disadvantage

I first discovered Arena through their Twitter profile. They post so much interesting stuff. It's what Tumblr should have been from the start. I just hope it is sustainable well into the future. There's too many important ideas that could be wiped out if this gets shut down.

> Do people just assume it's compromised

One of Tor's weaknesses has always been the exit node problem, where things can be seen in the clear unless encryption is used. And sometimes it's not used, so personal data can be gleaned through exits.

Another weakness is the Tor Browser Bundle itself. I'm not certain if it's 'compromised' but we'll never know, due to the secret nature of 0-days. People don't take extra caution and connect to Tor with a specialized Tor router with a kill-switch / fail-closed system, thereby mitigating real IP leaks.

There's also a more academic in nature problem of a 'bird's eye view' of the Tor network, whereby if you control and have insight into all the hops a Tor user makes, you can do correlation attacks, but I'm less concerned about that than the other two weaknesses I mentioned.

> Gmail have turned off the basic HTML view. The new interface is unpleasant.

It's not the UI that bothers me (it's actually quite nice and modern) it's that it loads like treacle, when in the past I exclusively used the basic HTML interface as it was more snappier & performant.

Create a data center[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

Good. Means it's more lean. And nothing's stopping someone installing NTFS functionality with apt. I once had to add exFAT[0] compatibility to Ubuntu because I had a thumb-drive flashed in that format.

[0] https://itsfoss.com/mount-exfat/

As someone who abhors subscriptions, I think it's a bad idea. This is why I love pay-as-you go electricity meters and pay-as-you-go phone plans, and sometimes lifetime purchases of software licenses. I also detest 'bills' which force you to cough up money and get disconnected from the service if you don't.

With pay-as-you-go if you don't have the funds, you simply bear with the circumstances until you can afford it. For example, if my electricity is cut, I am forced to use a duvet with two blankets on top to stay warm when if I had the funds, I don't need to, since the heat is paid for.

Same with Internet. I sometimes have no Internet for the day, but when funds arrive I can get back online. But those moments are teachable: I simply read a book, or clean the house when there's no Internet. Subscriptions are a marketer's dream. They want you hooked. Fuck that.

Escalate the issue and @mention Twitter employees. Hopefully someone will listen. You will have to create a new account to do this. Sometimes Twitter over-moderates and something triggered a false positive. Twitter has re-instated many old suspended accounts already, and hopefully they'll do that for you too.

> Consultant engineer Joseph Bazalgette, who was already working as a surveyor for the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, was employed to mastermind a plan for sewers, pumping stations and the redevelopment of the embankments of London. The results of his remarkable efforts are still maintaining London’s health today. The Great Stink may not have the historic cachet of the Great Fire or the Plague of London, but its influence was ultimately to the good of the city.

Now the UK still has to deal with smog. Cars might be all electric in my lifetime, but smog is still a persistent problem and causes respiratory problems.

Audacity, but it's more for editing not music production.

> Until not long ago, plenty of places in the world wanted to model themselves after America. But after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade almost two years ago, America has, for some nations, become a model … of what not to do.

What specific things apart from US abortion laws are 'American' in nature? If it means McDonalds outlets then fair game, but I can't think of anything else, apart from maybe the US 'hustle culture' that is always admirable.

This had me thinking, in order to get someone's username and spark up a convo, you have to use lesser secure channels to obtain the username?

iPad pro with VLC

Without social media:

Pros: Focus on projects. Get on with work.

Cons: Not engaged in a human way with the web. I would be a complete nobody.

An iPad with a keyboard peripheral is the closest I got to coding on a phone. I type really badly on phones, I can't bear the thought of coding on one.

Humans have went dark considerably over the years. I don't know the exact date when encrypted comms became the norm, but we rarely transmit plaintext out into the Universe anymore. We still leak plaintext, but the vast majority is encrypted now.

> Would you like to show your collection?

I consider them very private. I use Pinboard, but for sensitive stuff, I store that locally using my browser's bookmark manager, then at the end of the year, export it and convert to a boring plaintext list of URLs which I use going forward. I am not sharing this list, ever.

Do modern browsers support JPEG XL?

Free soda / red bull to stay focused

Setup a new AppleID. No need for that stress. If you have everything stored in iCloud, that's a problem though. I don't store anything in iCloud, because, like you, I could get locked out. I have other places to store things that I trust more.

Looking into Lemmy. Signed up on a few instances. It's not exactly a Reddit Killer App but it works for now. Not that much engagement on my posts since people are only testing the waters with it.

> The more you build walls of ideas around yourself the easier it becomes to make you discombobulated with the slightest gust of wind.

Resilience can be cultivated with practice. The more you enter caves you don't want to enter, the more treasure you find.

> In 2004, in our earliest study, we found that people averaged about one hundred fifty seconds (two and a half minutes) on a computer screen before switching their attention to another screen

Maybe it's just me, but I look at several different screens each day (Phone, Workstation, Raspberry Pi for home network logging using Pi-Hole, and a tablet). Not to mention our main TV. This is all normal for people these days. One screen for everything doesn't cut it, unless you are very disciplined and force yourself to use one device for everything, but I don't see the main purpose of that.

Maybe if you're running a business with tricky logistics, you need to be pinned to a single device and need real-time interaction with your systems to get things done?

It depends on how complex the system you're building is. If you're a 'systems thinker', you naturally gravitate to solutions which boilerplate away all the grunt work.

> Personally, I think that one of the most important human activities should be actively trying to seed other nebula, stars, and planets with archaic life, since this increases the overall probability that life will continue to evolve somewhere, even if humans fail to expand beyond Earth.

I think merely one Voyager Record[0] is not enough. We need to be sending millions of these in all directions right throughout space, and spaced out over decade intervals. Then there's a greater possibility of discovery/contact. We already do this to some degree with the Arecibo message[1], but probes like Voyager are better IMHO.

[0] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message

> In lieu of meaning, I mostly adopted the attitude of Alan Watts. Existence, he says, is fundamentally playful. It's less like a journey, and more like a piece of music or a dance. And the point of dancing isn't to arrive at a particular spot on the floor; the point of dancing is simply to dance. Vonnegut expresses a similar sentiment when he says, "We are here on Earth to fart around."

Ikigai[0] is worth exploring if you find yourself questioning the grand meaning of things:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai

> The Oxford English Dictionary defines ikigai as "a motivating force; something or someone that gives a person a sense of purpose or a reason for living". More generally it may refer to something that brings pleasure or fulfilment.[1]

> The term compounds two Japanese words: iki (生き, meaning 'life; alive') and kai (甲斐, meaning '(an) effect; (a) result; (a) fruit; (a) worth; (a) use; (a) benefit; (no, little) avail') (sequentially voiced as gai), to arrive at 'a reason for living [being alive]; a meaning for [to] life; what [something that] makes life worth living; a 'raison d'être'.

Personally though I've found the pursuit of this philosophy very hard to integrate into life. It's one of life's hard problems. It means somehow intersecting 'play' with 'work', but as many people say: 'work is something people don't do voluntarily'. Hence its name: 'work', we don't naturally want to do it. But if you can make work as a form of play, you already are living in Ikigai.

> we can't even build self-driving cars, let alone have a robot clear the table after dinner

I think once you give AI working limbs and the ability to manipulate matter like humans, that's concerning, because if the AI becomes a runaway AI with no upper limits on the types of behavior allowed, we get into Paperclip Maximizer[0] territory very fast.

[0] https://tanzanite.ai/paperclip-maximizer-experiment/

I use the Standard Notes[0] free tier. I organize notes with tags. I self-actualize things with my TODO, and everyone should do that. I'm often reminded of the phrase: 'Because I said I would'.

[0] https://standardnotes.com/

> Is it possible to automate this process in some way?

You can disable notifications for everything and also the red dot 'notification badges'

> Where is the public open chats of cyber space?

It used to be every tech-savvy person had their own PhpBB instance and built small communities with that. All that has largely migrated to Discord, Reddit, Facebook Groups, and to a lesser extent: Lemmy & Mastodon. There's also quite niche and bespoke communities like Subreply[0], Tildes[1], and Raddle[2] (Built with Postmill). I prefer the Reddit style Karma system over the 'Micro-blogging' system. Everyone has their preferences.

[0] https://subreply.com/trending

[1] http://tildes.net/

[2] https://raddle.me/