That makes a lot of sense, thanks.

Ugh, that’s really unfortunate. I will probably just disable voting buttons for myself if that ends up being the case.

I don’t really know what’s stopping someone from creating 100 alt accounts without private voting though? If the voting ID is consistent and you can take punitive action on the voting ID, it seems the same as if the person had a cleartext name. The real problem is that an instance is allowing these 100 alt accounts to sign up and manipulate votes, which I assume there are already solutions/measures for?

Don’t mind me though, I’m fairly new to all this, and I’m sure everyone’s thought of all these vectors before. I just hope that there is some sort of middle ground that doesn’t inevitably allow mass data harvesting.

I am paid a fuck-ton so my answer is definitely yes, but I really think it would vary person-by-person. “Should” people need to work 5 days per week to get that pay? My answer is probably no.

This might be the funniest possible direction for this to go. Purported savior of X11 and anti-DEI dogwhistling developer writes X11 code so bad, asked to leave commit history.

My corporate job is one of the better ones in terms of pointless BS and people pretending to be their corporatesonas, but every time I take time off I’m reminded that we’re wasting our entire lives with work. I take a few 4-day work weeks and suddenly my house is clean again, I’m cooking more interesting meals, writing code for fun, hanging out with friends, catching up on shows, etc. Imagine how much progress, art, and innovation we could have if everyone’s natural talents and interests were given space to exist. Long-term we would have so much more of everything, and everyone would be happier and healthier. Unfortunately, short-term we’ve gotta layoff 4% of our workforce again because Mr. AI said it might make the line go up.

How so? I feel it is an example of the effect because customers are drawn in with a low price and are surprised by a plethora of seemingly-sneaky fees, which take up a large portion of the total bill. Customers feel negatively about the long list of fees and the implication that they’ve been tricked, but they wouldn’t think twice if the fees were just included in the base price. It is against their best interest to be automatically and opaquely charged for all regular services (i.e. normal airlines) instead of being transparently given the option to forego those that they do not care about (i.e., fee-based airline).

I was under the impression that it’s intentionally #1 so that other instances can still track malicious voting behavior (e.g. mass-downvoting posts in a community) of an anonymous account without knowing the real identity. But yeah I’m guessing we would need some clarification somewhere on the specifics; I tried looking for documentation on how the private voting works but couldn’t find any, and I didn’t feel like digging in the code or hitting the API just yet.

If the voting ID is static in any way, it’s still inevitably trivial to de-anonymize a user’s votes, but it would at least require a more heuristic approach (e.g. finding a thread that the user is in and checking to see if they have upvoted/downvotes any comments they’re replying to). As well, the instance tag (@piefed.ca for example) on the voting ID can narrow things down significantly when trying to figure out which user is voting.

I’m mainly just thinking about how these systems can be scraped for mass data collection by e.g. advertisers/big tech in the future. Upvotes and downvote behavior can really paint a detailed picture of someone when all data is combined.

I think the best would be disabling the ability to vote your own comment/post with your voting account.

Actually yeah this is pretty easily the best option. Just make it so that every post/comment is upvoted once with your real account, and leave any other votes to the private voting account. This feels so obvious that I’m guessing it already works this way.

I remember someone talking about an airline that advertised very low prices up-front but then added tons of fees for every individual thing, and when adding all the fees up for the service you’d expect with any other airline the end price would be the same. However, given that all the services/fees are technically optional, this is actually an ideal pricing model since you don’t have to pay for any services you don’t want.

It’s just a label that you can pick up and drop off whenever you feel like it’s convenient. The “furry” umbrella is so gigantic that calling yourself a furry doesn’t really mean anything in particular. I think this aspect is rather utilitarian as well, since all the furry subgroups are stronger and more connected under this general identity. It reminds me of how LGBTQIA+ bands together instead of fighting for “gay rights” and “trans rights” individually.

One of the more interesting perks of including yourself in the furry fandom is that everyone is welcome and usually furries are happy to help each other out just for wearing the label. Most furries lean left politically, a vast majority are queer to some degree, and usually they’re quite tech-literate, so there’s a good chance you’ll have good personality compatibility with any given furry. It’s an easy way to make friends, especially in a time when the world is so closed-off and cynical.

It’s worth noting that some people feel like they’re “born furry”, but others pick it up intentionally or just as a passing interest, so don’t be afraid that putting the label on is some sort of commitment or reveals something about you as a person. In practical terms, I would guess you probably have a pretty good idea of what specific corner of the furry fandom interests you, and I would explore more in that direction to see if there’s anything else that you might like.

It’s important to use services with a workflow that works for you; not every popular service is going to be a good fit for everyone. Find your balance between exhaustive categorization and meaningless pile of data, and make sure you’re getting more out than you’re putting in. If you do decide that an extensive amount of effort is worth it, make sure that the service in question is able to export your data in a data-rich format so that you won’t have to do it all again if you decide to move to a different tool.

TJ noooooooo. I’m sure he’ll be happier if we hang out with him for spring break! What’s the worst that could happen? (I don’t think my brain/heart/soul will ever heal from the horrors of Echo.)

I like DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection a lot, and I switched from my paid SimpleLogin account to it. DDG is free and unlimited, the aliases are human-readable, and sites rarely block them. The downside is that they’re sort of hard to manage in multiple respects, but Qwacky helps a lot with the generation of them. The only way(?) to disable an alias is to receive an email through the address and then click the link at the top. There’s also no dashboard to see all your aliases, but I store each DDG email alias in Bitwarden next to the relevant account; that way if I start getting spam from an address I can figure out which account is doing it by searching my vault for it. Creation of an account also requires downloading their extension or their browser I think? You can uninstall it immediately after and manage with Qwacky instead though.

It definitely feels too good to be free considering the competition, but I’d honestly be happy to start paying for it again if they start asking, and I trust DuckDuckGo to not disappear overnight and leave all my accounts fucked. I’m also guessing DDG will eventually implement a better dashboard and management tools, so I’m okay with limping along on an okay UX experience for now given the end results.

Isn’t one of the problems with X that applications can log your keystrokes in other applications and record your screen? Obviously you shouldn’t be installing compromised software, but who knows if Borderlands 2 now includes some malicious code in its DRM or something.

I wonder if this opens up any new opportunities for cool Distrobox usecases.

I usually use GNOME Disks (gnome-disk-utility) when I need a GUI for disk management. If you’re not doing anything complicated or scripting disk manipulation the GUI is probably sufficient.

I’ve found that using RedLib instances through LibRedirect is very slick for accessing Reddit results from search engines.

For what it’s worth, when I signed up to piefed.ca it asked me to pick 3 interests and there were only 2 interests to even choose. I just clicked past the screen without picking anything, and it seemed to accept that as an answer. So maybe it’s already working fine, and the text just needs to be updated to be more optional-sounding?

By default, Wine/Proton has access to your full Linux filesystem under the virtual Z:/ drive from within the Wine environment, so any dedicated adversary could include your Linux stuff into its data collection. The odds of this already occurring are probably low-ish. You can use bubblewrap raw to start sandboxing resources (e.g. blocking network access or masking directories), or there’s a project called sandwine which presumably auto-configures the important stuff through bubblewrap (though I’ve never gotten around to trying it). Wine itself can also be configured to drop the Z:/ drive through its winecfg tool.

Without a dedicated configuration, I’m not sure Wine has any real priority or guarantee about sandboxing your original system from Windows executables, which is also why it’s important to remember that Windows malware can still do damage when running on a Linux system. The malware doesn’t really even have to be aware that it’s running in Wine if it just tries to encrypt any files it can reach.

The comment collapsing I think is fine; Lemmy-style forums already heavily rely on voting to move content around, and I think net -10 is a pretty good indicator that the comment in question has bad info, is a troll, or is otherwise not good content (as voted by the local community).

The low karma icon I’m seeing out in the wild and honestly, so far every time I see someone with that icon I look at that profile and sure enough there really are a lot of downvoted comments and antagonistic behavior. It’s probably handy to determine whether someone is sealioning, trolling, or just otherwise has a lot of bad takes (again, as voted by their local community) before deciding whether to waste energy trying to engage in a thoughtful conversation.

4chan screenshots being reported is pretty opinionated (the rationale being that it’s not about the content itself, it’s about the normalization of 4chan and the enablement of the alt-right pipeline it provides), but hopefully it’s at least optional?