Austria’s data protection authority has ruled that Microsoft unlawfully used tracking cookies on a student’s device through its education software, marking a further regulatory setback for the company’s use of personal data in schools.
The Austrian Data Protection Authority (DSB) has ordered Microsoft to stop using tracking cookies in its Microsoft 365 Education service after finding that the company processed a pupil’s data without valid consent.
I want a more efficient public sector, just cutting top line costs with no regard does not make it more efficient.
Banning Microsoft laggardly software would be one thing. They've built a walled garden and they want you to use it, and that's at the expense of better tools that do get the job done faster/easier/better. Eliminating make-work jobs would be good. Dumping seniority rules in the union would be good.
And you know what else: hire a full time per-department dedicated digital service. No, centralized isn't good enough. No, contracts aren't good enough.
Software is not a business. It is a strategy and a requirement. Our government needs to grow up and act like it, but it's infested with tech-illiterate boomers. Stop the endless rounds of dependency gathering to try to get one solution that does it all with one mega contract, and endless red-tape legal barriers that make it impossible for non-US mega-corp contractors to get contracts.
A dedicated digital service would always meet requirements because they would be involved in them. It
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I want a more efficient public sector, just cutting top line costs with no regard does not make it more efficient.
Banning Microsoft laggardly software would be one thing. They've built a walled garden and they want you to use it, and that's at the expense of better tools that do get the job done faster/easier/better. Eliminating make-work jobs would be good. Dumping seniority rules in the union would be good.
And you know what else: hire a full time per-department dedicated digital service. No, centralized isn't good enough. No, contracts aren't good enough.
Software is not a business. It is a strategy and a requirement. Our government needs to grow up and act like it, but it's infested with tech-illiterate boomers. Stop the endless rounds of dependency gathering to try to get one solution that does it all with one mega contract, and endless red-tape legal barriers that make it impossible for non-US mega-corp contractors to get contracts.
A dedicated digital service would always meet requirements because they would be involved in them. It must be embedded inside departments for continuous feedback and iteration, no other model works, ever. It needs to pay competitively, and acknowledge the fact that there are thousands of tech workers like me would never meet the insane public sector hoops, or deal with the low pay scale, or the large amounts of bureaucracy.
Last year I actually looked into how I could help either the government or the armed forces, and basically, I am not "qualified" for any of their listings, despite over a decade of experience and delivering hundreds of projects.
I've been using Linux for a over a decade, but haven't used anything Gnomey in a while. I gave PopOS another try the other day because I needed a simple distro to put on a home PC for my partner to use. This is the most usable Gnome distro I have ever found!
I won't be switching myself anytime soon, but I really like the way the tiles on Cosmic expand to always keep the screen full. I know KDE can tile using shortcuts, but have ant of you come across something on KDE that autoresizes the tiles like Pop does?
Oversimplification. COSMIC lacks like 95% of what GNOME has that is important for regular users, like the vast extension ecosystem or GSConnect as simple examples.
Cosmic runs its own window manager called cosmic-comp, whereas Gnome uses Mutter. The tiling is baked into the Cosmic window manager, whereas you'd need to use an extension to get the same functionality on Gnome.
Glad to hear you're liking it, though! While I currently use Gnome with the PaperWM extension, Mutter is frustratingly behind on some current WM improvements (without good reason, IMO).
If you enjoy the tiling aspects, check out similar projects like Niri, as their window management shares some of the same codebase! Lots of neat projects out there, these days.
Not familiar with PopOS Tiling, but my goto tiling for KDE is Krohnkite It can be installed inside of KDE via Settings / Kwin Scripts / "Get new..." It has lots of keyboard shortcut and of course you can change them.
I've never used it but since it's basically a kwin script I'd bet you can change them in system settings, like in system settings -> keyboard -> keyboard shortcuts -> Window management (or however it is named in english) -> look up for krohnite
E: Or maybe, just maybe, in its entry in the Kwin scripts section - System settings -> Window management (or however it is named in english) -> Kwin scripts -> Krohnite -> Click or tap the cog button -> maybe there should be something related to keyboard shortcuts
It is the first one, yes. Just the normal keyboard shortcut settings. And all the Krohnkite shortcuts are prefixed with "Krohnkite", so you can find them easily.
Well, PopOS is a distribution, based on Ubuntu, shipping a desktop. That desktop was formerly a customized GNOME, now they have their completely own desktop environment.
The tiling might be similar between both but their GNOME extension is probably deprecated now.
Cosmic has dynamic tiling, while KDE has many manual tiling features which may be less efficient but require nearly no setup.
Used to be that KDE would let you run other window managers than the default kwin. If that capability still exists, you might just be able to borrow Cosmic's WM and implant it in your KDE session.
I believe, that's something which became impossible with Wayland?
But it wasn't very good under X11 either. Even back then, it was much less clunky to use the various KWin scripts, which offer tiling. Well, and by now Plasma has built-in semi-automatic tiling, which those scripts basically just configure, so they do now feel quite smooth.
KDE has native tiling built in. Simply press the (default) hotkey Win+T to set up your tiling zones, and then hold shift while moving a window and it'll snap into that area.
Their operations become somewhat declassified after X years (I don't remember the exact number, but there is law for it). You can see many of their documents on the CIA website. For example, the Aerodynamic operation.
I mean basically everything bad ever right? Coups and proxy wars all over the world, spying on everyone, torturing, human trafficking, drug experiments, assassinations, mass murder, etc.
Can you point to relevant documents? I have heard of involvement in coups but I have not heard anything about them being behind so-called color revolutions, which I believe is a dangerous made up word used to justify imperialist repression against dissidents and protesters.
Some on the right are now referring to the current events in Minnesota as a color revolution, and I believe this is a result of our lack of criticism of this very dubious term.
There's simply no evidence any nation has been able to engineer a popular uprising. Such a thing is not possible. People feel how they feel and they hate their government for a reason.
It's just selectively chosen and distorted facts and invectives against the enemies of authoritarian leftists. It's not a serious attempt to document reality.
As an example, I looked at the page on color revolutions the user above recommended. It's just a series of unsupported assertions with no supporting evidence. It literally doesn't contain a single reference.
I do find it useful for evaluating leftists though. I find when prolewiki criticizes them then it's usually because they actually care about facts and have consistent values. So it does have some use.
References Statista (2022). Catolicismo y evangelismo: las dos religiones más comunes en Latinoamérica – Statista UNDP Human Development Report (2021-22). Human Devlopment Report 2021/22 – UNDP "Chile: The Failed Socialist Revolution" (2019-09-14). Politsturm. Archived from the original on 2021-08-27. Retrieved 2022-06-12. Jeremy Kuzmarov (2022-09-21). "Murder on Embassy Row—46 Years On: Remembering the Assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt" CovertAction Magazine. Archived from the original on 2024-07-23. Vijay Prashad (2008). The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World: 'La Paz' (pp. 147–8). [PDF] The New Press. ISBN 9781595583420 [LG] Notes Spanish: República de Chile
There are also people like Chris Hedges, Greg Palast and multiple others. But I already knew you weren't sincere and wouldn't accept any sources.
What I find fascinating, and I've certainly been guilty in years past, is the louder and more "confident" people are, the more uninformed,
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References Statista (2022). Catolicismo y evangelismo: las dos religiones más comunes en Latinoamérica – Statista UNDP Human Development Report (2021-22). Human Devlopment Report 2021/22 – UNDP "Chile: The Failed Socialist Revolution" (2019-09-14). Politsturm. Archived from the original on 2021-08-27. Retrieved 2022-06-12. Jeremy Kuzmarov (2022-09-21). "Murder on Embassy Row—46 Years On: Remembering the Assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt" CovertAction Magazine. Archived from the original on 2024-07-23. Vijay Prashad (2008). The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World: 'La Paz' (pp. 147–8). [PDF] The New Press. ISBN 9781595583420 [LG] Notes Spanish: República de Chile
There are also people like Chris Hedges, Greg Palast and multiple others. But I already knew you weren't sincere and wouldn't accept any sources.
What I find fascinating, and I've certainly been guilty in years past, is the louder and more "confident" people are, the more uninformed, misinformed, or guilty they turn out to be.
I reacted the way I did because you basically said "lol google it nerd" instead of providing useful information. You get what you give in online discourse.
Well I am using the term as distinct from a coup. A coup is when a small circle of power holders (usually but not always the military) seize power without the involvement of the masses.
When people talk about color revolutions in my experience, it's usually an attempt to smear popular uprisings as being artificially created by some hostile foreign power. To my knowledge, such a thing has never happened. This is because it's far more difficult to motivate the thousands or even millions of people needed to take such actions. You can't simply pay them off or order them the way you can with a handful of generals.
The Shah was put in power in one of many coups supported or orchestrated by the US. But I would not describe it as a color revolution because there was little involvement of the general public. It was a struggle between elite factions.
You can literally read documents that have been declassified. Anyone can. Even if you are being pedantic, they released their own classified documents. If that doesn't count as admission i honestly don't know what would.
I'm not doing research to support your claims. That's your job. The CIA has declassified mountains of documents, most of which are irrelevant to this question. And I can't prove that something is not in there. You can prove it is. Or you can fail to do so.
I have yo. Yet you still disagree. If you won't look at it yourself, then don't act like you have any leg to stand on. You can't say the sky is falling then refuse to look up.
WHEN DOES A SEPARATIST movement become a threat to Canada’s national security?
This is a question hanging in the air in Alberta. People are asking how it can possibly be that the very same individuals who are leading the separatist movement can also be three meetings deep into a relationship with senior officials of the Donald Trump administration in Washington, with a fourth scheduled for this month.
It is, as we know, entirely legal in Canada to advocate and campaign in support of a province or territory leaving Confederation. This is covered by the Clarity Act but also by the Charter, which protects the rights of citizens to free expression, assembly, and association.
Any organic political movement that is based in a genuine desire to achieve an outcome of their design is free to pursue that through whatever lawful means are available to them. Foreign interference in such movements, however, is where the line between lawful advocacy and dissent crosses into territory that constitutes a threat to Canada’s national security.
The Canadian Securi
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WHEN DOES A SEPARATIST movement become a threat to Canada’s national security?
This is a question hanging in the air in Alberta. People are asking how it can possibly be that the very same individuals who are leading the separatist movement can also be three meetings deep into a relationship with senior officials of the Donald Trump administration in Washington, with a fourth scheduled for this month.
It is, as we know, entirely legal in Canada to advocate and campaign in support of a province or territory leaving Confederation. This is covered by the Clarity Act but also by the Charter, which protects the rights of citizens to free expression, assembly, and association.
Any organic political movement that is based in a genuine desire to achieve an outcome of their design is free to pursue that through whatever lawful means are available to them. Foreign interference in such movements, however, is where the line between lawful advocacy and dissent crosses into territory that constitutes a threat to Canada’s national security.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act is clear on this. CSIS itself does not have a mandate to investigate “lawful advocacy, protest or dissent” unless these forms of activity are carried on in conjunction with the range of activities which the act defines as threats to the security of Canada.
Those threats include espionage or sabotage harmful to Canada’s interests; covert or deceptive foreign-influenced activities that undermine Canada or threaten individuals; support for or direction of serious violence against people or property to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals; and covert, unlawful acts aimed at undermining, overthrowing, or destroying Canada’s constitutionally established system of government through violence. In short, the act draws a clear line between protected democratic activity and conduct that involves foreign interference, secrecy, violence, or efforts to subvert the state itself.
They seem to think they’ll get to give Alberta resources to the grifter. In a way I wish they’d do it so I could laugh in their faces when they get shafted by him as well as everyone else he’s conned.
gotta think strategically. it's not the time to be leftist right now. we just gotta wait until elections and put kamala hamala in power.
then we rest assured fascism doesn't exist anymore as long as you keep voting for whoever you think is not fascist. but for now just give everything they want so they don't get angry.
"Oh no by moving left we mean we're going to very strongly condemn ice but then also condemn anyone principled enough to take a real stance" - Average shitlib
I also realized if OOP is a man, that sometimes women will judge men on their financial status because the traditional path assumes "the woman" will need to depend on "the man" financially as a stay-at-home mom, and so a desirable man to a traditional, straight woman is usually a wealthy man.
Since I'm a gay woman and I accidentally assumed OOP was also a gay woman, I found it really confusing why she was worried the girl she is going out on a date would judge her for her old but reliable car.
The whole meme makes more sense to me with OOP being a straight man 😅
My ex and I were joking about that. I asked her what kind of car would instantly cause her to nope out if someone came to pick her up... "PT Cruiser." No hesitation.
I am inclined to agree.
As for the "assumed OOP" thing - we all do that, I think. I know I do constantly and have to check myself, even though I think it's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. That is, of course, as long as we can all agree about PT Cruisers. ;)
I think a Hummer would give me the ick faster; I feel like a PT Cruiser is ugly and poor taste, but I would at least find out if like they inherited the car or someone gifted them the car before nopeing out, whereas a Hummer wouldn't probably get that level of benefit of the doubt, I would be looking for the quickest opportunity to nope.
I think I would also feel that way about Corvettes and certain other luxury cars. BMW is also a red flag. Lexus is borderline.
But yeah, I'm also not a typical person who actually went on dates or participated in much courting. At some point it was my goal to never have a romantic partner, and I see it as a fluke (even a failure) that someone found me anyway.
💬 31 🔁 10497 ❤️ 13181 · Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voi…
My '10 Versa's having the same humidity problems from so many rear end collisions. The cabin smells so moldy and nothing seems to work. It's a shame really because that thing can drive for another 100k miles easily.
Get some of these and it should take care of the moisture issues. One should last at least 3-4 months. Replace as needed. Then just find some kind of fabric cleaner and air freshener and you should be good to go.
Never been in one but they definitely seem nice. driving any 90s/2000s sedan would definitely make me like a date better, especially given how many people I know drive horrible modern SUVs
Definitely. I miss driving sedans and small hatchbacks, up until a few years ago they’re all I’d ever driven.
I currently have a Kia Sportage only because I moved to a rural area and needed something that could deal with country roads and off-road. Otherwise I’d still be driving my old ‘07 Accent, that thing gave me zero problems in well over 100k miles.
Decades of propaganda by the auto industry, especially through cinema and TV, has programmed people to think that if you don't have a nice car you won't get laid.
Yes and it cuts both ways. Prior to transition when I was driving an Infiniti I got female attention but driving beat up Hyundais and Fords the only attention I got was from the police, like driving around with a sign that says, "pull me over".
Post transition my life circumstances are much better but the cars affect my dating prospects totally differently. Driving a brand new performance model EV in 2022 I had at least two dates where the guy would lose all interest in me once they saw I was driving a car that costed several times their annual income.
You could literally see all interest melt off their face, "my car is the white sedan, can you drop me off there?"
Immediate flip from being warm and engaged to this cold, "gtfo out of my Nissan" vibe
You can't have a shitty car as a man and you can't have a nicer car as a trans woman
Driving a brand new performance model EV in 2022 I had at least two dates where the guy would lose all interest in me once they saw I was driving a car that costed several times their annual income.
It’s a class war thing more than anything. Cops will pick on you more if you drive certain models of cars or a car that’s a total clunker with a busted window that’s taped up. Most people here don’t really care what you drive in the dating world unless you come from a wealthier background and are a snooty dick about it.
MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum announced Sunday she plans to send humanitarian aid to Cuba this week, including food and other humanitarian aid.
Sheinbaum's comments came after U.S. President Donald Trump said he asked the Mexican leader to suspend oil shipments to the Caribbean island.
Sheinbaum said at a public event in the northern state of Sonora that she did not discuss Cuban affairs in a phone conversation with Trump on Thursday. She added that her government seeks to “ diplomatically solve everything related to the oil shipments (to Cuba) for humanitarian reasons.”
Earlier, Trump told reporters that he told the Mexican president not to send oil to Cuba.
I have a few old automations that are designed to unlock my front door, or open my garage door, depending on how I leave. If I ride my bike or car, it opens my garage, if I leave via front door, it opens the front door. Pretty simple. Except!!! I did this in pieces, so it's 2 separate automations. One detects my phone entering the "home zone", the other detects an event firing (iOS triggered the event via 'shortcuts')
There is now "zone based" automations, and there is also my "person entity". So the way I see it, I have 3 different ways to tell when I come home:
My phone's gps enters the 'home zone'
My HA 'person' state changes from 'away' to 'home'
My phone's shortcut app fires an event that is detected.
I feel like #1 and #2 are the same, no? I only have one device linked to my person entity, and it's my phone. Is there any difference in this case? Is there a preferred choice?
Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) advanced American farmers and equipment owners’ lawful right to repair their farm and other nonroad diesel equipment.
Dr. Michael Antil moved from North Carolina to Toronto in July 2023, seeking a more diverse and broad-minded environment for his family and a universal health-care system in which to practice. But three years later, despite Canada's well-documented doctor shortage and so many theoretical routes to citizenship for skilled workers like himself, he still doesn't have permanent residency.
Antil came to Canada with over two decades' experience in the States — and he is now adeptly managing an above-average load of over 2,000 patients at a Toronto clinic. Yet he and his wife (an ESL teacher) are still living by dint of temporary work permits, their children are facing international student fees for post-secondary education, and he had to cough up an additional 25 per cent foreign buyers' tax on his house.
Rifling through an inches-tall stack of paperwork, the 50-year-old told White Coat, Black Art host Dr. Brian Goldman about all the hoops, hurdles and red tape he’s come up against since first applying for permanent residency in 2023.
He has been rejected t
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Dr. Michael Antil moved from North Carolina to Toronto in July 2023, seeking a more diverse and broad-minded environment for his family and a universal health-care system in which to practice. But three years later, despite Canada's well-documented doctor shortage and so many theoretical routes to citizenship for skilled workers like himself, he still doesn't have permanent residency.
Antil came to Canada with over two decades' experience in the States — and he is now adeptly managing an above-average load of over 2,000 patients at a Toronto clinic. Yet he and his wife (an ESL teacher) are still living by dint of temporary work permits, their children are facing international student fees for post-secondary education, and he had to cough up an additional 25 per cent foreign buyers' tax on his house.
Rifling through an inches-tall stack of paperwork, the 50-year-old told White Coat, Black Art host Dr. Brian Goldman about all the hoops, hurdles and red tape he’s come up against since first applying for permanent residency in 2023.
He has been rejected three times on various technicalities even though, he says with a rueful laugh, "Ontario needs doctors.”
Over 2.5 million Ontarians are without a family doctor, according to the Ontario Medical Association. Across Canada that number sits at around 5.9 million.
It's ALL in the article. You should read it because it's very good.
Antil’s immigration journey began in 2023, when, with a five-year contract at the Albany clinic in hand, he settled in Toronto with a licence from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) and an Ontario work permit.
Getting the former was a four-month back-and-forth process that Antil meticulously completed step by step, which he likens to building an intricate Lego set.
Getting the latter meant making a 13-hour drive from North Carolina to Buffalo, N.Y. — on the advice of an immigration lawyer after his application, filed that February, had still not been answered by June.
Things got harder after that. Antil also applied to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s (IRCC) express entry under the Federal Skilled Worker program — a competitive permanent residency stream that assigns applicants a points-based score, and then invites those with a high enough score to apply for the accelerated process; shorter than the usual six months.
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It's ALL in the article. You should read it because it's very good.
Antil’s immigration journey began in 2023, when, with a five-year contract at the Albany clinic in hand, he settled in Toronto with a licence from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) and an Ontario work permit.
Getting the former was a four-month back-and-forth process that Antil meticulously completed step by step, which he likens to building an intricate Lego set.
Getting the latter meant making a 13-hour drive from North Carolina to Buffalo, N.Y. — on the advice of an immigration lawyer after his application, filed that February, had still not been answered by June.
Things got harder after that. Antil also applied to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s (IRCC) express entry under the Federal Skilled Worker program — a competitive permanent residency stream that assigns applicants a points-based score, and then invites those with a high enough score to apply for the accelerated process; shorter than the usual six months.
But upon arriving, Antil didn’t meet that points threshold — though fluent in Spanish, he didn’t speak French, and his age (then 47) was considered high.
So he applied through the Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program (OINP), which awards bonus IRCC points to people with valuable skills. But it also required more forms, including additional certification of his U.S. medical school diploma — odd, he says, since he already has a medical licence in Ontario.
A months-long comedy of errors ensued — including a two-month delay because his notary signed Antil’s photo over, not under, his seal. So Antil missed the OINP deadline and they closed his application. He got the certification two weeks later so he filed an appeal, but still hasn't heard back.
So Antil applied, again, through IRCC but made two errors — ticking the box that said "doctoral degree" instead of "professional degree" and submitting an educational transcript for his wife that didn't have the official IRCC approval stamp. Those errors proved fatal to his application.
Antil is now working with immigration lawyer Ilene Solomon, who wasn’t surprised to learn about those rejections on what some may see as technicalities.
It's a "rigid" system, she said, "and one mistake is fatal."
Interesting read but that's just another one in a myriad of cases. This is the norm.
100% of my acquaintances that did not get professional services to prepare the application forms and documents (because that help is very expensive) had at least one rejection due to a form mistake or weird edge case.
Even with professional help I had trouble getting my wife's fingerprints validated because her digitals are so dim that ink-on-paper fingerprinting just doesn't work, it's a black blob every time, and during our year-long process the government changed the rule so that digital submissions were no longer valid so it had to be ink-on-paper.
In response to user feedback on AI integration, Mozilla announced today that the next Firefox release will let users disable AI features entirely or manage them individually.
With the launch of optical media in game consoles such as the Sony PlayStation 1. The console could be hacked with a use of a simple modchip - an unauthorized hardware modification that was soldered directly onto the motherboard. This was done to circumvent security features. While the original goal was for piracy and backups, as modchips evolved, so did their use cases. Everything from Region Free, homebrew, emulators, makeshift development kits and more were soon possible. In today's video we look at the earliest modchips and how they shaped the video game landscape.
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
Hehe same, I powered on a stock system to play a few years ago and I'm like sitting there wondering if it's broken or if this really all there was to the stock system LMAO
Meet new people in your area, absolutely privately using open-source technologies. You're only a few clicks away to find new friends, dating and sexual partners.
I can only guess but I think it's a combination of a lack of effective anti-bot protections and it being a sort of dead platform (so the only users that remain are largely bots which never leave)
Then I guess isn't worthy trying to use it. It's sad cause sounded like an alternative for Tinder and the rest of meeting apps from the Play Store that have the Google infestation on them.
Unfortunately I think projects like this have extra challenges over even regular social media platforms. There's also retromeet which seems even more dead (it may have not even made it to a stable release).
The idea is great but for a dating app to work, it needs to quickly get past two network effects: the global network effect (there must be enough people globally, or in a larger region, to get other people interested in trying out the platform) and the local network effect (there must be enough people to match with in most users' local areas to keep enough people interested). With corporate backing that's easy enough to do with a dedicated team to market and develop, but FOSS rarely has that sort of manpower. Slow growth is hard too, since users tend to leave dating apps quite often.
There's also the funny problem if the dev gets a partner usually the partner doesn't appreciate them staying on dating apps. Developing a dating app could be even worse for the relationship... actually now that I think of it, maybe I should make start a similar project since I don't like dating...
needs to quickly get past two network effects: the global network effect [..] and the local network effect
Sounds like a job for Fedi-date! If you could somehow hook a dating app into the fediverse, then maybe it could survive long enough to get sufficient users. If it also offers more general IRL meet-ups (like meetup.com but without the corpo rent-seeking), then it could perhaps begin to get popular that way too.
Though I do agree that having a broader scope than just the hot-or-not swipe thing would really help to attract enough people to join. Retromeet doesn't seem to do that, though I haven't used it so I could be wrong.
Local network effect is enough, even when it’s restricted to a specific demographic or subculture. Once a dating platform grabs a hold in a location and demographic, it can extend from there.
Of course to keep a project like this running, you need a way to pay for hosting and development.
Maybe we can agree to disagree because I don't think a specific demographic is enough to overcome the negative network effect at the start. The problem, imo, is that the attrition rate of dating apps is really high and dating apps are only good if a lot of people are located geographically nearby. You either need broad appeal to avoid running out of people early on or a demographic that is unusually geographically concentrated and usurps the attrition rate (ENM comes to mind for the latter).
Of course, you could always make something for dating without the geo proximity, but I think most people won't want to use something like that at all.
The beauty of new FOSS projects is that they're quite often hosted and developed for free, so I don't think that's much of a limiting factor as long as the community is there. That's also why I think it's important to make it big quickly, because that's the way to get a big enough community before the creator loses interest.
I was specifically thinking about men who have sex with men. Grindr and similar platforms are very successful. Most of it is about casual sex between promiscuous men. They are also a great target group otherwise. Travel between gay metropolises is common as. Pride tourism is big.
The mainstream apps (at least the ones that have been around a while) have bot ratios which are much better. They also have active moderation teams which remove profiles that make it through the automated protections. I'd guess they have ratios closer to 20:1 than 1:20 (people:bots)
I think a lot of engineers underestimate the amount of non-technical effort that goes into running platforms with users.
It's a shame I think there are some really interesting problems that a less profit driven dating app but currently anything without a big marketing budget isn't going to have the userbase to support it.
This kinda app would need at least an attempt at a technical solution to the bot problem. An open source app can't just pay people to kick bots out. And even the paid apps that can are drowning in bots.
Something cryptographic maybe. Tor is kinda magical, makes anonymity possible while the each machine knows who they are talking to. Maybe something where you can show that you are "a verified user" without showing exactly which one.
Other apps do have some good anti-bot measures which could be adopted for a FOSS project. The problem with a lot of cryptographic solutions for this is that often cryptography is usually more about proving your identity more than proving something about your identity. Tor is also focused on privacy from middle-men, which doesn't really make sense for a dating app.
I think the challenge boils down to how to prove you're human without biometrics or other PII. And I think the sad reality is that you can't prove it. Though you may be able to prove you have unique PII with some sort of zero-knowledge proof...
Maybe it would need to draw on experiences of moderating chat rooms and forums - these are very often done by volunteers who put a lot of time and energy into it because they believe in it.
There is also the "Web Of Trust" concept, where, given that everyone can prove their identity, people can then vouch for each other.
no need. this kind of individualistic approach to solve this problem isn't being effective so far. we'd need to find a better solution to the network effect.
M with Arch and Long Socks looking for that special self hosted someone with BPM>0, let's meet at the abandoned factory and compare notes about brutalist architecture.
I used it to chat with people and someone suggested what ended up being one my favorite albums. You won't meet the love if your life, but IMO still worth to spend some time there, you can find very interesting stuff.
I checked it out for fun some time ago. I really appreciated how unmonetized and not emotionally manipulative it was. There's like no people on there though.
panda_abyss
in reply to BrikoX • • •I want a more efficient public sector, just cutting top line costs with no regard does not make it more efficient.
Banning Microsoft laggardly software would be one thing. They've built a walled garden and they want you to use it, and that's at the expense of better tools that do get the job done faster/easier/better. Eliminating make-work jobs would be good. Dumping seniority rules in the union would be good.
And you know what else: hire a full time per-department dedicated digital service. No, centralized isn't good enough. No, contracts aren't good enough.
Software is not a business. It is a strategy and a requirement. Our government needs to grow up and act like it, but it's infested with tech-illiterate boomers. Stop the endless rounds of dependency gathering to try to get one solution that does it all with one mega contract, and endless red-tape legal barriers that make it impossible for non-US mega-corp contractors to get contracts.
A dedicated digital service would always meet requirements because they would be involved in them. It
... show moreI want a more efficient public sector, just cutting top line costs with no regard does not make it more efficient.
Banning Microsoft laggardly software would be one thing. They've built a walled garden and they want you to use it, and that's at the expense of better tools that do get the job done faster/easier/better. Eliminating make-work jobs would be good. Dumping seniority rules in the union would be good.
And you know what else: hire a full time per-department dedicated digital service. No, centralized isn't good enough. No, contracts aren't good enough.
Software is not a business. It is a strategy and a requirement. Our government needs to grow up and act like it, but it's infested with tech-illiterate boomers. Stop the endless rounds of dependency gathering to try to get one solution that does it all with one mega contract, and endless red-tape legal barriers that make it impossible for non-US mega-corp contractors to get contracts.
A dedicated digital service would always meet requirements because they would be involved in them. It must be embedded inside departments for continuous feedback and iteration, no other model works, ever. It needs to pay competitively, and acknowledge the fact that there are thousands of tech workers like me would never meet the insane public sector hoops, or deal with the low pay scale, or the large amounts of bureaucracy.
Last year I actually looked into how I could help either the government or the armed forces, and basically, I am not "qualified" for any of their listings, despite over a decade of experience and delivering hundreds of projects.
It's asinine.