As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make things cheap

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 8th, 2024

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  • That’s the network effect though, no fun being alone in a social network.

    Mastodon in particular has this problem, as it is built so much around emphasizing genuine human interactions and being a true social network, rather than just a social media broadcasting information. If your network is not there you have little reason to be there either.

    Commercial social media increasingly replace connections with engagement, which makes it easier for them to attract new users who don’t have their friends and family there. TikTok has taken it to the extreme it seems, judging by my very outside understanding.

    What makes me hopeful is that it is to a large degree a problem of first movers, and Mastodon did manage to get past the initial hurdle of just being a tiny group of FOSS freaks. The first million users are the hardest million when fighting network effects, and the Fediverse has made it that far.




  • Mojeek is the only usable engine I know of that’s European and truly independent at the moment. But the results are not nearly as good as in Qwant.

    SearXNG also runs on Google and Bing in the backend, and I can never seem to find an instance that works reliably.

    I think the Qwant/Ecosia index focuses primarily on the French (and German?) speaking web to begin with, but I’m hopefull it will get good in all languages eventually.


  • I misunderstood and thought you talked about a newer product than the original OLPC, which I was unaware had a transflective display. That’s cool, I’d love to see it in practice. The device is pretty ancient by now though, and as you said hard to come by.

    E-ink generally refers to electronic paper displays, which is different from (and much more expensive than) transflective LCDs. So I was confused by the prospect of OLPC having it, especially as the technology barely existed for consumer hardware back when these laptops were made.

    My favourite anecdote about the OLPC was how the antennas enabled farmers to communicate locally, and basically unionizing against exploitative practices by the assholes who were buying their crops. It was a really cool project.






  • Thankfully it is a crime, as they are bound by software licenses requiring users to be able to mess around with the system. That’s the only reason it’s possible to access the terminal through SSH from a computer, and doing so is easy. However, getting from there to making meaningful changes is a mess.

    For those interested there’s a useful list of Remarkable hacks on github. There have been many useful hacks throughout the ages, but many have been broken as Remarkable has changed the architecture of their cloud service and made various tweaks to the operating system. Some of them I have also found to be too difficult to set up so I just gave up.


  • Yeah, this is really not such a strength as people might think. I’m all for it being minimalist, and I wouldn’t want to have a web browser on mine. But the system is closed down way beyond what is reasonable. It runs Linux, and the only reason I can see to keep it closed down is that they want to sell their own cloud subscription.

    I would love to synchronize files with Nextcloud. Should be easy to do, considering it’s a Linux device. But nope, it’s too locked down and there’s no way.

    I have the keyboard attachment. It’s useless - I cannot edit plain text files, only their own restricted word-like format. At some point they even removed the option to email myself the text of the notes I had written, rendering whatever I wrote completely locked inside the device. And while the Linux shell of the device is accessible through SSH, I cannot change the keyboard layout without re-routing the driver which is some sort of deep black magic. So I’m stuck with QWERTY which is pretty much unusable for me.

    Their cloud service forces you to pay a monthly subscription for some pretty basic features. Thankfully I get it for free as I had my account before they started charging for all that.

    Reading the web sounds bad indeed, but it would be nice to be able to read the news on the device. It would be the perfect device for an RSS reader, had they not closed it down so forcefully.

    Hell, if I could just access the terminal from the device I could use the keyboard attachment and SSH my way into my laptop, and I could do my writing work without having to stare at a screen all day. But the only way of accessing the terminal without jumping through a bunch of impossible hoops of third party hacks is through a computer using SSH. It would have been so easy for them to just make one available directly somewhere.

    They do not have a linux app and there’s no nextcloud support, so I have to sign in to their web app every time I want to send a PDF to the device. And when I want it back to my computer I have to email it to myself.

    Hell, I should be able to run Zotero on it and integrate it with my Zotero cloud. My Zotero library should be directly available on the Remarkable, and my annotations in documents should be synchronized. The Remarkable runs Linux, and Zotero supports Linux ARM. It would be easy to achieve, and would be an obvious benefit to a lot of users. But no, they insist on their own stupid solutions for no other reason than fucking over their users for money.

    I use my Remarkable all the time. I wouldn’t want to be without it. But the stupidly restrictive system is not a feature, it’s a pain in the ass.






  • Going out guns blazing will be seen as an escalation, even if that’s what they’re doing already. That’s just the reality of the situation. Hell, they’re currently trying to justify their killings with arguments such as “he held a phone” and “her foot fell on the gas after she died”, and parts of Trump’s base are nevertheless buying it. If anyone actually came at them with weapons they would be having a blast.

    You don’t end violence with violence against footsoldiers.

    Pressure against the regime works. Trump and Vance are not afraid of ICE agents getting killed, they would be overly excited about it. They are not, however, excited to see the country rise in pritest against their fascist takeover.


  • I’m just saying that the fact that America tends to lose its wars is very meager comfort for those on the receiving end of them. You can’t really win a war as a civilian.

    Protests and strikes are working. Organize locally in a positive and constructive manner (maybe get active in a union? Do you still have those over there?), build community and dedicate time and effort to that. Be the opposite of the fascists, don’t just echo their ideas of violence.

    It might not feel so badass, but you’ll do more good as a living organizer than as a dead agitator.

    If you want to die a martyr, Luigi showed that there’s a better way than to go in guns blazing towards low-level losers working as fascist henchmen. Ultimately the awful people in ICE and US Border Patrol are also victims of this broken system, they’re just too stupid to have figured it out.