Whats your must-have FOSS app?
These two are now the first apps I install on any new device:
- Kiss launcher (simple and fast)
- Articons icon pack
Basically, my approach is to (mostly) prioritize text over icons, and reduce the colors I need to process.
Other apps:
- Brave browser (for YouTube and built-in anti-tracking features.)
- Librera (ebook/PDF reader with lots of features)
- Odyssey (local music player optimized for speed. My library is so large that all the other players were having trouble finding songs.)
- Graph 89 (TI graphing calculator emulator)
- Feeder (RSS feed aggregator)
I really don't want something similar to the Reddit platform.
What I want is for the communities I'm in to move over to the Fediverse. Obviously I subscribed to some brainrot meme communities, as I have also done on Lemmy, but I also subscribed to a lot of deeply informative and useful subs that were the frontpage for serious communities.
For example, I subscribed to /r/DSP to read about real problems in digital signal processing, /r/audioengineering to keep up with the trends in music production, and a plethora of music subs to discover new bands. I subscribed to /r/Calculus, /r/Aspergers, and /r/mathmemes and wrote extensive comments about math and its details. I did this because I wanted to talk about math and things I'm interested in for the sake of doing it. Frankly, a lot of STEM stuff happened on Reddit.
I learned a lot from hobbyists and experts who were just there to engage in their craft. I stayed at Reddit because, at the time, it was still a (relatively) safe haven for people to communicate for the sake of communication, as opposed to a convenient side effect of Reddit doing business. Although it was never a perfect platform in that regard, the human urge to connect managed to pop out of the concrete in spite of Reddit's commercialization of the platform.
I just hope that the niche Reddit communities and their members snap out of it and come over to the Fediverse. I'm not at all ready to recreate Reddit's centralized power structures, but I hope that the good people behind the screens will join us.
No, I'll install VSCodium for you. Fuck Microsoft's telemetry.
Other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets
I mean I could just smash or burn those things, and lots of important physical artifacts were smashed and burned over the years. I don't think that easy destructability is unique to data. As far as archaeology is concerned (and I'm no expert on the matter!), the fact that the artefacts are fragile is not an unprecedented challenge. What's scary IMO is the public perception that data, especially data on the cloud, is somehow immune from eventual destruction. This is the impulse that guides people (myself included) to be sloppy with archiving our data, specifically by placing trust in the corporations that administer cloud services to keep our data as if our of the kindness of their hearts.
Could it? Yeah, sure it could, and in some cases it will, but only if someone up the chain thinks it's profitable. Profit motive should never dictate how archaeology is practiced.
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If you need GPIO (general-purpose input/output - e.g. you need to directly interact with an electrical circuit) and you need serious processing power. For example, one of my school projects was to use a Pi to process audio in real-time and high quality. The user controls, which consisted of buttons, potentiometers (with ADC), and rotary encoders, were connected directly to the Pi's GPIO pins. I needed a combination of low-level control and high-level signal processing. I really needed a Raspberry Pi and specifically the 8GB Pi for that sweet RAM, because I don't think any of the knockoff Pi's offer 8GB yet. Correct me if I'm wrong, because I need another Pi. Also, the documentation for GPIO is a lot better for the Raspberry Pi than its knockoffs. Like there's probably a "correct" cross-platform way to do it on Pi clones, but my degree is in electrical engineering, not computer science, so I don't (yet) have the Linux background to do bare metal programming without using Pi-specific libraries that don't seem to exist on Pi clones.
Edit: someone else said space. That's why I chose a Pi (and looked at options in that form factor), because I wanted to fit the system into a small case.
Same. Hope it continues to grow.
It's nice to not be advertised to. It's nice to be on a (group of) platform(s) where connecting people is a goal rather than merely a side effect of a particular way of generating profit. I have trouble talking to people IRL, so Reddit was where I actually connected to people for the most part. Not at all healthy now that I'm writing it out, but it is what it is.
And I've seen a higher proportion of "essays" on here than on Reddit. Definitely starting to feel like home. I just hope that more Redditors agree.
Honestly? Not fundamentally different than right now. Hopefully I'm proven wrong.
So far, capitalism and the liberal systems that defend it have been pretty resistant to the needs and political will of the working class. Fifty years is (probably) too short to observe a fully general change of the way governments operate. I suppose that future governments will eventually learn to leverage technology for routine business.
It seems like the popularity of authoritarianism fluctuates over time and space (e.g. some places suck more than others), as would the actual "average authoritarianism" if such a metric could be unambiguously defined (and that's a big if, but it's a place to start). Speaking very loosely, I think that lately, there has been a "blip" in authoritarianism on top of the usual increasing authoritarianism and centralization of government since World War II.
Even though the worst of climate change is basically scheduled to occur within the next fifty years, I don't think that governments are going to structurally change in response. I think that they will adapt to the new status quo, whatever that may be. The COVID-19 pandemic is a great example of what I think will happen: any changes deemed necessary to preserve continuity of government will be made for as short as possible subject to the whims of the capitalist class, more specifically those who lobby the people in power.
That being said, privacy is fucked and will be even more completely fucked in the future. I anticipate that public consent for the kinds of "backdoor" spying that goes on by "abusing" existing "protections" will be successfully manufactured and codified into law.
Anecdotally, I am about to finish an engineering degree, and it's hard to find employers in my field who aren't somehow benefitting from taking contracts from the military or police. I regularly get spam in my school email asking me to apply for positions designing weapons or vehicles for the military. Most civilian firms seem to have no trouble taking huge military infrastructure contracts; military installations are usually the first thing in their news feed because they're so goddamned proud. My experience has backed up my belief that governments will be sinking their tendrils deeper into public life. Eventually, I think it will be prohibitively difficult to participate in society without materially contributing to the police and the military (beyond the fact that some portion of your taxes goes toward them), unless we begin to organize networks without them.
Yeah that stuff is a bit obnoxious, but once you get browsing it doesn't come up, at least for me. Well worth it for no YouTube ads and making tracking more difficult.