• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • That’s kinda why I said to each their own. I personally find a full fledged keyboard with integrated touchpad controlling a PC using a media center UI to be my control/interface preference. The keyboard is small enough and light enough that it sits on the couch or end table with the other remotes or controllers without any issue. Until Logitech decided to be cunts there was actually a great solution more on your end of the spectrum in the form of the Harmony remote, but well, they killed it. Luckily though, there are a couple of open source efforts to create equivalent hardware as well as to dump their database of IR codes.




  • Ubuntu Touch exists and I have it installed on my backup Fairphone 5. In terms of the OS itself, it seems pretty solid and performs well. However it is very spartan in terms of both the interface itself as well as the apps available to interact with the OS in various ways.

    It’s a very small team working on it and as far as I can tell they aren’t exactly drowning in funding. I bet if every person that would like to see another OS option donated a cup of coffee amount of money to them every month they would probably have what they want in the next 3-5 years.

    I don’t see that happening though. I think most


  • I should preface everything I’m about to say by saying there is probably a reason you are married and I am not, and that my response is probably wrong.

    I lived a somewhat similar experience during his first presidency and COVID. Personally, I would have the most issues with my partner. By ignoring the abhorrent behavior and decisions of their family and choosing to interact with them anyway, they are condoning what their family is doing. Even if they are somewhat vocal in their disagreement, the family is avoiding the consequences of their actions since the spouse is still giving them what they want.

    If my spouse shut them down and called them on all of their bull shit, I’d probably be OK with them continuing the relationship, but most people aren’t willing to do that.



  • You aren’t wrong, but I still see two distinct benefits assuming there is an IR reflective or absorbent coating that can interfere with facial recognition.

    • For non government entities it makes direct tracking of individuals much harder (i.e. if you decide not to carry your phone or smart device any one company probably doesn’t know who you are).
    • For government entities it’s about making their job harder and increasing the error rate. You are right that they can still track someone via those means, but any time they have to correlate data or use multiple sources it does become more resource intensive in some way.

    Realistically will either of the above matter? Probably not. For it to be effective a large portion of the population would need to care about their privacy, or even their principles above convenience, which they usually don’t. However, I can’t control what other people do, only what I do. So in this kind of situation I do my best to be a good example of the behavior I would like to see from others and do my best to not contribute to the Prisoner’s Dilemma or Tragedy of the Commons.

    It’s not much, arguably it’s basically nothing, but it’s what I have.












  • That’s nice. I wish a security token was also an option, but it doesn’t appear they have any intention of implementing that. I don’t like the idea of using biometrics for anything specifically because of law enforcement and how there I can be compelled to provide biometric data. A security dongle is almost the same, but with the “advantage” that a little bit of security through obscurity can be implemented since they not only have to know a token is required, but also which one.

    Technically that’s also a disadvantage in that a security token can be lost vs biometric, but that’s the risk profile I would personally prefer.