• 5 Posts
  • 158 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Is it actually viable for ordinary people to purchase small amounts of cryptocurrency for the sole purposes of making more private purchases online or taking advantage of cryptocurrency discounts? All the coverage on them is about large-scale investing which makes me feel like no one buying and selling actually has any interest in cryptocurrencies as an alternative currency. Instead it’s just about getting rich, which is a massive turn off.



  • I recently reset a laptop with Windows 11 on it, prior to installing Linux, and went through the setup process again. It is so bad now, the offline account option was completely missing and it was constantly trying to push Microsoft services on me. It felt very reminiscent of how freeware installations often try to trick users into accepting additional third party garbage.





  • “This was Microsoft’s choice, not ours,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told me in an email. “We are and have been open to agreements with companies who are open about their intentions and commit to treat us and our users fairly. If Bing or others want access within our policies, without training, without summarization, and without selling it to others, we are and have always been open to that. If they want to build a business selling Reddit data or using the data for training, we could be open to that, but it’s a commercial conversation.”

    Mojeek, the search engine that initially told me that Reddit was blocking all search engines but Google, and which was unable to get in touch with Reddit at the time, told me Reddit got in touch after that story was published. Mojeek said it was unable to share any details about the deal because of an NDA, but confirmed that Reddit wanted to get paid for letting Mojeek crawl the site, even though Mojeek does not have any AI products.

    This doesn’t add up and it makes me wonder what else Google and reddit agreed upon. This situation benefits no one except Google, as far as I can tell. If reddit wants to milk search engines, and Microsoft is willing and able to pay (which I assume they are), there is no reason for the deal to not go ahead like it did with Google. Kinda makes my brain start going down the conspiracy path, but then again it’s hardly unbelievable that Google would pursue anti-competitive business strategies, particularly when it comes to generative AI.



  • Why build Proton Wallet?

    Early in our journey, we experienced first-hand what it’s like being cut off from the financial system and at the mercy of large banks and institutions — an ordeal that affects millions of people across the globe. In the summer of 2014, as the original Proton Mail crowdfunding campaign was in progress, Proton had a near-death experience when PayPal froze our funds(new window), questioned whether encryption was legal, and whether Proton had government approval to encrypt emails.

    Fortunately, in that instance PayPal returned the blocked funds, and Proton was able to start the journey that we’ve been on for the past decade. However, that dangerous moment has always stayed in our minds, and we still keep a proportion of Proton’s financial reserves in Bitcoin.

    Having experienced firsthand the unreliability of the traditional financial sector, building Proton Wallet is an important strategic move to make Proton more resilient and independent in the future. By enabling us and the entire Proton community to more easily adopt means of payment that deliver on the promise of financial freedom for all, we better insulate Proton from the risks posed by traditional finance.








  • It’s been all over the left-leaning Lemmy instances too. It seems there are a lot of copers living in an alternate reality where Trump is on track to lose the election and needs to resort to killing his own supporters in a fake assassination attempt to boost his popularity. Sorry to break it to you guys, but in the real world there was absolutely zero need for Trump to take the spotlight away from Biden’s spectacularly awful debate performance and the age/replacement question, which has been front-page news ever since.