I remember seeing a fun website somewhere which was basically an isometric animation of a space station or something like that. It had a lot of tiles with a lot of fun stuff happening on it, it kinda had a "Where's Waldo" vibe. I think it had a number in it's name, like station42 or something like that. I can't find the website now. Does anyone remember what it is?

It’s been a few weeks now since the release of iOS 17.4, which

[…] provides new options for app marketplaces, web browsers and payments for residents of the European Union. […]

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a firm believer in the underlying regulation to it, and have been ever since the possibility of this becoming a reality was in the Brussels air. But so far, I haven’t really been able to come up with a truly practical use case.

Furthermore, I haven’t seen any marketing for an Epic Store, Meta Store, or similar “app marketplaces”, but this may be attributed to the still rather… wobbly legal situation surrounding, notably, still having to direct payments to Apple while not using their store for app distribution. I don’t think there has been any follow-up from Apple (or the EU) that retracts these conditions.

So: Have any fellow EU resident ~tech’ies done anything fun or interesting with this new freedom yet?

To those not affected by this regulation, what would you like to “sideload”, or are perhaps already sideloading on Android?

Do any of you think big companies will move their entire palette onto an alternative store anytime soon, e.g. Facebook and sister products? To be honest, I doubt this will happen, otherwise it would’ve long occurred on the Google Play Store as well.

My ideas were:

• I’ve thought about trying to install Minecraft (the full version, probably using Pojav), or a game of similar caliber, on my phone just for fun and to see how well the iPhone GPU really fares against a “real” game, but didn’t find the time yet for looking into it.
• Also personally, I’d love to see a real “root-capable” shell on iOS, but I don’t think that will ever be a thing irrespective of how much sideloading Apple is forced to allow into their OS.

Not quite sure if this is a ~tech question, or a ~sport question, or a ~health question. But at least it's a question!

I have a Garmin watch, and so does my wife. They track our activities. We would like to compete in challenges, but Garmin's challenge options are quite limited. Through Garmin, you can compete for the number of steps, or distances ran or swam and such, but those don't really work very well for us.

I was wondering, are there any apps that work on both iOS and Android, sync with Garmin Connect (either directly or through Apple Health / Google Health Connect), have a sensible privacy policy, and offer some or all of the following types of challenges, which I think would be more interesting:

• Total time exercised (either any exercise type, or specific sports)
• Time spent in "vigorous" exercise
• Time spent in "zone 2" exercise (or another zone)
• Active calories burned (either total, or percentage of your resting calories)
• Number of exercise sessions
• Number of consecutive exercise days, i.e who can maintain the longest streak (allowing rest days)

Does anything like that exist?

I also have a bonus question:

Garmin has Expeditions, which track the distance you have walked or run, and once you reach your Expedition goal (say, "walk the distance of the Appalachian Trail"), it tells you that you have reached your goal and gives you a badge. I like the basic idea, but the implementation is quite bland.

Are there any Expedition type apps where the app not only tracks the number of steps against the total needed, but actually shows on a map where you'd be currently going if you actually were walking the Appalachian Trail or something, and gives you notifications when you reach some interesting points along the way, with pictures and a little bit of information about the place? Now, that would be something!

Hey there,

Title is pretty self-explanatory, looking for some web camera recommendations, USB obviously¹, good price to value, higher quality the better, microphone not required, but appreciated.

¹ Don't need any MDR-26/SDR-26/CameraLink connectors, or Game Boy Camera recommendations here /s

This is my cry for help.

I'm a newer programmer who just got hired for my first actual programming job a few months ago. Before now the only things I really made were simple python scripts that handled database operations at my last job. I live in an area with no opportunities, and so this new job I got is my saving grace at this point. For the first time in my life I can have actual savings and can actually work on moving to an area with opportunities. However...

Everything is falling apart. I have no idea how this place has survived this long. There is no senior dev for me to go to. There are no code reviews. There is no QA. There is a spiderweb of pipelines with zero error handling or data-checking. Bugs are frequent and go undetected. The database has no keys or constraints, and was designed by a madman (so it's definitely not normalized whatsoever). I already have made a bunch of little scripts handling data-parsing tasks that are used in prod, and I've had to learn proper logging and notifications on errors along the way, and have still yet to learn how to do real tests (I ordered a book on pytest that I plan on going through). I am so paranoid that at any moment something I made does something unexpected and destroys things (which... kinda actually happened already).

We're in the long and arduous process of moving away from this terrible system to a newer, better-designed one but I'm already just so lost and... lonely? There's a few separate dev "teams" but one is outsourced and the other is infamously unapproachable and works on a completely different domain. There's no one there to catch me if/when I make mistakes except myself. The paranoia I have over my programs is really getting to me and already affecting my health.

I guess I just want advice on what I should do in this situation. Is this a normal first experience? I care deeply about making sure the things I make are good and functional but I also don't have the experience to forsee potential issues that may come up due to how I'm designing things. And how can I cope with the paranoia I'm feeling?

EDIT: It takes me a while to write responses, but I want everyone to know that I really appreciate all your advice and kind words. It does mean a lot to me! I'm doing my best to take in what everyone has said and am working on making the best of an atypical situation. I'm chronically hard on myself, but I'm gonna try to give myself a bit more grace here. Again, thanks so much for all the thoughtful replies from everyone. :)

I have for the last few years been preoccupied with creating a kind of audio-based social media, a call-in radio-show if you will without any call-screening, and the occasional piece of music to rest the ears after too many words. By now this has resulted in a pretty solid community of dedicated listeners capable of discussing a wide range of topics and so far no heckling or trolling even though we never had a call-screener. Two listeners even met through the show and are now dating <3 <4

The relative success of this radio format has made me ponder how a community comparable to tildes would behave if it had an audio or podcast layer to it. Like a spoken forum/Reddit thread with moderators arranging audio messages from users/listeners into threads that make up rotating topical sections in an ongoing audio transmission. If you could listen to a curated spoken feed of tildes. A community-based audio forum live radio social media hybrid.

Drop some references if you know of any media experiments it might be worth for me to know about while I brainstorm with myself!

One example I know of is the US-based 100% listener-sponsored radio station WFMU. Full weekly schedule, absolutely unrelenting top programming by hosts who have full autonomy to explore their broad musical interests. There is never this modern smarmyness of some podcasts hosts. No ads. Fully listener sponsored. Your attention is taken for granted. Nobody's trying to get you hooked. Your attention is rewarded. They have a written chat-roll during most broadcasts the host will sometimes include into their speak, but not often. It's freeform radio with a digital layer as an add-on. It's fantastic for what it is. https://wfmu.org

Do you know of any experimental/hybrid social media where the users/listeners provide the spoken input in the style of call-in radio? Please drop some references, books, anything that connects to experiences gleaned from this type of experiment. Also interested in your ideas for how to make this work in real life.

It's not supposed to be the best and most streamlined brains-off entertainment ever. Just a stab at a technologically modern and democratic way of enabling discourse and the identification that seems a unique feature of audio-based media. When you can't see the person talking, it's a pseudonymous stranger ... you fill in the blanks with projections, guesses about the person. Always loved this kind of interaction. Which is why I'm here on tildes too!

I've been looking at job postings at tech companies. Many of them have pretty bad Glassdoor reviews
(and I tried pretty hard to play Devil's Advocate while reading!). I think there's no perfect company out there. Still, I notice a lot of mentions of overvaluation, layoffs / diminishing culture, stressed employees / long hours, insurmountable tech debt, junior / inexperienced leadership, "toxic" culture, Hire-to-Fire 15% PIP cultures, etc. I feel differently about a lot of companies I used to aspire to join.

In the midst of all that, I also then see small startups. 10, 20 people. It sounded like way too much work at first, but I know some people who seem pretty fulfilled by such a setup and not (visibly) half as stressed as I was at a ~70 person mismanaged startup (although engineering headcount was pretty small). Some part of me wonders if a small company, even of strangers, would actually be less stress because we wouldn't yet have made the mistakes on culture mismatch, growing headcount, adding features to get growth that may never come, etc.

edit: adding clarification

Oh yes, to be totally clear-- a lot of the Glassdoors / Blinds were actually for large tech companies, including but not limited to "startups" originating from 10 years ago. Some were also smedium sized (~6 years old, ~50 people, typically Series A or earlier) so had been doing the startup thing long enough where you can see the team is starting to fray.

In my post, it's basically a slightly unhealthy comparison between older companies that have had lots of time to screw up, and companies that have not yet publicly or irrevocably screwed up (the small, new startups). Of course, I'm then kind of assuming I won't be the reason something fails when I totally could be lol.

Something I have been thinking about lately is how sexual content online seems to be proliferated and normalized much more than it used to be. I'll give a couple of examples.

While I do not use the big social media sites (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok) very often, I've seen questionable content while others are scrolling, as well as conversations both online and offline with others who do use them. Nearly all of these sites contain profiles of people who are primarily there to market an OnlyFans account or similar. And these profiles are pushed to various demographics, seemingly moreso to males.

Reddit has a very questionable history with this type of content. But outside of that, any subreddit that allows submission of photos of people will often include these models trying to promote themselves, and they frequently make it to the top of the subreddit. (Some reddit users make fun of this in subreddits such as r/UNBGBBIIVCHIDCTIICBG, which stands for "Upvoted Not Because Girl, But Because It Is Very Cool; However, I Do Concede That I Initially Clicked Because Girl").

Twitch is a livestreaming platform that primarily hosts streamers who are playing video games. Streaming other events or "just chatting" has grown in popularity, which I have no complaints about. But there has been a lot of controversy about sexual content on the platform. To address this to some degree, Twitch added a "Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches" category for people who are streaming in that specific context. But OnlyFans models do not stick to that category, and can easily be found in "Just Chatting." And I can personally say that regardless of how many times I select "Not Interested" on these streams, I continue to get suggestions for them.

Even generic chat applications (such as WhatsApp and Discord) are plagued with bot accounts that are either representative of an actual model or part of a scam, but in both cases, try to lure users in with sexual content.

I do want to say I have no issue with adult content when it is in the appropriate venue. Sites dedicated to pornography are completely fine for consenting adults. What I take issue with is how this content has expanded far beyond dedicated sites.

Society has reached a point where we hand off internet-connected devices to children at a very young age. Chromebooks are used in schools very early in education, and smartphones are given to kids early in life. It already seems to be common knowledge that social media use results in self-image issues in youth. These issues will likely be accelerated by social media not only showing a false image of how people live their lives but also the lengths they go to appear sexually appealing.

I'm not proposing some overreaching "save the children" censorship legislation is needed. But it's hard to imagine how this trend can be turned around. It produces a ton of clicks, which is all these user-posted content sites (and advertisers) care about. Is there anything that can be done, or is this just the new internet?

I have, despite my better judgement, gone back on reddit in a limited way after exiting completely for a few months. I decided to anonymize myself as much as possible and was using Redact to cover my history. It overwrites comments with random words plus a short message that the comment has been anonymized and deleted with Redact. It's been working great for quite a few months.

Today I logged on for the first time in a few days and my comments have ALL been restored, right back to when I opened a new account a few months ago after closing my ten year old account. Everything is there again.

Not sure reddit's point in restoring them, other than a stark reminder that comments and personal info mining is the point of reddit, not community engagement, just like all the other social media.

Curious if anyone has any idea on how to permanently delete comment history?

I've been a hiring manager before across a few jobs. But, then, I was receiving maybe 50 resumes to screen a week with my recruiter. Y'all are, what, at a few factors to an order of magnitude more than that?

Are your recruiters now pre-filtering resumes before you see them? What is being used to determine whether a candidate gets an interview now?

What I'm seeing:

• Referrals almost never matter: I've gotten two interviews through my network after dozens of applications—and I'm fairly well networked.
• Experience at other well-known Tech companies doesn't get an interview
• Having the right skill set, based on the job description doesn't get an interview.

From the outside, it seems like a coin flip.

Meanwhile, I have LinkedIn's AI advisor routinely giving me flavors of "yes, you're definitely their kind of candidate" yet no responses after weeks followed by the occasional casual rejection email.

So what's happening behind the scenes? How do resumes get on your radar? How do you work from the deluge to hiring a human?

Sincerely,
A very experienced engineer and manager who is rather fed up with what seems like a collection of pseudo-random number generator contemporary hiring processes.

EDIT: I should have also included recruiters in the title of my ask.

It's nice having english language forums that don't require a vpn to access. Anyone got any other suggestions and any recommendations for vpns that work on mobile data reliably? I've found PIA, Nord, and Proton to not work but Surfshark does for now if intermittently (more reliably on wifi).

I really like this instructional video. I even downloaded a copy. The copy I downloaded is as blurry as the copy on YouTube.

Is it possible to possible to sharpen my copy of that video?

If it is possible, can it be done with freely available software on Linux?

Thanks either way.

In the recent months I started getting dissatisfied with Google the company in general, but also with its search engine due to privacy reasons, and SEO bloat affecting certain searches. A few weeks ago I switched to Duckduckgo from Google. Some searches are fine but there are three main issues I've been experiencing with Duckduckgo since the switch.

• The search "fails" and shows me results that are tangentially related to the query. Happens quite often and for various topics.
• It shows me a semi-related search results instead of the one I searched for, because it says there are not enough results for my query. Then I have to click again on the small text to search for the actual query.
• The automatic prompts that complete your query are scarce and unsatisfactory.

Because of this I've been switching back and forth between Google and Duckduckgo lately. I don't want to use Google, but Duckduckgo is definitely the worse option in general in my experience. It's better in some searches and shows useful results instead of big site bloat, but my overall experience was one of getting heavily downgraded.

This led me to a criticism about the discussions around this topic. People talk a lot about SEO bloat affecting search results, and it's definitely a real issue. It's especially a problem for some political searches, as it results in you getting propaganda results. However, recommending people Duckduckgo without mentioning its significantly worse search quality seems misleading.

I am of course not against using or recommending Duckduckgo. In fact, I wish them greater success in market share and development, as I think their policies are much better. But I think mentioning Duckduckgo's downsides is important to adequately inform people. I expected a noticeable downgrade, but I didn't expect it to be this worse because nobody mentioned it. As a result, I felt misled, and I definitely didn't know what I was getting into. Being adequately informed would have prevented that, as I would adjust my expectations.

So, this seems to be largely unaddressed in discussions around this topic, and I suspect the echo chamber effect around anti-Google discourse and privacy issues might be to blame.

What are your thoughts? Has anyone experienced something similar?

I am going to be living in France for the next year. I want to keep my US mobile phone number, and I would like it to be somewhat usable while I am out of the country, but I can't find an affordable way do set this up. I am hoping someone here has some more insight for me.

I am going to be buying a French mobile phone plan (most likely through Orange) that will cover my data usage, along with a local number for calls and texts. I already have either whatsapp or imessage set up for calls and texts to/from my family in the US. Ideally, I would like to have my US number on a second sim on my phone. I wouldn't need any roaming data for that sim, just calls and texts, and my actual usage will be very small.

Here are the solutions I have explored:

1. Porting my number to Google Voice. This is probably the best solution, but I would like to avoid google if at all possible. This costs only $20 with no monthly fees. This would require me to use a separate app for this number. If possible, I would like to be able to use the iPhone system apps for calls and texts.

2. Some MVNO with international roaming. So far the best I have seen is Ting mobile. It costs $0.30 per minute calls and $0.12 per outgoing text. This pricing would be perfect for my extremely low usage. However it requires a $10/month pay as you go plan which is more than I want to pay.

3. IoT sims (although I am almost positive this won't work). These appear to be sms and data only, so for my usage they would be sms only. Telnyx is the service I found that actually supports esim (my phone has only esim). I am having trouble with the console, but I am trying to get an esim on my iphone. If this can work, it would be only $2/month plus usage, which would be perfect.

Are there any other possible solutions that I should look into?

Sorry in advance if this is kind of a ramble. Thanks for any thoughts you may have.

This post asking about specific hardware made me realize that I have lost touch with major architectural changes in PC hardware. Back in college (over 20 years ago), I was constantly upgrading and rebuilding computers, talking about them, reading about them. But that's probably par for the course in a EE program. I'm sure there must have been other online resources, but Slashdot is the thing that sticks out in my memory of that time.

Then in grad school, my last set of desktops from college carried me through the first few years, and I had a series of laptops provided by school.

Since then, I've always just bought laptops because they've gotten good enough to do everything I want, and with kids, it's much more flexible to be able to work anywhere in and out of the house. My latest (now several years old) has a high end I7 cpu, an NVIDIA GPU, two solid state drives (1.5TB total). It weighs just a few pounds and does everything I want, including things like Solidworks, zbrush, and older PC games.

Since I can remember a time when I was excited about 90mhz processors and feeling like I was getting a screaming deal to pay $500 for a 500mb hd, sometimes it just feels surreal for this to be so normal.

So, am I out of the loop? Or is this reflective of a more general shift? What do you read / where do you post to discuss hardware, hardware compatibility, etc. Are you still building desktops? Laptops? Cyberdecks? What are your thoughts on cost/value trade off of dell, etc. vs rolling your own?

I'm working on an AI chat portal for teams, think Perplexity but trained on a company's knowledgebase (prosgpt dot com for the curious) and i wanted to talk to some people who are successfully using LLMs in their teams or jobs to improve productivity

Are you using free or paid LLMs? Which ones?

What kind of tasks do you get an LLM to do for you?

What is the workflow for accomplishing those tasks?

Cheers,
nmn

I am planning to go back to a desktop after using laptops for years.

I already have an 1080p IPS monitor. I want just the tower.

There is the new Zen 5 coming out soon.

I was thinking about buying a Ryzen 7600 and maybe buy a GPU in the future if I want to play heavier games. The Ryzen 7600 has integrated graphics for basic things.

My main use now is just some casual gaming (Afterimage, Hollow Knight, Fallout 4), movies, browsing the web and compiling some software (Gentoo Linux).

I use exclusively Linux and I want to keep using AMD.

Should I wait the Zen 5 to come out and see if the 7600 price drops or this probably won't happen?

As the title says, looking for recommendations of fun and interesting websites that don't involve current events/news. Sites where you can spend hours diving down rabbit holes, browsing fun and interesting content, or just otherwise detach from reality for a bit.

This isn't a request for just myself, but just in general. I feel like all the biggest websites just have a bit too much influence from current events and news, which can make browsing pretty stressful. And given how centralized the internet has become, finding sites outside those has become a bit trickier. It'd be fun to see some more focused sites for various topics and niches. Can be an educational site with cool articles, could be entertainment, could be a forum or a blog. Just, what sites could you spend hours on?

I know it isn't a good habit. I like to watch movies, "T.V. shows" on my computer. It was never a problem with older style monitors.

However with newer style monitors ( like I have ) and T.V. screens you either have to be far away from the monitor or be sitting up straight for the images not to fade. Worse, you can't see anything with night scenes.

Anything I can do about it aside from buying a hug TV and sitting on a couch at the other end of the room?

Update: I got the monitor /user/ButteredToast recommended. It works noticeably better than my old monitor and the price was very reasonable

My wife is thinking about signing up for the Master Workshopper program from AJ & Smart. It’s a relatively big financially decision so I thought I would pass along some of her initial thoughts and questions here in the hopes anyone had some experience with this program either personally or just anecdotally.

Hey everyone,

I'm thinking about signing up for the Master Workshopper program from AJ & Smart and would love to hear from anyone who's already gone through it. If you've done it, I'd really appreciate your thoughts!

Here’s what I’m curious about:

1	Quality of Content: Is the material solid and up-to-date?

2	Instructors: How are the instructors? Do they make the content engaging and clear?

3	Practical Application: Were you able to use what you learned right away in your work?

4	Community and Networking: How’s the community aspect? Did you make any good connections?

5	Value for Money: Do you think it was worth the investment? Why or why not?

6	Career Impact: Has it made a difference in your career or skills?

Any other thoughts or experiences you can share would be awesome too!

Thanks a lot for your help!

as the title indicates, I am in search of a reliable privacy-conscious notes app, I have tried the following which have the indicated bugs that I frequently experience and make the notes app feel unreliable or just too inconvenient:

1. NextCloud Notes:

• https://github.com/nextcloud/notes/issues/1187
• bug is that sometimes I have to rename a note 2-3 times in the browser for it to take
• bug where the pop-up menu doesn't go away after favoriting a note
• and the nextcloud android app has its own slew of issues

2. StandardNotes app: I remember the app being really buggy on Firefox to the point where I had to regularly use Brave just for that app.

Hi everyone,

Have a quick question if you have the time. I want to buy some of the new Android Find My Device trackers, have wanted to ever since destroying my Tiles when they were bought by that scummy data-retailer.

My question is: if I buy, for example, a Pebblebee device, does Pebblebee get my location data? Google already has that; that's the deal with the devil you have to decide whether or not you want to take. But I don't want to give this information to another third party.

I've done some Googling on this but of course search is useless these days. I tried to read Pebblebee's privacy policy but gave up pretty quickly:

➜  ~ cat pebblebee | wc -w
17391

Does anyone have an authoritative answer on this? Would love to know.

TIA and thanks for your time!

ETA: I have seen where Pebblebee claims they don't sell user data; I'm not even questioning that with this post (although I do question every company's trustworthiness). This is more a question about the architecture of the Find My Device network itself.

Edit 2: I'm already carrying around a personal spy that reports everything I do to Google, I don't think it matters whether they can get my location from the trackers lol. I just wondered if I was exposing that to Pebblebee (just as an example) as well.

Hey everyone,

I'm currently getting close to releasing a piece of software and I think that engaging users and collecting their feedback to inform the development of future features is valuable. So, I am currently evaluating different specialized solutions to see which one is best.

Does anybody have a preference for a particular tool, or otherwise know which tools are the best in terms of functionality etc.?

Thanks in advance for your input!

I'll go back to comparing options and I'll check back in here later on. Have a nice one.

Edit: To clarify, I am looking for an end user-facing tool for a (currently closed-source) SaaS (I may eventually open-source it, but I'm a bit on the fence-I would have to weigh the pros and cons).

Currently, I'm using the Aero launcher, and I really like having all the names of my apps listed out, but if I could have something with a to do list and then swipe for apps, it would be kind of neat.

Other wish list functions:

• Folders for Apps.
• Able to add PWA or a URL to a list of apps.
• Start a search from searching through all apps.
• Corner widgets/shortcuts
• A pony!

Willing to poke around if there is an open source project I can add stuff too.

Has anyone out there hooked HomeAssistant up to a local LLM? I'm very tempted:

• Alexa integrations fail often. HomeAssistant integrations tend to be rock solid.
• Alexa is rule/pattern matching based. LLMs can understand natural language fairly well. The "magical incantations" required by Alexa are awkward.

Other than the software, the device side seems challenging. There are $50 fully-baked POP devices. I'm less sure on the DIY front.

Also, I desperately want my house to speak to me in the voice of the NCC-1701D computer. I've read enough now to know this should be achievable with a modicum of effort via OSS voice cloning tools or training a new model (same difference except "voice cloning" seems to often refer to doing this without training a whole new model?).

Thoughts? Experiences?

I've seen several pages that have led me to conclude this is tenable:

https://github.com/myshell-ai/OpenVoice

https://github.com/domesticatedviking/TextyMcSpeechy

https://github.com/mezbaul-h/june

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_local_assistant/

https://heywillow.io/hardware/#esp32-s3-box-lite

Second edit: It has been pointed out that my collaborators don't necessarily need to upload my files in order to work on them, and that the bigger the project/organisation, the more likely they are using their own system for managing content rather than the Adobe Creative Cloud. I didn't realise that not using the CC is an option. In conclusion, I can still collaborate with Adobe's customers as long as I ask them to never upload my work to the Adobe CC.

Edit: After sleeping on this, here's my biggest gripe with terms like these.

Regardless of the contents of Adobe's TOS, I cannot be forced to accept them as long as I'm not their customer. Similarly, people who don't use an imaginary social media app called "Twitter" can't be subjected to Twitter's terms of service even if for some reason Twitter had access to these people's data. If Twitter wants to make an agreement with non-customers, they must get these people's explicit consent. Writing stuff in their TOS doesn't cut it because those are directed at customers. Corporations absolutely can't have the right to make me a customer without my informed consent.

As it stands, given Adobe's market share, I would either have to accept their terms when it comes to my work that gets uploaded by third parties, or I can never get my work published again. This is completely unacceptable. Even if the terms were the most gracious and reasonable terms anyone has ever seen (which they aren't), I would still have the right to refuse them. This right cannot be taken away from me. Adobe has done nothing to show how they intend to separate non-customer content from customer content, which most likely means they have no plans to do so and certainly aren't doing it at the moment.

Organisations that are Adobe customers and want to publish/edit content produced by non-customers will have an insurmountably tough task trying to draft a solid contract with these people. In order to protect themselves from future disputes, they will have to get explicit consent for everything that I quoted in this post, for all imaginable and unimaginable purposes. The rest of the TOS (the parts that I didn't quote) is legally too fuzzy to be put in a contract, and as far as I know, the term "generative AI" doesn't even have a legal definition yet. Essentially, Adobe is making their own customers do their dirty work for them. Good luck with that.

Original post:
Adobe receives an unrestricted license to use all uploaded content however they please, according to their TOS.

Let's say I am a professional photographer, but I don't use Adobe software to edit my work because I don't want to grant Adobe a license to do whatever they want with it. Now, let's say that High End Art Magazine wants to publish some of my photos in their Hot New Photo Artists section. Most likely they are using Adobe software. To create the magazine layout, they are going to have to upload my photos. I haven't used Adobe since they put everything in the cloud, so I wouldn't know how the process actually works, but I doubt that Adobe asks about the ownership of each uploaded file. Do they? The magazine editor does not have the right to grant Adobe any sort of license to my work. It's not their content, they are merely presenting it. The end result: Adobe has content on their servers that they do not have a license to use however they wish, no matter what they put in their TOS, and they most likely have no way to tell this content apart from the rest.

The above example is simplified. I am actually not a photographer, but an artist in another field. Publishing my work involves images that are put together by a team of people, each of whom must be able to deny using the resulting photo without their explicit consent. How can cases like these be handled? If I care about how and where my and my team's work is used, will I have to stop collaborating with anyone who uses Adobe products? Even that won't necessarily protect us. Uninformed people can still grab an image form somewhere and use it for a school project or something. This used to be okay as long as you didn't publish the result, let alone try to profit from it financially. But now, if you use Adobe software to edit your project, ethically you can only use unlicensed content as your source material and everything else is off limits.

From the Adobe TOS:

...you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to do the following with your Cloud Content:

reproduce
distribute 

create derivative works 

publicly display 

publicly perform and
sublicense the foregoing rights to third parties acting on our behalf

And:

“Content” means any text, information, communication, or material, such as audio files, video files, electronic documents, or images, that you upload, import into, embed for use by, or create using the Services and Software.

To be clear, I get that the TOS is meant to enable Adobe to run their services in the cloud. At least for now. But there are no guarantees that this will remain the sole purpose of that license. I prefer to simply not grant them any sort of license to use my work. Obviously, I must have a right to deny corporations such a license for whatever reason, at all times.

For comparison, when I started using Reddit, I read through their TOS and decided that it looked predatory. I have always refrained from posting things that I wouldn't want them to use for extracting financial gain. I was happy about that decision last year.

Does anyone know if the Adobe TOS are different for organisations that routinely handle large amounts of content that they do not own the rights to?

I'm thinking something I could use for news, with a feed that I curate myself. I'd open the app in the morning and see that I have a feed with five newstoks in it. I swipe to the first one, general updates from my local news, swipe for the weather, swipe for sports, etc. They'd all be short-form, and take the same amount of time it would take me to skim a newspaper. Once I get through each "card," my feed is done and I can put the app down and go about my day.

I could curate this feed to contain only the sources I want, and ideally content would not be user-generated, and instead more akin to traditional television with regularly scheduled programs. Then I can check at breakfast and see all the early news programs, check at lunch and see mid-day content, and ditto for the evening.

I'm not going to ruminate about social media, content, and news, but this would be a very refreshing change of pace instead of constantly being protective of my time, since everything is designed to suck away as much of it as possible.

A guy can dream, right?

I'm trying to get away from the lifestyle of taking a shit ton of photos and then laboriously organizing them at a later date. I could totally take a photo, switch to the gallery app, select that photo, and then move it to the right folder, but as many tilders can probably relate, that is not conducive to the ADHD lifestyle. I need something at the point of contact.

I'm not sure if this would be better for ~music, ~tech, or what, but after messing around with Udio for a bit, I made some stuff I liked and wanted to get folks' thoughts. Imo, it's incredible to be able to get music from a text prompt - it means I, as someone who is mostly ignorant to music production, can have my musical idea and actually render that out as music for someone to hear. I can think "damn that would be cool" and then in kind of a fuzzy way, make it happen then and there. Whether it's good, I don't know. That's not up to me, really, but it is the kind of sound I wanted to happen, so I'm left conflicted on how to feel about it. Figured it would be worthwhile to show folks some of it, and see what they think.

I do enjoy synth and metal, so there's a lot of that in these. Feel free to be as critical as you like. If I can apply your criticism I will try to do it, and if you want to see how that works out, I'll share.

1. Cosmoterrestrial
2. A Floyd, Pinkly
3. Empire's Demise, Foretold
4. Metal for Ghosts Bedsheet Edition (the very end of this one is hilariously appropriate)
5. Multi-3DS Drifting

And here's a link to my profile, if you would like to browse. It will update too when I put more up.

They're all instrumental. Lyrical music is less appealing to me in general and Udio's voices do sound kinda weird to me more often than not. The way I made the tracks, I would start with a clip combining some genres/moods, and then add to either end of the clip until I had a complete song. Along the way, I could introduce new elements/transitions by using more text/tweaking various settings and flipping "manual mode" on and off. The results were fuzzy; I didn't always get what I wanted, but I could keep trying until I did, or until I got something that sounded "better". I wrote all the titles after the song was finished. The album art is from a text prompt.

I'm not sure what I think, to be honest. On the one hand, a lot of the creative decision-making wasn't mine. On the other, the song would not be what it is without me making decisions about how it came about and what feelings/moods/genres were focused upon/utilized. I think the best I can say is "use the tool and see whether it's enough to count". To me it feels almost 50/50, like I've "collaborated with my computer" rather than "made music". Does it matter? If the sound is the intended sound, the sound I hoped to make and wanted to share, is that enough to say it is "my music"? Is this perhaps just what it looks like to be a beginner in a different paradigm?

When I used Suno, I had a much more rigid opinion. What it produced, I called "computer spit". Because, all I could actually control was telling it to continue, changing the prompt, and giving it structure/genre tags that felt like a coin flip in terms of effectiveness. I had a really hard time trying to get it to keep/recall melody, and my attempts to guide it along felt more like gambling than deliberate decisions. It also couldn't keep enough in context to make the overall song consistent with respect to instrumentation. It's different with Udio, both because you have a lot of additional tools, and because it feels like those tools work more consistently at making the model do what you want. I still call the results "computer spit" where I've shown them off, but I'm unsure now whether the production has enough of myself in it to be something more. Perhaps not on the same level as something someone produced by playing an instrument, or choosing samples/arranging things in software, but also not quite the same as the computer just rolling along, with me going "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". Maybe these distinctions don't actually matter, but I'd be curious if anyone has thoughts along these lines.

I'm intentionally trying to avoid a discussion about the morality of the thing or what political/social ramifications it has, not because I don't care about that but because I'm in the middle of trying to understand the tool and what its results mean. Would you consider what I've posted here work I could claim as my own, or do you think the computer has enough of a role to say it's not? Is my role in the production large enough? Or perhaps you have a stronger position, that nothing the computer can possibly do in this way counts as original music. Does any of this change that position for you? I ask because I've gone through a lot of opinions myself as I've been following things, and one interesting bit is that I have not gotten any copyright notices when I've uploaded the music to Youtube (I did get notices with Suno's music). As far as I can tell, with what is available to me, this is all original.

And of course, the most important one: Did you like it? Is there something you think would make them better? Do they all suffer from something I'm not seeing/hearing? I'm not an expert technician nor a music producer, so perhaps my ignorant ears are leading me astray. Either way, I've had a ton of fun doing this, and the results to my ear are fun to listen to while I'm doing stuff. I wouldn't call any of it the best music I've ever heard, but I can also think of a lot that is worse. I think what I wonder the most is whether it comes off bland/plain. Most of the folks I show things to are a bit too caught up in being astounded/disturbed to really give me much feedback, so perhaps putting the request in this form will work out a bit better - ya'll have time to think on it.

As always, your time and attention is greatly appreciated

Edit: I should clarify. I am not attempting to be a musician. Hence calling it "computer spit" with anything public, and the lack of any effort to pitch it as something I did only on my own. Rather, I recognize the limit of my own understanding, and felt I'd hit a point where my ignorance of production meant I could not judge the results as well as I'd like. That means it's time to engage some folks because folks out there are likely to know what I do not and see things I can't. From that angle, a lot of the discussion is very interesting, and I'll be responding to those in a bit. But there's no need to argue for doing the work - I recognize that. I'm trying to see past my own horizons with a medium I don't put the work into. I'm a consumer of music, not a creator, so getting some perspective from folks more acquainted with creating and with the technology is really what I'm after in sharing the experience.

Edit again: Thank you all for a very interesting discussion. I had a spare evening/morning and this was a good use of it. For the sake of tying a bow on the whole thing, I'll share my takeaways as succinctly as I can manage.

It seems, at present, and at best, the role these tools can play is of a sort of personal noise generator. The output is not of sufficient interest, quality, complexity, etc., to really be regarded the same as human-produced music, is the overall impression I have been left with. And for other reasons, it may be that the fuzziness of it all is a permanent feature, and thus a permanent constraint on how far toward "authentic" the results can ever get. I was trying to avoid a discussion about my own creativity, the value of doing work, societal ramifications, etc., so I'll work on how to present things better. For what it's worth, this has all been part of what I do creatively - my area of study was philosophy, and the goal of that to my mind has always been "achieving clarity". So I am attempting to achieve clarity with things as they develop, as a hobby sort of interest while I'm busy doing completely different stuff and to better protect my own mind against dumb marketing and hype. So once again, I appreciate you all taking the time, and I wish you all well in all the things you do.

I like to write notes for work and sketch/draw in my spare time. I'm about to finish another paper notebook, and I noticed a few ads for the ReMarkable & decided to check it out. A few YouTube videos later, I'm now quite interested in getting an e-ink tablet to replace the notebooks I've been going through.

Thing is, with this type of technology I'm always a bit worried that I won't use it enough to justify the price. If anyone has one of those - have they managed to replace the classic paper/pen combo for you? Do you regret your purchase or are you happy with it?

If anyone is curious, I was specifically looking at the ReMarkable 2 and the Supernote Nomad. The ReMarkable seems to be the most popular choice, but I really like how the Supernote emphasizes repairability (notably, the battery is replaceable). I'm also very much open to other suggestions if you have any!

Are there any other people on Tildes who regularly use VR?

• What has the experience been like for you?
• Which headset do you own?
• What do you use it for?
• Do you use it regularly?
• Any favorite/recommended games/apps?

Hi people,

I have the chance to pick up an unused BenQ W1110 (BenQ HT2050 in the U.S). I don't have any interest in 4k nor 3d, I only need it for 1080p blu ray. It's listed at 200 EUR. Do you think it's a fair price for what I need? Bulb life is only 2,500 hours, but replacements are 100 EUR or so, so not so steep. Anyone out there recommend I hold off? Know of other options? I'd be happy to spend around 600-700 EUR for the right unit. The only primary considerations are that it can produce 1080p, and is quiet (important).

Hiya folks,

I work remotely, and I've got a little deck with a table and umbrella that I like to work at for most of the summer. The trouble is, my umbrella can never be fully angled to shade me from the sun.

I find my laptop screen (13") to be woeful for working on outside. Not only is it tiny and promotes bad posture, it also doesn't have amazing brightness. Lots of squinting and hunching, depending on the sun!

Every monitor in my house it turns out is 350 nits, except my laptop screen, which is 500 nits.

Does anyone have practical experience lugging a monitor outside and working on it during the sunny day? If so, what brightness gets you over the usability threshold?

It seems like I could get a 1000 nit monitor relatively easily. Anything above 1000 the market seems to narrow quite quickly.

I'm finding it more and more frustrating having to parse the things I'm actually looking for from what feels like a deluge of rubbish. Are there any strategies, extensions, add-ons, etc that people are using to filter results?

Just had a chat with friends about the possibility and how it would likely be introduced.

Paraphrased into the following;

2.99$/Month
OEM installs have a 2 year license
Upgrades are free for the first year (from 11 to the new)
Comes with Office 365 and AI functionality to soften the blow

What are your thoughts on this?

I'm very sorry, but this is going to be rant. One that may seem to come up almost daily, but I still feel the need to vent.

Every day I feel like I'm jumping through hoops to keep a little bit of privacy and autonomy, without ever winning. DuckDuckGo is my search engine, use a paid mail provider, I try to stay away from anything Google and Meta, use only Signal, ad blocking everywhere, hosting most services locally, etc. It seems, however, to make no difference in the long run. The user-profile-building just seems to enter the home faster than I can mitigate it. Kids install some new app or new hardware ends up listening in, privacy infringement is there.

The reason I'm starting this post now is because I switched ISP and TV provider recently, but it has been on my mind for a long time. Finding one that isn't owned by one of huge 3 parent companies, is almost impossible here. After a year of deciding, I finally figured it was time to throw in the towel and just pick the least bad option. Yesterday was the day of switching and it has been such a frustrating process.

The provided router doesn't allow me to turn off its WLAN. I live in a city, so the airwaves are already crowded enough as it is. No need to keep that antenna on, but screw me, that's not possible. Opened up the device to just remove the card, but everything is soldered on the board and disconnecting the antennas didn't do shit.
It's possible to buy a modem/router myself, but it'll need to follow their requirements and will set me back $200. It would be okay if the rest of the service was great, but here comes the TV part!

The device they use for TV is apparently Android TV. I assumed it would be IPTV with this subscription, but Android TV isn't that. Booting the device makes it immediately clear they are here to harvest data. It makes me so unhappy that a service I'm paying for, is also making money on the side by collecting data. To get a quick idea of what's being done, I routed the box through wireshark to sniff DNS traffic. It's riddled with domains used for data collection and ads. That combined with the features this box wants me to agree to (location, using the mic, access local network, sign into PlayStore, make a profile including real life information) does not make me trust this device. So I've decided to not play and will be sending it back.

People around me are pretty conscious about what they do online, but compared to them I'm highly paranoid. Wherever I look, there are privacy issues. It seems impossible to escape from. How are other people dealing with this?

UPDATE: I don't know if anybody is really interested, but I thought I would update anyway. I decided to listen to my gut and I cancelled the subscription. It feels like the best decision I've made in a long time. It's nice to feel like I'm still a little bit in charge, even though I know that's also just a false sense of autonomy. Suck it, Google! You're not the boss of me :-)

I guess I'll post another thoughtful analysis rant on tech trends. It has been mentioned here in a few threads already but I simply wanted to try to start a focused discussion.

Personally I first noticed significant degradation of search functionality around 2018 or so, while specifically Google was mentioned at least as far back as 2016. But it is not simply Google or even just general search engines. Any random site specific search functionality or discoverability algorithms on various sites share these trends too.

It really seems that the focus is simply on delivering as many results as possible with actual quality or even relevance being somewhere on the tail end of priorities. It is not even just lack of(useful, consistent) search operators, lack of transparency, lack of structured search possibilities, lack of sorting options, lack of granularity - it is the simple disregard for the basic intent of the query with some implementations sometimes being actually more accurate with fewer keywords with no option to modify this behavior.

It is especially damaging for(at least my) ability to research a topic. A decade and half ago I could go in with a topic I had no idea about and emerge two hours later with a very basic but likely mostly accurate and slightly in-depth overview by refining my searches. Now I'm lucky to get one single thoughtful blog post or discussion among dozens or tutorials, 10-bests and ads with the query being almost completely disregarded and keywords being straight up ignored to deliver this deluge of both low quality and mostly completely irrelevant results.

Are there any projects, search engines or anything other that aim to deliver actually useful, steerable, user directed results?

Is anyone here using https://nebula.tv? Multiple creators I watch are on there, and I'm considering getting a subscription, but I'm just not sure if it's really worth it. Most channels on there don't seem to upload any exclusive content, so I'll basically just get the same videos but for $5/month instead of for free. I've also heard that the app and UX isn't that great.

People who use the service, what makes it worth it for you? Is it just a way to support the creators more?

Hello, every now and then I find myself looking for open-source "self-hosted" (VPS accepted) Google photos alternatives.

I have searched every now and then but I have never found something I felt that suits my needs.

I don't mind setting it up myself with command lines and stuff from an empty VPS as long as the monthly fees are pushed to a minimum.

I do have a certain set of constraints and I was wondering what would be the best app to do it. Any app that I end up trying fail one of these somehow. Or it is an app that I couldn't test adequately on my 2GB RAM VPS. Should I be upgrading first and then testing them?

Here are my constraints:

I would like to be able to share photos privately to friends and family. Like maybe a secret link to share photos or albums with friends.

I would like to be able to view photos on mobile, using Internet. I don't mind opening a mobile web app but I would like to be able to show it.

I would like to have some privacy-respecting face recognition. This also opens up the question of what RAM of VPS I should be using.

I would like to leave the file and folder structure untouched. I have already somehow arranged the files into albums by using folders so bonus points if the app figures that out. However, I would bite the bullet if there is a good solution that asks to "copy" the files into a new folder thereby doubling the storage needed. But I hope to avoid it.

Any help towards the right direction would be appreciated!

Fellow PC builders, here's a fun one for you.

I took some "old" and no-longer-used PC parts and built my sister-in-law a gaming PC for her and her stepdaughter to use. It was a Christmas gift so the stepdaughter could play the Sims.

She has called me three times to tell me it's completely frozen - like hard locked, dead freeze, screen is displaying the last frame it was on but you can't interact with the PC in any way until you reset it with the power button.

She let it sit for an hour before she gave up. Two times this happened while stepdaughter was playing the Sims 4 and once it happened while my brother-in-law was watching YouTube videos.

Obviously, I went through the usual things you'd think in this situation and I had her bring the PC over so I could do some digging. Fully expecting to find a hardware issue, I tried the following:

1. I ran the Sims while also watching multiple YouTube videos in the background. Couldn't replicate the issue after about two hours.

2. I obviously checked the temperatures while gaming and YouTubing, checked the usual performance metrics and everything was great.

3. Ran OTTC stress tests - all of them. Under heavy loads, this thing was doing fine. Even at 100% utilization, the memory, graphics card, and cpu were fine. Did a power test too, fine. Did a "combined" stress test and all was fine.

4. Ran mem86, no issues with the memory, no bad sectors or errors.

5. Played Skyrim on ultra for several hours. This was a really fun way to troubleshoot.

6. Checked the event log from the day she had freezes. I can see where the event happened because leading up to the unexpected "power off" event, there were a ton of events related to various processes timing out. Seems like it was unable to connect with services and run certain background processes while it was frozen? I didn't see anything that really stood out to me as being a possible cause except...

7. in the event viewer, there were a few events related to Microsoft family safety. I set this up at the request of SIL so stepdaughter wouldn't get into anything she shouldn't. In the Event Viewer, it seems like maybe it wasn't verifying something correctly or didn't have permissions it needed? Upon Googling, I found some other folks with this error but I couldn't find anything about whether it caused freezing or not. Seems like one of the many events that just gives a warning but doesn't have any effect. One guy who had this issue had his computer freeze but disabling the family safety entirely did nothing. People in the comments thought it probably wasn't related. I also found another event that Google wasn't very helpful with. Might have been related to sound card but my sound card drivers are up to date and again, I have not been able to replicate the issue even when gaming and watching videos, so I don't know if it's related.

8. I ran the Windows System Files Checker and found no issues related to my Windows install.

I can't figure out why this would be happening only at her house. She says it froze after one hour of use every time. This brings me to the title of this post. My SIL moved into a really old house with sketchy wiring. My FIL told her the wiring is so bad that she needs to get it fixed immediately or risk a fire, so she's working on that. This house has a butler stairway, asbestos, and plaster/lathe walls if that tells you what we're dealing with here. This is the ONLY thing I can think of that would possibly be different between the two setups and maybe explain the freezing, but it just seems so unlikely to me that this is the cause.

Help?

There are a lot of awesome open source projects that I'd love to donate to, however, I can't afford to donate to all of them.

It would be great if there was something like a charity fund (eg. GiveWell), but for FOSS. So a lot of people donate to it, and it distributes all collected money between some curated projects (most influential/important/promising/underfunded/etc.).

Do you know if something like this already exists? if not, could it potentially be a good idea to do? It seems like the idea of donating to open-source is currently more prominent in the community due to the xz backdoor thing.

I have a guitar multi effects that has a headphone out with 47Ω

I want a budget somewhat neutral headphone to use with it and I am getting confused with the answers I found so far.

The AKG K240 mk2 (55Ω) seems to be a popular choice with people who own another multi effects (HX Stomp) with a different impedance (I think it's 12Ω).

This headphone is within my budget, but it seems too close to the 47 output of my multifx.

Will I have a problem with this?

I read somewhere that the headphone impedance should be much bigger than the output impedance, but another text I read somewhere explained that they should match closely.

I'm really confused about this.

I'm taking some time to set up a mastodon account, and am currently confused about how following other federated accounts is supposed to work.

Let's use https://lemmy.world/c/comicstrips as an example. I go to that link and I see posts from other federated sites, as well as posts made directly on lemmy.world (I presume). I can also view all posts from that community in r.nf as well (https://r.nf/c/comicstrips@lemmy.world). I see all the same posts from the lemmy link.

What I don't understand is why, when I follow @comicstrips@lemmy.world on mastodon I only ever am shown replies and boosts from the account. I don't see the original image post, which I was expecting.

What am I missing? For what it's worth I'm using Phanpy to interact with mastodon, but am experiencing the same behavior on mastodon.social as well.

I have managed to install and configure something called NextDNS on both of my devices and most browsers, even though the documentation seems to be made with more tech-savvy people in mind. So far so good. I turned on all the available blocklists, but a lot of strange looking (to me) traffic is still getting through. I'm assuming some of it is benign, but how do I evaluate which addresses I should block or not? I'll list some examples below.

init.ess.apple.com
init-p01md.apple.com
bag.itunes.apple.com
gsp-ssl.ls.apple.com
gspe35-ssl.ls.apple.com
pki-goog.l.google.com
For these, the service offers the following information: 'Provides advertising or advertising-related services such as data collection, behavioral analysis or retargeting.' Sounds like something I wouldn't want to enable. When it comes to the iTunes one, I don't use iTunes and don't even have it installed (don't ask how I managed to get rid of it - it took several days worth of trial and error..). One of these, pki-goog.l.google.com is listed as 'dangerously prevalent (tracks 21.23% of web traffic)'.

Then again, the same general description is sometimes given to addresses that seem legit, such as:
time.apple.com
weather-data.apple.com

Some are indecipherable to me and don't come with any sort of description:
fp2e7a.wpc.phicdn.net
init.ess.g.aaplimg.com
get-bx.g.aaplimg.com
ocsp2.g.aaplimg.com
ocsp.pki.goog

Some descriptions are kind of vague:
a2047.dscapi9.akamai.net
apis.apple.map.fastly.net
'Content delivery network that delivers resources for different site utilities and usually for many different customers.'

Some seem to be doing tasks that are definitely wanted:
ocsp.digicert.com
'Digicert Trust Seal - Includes tag managers, privacy notices, and technologies that are critical to the functionality of a website.'

Then there's an Amazon Web Service, go-updater-1830831421.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com, listed as very prevalent (tracks 5.5% of web traffic) that has been contacting my phone even though I haven't done any shopping or product related searches. What is this and should I block it?

And so on and so on. Is there any logic to these that I can follow? I tried google searching some to no avail.

This is a question I eventually ask about every social media site I use(d). I like Tildes, and the discussions here are much more constructive than any other place I've seen, however I've seen it to be true even here. When one doesn't curate their feed, and use the default home page, the negative topics seems to dominate. I'm talking about the topics that talk about problems and what's wrong with something, often with titles implying the awfulness or emergency of such a problem. I think I don't need to elaborate on how this is much more prevalent and extreme on other sites. But nevertheless, it's a recurring pattern even here.

I know the argument that goes that humans are problem-fixing machines, and that there are psychological incentives to focus on problems. However, this seems overly reductive and lacking in explanatory power to me. Outside of internet, this is not a phenomenon I've experienced with people, unless they were mentally going through something very rough. Otherwise, people generally seem to talk about neutral or positive issues. And even while talking about negative issues, the tone often isn't grim, and doesn't leave a depressive aftertaste.

Even on the internet, in smaller spaces and more closed spaces, like chatting servers, this doesn't seem to hold true. Sure, there are politically-oriented, and therefore problem-oriented spaces even there, but most spaces don't seem to be that way. Back when I used Facebook too, while the posts were vain, most of my friends and acquaintances were just interested in sharing and commenting on social lives.

So I think this is a problem that is more endemic to "open" social media sites, with easily accessible and open-to-public spaces, rather than applying to the whole humanity or even every internet space. Its one of my biggest head scratchers about social media sites. So far I couldn't find a satisfactory explanation in the literature either. Doesn't mean there isn't, but I haven't stumbled upon such.

So, I'm interested in your opinions: Why do negative topics dominate on open social media sites, even here, unless curated against? Why is this such a strong recurring pattern for sites structured like this, while it's not in other online and physical spaces and interections I mentioned?

Added the qualifier to the title as web3 understandably earns a lot of eyerolls haha. At the same time, a lot of web3 focused places seem to have a specific mindset about what "should" be done so I wanted to ask here.

I worked in the space at startup (ironically making web2 services to assist in web3 so I’m still an extreme novice). But my time there was a constant push / pull between convention and money and innovation and the unknown. The company I was at would try to appeal to big companies in hopes of finding a product market fit, who looked to us for guidance on what to do in this new space where they hoped to make money. Trend after trend would pass and it would be entertained whether we’d jump on it because product market fit.

The most desirable companies were household names with non-web3 userbases because they meant unprecedented reach. But to make web3 approachable to them, you’d have to define a UX that didn’t exist and would be pulled in a tug of war between two forces. The first mindset optimises for the purest idea of giving the user power— UXs that were obvious about the concepts of transactions and transferrable assets. The other wanted to replicate web2 UXs in web3, to the degree that a user gives temporary control of their wallet to a developer so the developer performs transactions as them.

Then, there is the data and pseudonymity piece. Companies have been taught that data is valuable, and one of the values of a blockchain is an identity that exists outside of any one company. But if all of your assets are on a blockchain— either under your public key or perhaps under a few that might transfer assets only between each other— then your identity can be known (not so private) and also cannot be monopolized and sold (because your data is public).

In the background, as this all happens, is the decentralization argument. At the end of the day, my company used EVM nodes operated by another company (which themselves might be wrappers around something offered by AWS). What is meaningful decentralization alongside specialization of labor? What is decentralization in a world that has billionaires and enormous companies who has the means to buy resources and set up tons of nodes?

Being out of the space now, I do think a decentralized database with immutable scripts, user-managed transferrable assets, and transferrable identity has enormous value. But recently I’ve been wondering how much of that can be accomplished in the private sector. In my time there it felt like the startup needs (enterprise customers, increased ARR) constantly compromised the will for innovation efforts.

As the title suggests, I am looking for a free chrome or firefox plugin that can locally scrape data from multiple URLs. To be a bit more precise, what I mean by it:

• A free chrome or firefox plugin
• Local scraping: it runs in the browser itself. No cloud computing or "credits" required to run
• Scrape data: Collects predefined data from certain data fields within a website such as https://www.dastelefonbuch.de/Suche/Test
• Infinite scroll: to load data that only loads once the browser scrolls down (kind of like in the page I linked above)

I am not looking into programming my own scraper using python or anything similar. I have found plugins that "kind of" do what I am describing above, and about two weeks ago I found one that pretty much perfectly does what is described ("DataGrab"), but it starts asking to buy credits after running it a few times.

My own list:

• DataGrab: Excellent, apart from asking to buy credits after a while
• SimpleScraper: Excellent, but asks to buy credits pretty much immediately
• Easy Scraper: Works well for single pages, but no possibility to feed in multiple URLs to crawl
• Instant Data Scraper: Works well for single pages and infinite scroll pages, but no possibility to feed in multiple URLs to crawl
• "Data Scraper - Easy Web Scraping" / dataminer.io: Doesn't work well
• Scrapy.org: Too much programming, but looks quite neat and well documented

Any suggestions are highly welcome!

Edit: A locally run executable or cmd-line based program would be fine too, as long as it just needs to be configured (e.g., creating a list of URLs stored in a .txt or .csv file) instead of coded (e.g., coding an infinite scroll function from scratch).

Hullo! I'm very much a list person, but I'm also very much a visual person. So, I've found that simple grids of images work really well for me when I want to plan and organize information, aesthetics, etc. However, I've struggled to find my ideal website or program that allows me to do this.

My wants:

• To upload images with minimal clicks. (My workflow would likely be to find an image somewhere, get the image's URL, navigate to a page, and upload via URL, without necessarily needing to enter form fields or save an image locally first.)
• To display medium resolution images as clear thumbnails (e.g. anywhere from 200x200 to 500x500). Enough for detail, but not necessarily "HD".
• To offer the ability to crop (or even just display) images as square thumbnails (for the purposes of a neat and uniform grid) without me having to go through https://squareanimage.com (real website!) for every single image.
• To categorize images into groups (i.e. to display a set of images as a coherent little grid/gallery). I'm not picky about whether this is done via fixed category pages, or tags + filtering.
• To maybe add extra information attached to each image (e.g. descriptions, links, etc.) without necessarily cluttering the grid.
• As for whether the service is public or private, cloud-based or local, I don't really mind!

Some of the options I've tried:

• Wordpress: Really nice grid-based themes, but the "blog post"-based system feels cumbersome for what I'm trying to do (images only). So many clicks to add images and make new posts.
• Tumblr: Lovely for content discovery, the quick reblog feature saves a lot of clicks, and tagging is flexible. But, this has many of the same downsides as Wordpress (lots of clicks to upload your own images, post-based system), and Tumblr as a platform is so much more than what I'm looking for (don't want/need social features).
• Pinterest: 10/10 for content discovery -- their image similarity algorithms and image search are unmatched. Wonderful for quickly spinning up a collage of themed pictures. But, horrid for uploading new pictures, given that they'll become public pins with comments/links/etc. Too many clicks + unnecessary fields. I worry about attribution for artists with Pinterest specifically -- I don't want to perpetuate a lack of attribution with publicly re-shareable images. Also, the collages are very busy with ads and unnecessary text. Plus, it's kind of cumbersome to reorganize images between boards if you want to change your board scheme.
• Pinry: Open source, self-hosted version of Pinterest. Was a bit too rough around the edges the last time I tried to use it, but maybe it's good enough now?
• Are.na: A bit too... New York trendy? For my tastes. Also, the social elements aren't really my thing... Also, costly!!!
• Google Keep: Surprisingly good? Perhaps the best option I've tried? For image notes, it's very flexible with regards to grid-based layouts, tagging, adding optional details, adding multiple images to a single note, etc. My main criticisms are that uploading images and tagging notes does take quite a few clicks; the grid stops being aligned the moment your notes begin to differ (e.g. add images of varying size, add titles/details, etc.), so it can start to look a bit visually cluttered; the UI doesn't seem to be designed with many tags in mind; the default layout shows all notes (I never want this).
• Local files and folders: Dead simple, but with very few features. Thumbnail views in file explorers are really space inefficient compared to grid-based image galleries.
• Random photo organizing software: Largely geared towards actual photos taken with an actual camera (real life subjects, camera EXIF data, organizing by date taken, etc.). Too many unnecessary features for my needs, not enough features geared towards digital non-photo images (e.g. graphics).
• "Speed dial" new tab pages for browsers: Helps me organize bookmarks! I like being able to see the icons, like a desktop for webapps. I will use image grids for everything.
• Artwork grids in media libraries / tracking websites: Plex, MusicBee, Letterboxd, Goodreads, Anime-Planet... you are heaven to me.

Here is a gallery of screenshots for websites/services I have tried, to give you an idea of how I use these services. The first one (tumblr) is the closest to visually ideal (dense + uniform grid), but Keep is the closest to ideal feature-wise. Surely there is a website or service I'm missing that could be the best of both worlds!