Thanks, it's late here now but I'll try to look soon. I didn't realize significant improvements over Goldberg etc al were really possible. I'll try to understand that too.

Is there another post somewhere giving a general description of what you are doing?

Do you have a link about your messaging app? And PIR doesn't conceal the existence of traffic, so it doesn't seem like the right thing for messaging. It's more for databases as the name implies. What exactly are you trying to do?

See if there is anything useful here:

• https://old.reddit.com/r/Masks4All/comments/sqxvvl/earloop_mask_recommendationalternative_to
• https://old.reddit.com/r/Masks4All/comments/ssdb39/best_n95kf94_mask_for_really_big_faces/

Unfortunately those seem to be earloop style masks though.

The 3M 6200 (elastomeric half facepiece respirator) is available in different sizes. I have the medium and it fits me ok, so you might see about a large. This type of mask makes you look like Darth Vader so I tend to save it for special occasions.

I've had pretty bad luck with the Gerson 3230 since they fall apart rather rapidly. I bought a box of 50 and still have a few left, so if you want, I can probably send you a couple to try.

I do like the 3M Aura 9205 except for the rubber straps, but again, they are sized ok for me and might be too small for you.

This seems to be different and is geared towards directly looking after other humans. Hactivism as I'm used to the term, can often be technocratic.

scrutinize the protocol beforehand.

Sorry but that buys into the data miners' self serving myths. It implies the protocol is ok unless some failure makes it leak more information than was intended. In fact it's invasive even if it works exactly as hoped. "Tracking" is a misnomer too. It's hostile surveillance even if it's at population level. (Any nonconsensual surveillance that produces info to be used by people you don't like is hostile by definition. And it's near guaranteed that some of the buyers-advertisers, political campaigns and funders, govt agencies, whatever-will be people you don't like). So shut it down.

This was basically Blondies Pizza back in the day. Also the nitter thread is from 2019.

If we told just anyone, it wouldn't be private!!!!

Srsly any phone app is inherently insecure because the phone itself is insecure. And there's lots of metadata leakage, like the phone broadcasting its location. There is no "go to app". It all depends on what you are trying to do and who you are trying to communicate with.

Sort by newest first.

They want to obsolete all our phones again? No thanks.

I'd like the feed to be adjusted so that if there are a bunch of posts from the same community not too far apart from each other chronologically, to group them all together. Alternatively, a way to block communities showing in your front page view without blocking them completely. It's not just memes, there are a bunch of other topics that also clutter up the front page constantly. Even things like news reports in Dutch, which are perfectly legit except I can't read them, would be less annoying with this type of feature.

He is the one guy who doesn't have to worry about the Spanish Inquisition. Cardinal Fang!

This forwards to an (oh the irony) blogspot post, https://articlesgallery8543.blogspot.com/2023/10/lets-decentralize-web-together.html It encourages people to move off sites like facebook towards sites like lemmy. Great but I think we knew that already.

About a year ago I found Osmand near unusable. Maybe I should try it again. I currently use Organic Maps and it's pretty good, though it's missing a few basic features that are probably on a todo list. Also, some of its data is wrong. I expect Osmand uses the same wrong data. Unfortunately last time I hit an error, I had no internet, but will try again next time I'm there.

Psychologists are therapists. Just specifically trained.

Nah, there are psychologists who measure axon potentials in rats and stuff like that. Therapy is an area in clinical psychology, which is a subfield of psychology, but you can get a psychology degree without ever going near that subfield. You get to be Dr. Rat Maze or whatever. But who knows, you might end up training the next Algernon who then takes over the world.

Source: had a grad student housemate doing that type of research. He said when people heard he was studying psychology, they thought he was getting trained to be a marriage counselor. Nope, nothing of the sort.

I don't care much about any of these technical intricacies regarding word matching. I want Lemmy to be a human institution, which means no bots editing people's posts beyond possible spam control. If there is a serious trolling problem featuring specific keywords in a community, I'm fine with a moderator manually kicking off some automatic action to remove a bunch of posts at the same time. But we don't need robot nannies surveilling and messing with all of our posts.

Here's another example, not from here. Before celullar phones, before television, before broadcast radio and even before the telephone, there was the telegraph. Communications with it were done in Morse code, by operators tapping away on telegraph keys. Telegraph keys were typically made of brass, and people who used them all day were called "brass pounders". That profession is long since obsolete, but there are still ham radio enthusiasts who use Morse code as a hobby, and there is a group of them called the BPL, for "Brass Pounder's League". There are also people who simply try to honor the history of the venerable telegraph even though they recognize it as being a relic from the bygone era.

Anyway, where am I going. Someone started a pretty good site about telegraphy and telegraph keys, called "brasspounder.net" which was a really cool name. Unfortunately Google's algorithm seems to have classified that name as that of a porn site, because it saw the word you get if you ignore the "br" at the beginning, leaving "ass pounder". Whoops. The site ended up changing its name to telegraphy.net, which is fine but less evocative in my opinion. Oh well.

The above is an example of the so-called Sremovedhorpe problem. Let's see if Lemmy has that too.

Large ones can be a pain and I've generally converted those to other formats even it's at some cost in disk space.

How well do you think the federation model is working, in terms of cultural dynamics, more defederations than I would have expected to see, etc.? I'm not counting technical glitches that I assume will get sorted out over time.

There's tons of memes and stuff, but I was never into that, so meh. My thing was specialized nerd groups and they are mostly not here yet. With time, maybe they will come.