Orion (awooo)

  • 4 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • I think what they mean is that someone unfamiliar with your line of work might even read the entire post and come away with it with the view of “Okay, and?” since the title told them this was going to be about “What Does It Mean To Be A Signal Competitor?”

    The problem there is that what Signal is is different to different people, someone might for example use it like any other chat application, in which case even something like Telegram (ew) or Discord could be an alternative to them.

    Again, if someone is familiar with your blog, they’ll know what you mean, but the blog post can be viewed by someone in isolation, in which case it won’t be so clear, especially since it’s also in relation to moving off of Telegram, which is not an E2EE platform at all by default






  • It’s honestly pretty hard for me to find media I can swallow because of having an anxiety trigger that is so common.

    Most media has depictions of death or loss in it, and I’ve come across first person descriptions that were so immersive that my heart was actually pounding and I had to take a few days to stop feeling down, and it’s not something the authors usually mention explicitly. So in the end I don’t really watch or read anything serious these days.


  • That’s really the thing with Steam in general, from a consumer perspective it’s a very good and honest service, it actually adds to the experience of playing games instead of being an annoyance.

    A lot of other stores feel like only shells made around popular titles to promote more stuff and lock people into using them. More launchers won’t solve the monopoly of Steam, you’ll just end up with as many as there are streaming services.

    That’s not the case for GOG and Itch, but there you don’t get the same level of experience.


  • Hmm I think my main concern would be lack of kernel/firmware updates, running something like postmarketOS could partly solve that and still be nearly as easy to set up (just unlock and flash a prebuilt image)

    But firmware is still almost entirely dependent on the vendor, since it’s all signed and unpatchable.

    Next issue would be lack of connectivity on a lot of phones, which have gone backwards and include USB 2.0 now. WiFi is an option, but less stable, I personally decided to just go 100Mbps and suffer.

    As for the battery, it would help a lot if phones were designed to boot without one and they were removable, it all worked well for about half a year until I found out I had a spicy pillow and had to replace it with direct power to the board, which made the whole setup much less elegant and required soldering.

    It all comes down to how devices are designed in the end. If someone took the time to make a computer instead of just a phone, and included features that make it useful past its initial life that aren’t that popular (display output, microsd, headphone jack), mainlined all the drivers and maintained firmware, that would be a different story.

    But that’s not a very profitable model, because it’s all about reducing waste and thus selling less. A lot needs to change.










  • It’s definitely useful for exploring ideas, I recently used AI-generated images as reference for an artist and it helped me get my thoughts across. I can’t wait to see the final result of it!

    It’s probably also good for adding illustration to text where someone otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it or spend the time, adding detail to your own art and so on.

    The worrying thing to me is how fast it can create all sorts of images, and combined with LLMs and other tools even be automated. I could totally see entire feeds being populated by personalized AI art, stories, and music, let’s not forget that’s largely dictated by algorithms already if someone uses things like Spotify.

    So one day it might get extremely difficult to tell if what you’re looking at was even created by someone on their own, or if AI had any significant role in it. This would make it impossible for regular artists to compete under the current economic model, which to be fair needs to go, but it will still cause suffering in the meantime. Even beyond capitalism, people want share their work for others to appreciate, and if every channel of communication is flooded it’s going to be pretty difficult to get noticed among the noise. If AI can create stunning images it might also depreciate art in the eyes of others, because to get to a very similar result using AI could take a lot less effort if the technology further improves, so they might see it as just a commodity or “pretty picture” and not think about artists at all.