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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • This tech would be great if we had high power nodes all across the globe. But we do not. Maybe a cool idea could be encrypted data over FM radio. The radio stations already exist and are a dying business. Nonprofits could buy up radio stations and rebroadcast data broadly and only those with the encryption keys could decrypt. Cut the ISP out entirely. Like the difference between a local call and a long distance call.

    Meshtastic communication would prioritize local hops where they are available and then where there are spans of area without nodes, they could hop across radio broadcasts.

    Primary issue would be speed. Next to no bandwidth on a signal like that. Kbps not Mbps. Perhaps an incentive for much better compression as well.



  • This is slightly false in an alarmist fashion. At least in the US, the police are not actively tracking anything without a subpoena to the cellular provider of the phone in question. They can look at the location data after the fact, using a court ordered subpoena. They can also use live location data in an emergency situation,also using a court ordered subpoena.

    Cellular data from cell towers on cell networks are private property of the cellular provider companies. That’s not to say you are private while on them. Just that the police are not actively tracking your location through them without great effort for each individual they wish to track.





  • There’s another thing that frustrates me about Linux and its various philosophies. Should I be allowed to do what I want with my software? Or should the machine protect me from myself? It seems at conflict with itself to allow you to do stuff like delete system files without much more than a warning while also having protections in place as you describe. Windows tried doing this exact thing with S Mode and people get pissed about windows not allowing them to do whatever they want.

    I fundamentally disagree that users should not be allowed to install whatever they want from wherever they want.


  • Preface: I am a Linux user

    The Linux desktop needs to not require users to dig through config files to enable features that both windows and Mac have working by default. Fingerprint sensors, audio interfaces, broken bootloaders that you have to fix yourself. Requiring people to ever use a command line even once will keep people on Windows as the dominant platform.

    Every time I have to look at a Linux forum to figure out why something isn’t working and the answers are run these commands I am instantly reminded that this is the exact thing keeping Windows mainstream.

    Driver support still isn’t perfect. Software support as well. Linux needs to ship out of the box running exe files in compatibility layers. Linux needs to adopt executable installers for software packages that can be downloaded on the web. If Linux wants to be the way people use computers, Linux needs to fit the mould that windows has built for the people who have used it for the last 40 years.

    Doing anything differently is enough of a deterrent for 90% of computer users. And of those 90%, 75% of them will give up immediately trying to fix anything that doesn’t work and either call someone else or decide it’s broken and do nothing.

    Linux is incredibly powerful and I believe it should be the way we run computers, but I get exactly why it isn’t.