Comments

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

tal, (edited ) to asklemmy in What are some must have Firefox plugins?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Some that I use:

Dark Mode

I don’t like having a light screen.

  • Dark Reader. This does a pretty technically-impressive-to-me job of making reasonable dark versions of pages. It’s not perfect – there are a handful of sites that it needs to be toggled off for, makes something hard to read – but I’m amazed that it does the job it does.
  • Blank Dark Tab: Replace the new tab with a blank page matching Firefox’s built-in dark mode

Privacy/Anti-Tracking/Ad-blocking

Paywalls

Some paywalls can be bypassed.

Tweaking Frameworks

  • Stylus: Doesn’t do anything on its own, but permits collections of third-party themes to be applied to websites to fix annoyances.
  • Greasemonkey. This doesn’t do anything on its own, but it permits people to publish little modifications to be applied to webpages, permits for a lot of little scripts that fix annoyances on websites. There were a number of useful scripts that I used on Reddit.

Misc

  • Edit with Emacs. Permits opening the contents of a textarea in an external emacs instance. Nice for things like, say, writing a large lemmy post in Markdown. I vaguely recall that, at least some years back, there was a way to embed a version of vim in Firefox textareas, so if vim’s your cup of tea, that might be interesting, if it’s still around.
  • Instance Assistant for Lemmy and Kbin. A variety of quality-of-life fixes for lemmy and kbin. Lets one open a given lemmy/kbin post on their local instance if they wind up viewing a page on a remote instance.
  • Reddit Enhancement Suite. If you still use Reddit, this has an enormous collection of quality-of-life improvements for Reddit.

EDIT: I don’t know if this is the embedded vim that I recall, but Firenvim seems to do roughly the same thing, if not.

EDIT2: There’s also some “overlay remover” plugin that can bypass a number of obnoxious overlays that I use on my desktop, but I don’t have it installed on this machine. I think that it’s Behind the Overlay.

tal, (edited ) to asklemmy in Countries that let anyone in?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Well, “liveable” is going to be somewhat-subjective.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_border

Examples of open borders

Svalbard

Uniquely, the Norwegian special territory of Svalbard is an entirely visa-free zone. No person requires a visa or residence permit and anyone may live and work in Svalbard indefinitely, regardless of citizenship. The Svalbard Treaty grants treaty nationals equal right of abode as Norwegian nationals. So far, non-treaty nationals have been admitted visa-free as well. “Regulations concerning rejection and expulsion from Svalbard” are in force on a non-discriminatory basis. Grounds for exclusion include lack of means of support, and violation of laws or regulations.[52][53][54] Same-day visa-free transit at Oslo Airport is possible when travelling on non-stop flights to Svalbard.

That’s not citizenship, but it’s living and working there without restriction, which is probably about as good as someone’s going to get in the present day. But it’s probably colder than most people would like.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard

Approximately 60% of the archipelago is covered with glaciers, and the islands feature many mountains and fjords. The archipelago has an Arctic climate, although with significantly higher temperatures than other areas at the same latitude. The flora has adapted to take advantage of the long period of midnight sun to compensate for the polar night. Many seabirds use Svalbard as a breeding ground, and it is home to polar bears, reindeer, the Arctic fox, and certain marine mammals. Seven national parks and 23 nature-reserves cover two-thirds of the archipelago, protecting the largely untouched fragile environment.

EDIT: And income looks pretty solid, even by Western standards:

In 2006, the average income for economically active people was 494,700 kroner, 23% higher than on the mainland.

Converting to 2006 USD and then rolling forward inflation to December 2023, that’d be ~$110,463.54/year.

But part of the reason that they’re gonna be paying that is because the people living there are gonna have to be living in polar twilight for a hefty chunk of the year.

tal, (edited ) to asklemmy in Do you feel a UBI is more left- or right-wing (or other) and why?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Depends on the implementation, and I think that that’s something of an issue in discussion about it – because its effects depend a great deal on the specifics.

There is a portion of the small government conservative crowd that sees it as a replacement for welfare programs where the government mandates policy. Like, instead of getting, oh, food stamps or such, where the government precisely spells out policy in each area (“this is what you are permitted to buy with this”), people who are poorer than a certain amount would simply get a flat cash payment and choose how to use it. In that sense, it’d reduce the degree of control that government has, which is a goal that they’d like to see.

There’s also a portion of the redistribute-more-wealth crowd on the left that sees it as existing alongside existing welfare programs, rather than as a replacement. For them, if the government has progressive taxation policy (like, income tax brackets or the like), a flat benefit to everyone will tend to redistribute more, which is a goal that they’d like to see.

Both implementations would qualify as UBI – they both provide an unconditional basic income. But the actual effects depend on the implementation.

So when someone says something like “sign this petition for UBI”, I think that a really good question is “tell me what sort of UBI you are aiming to have implemented”, because the details have a very considerable impact on what it is that you’re signing up to support.

tal, (edited ) to asklemmy in Folks in North America, where do you like to get PC parts online these days?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Mostly Amazon, myself.

If one wants an occasional old gizmo that’s no longer made, eBay can be helpful.

Specifically for cables – which aren’t that pricy relative to other items people buy, and are often marked up a lot by retailers – I’ve gone to Monoprice for quite some years. Useful if getting a bunch of cables.

tal, to asklemmy in How was Rudy Guiliani as mayor of NYC?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

My understanding – and I’m not a New Yorker – was that he has been often credited with reducing crime in NYC. Part of that was, as I recall, by cracking down on minor crimes, things like aggressive panhandling, with the idea that that was kind of a gateway drug to more-severe crime.

I don’t know whether that approach or him in particular was responsible for it, or whether it was other phenomena at the time – my gut is that changes like that usually aren’t just driven by one person – but my understanding was that crime did considerably fall off around the time, and crime was something that a lot of New Yorkers had been really upset about.

tal, to lemmy_support in Version 0.19.1 outgoing federation issues for anyone else?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

This post, a day before yours on the lemmy_support@lemmy.ml community, is describing some similar behavior, with some CPU usage at start (at least on the first boot; not clear whether that is a one-off on migration from the text) and then federation problems with 0.19.1:

lemmy.ml/post/9563852?scrollToComments=true

After upgrading Lemmy from 0.18.5 to 0.19.1, the lemmy_server process is taking up 200-350+% of my CPU…It seems like my instance isn’t federating properly now tho.

tal, (edited ) to asklemmy in What could my upstairs neighbor possibly be doing to make this much noise?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I kind of wish that multi-unit housing came with sound isolation ratings. That’d create an incentive to have better isolation and help customers weigh the tradeoffs.

tal, to asklemmy in What is Something Scientific that you just don't believe in at all?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I mean, define “scientific”. A currently-held, consensus theory? Because it’s easy to find theories that were developed in accordance with scientific theory, held for a while, but discarded.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories

In physics, aether theories (also known as ether theories) propose the existence of a medium, a space-filling substance or field as a transmission medium for the propagation of electromagnetic or gravitational forces. “Since the development of special relativity, theories using a substantial aether fell out of use in modern physics, and are now replaced by more abstract models.”

tal, to asklemmy in Why do you think so many people misuse asklemmy?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

It’s got a name that doesn’t intuitively indicate its role.

And it has a substantial population as the Fediverse goes.

tal, (edited ) to asklemmy in When will video support be added to Lemmy?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

You can link to videos if you want. I don’t think that lemmy or kbin instances will likely provide free hosting for them, though.

There is a Fediverse service that provides video hosting, PeerTube.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

I’m skeptical that it will scale – it costs to host video – but it’s there. You can host something on any PeerTube host willing to serve your content and link to it from the Threadiverse, same as you could on YouTube.

joinpeertube.org

EDIT: For a list of nearby instances:

peertube.fediverse.observer

tal, (edited ) to asklemmy in Is there an app or way to set a start time and end time and totally simulate an automatic sunset with Hue lighting
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I rigged up a simulated sunrise about 20 years back with a regular light, a computer, and an X10 controller back when I slept in a room without windows and wanted a more-gentle way of waking up than an alarm clock. So I totally get wanting to simulate a sunrise.

But why do you want to simulate a sunset?

Also, you might want to ask on !homeautomation, as they specialize in this sort of thing.

tal, to asklemmy in Are Americans more prone to conspiracy theories than people in other countries?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

While I think that it’s probably rare, there have been conspiracy theories that are intentionally crafted to achieve goals.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION

And I am very sure that there have been many efforts to amplify existing conspiracies; you can look at disinformation research.

tal, to asklemmy in What are some must have Firefox plugins?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Mmmm…okay, but the parent comment I was responding to does have a point in that there are some benefits to blocking Javascript above and beyond just trying to deal with tracking. Like, if you’re on a laptop, there are sites that will burn a lot of CPU time – and hence battery life – doing nothing useful. Or, on an older machine, it can speed up page loading.

My issue is just that unless you’re going to turn it on yourself on a site-by-site basis, killing off Javascript breaks too much of the Web today. It was a viable option to just have on back when there was a meaningful portion of the world that didn’t have Javascript available and web developers designed pages to deal reasonably with its absence and you were willing to deal with flipping it off on specific sites to deal with the occasional breakage…but today, it’s a huge portion of the Web that doesn’t work without Javascript.

tal, to asklemmy in What are some must have Firefox plugins?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

That used to be a must-have for me about 20 years back, but today, it just breaks too much on too many websites.

I could maybe see selectively-blacklisting particularly obnoxious websites, but I don’t think that whitelisting them is really practical today.

tal, to asklemmy in Countries that let anyone in?
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

everything is terrible

I’d guess that warming is probably long-term advantageous in terms of human habitation of Svalbard. We’re not really glacier-dwelling critters. Probably sucks if you’re a polar bear, but…

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • localhost
  • All magazines
  • Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #