Huh… well, if I’m interpreting your situation well, this might be your lucky day! There’s a whole universe of software that isn’t in the Apple App Store. The thing is, releasing software in the Apple App Store costs developers $100 a year. And some people, on principle, don’t want to be tied to the Apple App Store.

So what’s the alternative? It can be daunting, because the App Store seems to guarantee safety and quality, right?

But there is an alternative that is used by millions: package managers. This type of software will fetch software for you, install it taking into account your computer’s hardware and software, and keep it updated (like an app store). Even better than that, there are some package managers that stand by the same values and use the same software-building process as Lemmy: they’re open source. This makes them community-oriented, and —by many accounts— safer.

The most popular open source package manager for MacOS is Homebrew. Once you install it, you can run brew install --cask thunderbird to install Thunderbird. Then, whenever you want to update it (along with all of the software that you install through Homebrew), you can simply run brew upgrade.

This is how package managers work: they help you manage software. And they have made me excited about managing my software, as well as relieved from how simple it all is once you understand them.

Thanks for sharing! It’s interesting to see what other people use.

As to email, I was recently looking to de-Google my life. I was looking into ProtonMail and CTemplar (I was oblivious to its recent scandal!).

In researching this, the internet lead me to this article, which I didn’t really read. But it lead me to this other article. Now, it’s worthwhile mentioning that ProtonMail did respond.

Anyway, all of this, including my lack of interest in doing the thinking needed to parse through the whole discussion, lead me to join Posteo. It’s much cheaper than CTemplar and ProtonMail for the basic functions I need, and it’s widely commended by the privacy community.

To use that account I use the local client Thunderbird.

ah, yes. superb execution. sublime

I’m learning with Java. I like that I don’t have to think about memory management compared with C or even Rust. I dislike how slow it is.

I’m also using HTML, CSS, and Go for a bunch of static websites I’m building with Hugo. I love HTML. I like CSS only in the context of Bootstrap. Otherwise I dislike the way my style-sheet documents turn out. And I haven’t really tried to understand Go’s whole “context” thing because I want to use Rust. This last comment is why I want to finish my current projects and then immediately leave Hugo for Zola.

I also just finished learning about and using R and the Tidyverse for a couple of statistics projects. I really dislike R… On the other hand, I love the Tidyverse with my whole heart. It’s been one of my favorite experiences with any language.

I like that this avoids the sometimes-problematic wisdom of the crowds. But at the same time, this solution empowers ‘wise’ users only. And, perhaps more importantly, reduces the burden of work on mods. Moderating is work that we can all help reduce, I think.

This is so relieving

I don’t know them by name, but I know there are forks brewing. To ‘name’ one, there’s the CookieMonster Engineer one that will get a new maintainer soon.

Ah. Thx for clarifying.

Hmm. Sorry, I’m having a bit of difficulty understanding what you’re saying. Do you mean that there were larger community efforts to first decide upon what to do and then act, but this maintainer ignored the community?

The maintainer created a poll to rename the project. 4Chan came up with Sneedacity. Apparently it’s a Simpson’s reference. It’s a silly name. The maintainer didn’t like it, and started saying things about 4Chan that others (see thread mentioned below) have characterized as exaggerated. 4Chan responded with threads full of mockery and bullying. The threads are available in the post where the ex-maintainer explains why they’re stepping down.

In summary, the 4Chan people who care care because they had an opportunity to do something silly and because they saw an opportunity to bully the maintainer.

Man I just spent too much time reading about this, going down the rabbit hole, and I’m just glad that I’m part of a community (Lemmy) that is so clear about how we’re supposed to treat each other. We not only care about each others’ experience, but we’re able to avoid reproducing tropes that reinforce awful ways of understanding and treating each other.

Others can claim that the ex-maintainer of the fork at hand fanned the flames, but the flames would have never been there to begin with in a more humane context.

What is this bullshit. Please leave our community.

Man, this for sure shows the technical abilities of the Chinese team behind it.

This makes me think of Mariana Mazzucato’s work. She shows that States are the ones that drive innovation, radical innovation. Rarely is it companies, since companies have dividends to pay. On the other hand, States have missions.

Once States have done the investment and the research, companies can come in and profit from these innovations (which opens up a debate regarding State compensation). But the hard science was done by the States beforehand.

This is one of the reasons why Space X is not that impressive. It is standing on the shoulders of giants, and its innovation has been minimal compared to the work (think of the absurd combined budgets of the Space Race) that was necessary for Space X to exist in the first place.

I am not saying the achievement that this short article points out is commendable (I wish that many other States have such capabilities). I am putting this achievement in a broader context.

When I went over there and liked Lemmy, a pop-up appeared that asked something like “Is this the alternative you prefer the most?”. So maybe my like appears as a single like in the sum of likes, but weighs more towards pushing that particular alternative up in the rank.

Conveniently, someone just asked for a Reddit alternative in /r/AlternativeTo. They would probably like to hear about this or something 😉

Y’all are amazing 🥲

@ajz@lemmy.ml, can I just say I think you’re amazing? Yeah, maybe this thread was not the most epic feat, but I’m speaking in general. Your technical prowess, your level-headed responses, your pro-privacy, pro-social values. I’d ask for an autograph but I ran out of space in my notebook :( ✌️

What @kimjong_ill@lemmy.ml says is spot on, regarding how you should be consuming (reading, hearing, ‘watching’) stuff that is comprehensible for the most part. The bits that you don’t know will gradually settle or you might find compelled to search it (e.g. “What does “indoctrination” mean? I’ve been seeing this word again and again in this series but I still don’t get it”).

That covers the part of internalizing the language. At least in an intuitive sense. Studying grammar will make it sturdier [edit: only after having internalized the language intuitively!]. I don’t really have resources for this though… I think I remember Oxford University Press having some grammar lesson books? I’d generally trust that…

But there’s still the part of speaking. The finding and stringing of words shouldn’t be the issue, if you’ve internalized the language enough by consuming it. Rather, pronunciation becomes the bottleneck. Here you can grab a small fragment of a video of an actor you like or a character you like and copy the mouth movements as well as the mouth sounds. Be aware of accent differences. Choose an accent you’re interested in learning to speak in.

I will cite this tomorrow, when I’m back in my desk.

Edit: @dessalines@lemmy.ml’s reference is exactly it :)

Ouch. Do we really need this? 😬 I mean, yeah, understanding others and empathy… but I can’t help but think this will become a problematic community. I hope I’m wrong.

I really liked how the story was told by Laxman. This is well written. Also, based on the story, what a shit move from Apple for giving incentives for unethical hacking by not compensating properly.