Well I didn’t want to have a bio, but Lemmy doesn’t let me null it out, so I guess I’ll figure out something to put here later.

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: May 10th, 2024

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  • By that logic, there’s nothing guaranteeing iMessage on iPhones is secure or private either because it’s closed source. If you don’t want to trust Beeper mini, you’ll be free to run their iMessage bridge on your own Matrix stack when they open source it at some point, which they’re promising to do (and you still won’t know that Apple isn’t scraping your messages on the iOS side). When I decide to trust a company, it’s because I look at what they’re transparently communicating to their end users. Every indication is that they are trying to get out of the middle of handling encrypted messages. Their first move to make this happen was allowing people to self host their own Beeper bridges (which you can still do with Beeper Cloud if you prefer and you will know that your messages are always encrypted within the Beeper infrastructure). They aren’t going to release the source for their client ever because that’s the only way they make any money.


  • To be clear, you’re not going to find many displays that can reach 4,000 nits yet. A lot of HDR content actually is mastered for 1,000 nits and that’s considered kind of the target for the mid-high range OLEDs right now. My pretty much top of the line QD-OLED Samsung S95C maxes out at something like 1350 nits. A 1000 nit capable Steam Deck OLED has plenty of range in luminance for HDR to be effective there. And I’m sure it’s got pretty good color reproduction which is the other big aspect of HDR.

    One thing we haven’t talked about is the possibility that the Steam Deck is enhancing SDR content with dynamic tone mapping to such a degree that it’s difficult to tell the difference when you actually enable true HDR. I’d really have to see this with my own eyes to be able to say with more certainty what’s going on.







  • What you’re describing is only possible on de-anonymized platforms that essentially have “know your customer” type policies where users have to provide some kind of proof of their identity. While I agree that there is value in social spaces where everyone generally knows the people they’re interacting with are who they say they are, I don’t think this is ever going to be feasible in a federated social platform. I think Facebook is the closest thing we have to what you’re describing, to be honest, and I believe Meta has even kicked around having a more sandboxed Instagram for minors (though I don’t use Instagram, so I’m not certain on the details there).

    For me, in most cases on a platform like Lemmy, a person’s age is not something I care about. I care about what people are sharing and saying. But then again, none of my interests for online discussion at this point in my life are really age centric. I think there are clearly better platforms than Lemmy if people want to guarantee they’re only interacting within their age specific peer groups.


  • I don’t want to make it sound like the Lemmy situation is rosier than it is, but considering how sharply users dropped off, say, Threads… I think Lemmy is doing alright. There are a number of factors that might contribute to user counts dropping, but mostly it’s unavoidable when you have a sharp uptick of anything. I think accounts and activity are going to flatten and then start trending back upward. If Reddit keeps fucking around, that’ll definitely bring more people in and this cycle will repeat. I’m actually fairly pleased with how many people have been sticking around on Lemmy.



  • I would highly recommend the recent Freakonomics Radio series about whaling. It’s Episodes 549-551 and the bonus episode from 2023-08-06. If you’re firmly against killing any living creature (or at least sentient creatures), I highly doubt it will change your mind (and I don’t think that it should or that it tries to), but I also think it is really fascinating learning about the history of the whaling industry and hearing the perspective of a modern whaler in the bonus episode. Putting aside the obvious ethical issues with killing sentient creatures, it’s interesting to consider things like whether there’s a sustainable level of whaling, what a sustainable quota would look like, and how much we’re in competition with certain whale species for harvesting fish as food for our own species. I personally appreciated how unbiased Freakonomics tried to be in their discussion of the topic.



  • Are these bridge puppet users from 3rd party chat services? If so, I don’t know if it would mess anything up, but you might be able to edit those users in Synapse admin (assuming you have that set up). You might even be able to change avatars that way. I’d try it with a contact you don’t care about accidentally breaking first.