I remember in the early days of the internet Alta Vista search worked quite well. It was easy to find what you wanted, and find new things relevant to your interests - and so it became very popular. Unfortunately, Alta Vista only worked well if people made their websites in good faith. It was searching meta-tags and text on the page; and so when greedy people wanted to get more traffic on their website, they found it easy to exploit Alta Vista’s search. As more and more people started exploiting the system, the search got worse and worse.

I remember the day I switched to using Google. I was searching for some C programming stuff on Alta Vista with technical words - and the results had more porn sites than programming sites. Like, wtf. Obviously that search doesn’t work anymore. It stopped working because arseholes were exploiting it.

And now, pretty much the same thing is happening to Google. Their algorithm worked better for longer than what Alta Vista was doing, but it seems that self-interested people have kind of cracked the system, and now the results are mostly just junk instead of useful stuff. (Note, I stopped using Google several years ago. I’ve been using Duck Duck Go. But you’re right that the problem is more widespread than just Google.)

Alternatively, you could be this guy.

Are we not discussing the choice to defederate? As in most choices, some options are better than others. Sometimes it isn’t obvious what the best option is. People discuss and share ideas to make their decision.

We as a community are faced with the choice of whether or not to support threads[.]net. We can think about it individually, or on an instance-by-instance basis - but we can also discuss it collectively. That’s whats happening here.

You gotta put backtick quotes around your password on lemmy, otherwise it is automatically censored. It’s a security feature of ActivityPub.

I tried to start that video, but I got “Failed with error code 1003, see logs for more info”. (I don’t think I have have access to any logs, so I guess that part isn’t for me.) Maybe Chipotle wasn’t able to watch it either, and so that’s why their system is broken.

deleted by creator

Ah, but if you use the rules BODMSA (or PEDMSA) then you can follow the letter order strictly, ignoring the equal precedence left-to-right rule, and you still get the correct answer. Therefore clearly we should start teaching BODMSA in primary schools. Or perhaps BFEDMSA. (Brackets, named Functions, Exponentiation, Division, Multiplication, Subtraction, Addition). I’m sure that would remove all confusion and stop all arguments. … Or perhaps we need another letter to clarify whether implicit multiplication with a coefficient and no symbol is different to explicit multiplication… BFEIDMSA or BFEDIMSA. Shall we vote on it?

Good to hear! My main computer is my desktop, running Mint. (I’m using it right now.) But I also have a Surface Pro 4 that I use for work. It has no problems and works fine on Windows… but I have been wondering if I can move that away from Windows as well. So its encouraging to hear that it has worked for you.

Does Mint have good support for the stylus and touch-screen on the Surface 4? (I imagine the Surface tech might be specialised to Windows a bit, so I wouldn’t be confident those would work immediately in Linux.)

Yeah. I don’t have a lot of negative things to say about Steam, and there’s a lot of high-value stuff. The mod workshop is great. Linux support is top-tier. There’s a lot of good stuff. The only major bad thing from my point of view is lock-in. Having a vast library of games tied to one account isn’t great. And having publishers and mod-makers etc essentially forced to rely on that platform is not good. Steam itself is good - but consolidation of power is generally a bad thing.

For that reason, most of my new games have been coming from GOG over the last couple of years. GOG’s DRM free policy means there’s basically no lock-in effect. That’s a major strength, even if some of their other features aren’t as strong as Steam.

Too real. I booted up windows last week because I wanted to test something quickly before going to bed… starting it and testing my thing took about 5 mins; but then shutting down took more than half an hour.

Maybe so, but it was still a janky story. A gigantuan struggle, with epic consequences… resolved by deus ex machina.

Yeah. Timeshift is good. Fortunately, it is part of the default Mint install, and the Mint ‘getting started’ instructions say to set it up.

I personally needed Timeshift on my second week of using Mint. What happened was that I was that I saw some setting somewhere for linking a google calendar to the calendar app or something like that; and I thought “I don’t really want to see any mention of Google anywhere in the OS, even in a setting that I can just not use”; so I uninstalled the thing that lets you link those accounts… what I didn’t realise is that uninstalling that also uninstalled a heap of critical parts of the Gnome desktop. So after restarting, I had no desktop or anything.

Fortunately, Timeshift is super easy to use, and I fixed it in a few minutes. Easy to break, easy to fix.

I agree that this is an easy way to try out Linux; but I wouldn’t advice doing it like this if you have intentions to eventually make Linux your main OS. If you’re using Linux in a virtual machine, then it will always feel like it’s another layer of work, another layer of abstraction, another few clicks to get started… it just adds a bit of friction. So although the virtual machine can show you what the OS looks like and how it works etc. The experience of possibly using it as a main OS will be skewed in a negative way by having to set up and run a the virtual machine.

So I’d say virtual machine is ok if you just want to look around for curiosity; but if you have intentions to make it your primary OS, then I reckon go straight to dual boot, and make Linux the default boot option so that the friction is in switching back to Windows rather than in trying the new and unfamiliar OS.

It’s true. I installed Mint on this computer to dual boot with Windows, expecting a gradual experimental transition away from Windows. But it has been months now, and I haven’t used Windows on this computer at all, other than to just test a couple of things for a minute or so.

Switching to Linux wasn’t perfectly smooth. I’ve definitely run into some problems. But the functionality is there, and the problems are mostly about my lack of experience. I doubt I’ll install Windows on any computer ever again. Windows is getting more and more annoying with nags and ads and bloatware, while Linux continues to slowly but steadily improve.

The Matrix link is marked as ‘dead’ in the side bar. The people who wrote the side bar are actively discouraging people from using Matrix.

Congrats. That’s a pretty nice piece of hardware; although, I thought Nintendo made it.

Ah yes. How fitting for a young new person in the world. A reminder that 2°C of warming above the pre-industrial mean would be catastrophic, but also is a good lower-limit of what to expect based on current intentions.

One advantage of directory-based encryption is for online backups. I use SpiderOak to backup some stuff, and so I can tell it backup my encrypted data without it ever seeing the unencrypted data. I don’t think that’s so easy with full-disk encryption. (I suspect only a handful people in the world still use SpiderOak, but the idea applies to whatever cloud backup thing you might use.)

Similarly, it means I can lend a portable HDD to someone to share videos or something, but still have private stuff stored on there as well if I want to.

I appreciate all the comments and links, everyone. Thanks a heap. I feel like I’ve got a much stronger and up-to-date understanding of what’s available now.

While checking out various links, I’ve found this detailed comparison provided by GoCrypt. It includes comparisons of features, encryption methods, and a couple of performance metrics. So that’s valuable information for decision making. I found the CryFS comparison page useful too, but that felt more about highlighting the advantages of their tool rather than a thorougher comparison of different tools.

Yeah, Cryptomator does sound like a good option. But I personally found the comment from the developer at the bottom to be a bit off-putting. I don’t like when people needlessly trash-talk other options.

If you value privacy higher than availability and integrity, this certainly is a point for CryFS. With Cryptomator, we strive for the best of all three primary security targets […] […] I personally dislike snakeoil statements on their website like “the security of CryFS has been proven”. While I don’t see a problem with the cryptography, I prefer to keep some distance from phrases used by all those “military grade security” bogus companies.

He seems to belittle the importance of a key advantage of CryFS, and then goes on to accuse them of being ‘snakeoil statements’ because CryFS said their security was ‘proven’ in a masters thesis. I’m sure that ‘proven’ is not a great choice of word here, but I don’t think CryFS was trying to trick anyone. They’re just saying that the tool has been thoroughly analysed in a masters thesis and found to be secure.

One of the ‘advantages’ being touted for Cryptomator is that it is more ‘stable’ than CryFS. But the claim of stability coimes from CryFS saying their software is in beta while Cryptomator says theirs is complete. The way I see it, that’s not really a measure of stability; it’s a measure of caution from the developers. Stability and reliability are not things you can just claim, or base on whether or not something is called ‘beta’. It’s about testing, and analysing. So, in that context of CryFS expressing caution, to say their masters thesis statement is a ‘snake oil statement’, I think is disingenuous.

(Note: I’ve given an in-depth explanation of something that really isn’t a big deal. What the developer said is not that bad. I just wanted to articulate why I found it off putting.)