• 22 Posts
  • 904 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 21st, 2021

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  • Actually I would pick GIMP.

    1. Says what it is, an image editor.
    2. No popups and random interruptions.
    3. Not only AI editing examples which makes me thing the tool is AI only.
    4. An overview of the variety of major features it has rather than just AI editing.
    5. Links to helpful documentation rather than endless marketing pages that say nothing.

    Really think only thing I would like to see is some screenshots and examples of using the tool, rather than just info on what it does. But the Photoshop page barely has this, just a few examples of the AI tools.



  • Maybe, but some of my favourite channels do YouTube as a full-time job. Maybe they would still post part-time if they couldn’t profit off of but the videos would almost certainly be less-frequent and be made with tighter budgets.

    But even then I find it hard to believe. I subscribe to a bunch of seemingly for-fun channels but most of my favourites have by this point become full-time video creators. GCP Grey, Captain Disillusion, Technology Connections, Tom Scott, Veritasium…

    It is true that money can corrupt, but in this world you also need an income, and if you need to devote a lot of time to get income from a different source then that only distracts from the time and energy that you can put towards making videos.




  • I would love to see some easy built-in monetization system for PeerTube. Ideally this could be “micropayments” style subscriptions where you could pay a small amount to subscribe to a channel or a small-amount per video (with batched payments to avoid too high of fees). I would also love to see a “pay what you want” subscription option and tipping.

    It would probably need to be plugable so that different payment providers can be used, but even just starting with one would be exciting.


  • I still recommend it. I’m not fully happy with the situation but for now I consider it my best option.

    1. I consider Chromium-based browsers out of the question as they give too much power to Google. This is already showing to be a problem with new APIs and “features” that Google is pushing into the web platform and the bigger the market share gets the more control they have.
    2. Web browsers are the biggest attack surface that most people have. Displaying untrusted webpages and running untrusted code is incredibly difficult and vulnerabilities are regularly discovered. I don’t yet know a Firefox fork that I trust enough to reliably respond to security vulnerabilities quickly and correctly.

    So for now I am staying with raw Firefox. Not to mention that as a disto-built Firefox I have some insulation from Mozilla’s ToS. But I am very much considering some of the forks, especially the ones that are very light with patches and are mostly configuration tweaks.


  • PeerTube doesn’t have a monetization story aside from sponsorships which means that it won’t be a real competitor from YouTube. There are lots of “for fun” YouTube channels but what enables so many people to publish so many videos is the fact that they can profit off of them. PeerTube is great, I follow a handful of channels, but it won’t be a YouTube competitor until people can actually run a business on it.


  • I love creators hosting their content on more disparate platforms, I would love to see less centralization. But the problem is that these all cost so much. YouTube Premium is $13/month and I get access to a huge variety of channels. LTT on Floatplane is $5/month for one collection of channels (which are available on YouTube, maybe with some bits cut). Corridor Digital is similar at $4/month.

    Very few channels actually provide me $5/month worth of value. This is only really reasonable for the biggest fans (which admittedly I am not of either of these). Even if these channels have a few videos a week (maybe LTT is over daily with all of their different programs) that is a lot to pay for little variety.

    I understand the problem here. Only a tiny number of users are actually going to sign up anyways, so you need to extract more value from them. Say LTT makes $0.50/month from the average subscriber on YouTube. If they charged $0.50/month for their Floatplane channel they would actually loose money, because the people that sign up on Floatplane are going to be above average subscribers. So they need to charge more to even break even (let’s say they value control enough that they aren’t looking for increased revenue). But as they raise the price along the curve they are even more heavily filtering for the biggest fans, which were bringing them in top percentile revenue on YouTube, making the problem even worse. This means that these platforms are always going to be priced to profit off the whales, rather than the casual users who enjoy watching some videos from these channels. Maybe in some beautiful feature where publishing on separate platforms becomes normalized this will change, but it is very far in the future and a huge roadblock to getting to that future.




  • Also consider independent or small-chain pharmacies. I’m spoiled for choice in downtown Toronto, there are a handful within a few minute walk. The one I picked (because it was the closest) was super friendly and convenient. Even though they have shorter hours I can walk in and be out with my prescription in literally 30 seconds. If I have questions I can call and someone picks up the phone. On top of this way better service they have never charged beyond my insurance’s coverage, so I haven’t paid a dime out of pocket.

    If you can this is definitely the way to go.


  • For .config it isn’t as important to me, but putting things that can be re-created in .cache (well the proper environment variable that defaults to .cache) is very nice because I don’t need to back up all of that junk.

    But it wouldn’t be unreasonable to put something like .config in a git repo, and storing full history for large and frequently changing files is a waste of space if they aren’t really “config”.



  • It’s definitely an option. It will do the things that you want (as long as your phone is online, but that is the same for any other solution).

    sending Signal messages with it would be less secure

    Yes, this is because Beeper converts the Signal protocol to the Matrix protocol and vice versa. In order to do this it needs to access the messages. So it needs to decrypt the messages, then re-encrypt them on the other side. This means that the bridge (in this case operated by Beeper) has access to your messages. This is often referred to as “end-to-bridge” encryption, as it isn’t end-to-end anymore.

    This is going to be true of any bridge you use that is hosted by a third party. You are always adding one additional trusted party into your communication.

    the recommended bridge instructions sends me over to Beeper, since I don’t have my own server

    Yes, to practically operate a bridge you need your own Matrix server. This is because the bridge will create a new Matrix user for every remote participant (every phone number you communicate with in this case). Doing this with regular mechanisms would be difficult (as signup is likely restricted in some ways) and inefficient (as each account would need to be checked for new messages separately). Beeper runs their own homeserver so that they can operate their bridges. However Beeper’s bridges are only available to users on the same homeserver (this is not a protocol limitation, just their choice). So in order to use their bridges you need to make an account with them (which you can, it is free IIUC). Beeper also offers custom clients which have special features for interacting with their bridges (for example making it easier to start a conversation with a new phone number).

    The alternative would be to run your own server and bridge (or hire someone to it on your behalf).