I think what they mean is that someone unfamiliar with your line of work might even read the entire post and come away with it with the view of “Okay, and?” since the title told them this was going to be about “What Does It Mean To Be A Signal Competitor?”

The problem there is that what Signal is is different to different people, someone might for example use it like any other chat application, in which case even something like Telegram (ew) or Discord could be an alternative to them.

Again, if someone is familiar with your blog, they’ll know what you mean, but the blog post can be viewed by someone in isolation, in which case it won’t be so clear, especially since it’s also in relation to moving off of Telegram, which is not an E2EE platform at all by default

I think hands with pawpads and some proper claws are a good compromise :3

I’d be an anthro, so all the benefits of being hooman without being hooman (except sweating, so you’d be able to outrun me eventually)

Depends, if it’s only biological changes, I’d get myself two hearts, and minimize the chances of any disease or aging knocking me out, then become an anthro folf because being hooman is overrated

If cybernetics are allowed, I’d probably get rid of the damn body and just have a virtual one, with my brain connected to some machine deep underground

I heccin love this!

Hmm I think my main concern would be lack of kernel/firmware updates, running something like postmarketOS could partly solve that and still be nearly as easy to set up (just unlock and flash a prebuilt image)

But firmware is still almost entirely dependent on the vendor, since it’s all signed and unpatchable.

Next issue would be lack of connectivity on a lot of phones, which have gone backwards and include USB 2.0 now. WiFi is an option, but less stable, I personally decided to just go 100Mbps and suffer.

As for the battery, it would help a lot if phones were designed to boot without one and they were removable, it all worked well for about half a year until I found out I had a spicy pillow and had to replace it with direct power to the board, which made the whole setup much less elegant and required soldering.

It all comes down to how devices are designed in the end. If someone took the time to make a computer instead of just a phone, and included features that make it useful past its initial life that aren’t that popular (display output, microsd, headphone jack), mainlined all the drivers and maintained firmware, that would be a different story.

But that’s not a very profitable model, because it’s all about reducing waste and thus selling less. A lot needs to change.

Not sure myself, I’m trying to get into some IT jobs (not necessarily programming) that aren’t anywhere near social media and are more focused on internet infrastructure, but getting any job is hard when you’re starting out and I would like to avoid the evil ones at all cost.

But just as there is no ethical consumption in capitalism, there’s no consensual work, so the values of wherever you end up working won’t align with yourself or the other workers fully, it’s just a question of degree.

A fursona is a better investment, benefits include:

• cute (even when you deny it)
• everyone loves it
• can be whatever you want, lots of choices
• expression of your inner self
• versatile
• can’t really be stolen
• inner emotional support
• increases in personal value as you grow with it
• won’t lie to you about making free capitalism coins™

It’s definitely useful for exploring ideas, I recently used AI-generated images as reference for an artist and it helped me get my thoughts across. I can’t wait to see the final result of it!

It’s probably also good for adding illustration to text where someone otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it or spend the time, adding detail to your own art and so on.

The worrying thing to me is how fast it can create all sorts of images, and combined with LLMs and other tools even be automated. I could totally see entire feeds being populated by personalized AI art, stories, and music, let’s not forget that’s largely dictated by algorithms already if someone uses things like Spotify.

So one day it might get extremely difficult to tell if what you’re looking at was even created by someone on their own, or if AI had any significant role in it. This would make it impossible for regular artists to compete under the current economic model, which to be fair needs to go, but it will still cause suffering in the meantime. Even beyond capitalism, people want share their work for others to appreciate, and if every channel of communication is flooded it’s going to be pretty difficult to get noticed among the noise. If AI can create stunning images it might also depreciate art in the eyes of others, because to get to a very similar result using AI could take a lot less effort if the technology further improves, so they might see it as just a commodity or “pretty picture” and not think about artists at all.

I feel like that’s where online payment systems really let us down. If there was an easy universal way to pay a few cents to view content and it wasn’t a privacy and fee nightmare, I’m sure people would have no problem doing that. Digicash systems come to mind, I hope they could make a comeback one day.

But I also fear a lot of the damage could’ve been done already, kids who grow up with the internet now will probably only remember big tech platforms and may not be very eager to try out something more complicated.

Not really (I wasn’t using Google directly anyway), I think it fills a slightly different niche than search engines.

It’s good as a fuzzy search for the sum of public knowledge, since it can understand quite complex queries and point you in the right direction, then you can go to regular search engines to find more specific stuff.

Bing was fun to exploit, but I don’t really see why it’s useful, it tends to always look up information which means it provides less of its own knowledge, I can do the searches myself better than an LM. Maybe it can provide more concise answers than all the SEO crap everywhere, but that can be avoided by searching on specific websites like reddit.