Thanks :). I’ve actually been looking for the RSVP stuff and I wasn’t sure which RFC to look through (wasn’t sure if it was in the CalDAV one or the iCalendar one… and they’re weirdly huge). I appreciate you pointing me in the right direction!

Also was curious how they were implementing reactions in e-mail. I actually think it’s a good feature, and it’s one that’s slowly been making it into XMPP and stuff. Emoji reactions and stuff sound kind of dumb and like a “whatever, who cares?” feature, but I find that on platforms like slack they’re actually a really good way to deal with quickly confirming something / finalizing decisions / quickly gauging the opinion of a group. I think a huge problem with e-mail and instant messaging is that they can be quite noisy, so having a “quiet” way to respond without having a thread explode is actually pretty welcome in my opinion.

Which RFCs are you referring to?

Of course, I don’t think we’re actually in danger of bacteria suddenly eating through plastic like it’s a moldy apple or anything… Obviously wood is still hard to break down, and plastics aren’t too dissimilar. It’s just kind of cool that we can build something super cheaply out of plastic and it will hold up well in the elements without much care at all.

At the risk of sounding super ignorant the desire for plastic to biodegrade always seems really short-sighted to me? I understand that there are problems with plastic pollution for the ecosystem and that there may be health concerns with microplastics and whatnot… And that we probably shouldn’t make so many disposable items that we do want to degrade out of plastic (and that we should probably not have as many disposable items in the first place)… But plastics are also kind of miracle materials and ideally you want them to not break down in many use cases. Like, wouldn’t it be bad if all of a sudden we have bacteria that will eat through blood bags and plastic structures?

It seems like this article is mostly talking about studying microbes to design plastic eating enzymes that will help efficiently recycle plastic in the future, and that sounds super cool and very useful. But the whole “we should have bacteria that can quickly break down plastic in the environment” angle that I hear about a lot seems kind of risky to me because one of the reasons plastics are so awesome is that they’re very resistant to degradation… Maybe I’m just ignorant, though.

It’s a bit odd… I guess people just want to feel justified in their own beliefs about the thing which manifests as anger. But I think there’s often perfectly reasonable justifications for these things too… Like, Uber and Lyft both required drivers to mask, so it’s perfectly reasonable for them to just keep the mask on between picking up passengers, and in that case it really wouldn’t be useless… Maybe somebody is picking somebody up or just dropped somebody off and feels more comfortable keeping the mask on in the meantime… Maybe it’s just easier to put the mask on at home and they don’t want to fiddle with it during the day… Or maybe it’s completely pointless, but it doesn’t harm anybody so who cares?

Honestly, I’ve just found the response to COVID (particularly in the USA) really depressing to the point where I just don’t want to be around people anymore. I guess just all of the selfishness and vitriol about the whole thing really took a toll on me.

Yeah, and I mean I really want people to be better about masking when it matters too… But I think it’s best to not get too mad about the people who are trying and making some questionable tradeoffs of comfort / effectiveness or whatever. I don’t understand all of the weird things people do with masks, and it’d be nice if we could actually talk to people and say “hey, are you wearing a mask to protect yourself or others? I think this is making it a lot less effective!” and have people be receptive to that, because there probably are some people that just don’t think about it too much and don’t realize… But it’s difficult to have those conversations without it feeling confrontational, especially when the whole thing has become such a contentious issue.

I’m sure it’s a mix of things. Some of it’s probably a lack of understanding, and sometimes it’s a “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” situation. They might have their mask on and ready to go for situations where they might want to mask up or where somebody else might want them to mask up… Or… Whatever. Maybe even some people take it off to talk (which is frustrating) because they think it’s easier to communicate that way and worth the risk to themselves and others and they’ll pull it back up after because it still does limit exposure overall? I dunno. Maybe I shouldn’t speculate too much. I guess I’ve been on the other side of this where a bunch of people were complaining about people wearing masks outside alone because it’s “stupid and pointless” and I’ve definitely done that when going between places because it was just easier to keep the thing on for me (especially since I try to have it fit really well).

This was my immediate thought as well. It’s unfortunate, but there will probably always be people who abuse online platforms like this. It’s totally okay if you’re not up to the task of moderating disturbing content like that — it sounds like it can be a really brutal job. I don’t know what the moderation tools on Lemmy are like, but maybe there’s a way to flag different kinds of moderation concerns for different moderators (so not everybody has to be exposed to this kind of stuff if they’re not comfortable with it). And maybe there could also be a system where if user’s flag the post it can be automatically marked as NSFW and images can be hidden by default so moderators and other users don’t have to be exposed to it without warning (though of course such a system could potentially be abused as well). But beyond that I’m not sure what else you can do, aside from maybe limiting federation.

I’ve been thinking lately that I kind of miss things like IRC where you couldn’t really post pictures in chat. With things like Discord and Slack the off topic channels often devolve into people just sharing random memes they found funny at the time, and not really talking to each other. I’m sure there’s value in that too, but I think it can take up a lot of oxygen in the social space, so I’m not sure it’s always a win. Different formats encourage different ways of interacting with each other, I guess, and it’s interesting!

For some reason I find it really unlikely that Google would support a product for 10 years. They don’t exactly have a great track record…

Yeah monitors are my primary problem too. Can’t get them to work properly at all through the thunderbolt dock.

Hell, I’d settle for thunderbolt peripherals working reliably. Maybe it’s just a Linux problem (or maybe I don’t know what I’m doing), but I’ve never had a thunderbolt dock “just work” as advertised.

You’ll almost certainly be perfectly fine. AMD cards generally work a lot smoother, and the open source drivers means things can be well supported all the time and it’s great.

On Nvidia, in my experience, it’s occasionally a hassle if you’re using a bleeding edge kernel (which you won’t be if you’re on a “normal” distro), where something changes and breaks the proprietary Nvidia driver… And if Nvidia drops support for your graphics card in their driver you may have issues upgrading to a new kernel because the old driver won’t work on the new kernel. But honestly, I wouldn’t let any of this get in the way of running Linux. You have a new card, you’ll probably upgrade before it’s an issue, and the proprietary driver is something we all get mad about, but it mostly works well and there’s a good chance you won’t really notice any issues.

This is my experience as well. It’s a little disappointing. Still, if anybody has suggestions for xmpp communities I’d be happy to hear it!

I’m surprised how many fellow xmpp people I see on here, because I feel like matrix has a lot more of the public consciousness. It’s nice! I’m pretty happy with xmpp, though I wish I could find some larger communities.

Monal is okay. It chews up battery and recently did some heinous crimes with group chat notifications so I’ve switched to Siskin. Either way… Neither app is perfect. Xmpp is decent on iOS now, but still a little lacking.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes RAM getting “wiped” is a “feature”, e.g., you don’t want somebody to be able to pull information from RAM after you shut off your computer… but that’s not really what it’s designed for (and you can recover data from powered off RAM in some lucky cases). It’d be sweet if we could have fast non-volatile memory. Having a computer use 0 power when suspended and not having to worry about hibernating to disk would be sweet! I do kind of wonder about the security RAMifications of that, but I guess it’s not much worse than having a laptop suspended currently.

I’m on iOS and the biggest downside to iOS in my opinion is the $100/year developer fee, the Mac requirement for development, and the lack of side-loading. What this ultimately means is that it can be hard to find free / open source apps for iOS, especially ones like newpipe that might not be approved on the App Store. It’s honestly a pretty big bummer. Some other restrictions also mean that Safari is pretty much the only viable browser on iOS and ad-blocking / extensions are fairly limited. Another disappointment is that ad-supported apps seemed to be a lot more annoying than the Google equivalents, weirdly enough. I guess Google maybe has more / different guidelines about making ads supremely irritating, or maybe I just had better options for free apps on Android.

I’m curious what you mean by “in light of what Apple is doing”? As far as I know iOS isn’t really miles ahead of Android in any particular area – they’re more or less comparable in my experience, with iOS being a bit more limited in terms of customization and stuff (the fact that you still can’t place icons anywhere you want on the homescreen is baffling to me).

If I’m being entirely honest, I think I probably like the Android operating system more than I like iOS… Which is weirdly part of the reason I like iOS – I’m a little less tempted to look at my phone and a little less tempted to tinker with it. And there are are things that I like about my iPhone. The hardware is nice, the Apple Watch is really nice, FaceID is great, some things I thought would be silly like live photos are actually kind of nice, some of the iCloud features are great, and it’s nice that it pairs with other things in the Apple ecosystem well. Ultimately the main reason I’ve abandoned Android is that I just got sick of my Android phones dying all of the time and only getting software support for like 9 months. Apple’s support window is massive in comparison, which is also a big plus.

… It’s legitimately kind of funny that this is a valid mistake to make now, haha.

I’m still kind of upset that they’re AMD graphics cards now, instead of just being ATI cards. It’s kind of confusing, especially since the CPU and GPU naming schemes are quite similar.

This has not been my experience at all. I’ve had tap for over a decade in Canada, and large banks in the US here did not give me contactless cards a few year ago. In the past couple of years they seem to be rolling out more of them, but people always looked at me like I was a lunatic whenever I tried to tap my Canadian card to pay for something.