MiXplorer - https://mixplorer.com/

A file explorer allowing for me to transfer files over the network. When Solid Explorer suddenly didn’t seem to want to do network transfers anymore (likely because Windows updated something), I waited for that app to update to fix the issue. It never did. I found that MiXplorer was a good alternative that transfers files over the network just fine and works nice and fast as well. The interface takes a bit to get used to (meaning it isn’t the same as Solid Explorer) but the app is certainly worth using. Importantly, I can transfer files over the network without issue again.

Notably, this app is free to download (from XDA) however the Google Play version is not free. The Google Play version (which supports development) is a one time paid fee.

Someone may want to know if you are a Democrat or Republican (for advertising, for gerrymandering, whatever). That person may not be able to ask you a direct question like that though (or may feel that you may lie about the answer to such a question anyway).

As such, they likely carry out occasional surveys asking people who are Democrat or Republicans for their opinions on something else. Once they find something else that can strongly correlate your political affiliation with a specific opinion, they know of a new question they can ask someone. That new question should generally reveal what your political party is most likely and they can then proceed with that “most likely” answer.

So “who cares” is those who cannot directly ask you something. They will ask you something else and use that answer to deduce the information they cannot obtain directly.

Reddit, about yesterday, started to implement a change…

They have the old Reddit interface and then the one that replaced it (“new Reddit”) and the current interface you see on Reddit replaced that. People don’t like the most recent interface iteration but had the option to go to “new Reddit” or “old Reddit” by vising the appropriate links.

Notably, each newer interface seems to be more stressful for the servers to run. Still, likely a decent amount of folks don’t like the newest interface so likely the load balances out.

Yesterday though, they “pulled the lever” and “new Reddit” is no more. (This was announced about a month ago at this link but they only got around to doing it yesterday.) Those people trying to access “new Reddit” are redirected to the latest interface. You have the option to use the oldest Reddit interface or the newest one but not the “new Reddit” one. Since the latest interface seemed to use the most server resources before, it is interesting how Reddit seemed to have their severs overloaded a bit when they made the switchover.

On Reddit, people have been upset in /r/help that this has happened but Reddit will likely continue on with this change anyway. Old Reddit will continue to be supported (at least for now anyway).

ArsTechnica has a bit more detail. I’ll quote the important bit below.

… try to reboot affected machines over and over, which gives affected machines multiple chances to try to grab CrowdStrike’s non-broken update before the bad driver can cause the BSOD.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/07/crowdstrike-fixes-start-at-reboot-up-to-15-times-and-get-more-complex-from-there/

This seems like an interesting application of a “race condition”. They are hoping that the update outraces the program starting up enough to crash…

Notably, Digg updated which also involved a worse interface and didn’t have an “old Reddit” interface you could access. Going to a site that was like the old interface involved leaving Digg and joining Reddit.

That is likely why you can now access older Reddit interfaces. They feel that many people will stay if they can find a way to use the new interface (and they may be right about that). The Digg approach of forcing all to use the new interface was a step over the line for Digg and Reddit likely fears a similar thing could happen to them.

I wonder what’s happening?

In general…

Microsoft is being pushy and has started to enjoy that far too much.

This started with things that could be argued as things that users shouldn’t control (like refusing to patch update… you can’t really refuse anymore).

It then pushed to things that is a little less defensible (you were asked to update from Windows 7 to Windows 10… but they really don’t want you to say no).

Once you are on the newer Windows 10 or 11, features just arrive that you have no say about because Microsoft determined it is better for you (you have AI, now AI on your taskbar, in fact you have an AI key on your taskbar, you will use Microsoft AI… the AI will just sift through your entire computer so that it can jump in front of your face to emphasize that you should use their AI!).

They points all have the same theme. Microsoft knows best, you will do what Microsoft wants, and Microsoft won’t really take no for answer but may let you say “bother me later”… maybe. Once you are really pissed off, your only option is to leave a Microsoft operating system… which Microsoft is pretty sure you can’t figure out on your own (more reasonably, you won’t care to put in the work to learn another way) so Microsoft OS it is! Microsoft is a tad worried that those people are starting to wander off to get Google Chromebooks or just use their Android smartphones… those take less effort and more people are opting for that…

Still, Microsoft is relatively sure that people will just put up with what they are doing. I’m pretty sure they will… until they won’t. Microsoft will be fine so long as they don’t cross the line into the “until they won’t” territory. Once they won’t put up with that nonsense anymore, it is far harder to woo them back to a Microsoft OS in the future.

There is a website of a person who catalogs Texas Instruments calculators. You can wonder over to the graphing calculator section to see how many different graphing calculators they made along with a bit of information on each one.

http://datamath.org/

I guess faster loading could be it? But generally it’s more of a layout problem than a bandwidth one.

There was a website which I allowed ads on to help support them. One day, I went to that site in my browser and my laptop fans spun up at that time. Turns out that ads on that site caused my processor usage to spike near 100%. A reload fixed the issue. Once that same thing happened 2 to 3 more times, I just blocked all ads on that site from then on.

There are times that people can’t throw the resources of an Intel i5 processor towards rendering the advertisements on one website. I would think that is more common these days with Chromebooks running the modern equivalent of a Celeron processor. Phones also don’t have much processing power to give and will warm up and drain batteries all towards the all important goal of “render those advertisements”.

I think people tend to allow advertising until it becomes a major problem that needs resolved (such as if the site is bogging down your computer or if the advertising makes the site unable to be read easily). Since those people would then need to fix the issue and hopefully fix it for good, it is easy and efficient to just block out all advertising forever.

Looking around a bit, it seems like you have a myAudi app which you register your VIN to which then lets you access the additional features.

https://www.audiusa.com/us/web/en/about-myaudi/vehicle-functions.html

Problem with that is that it implies that you are the one purchasing the features for that vehicle. If the vehicle is sold as used then you unlink the VIN from your account so that the new buyer can register the VIN to them. Then the new buyer seems to have “nothing” and has to “purchase any of those features permanently” again.

With such a system in place, I could imagine that a proper Audi dealership can be authorized to “continue a permanent subscription” to a new used car buyer (or Audi can just offer those sorts of upcharges at the point of sale).

Regardless, permanent only likely applies to your ownership and not to the vehicle itself.

Here is a hopefully minor thing…

Reddit has multireddits where you can have a few that follows a certain selection of subreddits under a label. You can have multiple ones defined as well. Therefore, you can have a view for all things news (following multiple news things) without having to view those things on your main home feed (as well as any other defined topics that you can think of).

It would be nifty if such a thing could exist inside of Lemmy as well.

The quote about what is a hard brake exactly or heavy acceleration is most relevant to my thoughts. Without any context, are you hard braking to avoid dangers? How many hard brakes are acceptable? What is the penalty for hard braking, etc?

What happens if your specific vehicle has a sensor somewhat out of spec that keeps errantly triggering harsh braking? You wouldn’t know the sensor is activating, you wouldn’t know that the information is being fed to your insurance, and you wouldn’t know why your insurance is priced as it is. You have no transparency as to what is going on nor any realistic way of fixing the issue (because the vehicle runs fine after all and nobody can define what “harsh braking” even is).

Such a hypothetical situation is unlikely but even several dozen or hundred examples is a bit too much…

Also, since you are never directly informed that you are harshly braking or accelerating, you are unlikely to improve how you drive to avoid those things. If you had a notification that the braking action was a bit too harsh then you could strive to avoid that in the future… not so much if you are never told that in the first place.

If you don’t know, Reddit updated their interface in February and made it worse by doing so. People who tolerated the older “new” interface can find a way to use that (at new.reddit) while the older interface is still there too (old.reddit).

Still, it seems like Reddit keeps making changes to drive away their older user base which hypothetically is drawing in new users (otherwise it seems a bit silly for them to be doing those changes).

Can I comment on Beehaw (or lemmyNSFW, but I’m at work so not going there right now) using this account I have at lemmy.world?

Beehaw, no. They defederated from Lemmy.world. More information is at https://lemmy.world/post/145337 (iffy formatting) and https://beehaw.org/post/567170 (easier to read). A bit more information is also at https://lemmy.world/post/149743

LemmyNSFW, yes. The answer is yes for most instances.

Is there a way to easily see which instances are defederated from others (or conversely which instances are connected)?

To add to what others are saying, there is a list that may be helpful. Let me explain it a bit though.

The list below shows various Lemmy instances in a table. An instance can block another instances (this is what they control). The instance can be blocked by someone else (which they can’t control). Either way, a block is in place so the two cannot communicate.

The column header BL specifies how many instances they are blocking. The column header BB says how many instances are blocking them.

If they have a high BL, they likely do not want to federate with many other instances which can be a drawback. If they have a high BB, that instance is likely acting in such a poor manner that nobody wants to interact with them. Basically, you may want to reconsider instances which have an excessively high BL or BB.

Note that there are pretty bad places out there so having a BL of 0 can be an issue as well. A BB of 0 may indicate that an instance is very new so nobody really knows about them yet.

The list is sorted by how many users are at an instance. If the instance has a high amount of users, the service is likely a higher quality service that can grow over time. Small services aren’t bad per say but they may eventually disappear or overload if too many people join them.

Like most things, this is just more information to help guide you in your decision making. The best decision is one that you make on your own after you do your own research.

Anyway, the list is below.

https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances/blob/main/README.md#all-lemmy-instances

I’m on the Samsung A54 right now. I had one too many times using Google devices which decided to suddenly die on me (Nexus 5x, Google Pixel 4a) and Internet mummers seem to hint that newer Pixel devices seem to be continuing that same lack reliability. I have an older Samsung tablet that is still working (better described as something that just won’t die) so I decided to try the Samsung world of things to see if I can get the reliability I desire. So far, so good.

Curious about the Google device issues? The Nexus 5x worked great until it just died for good one night. The Pixel 4a worked great until it “turned off” at night making me miss all my alarms and requiring me to turn it back on. Now it is a coin toss if it will stay on overnight or just turn off for no reason making me miss all alarms. Apparently it can turn off when you are not using it which is a bit concerning for a device that should receive phone calls and sound alarms…

Can we sidestep the usual complaints about federation or instance-specific issues?

We could… but people have concerns about their communities being always operational and their accounts always working. They want to easily register here and have a smooth experience. They cannot easily register because they need to know a few things (like where to register) and if their experience will be significantly lousy if they make any mistakes. This is for both people providing content (users) and people managing communities (moderators) who also need to know that their jobs won’t be significantly harder when they come over here.

Great work on the https://fediverser.network/ site! A simple guided pathway towards a great Lemmy instance (and perhaps a Lemmy instance which hosts many communities that they want to interact with) would be a welcome addition. Perhaps there could be a similar guided pathway for mods trying to find a great place to set up their community would be helpful as well.

I think that you would first want to have people using both services and annoyances/problems with one service will cause people to abandon the lousy place to use the better place.

That being said, the Lemmy instance I registered to had broken federation approximately half the time and was down for significantly long amounts of time as well. People interacting there had their comments take a long time to federate (only catching up during the rare times federation would work) and they had no idea that they were shouting into a closed box during that time. I’m not even addressing other federation issues such as this instance being blocked by another instance (Beehaw) which is causing some fragmentation.

Lemmy likes to emphasize that you should register for smaller instances and not with larger ones. This “spreads out the load”. You can create your community there as well. You then run into the “annoyances/problems” relating to your smaller instance and migrate to a more stable option… which is Reddit which you still use.

So while federation is a strength for Lemmy, it is also a weakness when it doesn’t work. Migrating people to Lemmy doesn’t tend to focus on migration to a specific server (like lemmy.world ) but focuses instead on migration to “Lemmy” which can be any random server under the sun (stable or not, reliable or overloaded, federating reliably or not). Once issues come up, the person could move to another Lemmy server or they can move back to Reddit… and I think many choose the Reddit option.

It doesn’t help that federation is a complicated topic to understand and the recommended new user approach to Lemmy is to join a tiny server where you are required to use federation and to hope that it is working (while also having no obvious indication if federation is working today or not). To use the email analogy, I get a “bounce back” email notice if my email being sent out cannot be delivered and I get that notice quickly. With broken federation, I have to do research and visiting external sites to determine if my message got through or if I am even receiving any new messages at all. People can get a little annoyed when things are mysteriously not working or when things “may be working or not, who knows?”.

With AI comes the potential for systems to detect AI generated content as well. Any system tends to have a counter system made against it but for a while things are a bit unbalanced.

A search engine company making their own AI system turns that system towards analyzing all of their search results. The AI is to determine if the content is genuine human based content and useful for other humans while filtering out SEO generated nonsense, AI generated fluff, and other low tier results. In other words, search results improve because of in depth analysis of the site content (of a sort that only AI requires).

While I’m sure that system wouldn’t hold out the garbage websites forever, it should improve search result quality for some duration of time. Since AI is a rather new topic, it isn’t obvious how one would “game” that system so that should keep the search results better for longer. Hopefully such AI classification systems can also categorize styles of sites allowing you to select what style results you want for your search query (such categories as a site is more scientific research, written more for children, better for people with short attention spans, etc.)

AI search categorization could have some pretty significant drawbacks but the overall result has a good chance of being better than what we have now…

>> "We are an AI company now! Hey Bob, do you know AI?"
## "No... ?"
>> "FIRED!  Joe, do you know AI?"
## "I can learn about..."
>> "FIRED! Bill, do you know AI?
## "... yes?"
>> "You can stay. I'm heading to the next floor to ask if they know AI!"

I think how the headset looks only somewhat matters…

Apple has generated an image of being “the innovator” in technology. There was “no smartphone” until the iPhone came around (even though that statement is not completely accurate). Their computers are “superior” (even though that statement isn’t necessarily accurate either). Still, the point is that the masses feel that Apple is a technologically innovative company and they still want to own some Apple technology rather than dealing with anything else.

In some realms, this is arguably working. The newer generations (today’s school children) see iPhones as far superior than Android (statement accuracy not relevant) and that anyone not having an iPhone as something being too poor to own the superior phone. Apple wants to keep that brand identity - of being superior technology.

Things like VR put a bit of a damper on that vision. If VR is the “latest and greatest thing” then why does “the owners of Facebook” have their own VR technology while Apple has nothing similar? There is a feeling that Apple introduces products when they are finally ready for the masses… but there is also a growing feeling that Apple is just falling behind and can no longer be innovative. The lack of innovation feelings is something that needs to be removed.

So we have the Apple VR headset. Does it look good? Well, it looks innovative in advertising. Is it for you? No. They would prefer that you don’t use the headset but instead that you “have feelings of technology superiority” when thinking of Apple products. Actually using the headset could harm those feelings. So they make sure to actually release something VR that only people with a ton of money could actually use so that those people can brag about having the latest innovative thing (while also not mentioning any issues with the device). Those people help deliver the actual product…

The actual product is the “innovative feelings”. So, to conclude the point, I feel that something that looks “so dorky” is sort of the point here.