• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle


  • Something worth noting is that this is yet another example of how the patriarchy hurts people. She felt that her image on Instagram was so important that she took risks which ultimately lead to her death. She doesn’t have to be an idiot to have this happen, I’ve done tonnes of stupid dangerous stuff in my life and I’m fairly sure everyone else here can think of a few things that could have gone wrong.

    The algorithm of something like Instagram is built around enhancing use of the platform. This is the same fundamental motivation as tobacco companies or gambling companies. Your continued use of the product is essential, even if it is harmful to your health. So they design their product to enhance it’s addictiveness and market to people who are vulnerable, say younger women for example, and boom, revenue.

    Meta has a meaningful hand in this type of situation. The same goes for all the other attention economy companies. Their product doesn’t have to be harmful but it is way more profitable if harm is not a consideration.


  • Root your phone and you can manage which APN is used by tethering. If you can’t do this consider trying a connecting to a VPN before enabling tethering, the connection will on some devices remain active on the normal APN because changing would disconnect the VPN and keeping connected is higher priority than updating the APN. Also USB tethering and WIFI tethering may behave differently.

    In the end this is a good argument for better regulation. When you buy a car they don’t get to extract more money from you because you drive out of state or use it for business. The fact that telecommunications companies have so much power and access to basically monitor what you are doing and bill accordingly is insane. You should pay for a service with a simple and clear contract and all this crap should be made illegal.



  • In Australia we have a robust and fast paper voting system administered by the Australian Electoral Commission. We get most results in the evening of election day with only really close races being a couple of days out. There is solid chain of custody on paper ballots and having been used for over a century we have all the kinks worked out.

    The USA has about 330 million people, we have about 25 million. The voting population of each is smaller, but it is a much larger percetage of our population due to compulsory voting. If we can do it with less than 10% of the population it could be done there with the same ratio no worries, just assume out country was a state and you can see it can work.

    Paper is safe and secure. It is well understood and all the hack and hijinks have been worked out. If you ask experts in IT if they think voting should be dine electronically they answer hell no without much debate.




  • It looks like it is downsampling the video or streaming after converting to another codec. Some codecs are fine for decoding on the server but the app may not support them so the server converts them. Some files are of higher quality than what the server is configured to deliver so it downsamples to stream it.

    Check the configuration and look for anything to do with codecs, hardware decoding, streaming quality, and so on. It may also be on the app, so if you can access a different interface then test that to narrow down the issue.


  • I have my headphones in literally right now. I use my phone as my primary media system, so video sources like YouTube and Nebula and audio like music and podcasts. I listen with wired headphones for any time I am not physically very involved as they are higher quality and provide a much more enjoyable listening experience, but I will switch to Bluetooth headphones when being more physically active.

    That said, I am a very high consumer of audio. I currently have 129 podcasts I am subscribed to (some no longer run, but most are weekly to monthly), along with a whole lot of audiobooks. I am currently at well over 2200 hours played in my podcast app this year and that excludes all the audiobooks and videos.


  • Something I have found is missing from both of these suggestions as well as every podcast app on device is transcoding to speed up so it is not sped up on the fly. For a lot of phones and other devices the task of playing back at 2x speed is enough to demand a higher power state than what is required to play a sped up file. For efficiency doing a single pass of speeding up the audio then playing back at that speed would use less power during the playback phase, allowing you to download and speed up all of your podcasts at home while on charge then listen for long periods without completely killing the battery. I have checked with a few if the open source devs and this is not a feature they see utility for so nobody intends to make it.