It's hard to overstate what a nothing-burger this article really is! Let me break it down:

• Signal got $3 million from the Open Technology Fund at some point in its development
• Some anonymous source alleges that the OTF's ultimate goal is to promote US foreign interests
• The current chairman of the board Katherine Maher worked at the National Democratic Institute and Wikipedia before
• The same anonymous source says she was recruited because of connections to the OTF
• She has at some point voiced the opinion that a completely free internet without regulation just reproduces existing power structures, and that balancing regulation and 1st amendment rights is a tough problem
• Signal doesn't have reproducible builds on iOS (it absolutely does on Android btw)
• Some people feel like Signal chats come up more often than they should in court cases and media reports

That's it, that's the whole story. That's the reason why the Telegram guy of all people thinks you should be careful, and better use his chat service instead, and the Twitter guy agrees.

I mean, reproducible builds on iOS would be nice, but that platform has much bigger problems from a privacy/security/sovereignty/freedom standpoint anyway. And the rest is just nothing turned up to 11.

Clickbait headline. The underlying article lists much more reasonable restrictions:

• Anonymous cash payments over €3,000 will be banned in commercial transactions
• Cash payments over €10,000 will even be completely banned in business transactions
• Anonymous payments in cryptocurrencies to wallets operated by providers will be prohibited

So non-commercial transations are fine, as are crypto transactions to non-custodial wallets.

Ombi can do that afaik.

A JSON array that looks like this:

[
    {"MusicBrainzId": <id>},
    {"MusicBrainzId": <id>},
    {"MusicBrainzId": <id>},
    ...
]

I use it to fetch my Last.fm and ListenBrainz recommendations for example.

Buzzword bonanza!

I just switched to using Lidarr(+Deemix)+Plexamp exclusively, and I'm really happy so far. I also scrobble to Last.fm and have a small script that imports their recommendations to Lidarr. The important bit imo is that you have to collect a lot of music you might never listen to, just so Plexamp has something to recommend and build playlists from. But once you do it works pretty much like any other music streaming service.

I use Piped + LibreTube, and I self-host Piped to get better and more consistent load times. Works very well, only minor issues every now and then.

Which had me wondering for the first time I hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop”, what percentage do we have to hit for this to be the year?

Imo it's more of a list of things that need to happen, like some mainstream games, apps and devices getting 1st-party Linux support. I suspect this to start happening around the 20% mark, but ofc that's just a guess.

Afaik the bot auto-creation is disabled now, but it used to mirror some Reddit subreddits by automatically creating bot accounts for every Reddit user posting in them, and using that to post the same content in a Lemmy community. That's how the instance got over a million users, pretty much all of them are bots that do whatever the Reddit user with the same name is doing in one of the mirrored subreddits.

What you are describing is another part of the plan: Allowing the original Reddit users to take over their mirror accounts on Lemmy. Apparently it just creates accounts for them if no bot exists yet.

Bots on alien.top do that afaik. They impersonate real Reddit users after all.

How do they handle bots? Seems to me this statistic could be heavily inflated. Or do they account for that?

Here is their listing of users per instance, looks a bit sus to me ("Benutzer" means "Users"):

Show

The main story of Baldur's Gate 3 is pretty bland and mediocre.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a phenomenal game! The companion arcs, acting and overall presentation are still next level, some sidestories are very good, and it’s great how faithfully they adapted the D&D rules. But the main story ...

Most routers are actually small PCs, just optimized for the specific purpose of connecting to the internet over a phone or TV line, providing a separate internal network in your home and bridging the two. But you could do that with any regular PC with the right hardware.

Your ISP could also just provide you with a standard network connection, so you don't have to use a modem to transmit data over a line that was originally built for a different purpose. This is not very common since most houses still predate the internet, but it might become the norm at some point.

The main benefit of having a separate network is that devices in it are not directly visible and accessible from outside. All others see is your router, and they can only access your devices if you establish the connection first or manually forward ports. You can also structure the local network however you like (e.g. assign IPs and domain names, create subnets), without being restricted by or affecting the outside world.

There are some topics where this sorting mechanism is the only one that will give you good comments, like asking for unpopular or controversial opinions. 1000 people will get upvoted for posting things that aren't unpopular at all, and the few comments that are actually worth discussing get just as many down as up votes.

The answer is probably yes, if you download movies or shows somewhat regularly.

Together with Overseerr they can reduce the process of finding, downloading and organizing releases to just one click in a Netflix-like interface.They can also keep looking for better versions of your existing stuff and upgrade it automatically in the background. And there is Bazarr to automatically fetch missing subtitles.

I had also heard of them but waited a long time to finally check them out, and I wish I'd done the switch much sooner! It takes a bit to configure everything to your liking, but it saves soooo much time now and does things I would never have bothered to do by hand, like upgrading pretty much my entire library.

Fedora.

They have solid community and financial backings, they do tremendous work pushing the Linux desktop forward, it's close to vanilla and the sweet spot between stable and bleeding edge (aka "leading edge") for me personally.

I'm an atheist through and through, but the one thing I'm unsure about is consciousness.

We basically made zero progress in figuring out what it physically is, how to test for it or how it is created, despite every single one of us experiencing it first-hand every day of our lives. That might be a sign that our physical understanding of reality is just not equipped to deal with this question.

On the other hand, if it has physical consequences then it must measurably interact with the physical world, and maybe it emerges from the complex interactions in the brain somehow. I personally just cannot imagine how the thing I'm subjectively experiencing as myself could ever arise from "dead" atoms and molecules.

If testing continues to progress well, we anticipate unveiling a fully open Firefox for Android extension ecosystem sometime in December. Stay tuned for details.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/11/01/is-your-extension-ready-for-firefox-for-android/

Imo the easiest way to think about it is different servers that send each other messages to sync all the content between each other.

You connect to one of those servers, but it doesn't really matter which because the content is the same and you can contact people on all servers. For the same reason it doesn't really matter if one of the servers goes offline, and if one goes rogue the others can just not sync with it anymore.

Sure no problem

• Definitely. I have a bunch of devices with FF installed, so syncing them makes things much easier, and because it's selfhosted my data stays with me. Although just using Mozilla servers is pretty safe as well, because sync is e2e encrypted. That's not the case for Google sync, so switching from Chrome is the important part.
• You can do that, but afaik it's quite a bit more involved and not really worth it for me. I have a Mozilla account anyway, and the account server doesn't store any more personal data if you use it for syncing. But if you don't want a Mozilla account then it might be a good option.