toastal

This assumes that just since abuse could happen means we should block access for everyone. Folks might make illegal photocopies of books so we should ban libraries. I & others have done general scraping for our own uses that isn’t done in some abusive manner. But to assume a company beholden to US shareholder is going to “to the right thing” would be to go against the history of US corporations.

And you know who is going to be able to afford to do the scraping? Big US-based “AI Bros” that can do it with venture capital preventing the average user or researcher from grepping the net.

Great to know. I saw it missing from the support table & just assumed that was that.

Just imagine: when we said we wanted “detail-oriented” & “technical” we didn’t mean in spelling—just everything else. Lol.

They are precisely deciding who can scrape what by sitting in the middle of like 30% of internet traffic & denying access. There is no way to tell if this ‘scraping’ is for research, hobby, commercial, or “AI” purposes; conveniently if it can make Cloudflare money, they’ll let you charge a toll. If Cloudflare cared about AI issues, they wouldn’t be having unpaid users solve/train their hCAPTCHA models just for visiting a site from Tor, a VPN, or even just a non-‘Western’ IP address. The fact that folks/businesses bought into this centralization is frightening—with little open access to information or allowing folks to stay anonymous (whatever their motivation).

Also don’t dare call someone “dumbass” if you can’t be bothered to turn on spell check or understand how commas work.

The gall of Cloudflare to think they can be the arbitrator of scraping… this is what happen when all y’all give a singular publicly-traded, US-based major control of the general internet infrastructure by purposefully letting them man-in-the-middle your production sites. Now they get to sell access to what was once an open internet. Instead every time Clouflare or Fastly go down, half of the internet goes down with them.

Yep. Camera situation is shit. I often carry a mirrorless so I can get a nice photo if I need it, but it means a general photo by me is shit since you need that proprietary software. And yet still since I use the headphone jack more than anything, it is a requirement—along with an unGoogled experience for privacy. If you want a jack + unlockable bootloader with flagship specs, Xperia is the only line left.

That is a real concern & it seems they are moving to 4 years of updates as well as not rolling out a new phone every year, but given that LineageOS supports the phones, even if I am not getting firmeware updates, I am willing to take that risk since I get more IO.

The Xperia 5 is a skinny 6.1" & many consider it to be a small phone option in 2024.

I saw the SailfishOS support last month. I would have picked up a 10 instead of 5 even with the non-flapship specs to have a way ‘out’ of Android in case. It is quite a suprise Sony is their chosen brand over the more popular option (even if they have worse IO)—butt the bigger shame is not extending support to the flagship 1 & 5 😔

Last with a headphone jack on the flagship while still allowing bootloader unlocking too. This is why I picked one up last year.

There are several open protocols that meet your criteria that aren’t Matrix (with most of them using double-ratchet encryption similar to if not exactly like Signal). Due to server costs (Matrix eats a lot of RAM & storage), medium-sized entities usually bow out so the Matrix network largely consist of a few 1–10 user servers & massive centralization around Matrix.org & the hosted servers they provide. Since almost all the messages get synced to the Matrix.org server if just one Matrix.org user is in your room or whatever, all metadata will be synced to the mothership in Matrix.org that was originally funded by Israeli intelligence.

Signal refuses to even try to accommodate for UnifiedPush or MQTT for those not using play services requiring an extra battery-draining socket to their servers. You are also still required to use one of the mobile duopoly OSs as a primary device to register (SIM still required). Good luck if you use a Linux phone, KaiOS, or just don’t want an ever-present tracking beacon on you. We all know the Electron-based desktop client is shit. I would flip this on its head & say it is the service’s probably if they choose to prioritize & mainly support the shitty mobile OS duopoly it’s their problem for providing a bad service & getting the criticism they deserve.

While the greater knowledge tells us the jack integration costs the manufacturer less than a greenback, the narrator buys @ 20× the price a dangling dongle whose DAC quality is an unknown. Strolling with cellular apparatus in hand, the narrator’s new phone tails are inserted—one side waving in the wind & the other causing a weird, uncomfortable cinch in the junction with 3.5mm jack. Additional stress is forced upon the singlar USB-C port. Who will last longer on this phone, port, battery, screen? “This is fine” he tells himself lifting the screen searching “best Bluetooth headphone 2024” just to see what’s out there—even tho his headphones have no performance issues & a replaceable, detachable cable already built to last.