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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • As someone who owns a digital audio player I can give some reasons:

    • Since most phones don’t come with headphone jacks anymore, it’s nice to have a device you can just plug your wired headphones into. It also means headphone jack inclusion is no longer a factor when choosing a smartphone.
    • Better audio quality depending on the DAC inside the device.
    • Expandable storage. Most DAPs let you insert one, some even two micro sd cards. No need to stream anything, plus you have space for lossless files.
    • No need to worry about data/wifi, your music is always there ready to listen offline.
    • Some DAPs are really small (Shanling M0 for example), making them more portable than a phone for a lot of use cases.
    • More headphone compatibility. A lot of higher end DAPs support more than a 3.5 mm jack. The Fiio m11 plus for example has a 4.4 and 2.5 balanced output jacks in addition to the standard 3.5 mm.
    • Higher power amps to power hungry headphones. A smartphone can’t power say a pair of Sennheiser HD 600s, a DAP can because it comes with a preamp (not all though, depends on the specs).
    • Dedicated physical buttons. A touchscreen will never compare to controlling playback with physical buttons.

    Though I will say, even as someone who owns one, unless you’re really into carrying your music library with you it’s generally not worth it. But they are nifty little gadgets and new ones come out every year to innovate the space.

    It’s similar to an e-reader as others pointed out. Sure, you can read on a phone/tablet as well but it’s nice to have a device that’s purpose built for one thing and does it really well. The same applies to a digital audio player. Yeah you can (and most people are fine with) play music on your smartphone, but a dedicated device does add some nice QoL to the experience.


  • Doesn’t Twitter directly suppress such links? I remember there was a crackdown on people linking their mastodon accounts a while back.

    And external links in general get a huge suppression in the algorithm because Twitter does not want to recommend tweets that take you off the site.

    The platform actively fights you if you want to move elsewhere (which should really be a telltale sign for you to move), so I get why some orgs struggle with that decision. Doubly so if your job relies on the platform’s outreach.


  • This is to me one of the major reasons Twitter discourse is completely ruined and the platform is mostly useless for seeing what people think now.

    When the only people who get to be at the top of discussions are people who pay for twitter, the only opinions that get shared are those that are pro Twitter, pro Elon, etc. Because they have a direct stake in the game.

    And that’s if the accounts posting aren’t all bots that pay for a checkmark to boost engagement, which is almost all I see when I occasionally have to check Twitter these days.

    So glad more people are leaving it. There’s nothing to gain from it anymore.


  • You actually tricked yourself into believing this isn’t all about shutting down competition to American companies or stopping people’s (especially young people’s) power to disseminate even remotely left leaning views that could gain traction and threaten the oligarchs.

    I mean even the politicians who back this bill state as much, so I’m not sure why you think this is about national defense. American citizens are just under as much threat as before, but now they have one less way to express themselves. Ain’t that great. /s


  • Over simplified, because Romani are usually nomad, they live in moving settlements and don’t typically integrate much wherever they settle in. A lot of the hatred they receive also stems from these settlements being illegally set up in private/public property, as well as how they result in a lot of trash being dumped everywhere. There is also an issue with Romani criminality (stealing, damaging property, and sometimes there are even shootouts between different Romani families which result in casualties).

    There is also a perceived notion that governments do not want to deal with these problems, which further fuels the hatred against the Romani as they’re seen as criminals who get away with everything.

    The truth of course lies somewhere in the middle. Most Romani are not bad people if you take the time to know them, but there is definitely a lot of toxic cultural norms being perpetuated by leaders of many Romani families, which doesn’t help with clearing the stereotypes, and with very little to no integration between the Romani and the cultures they are in, it’s hard to get rid of the animosity.


  • Wow, you’ve really succinctly put it best! Being a European myself, this is how I constantly feel when I hear racist shit in my daily life (mainly from family).

    It’s like, people here just can’t even fathom that what they’re saying is racist, that they’re racist, because to them what they’re saying is just a simple fact of life that everybody accepts. They don’t show open animosity towards minorities or throw racial slurs like you’d see more in America (though there is definitely some of that here too don’t get me wrong), but it’s a very casual, low-key form of racism where folks comment on X group of people all being one way and no one batting an eye for example.

    And if you so much as suggest they’re racist, or the country they’re in has or had issues with racism and other issues of oppression, a lot will legit fight you tooth and nail over it because they can’t handle the notion of it.

    It’s really freaking weird and took me a lot of time to be conscious of it myself, since I grew up surrounded by this sort of attitude.

    And it’s not just right-leaning people doing this. Some minorities like the Romani are openly discriminated by just about everyone across the political spectrum, the degree just varies. And then based on the country you’ll typically see a lot of Xenophobia towards the bigger migrant groups.








  • It is for most scenarios in my life. And in many peoples’ lives I will wager.

    For the people that are abroad I’d have to pay to call/text them each time, and I can’t even send them pictures/videos in a convenient way (no, convincing everyone to use signal just to talk to me is not happening)

    And when my family/friends share photos/videos of important events in their lives that I care about I’d just have to accept I’ll be the only one missing out and be that awkward guy at family gatherings that’s all out of the loop.

    And when my family is organizing events I would be the only one left out and have to convince someone to text/call me because I don’t want to be in the chat, being an inconvenience to everyone and also losing much of my input.

    And I’m not even gonna mention how most workplaces and business expect you to be on WhatsApp.

    And what would I get in return for being off WhatsApp? Nothing, that’s what. I’d just be seen as the weirdo that never wants to interact with anyone online.

    Do I like meta? No. But avoiding everything they touch is not worth being a nuisance to everyone else around me. I’ve just learned to suck it up like most people do. It’s not ideal but it’s absolutely unrealistic to expect most people to get off whatsapp/messenger when everyone has been on it for like a decade now. It’s unfortunate but it is what it is.




  • Nothing about the US system is particularly geared to prevent double voting.

    I get that you don’t have a federal register (something you should really fix tbh) but requiring manual registration when you could, oh idk, simply register people when they are born and then later automatically provide them a unique ID they can vote with? (I’m not even talking a government ID for the purposes of identifying yourself to law enforcement and stuff, I’m talking even just a voter ID for the sake of voting only)

    Then have part of the number in that ID identify the state you’re from if you want to prevent crossing borders to double vote (kinda like how credit card numbers have that info on them).

    It’s what they do here anyway, I’ve had an ID since I was like 4, and it’s with that document that I and everyone else votes.

    Though I know the US is probably too anti-democratic for this and none of the parties in power want to change jack.


  • Why is it not okay to call it what it is? If you openly allow nazis into your site, you have a nazi site. I’m sorry but there’s just no way around it.

    Either you nip that garbage in the bud or your site is overrun by far right nut jobs, which is what happened with odysee.

    Of course nobody wants to use the site. Why would they?

    It’s the nazi bar problem. You allow one nazi to enter your bar, then that nazi brings his nazi friends, and before you notice it you have a nazi bar and no one wants to visit.

    Odysee doesn’t “appear” to have more right wing content, it objectively does. The majority of people who migrate to it are wackos who got banned in other places for their extremist views.




  • I’ve had a lot of different setups over the years on my TV to see if my family (all “what’s a computer?” level of computer illiterate) could get the hang of it, and the one that clicked for all of them was Stremio+torrentio. Pop in a debrid service to avoid downtime/buffering issues and they’ve never complained since.