Smart watches are tricky for me. I like to have my fitness tracked and graphed, but I also love the feeling of a premium watch. Right now I wear a Apple Water Edition, which feels extremely premium, but I have the sensors taped over since I don’t trust its proprietary software, and don’t even use an iPhone regularly.

Contrarily, I’d love to wear a FOSS smart watch to track my fitness, but I’d then lose out on the quality feeling of a nice watch.

Its a tricky balance, and I hope at some point in the future a company builds a premium smart watch running a well polished FOSS OS

I watch DT quite a bit, but Ive never seen him go off about ‘broken people’. Do you happen to have a link?

Thats the other thing. Right now I use Matrix as my primary chat program, mainly for this reason. Even if Signal released all of their source code for the next year, at the end of that year, they could simply revoke the source code, and force you to either continue using their service, or stop talking to your contacts.

Whenever I question Signal on Reddit, I get downvoted to hell.

In terms of privacy, I still vastly trust Signal over WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc. But they’ve been sketching me out more and more lately. First was them making Signal dependent on Google services. Then there was them threatening to sue projects that attempted to create forks of the project without said Google dependencies. Now it’s them not disclosing the source code for their server side software.

In their defense, the client is still mostly open source, but they need to stop acting like some savior for privacy when they are so hostile to open source.

I agree, but I also think there’s still a place for heavier vehicles. Like, for day to day commuting, there’s no reason you need that much weight to move a single person, but when I’m going anywhere above 50MPH, I’d much rather have some weight to the car for sake of safety. Millions of people who live in cities could probably do just fine with a bike or other smaller vehicle, but there are just as many people who wouldn’t be in the position to safely drive a lighter vehicle.

I drive a 2009 Highlander, and it’s honestly a great balance for me. It doesn’t have lane keep assist, automatic emergency braking, or anything like that, but it does have traction control, stability control, and ABS, which I like. I think there’s a pretty distinct difference between assistive tech in cars that helps with subtle things in the background to help you maintain control, and assistive tech that tries to take over for you since it assumes it knows better.

The lane-keep assist thing you brought up is the perfect example. It drives me crazy driving cars that have it. If you really need a computer to keep you within the lanes, you probably shouldn’t be driving. Contrarily, if you’re paying attention, it can actually work against you. A common situation I get into is when I want to give a bicyclist on the side of the road some extra space, and lane-keep assist pulls me towards them at the last second, forcing me to swerve relatively hard at the last second. It’s not a massive deal usually, but on gravel, ice, or even wet roads at high speeds, I’d imagine it could lead to some fairly dangerous situations.

I really hope in the future that are at least some manufacturers that combine the modern idea of electric cars and fuel efficient driving, with older ideas like analog driving. I love the idea of electric cars, but not the idea of having the car try to take control away from me in exchange for convenience.

That probably wasn’t the best word to use, but I meant compliant with letting companies take advantage of them. Like, if you’re the only one in a field, users really have no choice but to use your service, even if you start selling user data, for example. Competition means users have somewhere to go if you start making dumb decisions.

This may be an unpopular take, but I don’t think there are enough “unpractical” electric cars. Every single electric car I know of tries to be as easy and convenient as possible.

I’d really like to see a more “analog” (for lack of a better word) electric car. Something with a manual transmission, and the ability to disable TCS and ESC. Something with more of an emphasis on being fun, simple, and inexpensive, rather than as easy to drive as possible.

Of course, I’m not saying these unpractical cars should be the standard, just that there aren’t really any cars that fall into the category of ‘cheap weekend car’.

The privacy of electric cars is also something somewhat off-putting. Teslas constantly report back data to be fed into auto-pilot, which I find somewhat concerning. As cars become more and more reliant on software, I find it more and more important that that software be open source, or at least offline.

I bought an Apple Watch a few years ago, and functionally it works great, but I stopped wearing it altogether since there’s no way I can tell how much data it’s feeding back to Apple. If privacy issues don’t bother you you’ll probably love it, but otherwise you’ll constantly feel uncomfortable.

The quality of the Apple Watch Ceramic Edition feels really nice, so I might just tape over the sensors, use my jailbreak to block the watch from connecting to the internet, and use it as a plain watch.

Here’s the thing. I love the idea of IOT, provided the devices running on it are FOSS. For example, I would never in a million years run a Google Home in my house, but I would gladly hook up some Raspberry Pis running Python scripts to various places.

A question: As I understand it, Lemmy is decentralized and federated, so is this as big of a deal as it sounds? Instead of a hard fork, couldn’t someone just host their own instance?

If a program like this is FOSS, and doesn’t collect more information than necessary, I would install it in a heart beat. I wish projects like this got the jump on contact tracing before Google and Apple did.

I personally don’t use NeoChat, but I’m really happy to see competition. I don’t want to see Element become compliant.

I seriously doubt there’s any way theyre making anything significant off a game thats 2 decades old.

The password generator built into KeePassXC is similarly customizable, but lacks a few aspects of SGen Libre.

First off, it’s not necessarily purpose built. If you just want to generate passwords, its a bit unnecessary to have to download an entire password manager.

Second, it only allows you to generate a single password at a time, which can be a slight annoyance in specific use cases where you need to generate hundreds of secure passwords. For example, if you work at a school, business, or even just have a large family, you may want to generate more than one password using the same criteria for a group of people.

Third, it’s UI doesn’t mesh fantastically with GNOME. Of course, this is purely aesthetic, but you can see in the screen shot how the icons, buttons, and text fields stand out from the general look and feel of GNOME.

I should clarify that I think KeePassXC is a fantastic program, and I even use it as my password manager. One of the features I really like from it that I’d like to implement into SGen Libre is the ability to set a custom set of characters to pull from when generating passwords, instead of just pre-configured sets.

In terms of security, I can’t say which is more secure, as I haven’t looked into KeePassXC’s source code, but I would imagine that they are similar in terms of security.

The term rice comes from the car community, where it stands for Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancement. In other words, its a visual change to a car with no functional purpose. The same term and connotation is used in computers to indicate something to do with aesthetics with no practical reason to be there. It isn’t anti-Japanese.

Crap. I used Firefox Send all the time, and it completely crippled my workflow when it was “temporarily” shut down. I was actively waiting for it to come back so I could get back to doing a lot of what I do.

They do some things that most hardcore Linux users disapprove of, like Snaps. They’re ok, but they really give you no choice but to use them, and will automatically install packages as Snaps. Pop!_OS still lets you use Snaps, but you aren’t forced to.

Elementary is like MacOS, but without a lot of the garbage MacOS forces on you. Hardcore Linux users usually don’t like it, but its great for newcomers.