spiraldancing's comments

spiraldancing | 4 years ago | on: Open Letter: Feneas in the Future

The title doesn't make it clear. It's a fund-raiser; they need money.

Promising-sounding non-profit dedicated to advancing FOSS-based Federated Networks (Matrix, Pleroma, Mastodon, Diaspora, etc). They provide several free federated servers/services.

They're also looking for membership, costs €1/month and gets some extra perks. I'm joining.

spiraldancing | 6 years ago | on: Pop_OS 19.10

I've been using Mint and Ubuntu for the past 5 years. Installed Pop on a spare laptop 18 months ago, to experiment with.

Switched to Pop as my primary OS 3 months ago.

There isn't much that's radically different ... it's just better, cleaner, more polished, smooth.

spiraldancing | 6 years ago | on: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

>GMail doesn't actually filter spam. It just hides it

This is not accurate. There is a long on-going issue with GMail (and others) wholesale blocking delivery of email from domains/IPs/providers it deems to be spam or otherwise inappropriate. GMail users get no indication/notification, and generally have no idea that email sent to them was simply not delivered.

spiraldancing | 6 years ago | on: Show HN: A New Tool to Understand and Visualize the News

Nice idea, I signed up.

Curious to see how you handle weighting/filtering of the sources, the whole "fake news" issue.

Not your primary concern, I'm sure, but I don't (normally) use Google, nor allow Google-tools into my browser. I am a small-but-vocal minority. There are good alternatives to Google's recaptcha, Google-docs registration, etc. Just sayin'.

spiraldancing | 6 years ago | on: Attempts to Censor AntiPolygraph.org

Lie detectors are a measure of heart rate, respiration, and galvanic skin response (roughly == how much you sweat).

What relationship—if any—those have to the truthfulness of a person at any given moment, remains debatable at best.

spiraldancing | 6 years ago | on: Jami – FOSS, Distributed Instant Messenger

Here's a first-hand review. I posted this as a reply a minute ago, then decided to make it a primary comment.

Wire has been my go-to communications app for 2-3 years now. Running it on a Google-free phone, it has gradually become more buggy, and less reliable over time, and sadly, still the best secure/encrypted app I could find.

Testing Jami. I tried Ring 8-10 months ago. Text worked, audio/video did not.

In the past few days, trying Jami, audio-only works very well - clear, crisp, no lag - much better than Wire. Video was a bit buggy, but still decent.

Connectivity was an issue, calls froze, or got cut off a couple times. Tentatively, it looked like switching from a local WiFi to phone ISP was at least part of the problem.

Also, using the same account across multiple devices is a bit buggy. Contacts established on one device are not available on the other.

All things considered, the basic quality of the connection is very good, better than Wire, maybe better than Skype. Reliability of the connection, and the various 2ndary features that people take for granted, still need work.

spiraldancing | 8 years ago | on: Show HN: Travel spontaneously on a budget

My dos centavos ... Running NoScript, giving full js permission to the primary domain and all (apparently) relevant 2ndary domains, home page still doesn't resolve.

If you need google, facebook and pinterest just to display a landing page, I'm never gonna use your site.

spiraldancing | 8 years ago | on: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions

So, reading through this discussion, I'm seeing a lot of "IRS tax law is confusing, complicated, and even contradictory on cryptocurrencies", and a lot of other people saying, in effect "well tough, it's the law, deal with it".

What I'm getting out of it all is, people who did not make money on cryptocurrencies this past year are getting some satisfaction from the difficulties of those that did.

spiraldancing | 8 years ago

Musk has actually said that he expects BFR to be cheaper to fly than their original Falcon 1 ... meaning prices in the $5-10M range, as opposed to $60+M for F9.

spiraldancing | 8 years ago | on: Forget $9,000… Bitcoin falls below $7,000

So, the latest drop seems to be triggered by credit card companies blocking purchase of cryptocoins "'cuz volatile".

Am I missing something? Since when do CC companies get to decide where you use your card? I thought it worked the other way around — businesses decide whether or not they accept CCs.

Are there other examples of CC companies blocking (legal) purchases made by people with good credit history?

spiraldancing | 8 years ago

In the US, at least, the underwear drawer is a popular place to hide other things ... eg, your illegal drug stash, or the engagement ring you bought, etc. I think there's also subtextual implications of nosing about in your sex life.
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