the same.

Of course the AI bot would have to work that out and avoid such cases.

[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There’s some kind of tech defect going on here. When I posted my comment, this thread and all others w/the same title had zero comments. Now I see many comments in here, some of which are older than my own. So in my view of this community, it appeared like a ghost town with a bot making a bunch of empty threads. Apparently posting in this thread triggered the node I am on to fetch the comments.

[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca -1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

I don’t get what’s going on with all these threads. You seem to be spamming your own community. All these threads with this same title do not link anywhere or have any content. It’s drowning out meaningful threads.

[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 2 points 8 months ago

I was able to find an existing deck for the language I was learning. But then I still spent some time on additions and mods to add words from my textbook brought up.

 

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/559409

All words ending in “tion” or “ty” are both French and English. Apart from that, English gets many words from both Dutch and French that are similar. But there is no effort to exploit this because so many people are brainwashed to believe you should forget the existence of your 1st language when learning a new one.

I am firmly outside of that school of thought. When someone uttered the opening sentence of this post to me, I probably learnt ~6000+¹ words in French in 5 seconds. You cannot beat that. This would have taken years of playing charades using the popular immersion teaching style.

So the question is, are there any language learning tools whereby you specify two langauges and it produces a list or dictionary of true friends? The idea is that you can make a quick gain in vocabulary before progressing into unfamiliar/alienating words.

There are instances where I am writing a bilingual paper in English and French. The French column is a machine translation. Knowing some French (but not fluent), there are situations where the translation tool chooses a synonym for a true friend. If the machine had chosen a true friend, it would be easier for me to verify the quality of the translation and also easier for me to learn from. Considering my reader(s) are often native French and /possibly/ decent with English, there are also situations where I fail to choose an English word that would be easier for a francophone. So it would be useful as well if a translation tool would reverse the French back to English while trying to select true friends in English.

Furthermore, a reader of my French-English text may be a native Dutch speaker. So I would like an translation tool that adds some secondary gravity toward choosing English-Dutch friends when English-French falls short. Or another way to state this: I want a bilingual text that minimises the frequency of unique original words that are not borrowed by any of the relevant languages.

I realise gravitating toward true friends may cause a longer text in some cases, so I suppose I would also want to set a threshold of tolerance on additional words or syllables. In the end there would be some manual effort in the end anyway.

¹ $ grep -iE '(ty|tion)$' /usr/share/dict/american-english-huge | wc -l

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