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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I’ve been using Tuta Mail for a few years now. No complaints. Most of the features you would expect. Lack of IMAP support is kinda disappointing but survivable. Their email security is very strong though — they encrypt every part of your email, including subject (some providers only encrypt the body). They’re also rolling out post-quantum encryption of email data at rest, which tickles my crypto nerd side.

    They’ve still a loong way to go to match Proton’s product suite though, as they only offer Email, Contacts and Calendar for now. They’re working on Drive storage next, which is the main reason I currently use Proton.


  • Of course. I have nothing against Fediverse server admins setting up a Patreon —ideally Liberapay— or something similar to receive donations to cover running costs. I have and continue to contribute financially to indie devs or server admins when I can.

    Not everyone will do that of course. But there again, running stuff at a small scale shouldn’t be crazy expensive either. The operational costs of keeping a microblog or indie site running are little to none. I host my blog and all of my side projects for free in a cloud provider.

    Running a Fediverse server is more expensive. Last time I looked into what it would roughly cost to stand up a barebones stack to host a Mastodon server in a public cloud, it was like a hundred bucks a month. Not cheap but it may be big enough to house a couple thousand users. If at least 0.5% of your userbase donated some money to cover running costs, you might be ok.

    Alternatively, if you have a server lying around at home, loads of people self-host at home, which is a tad cheaper.

    I’m not saying a fully decentralised indie internet wouldn’t have its shortcomings, of course. I’m just saying I’d happily take that over the current state of the web.






  • I’d say genuine. Genuine experiences. Sharing shit for sharing’s sake. Not for better SEO. Not for profit. Just unadulterated human expression.

    That’s how I envision using the internet for entertainment in the near future. I’ll still use the shitty corporate sites when I must, for transactional browsing. I’m not going to pretend I can push Amazon, Microsoft, Google, online banking, etc. out of my life just like that.

    But I will actively seek authentic spaces. They will be a tad smaller than your average social network, Reddit, and whatnot. But I’m certain they’re out there and more people will join me in this search and populate these small spaces as time goes on.

    Lemmy, Mastodon, the IndieWeb movement. The first steps. I hope to find more!






  • ML/LLMs applied sensibly is definitely not snake oil.

    Peddling ML/LLMs as AI and saying it will be the biggest paradigm shift ever seen is definitely snake oil and a lot of people just looking to capitalise on the latest fad, just like blockchain, “Big Data” or the metaverse.

    Tech companies were struggling to raise funds in the bearish market that followed the pandemic tech boom. They were desperately looking for something big and shiny to use to persuade investors into loosening their wallets, and they’ve struck gold with “AI” because it sounds so cool and it can “basically do anything”, including replacing loads of staff with bots. Investors are being very easily bamboozled by this. Of course FOMO plays a big role here too.

    I think “AI” is close to its peak of inflated expectations on the Gartner hype cycle curve below and it will take a while for people to wake up to the realisation that the “Bright AI-fuelled Future” they had been sold is nothing more than a thin wrapper around a ChatGPT API with a pretty bow on top.


  • I’m not disputing that certain super foods are just marketing but I would also say that almost no food is healthy when consumed in excess.

    “Regular consumption of coconut oil may raise cholesterol levels and is high in saturated fats”. How regular are we talking about? Every day? Every week? What amount of oil? A few ml or 3L? And what kind of cholesterol are we talking about here? The good one or the bad one?

    Coconut oil may well be a nutritious, healthy oil when eaten sensibly, just like eating nuts is very good for you but you don’t want to eat too much at once because they are very high in calories.