kirk781

joined 2 years ago
[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Not a perma ban but still.

Back when I used to be on Reddit much, I got auto banned from r/latestagecapitalism for having too much karma on certain subreddit they disliked. They weren't necessarily political in nature (I think I only frequented couple of political subs then and they were non US in nature) but apparently the concept of not breaking any rules on your sub but still being banned just because I participate in some place they dislike was dubious.

Not related, but I think I was very active on reddit from 2016-2021. I had gone through couple of user IDs then (stupidly forgotten the 2FA mechanism for both and never backed the recovery code :p) and had a decent curated feed. I still sporadically open it but hardly participate / post. The only thing worth keeping me there is old Reddit and RES which makes keyboard navigation a breeze.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 week ago

If one donates to Soulseek( on their official website a certain amount), they get privileges. If you have privileges, then your downloads will be queued ahead of other users (basically you side step a long queue for downloading).

I use Nicotine, and when I open the client, it shows for a couple of seconds at the bottom/tray No active Soulseek privileges before vanishing. That's the only clue.

In practise, my downloads usually go through normally. The 5 days I had privileges I honestly didn't notice much difference. Some users have an automated script that crawls one's folder whenever you download from them, so as long as one has decent amount of shares, it's alright. (I only have shared 40 odd gigs but it's decent enough).

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The chat is useless most of the times. The users troll each other and the unmoderated nature means racism is quite common as well. That being said, there are the odd decent folks as well. I had a decent conversation with a guy once there and he even donated 5 days of Soulseek privileges to me; sadly these type of conversations are forgotten in the cesspool that is the chatroom there.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 week ago

When I was listening to obscure krautrock bands which were nowhere to be found on Spotify or YT Music, Soulseek came to rescue. Also, funnily, it is easier to get flac from there than 320kbps mp3 of various albums. The former is more ubiquitous there.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think it's Xiaomi. Either case, that brand does put lots of useless stuff. Other Chinese OEMs do it too. Realme puts obnoxious junk even on its high end GT7 series.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I just searched for it and apparently, Moto pushed this app to some of it's devices via a OTA update. It's ironic because Motorola phones [atleast the midrange ones] have a relatively bloat free reputation.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 3 weeks ago

I use RedReader sporadically for browsing Reddit. I like it's compact UI style and customizability. Even when I had proper paid Boost for Reddit back in the day, somehow, the UI of RedReader made it more intuitive for me to use it.

I think one can technically use Boost still via patching it, but it's a grey area and not worth going after when RedReader exists.

Either case, the official Reddit app has to be purposefully coded to be as unoptimized and useless as possible. The bloat, the wasted white space; it all stands testament to the travesty that is modern software design.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 month ago

The site does seem to have multiple long form articles posted from around the world; so it makes for good read in case someone is interested in world politics/topics of such nature. Plus, it didn't show up any kind of paywall or any such modern nuisance, which was a positive surprise.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

India now has the largest population even though the latest official census data hasn't been done. Either case, unlike China, which has its own local variants of global giants; India usually doesn't. So of course it will be represented in correlation with its growing internet population.

I think there used to be subreddits as well like indianpeoplequora and one dedicated to LinkedIn as well for Indians. Both were fun and frolic usually. The former died out since Quora became a nuthouse in general and most folks abandoned it.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 19 points 1 month ago

I looked up the original post and it gets worse.

Ideally judiciary should change

What the heck does Judiciary have to do with girls? I think I have an inkling what he wants to say (Indian law in some cases favors the female sex more but that's because conditions forced lawmakers to come up with that way; in some rural areas the plight of females was quite bad and male dominance so much that law had to be slightly biased to provide everyone equality). In some cases, it leads to woman misusing the laws to their own ends (often seen in urban areas) and this guy wants to change the equations.

Eithercase, this is only what I think he might have had in mind because his statements make nothing clear at all. But then, I visited his company page even and the crypto currency laced language dongles my mind.

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

But in the vast seas of phones, Lineage OS still supports a very small subset. Major players like Google or Samsung are covered but a LOT are skipped.

If one's phone supports Lineage OS, well and good but it's not a fix all

 

The market is India. 4 out of top 5 phone OEMs are Chinese in origin (last I saw data) with other being Samsung.

Google does not have the same brand value as Apple in India, despite still somehow expecting people to pony up in the same price range. Add to it their custom heating Tensor chips in the past years in a hot climate like India and it doesn't make for a good showcase. Brands like Nothing have made faster inroads in the Indian market both by local production and complete array of their products available from launch time.

 

Too bad S25 base model still has only 25W charging support and a relatively short battery capacity of 4000mAh

 

Even simple apps nowadays have become subscription only. Whilst I used to pirate most stuff in the past, but if the app in question is a small one time purchase, it's not bad considering you don't need to sideload updated apk's from Mobilism each time a new version is released (looks at some great cheap apps like Pano Scrobbler).

However, the trend has shifted towards the other side with everything from video recording apps(AZ Recorder), Weather apps(Today Weather) and Battery monitoring apps(Battery guru) offering subscriptions. Some have a high one time purchase option but some like the latter don't.

Battery Guru is an example of enshittification. If phones still came with removable batteries and companies supported them, then for the price of say, a 4 year subscription to the app, I could have just gotten a new replaceable battery. It's not like the app will magically stop my battery from degrading.

Whilst I have done piracy ( and still pirate stuff like films because no alternative, screw you Netflix), I tried to go the legal route for some apps since then updation and management of them becomes easier. But with the subscription scourge, I doubt devs are going in the right direction.

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submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
 

Some companies, most notably Google, have regional specific pricing for their products. So for example, YouTube will be significantly cheaper in India, let's say, than in the US because former's purchasing power is much lower.

However, not all companies do so and that is a prime motivator towards piracy, even for customers who want to go the legal route. There are many examples from niche ones like the streaming app History Hit to mainstream newspapers like New York Times.

I would like to focus on the latter. It's no secret that it's news app in moddable form is easily available though the games section is still off limits, I think. Still, I went to see how much their legit variant cost in my country, India. For first year, it was INR 1000, not bad, considering that rival newspapers in my country have a similar structure. The small thing is that after first year, it will jump eight fold. So, a subscription to a newspaper will cost annually more than any streaming service I can think of(and Atleast streaming services have to offload the Full HD streams from servers, news articles have a much lower bandwidth cost) and almost the price of an entry level smartphone per year.

It's almost as if NYT deserves to be pirated. It is almost as if they don't wish to take users money, even for those willing to pay. For a subscription, that is Twice more than Play Pass, YouTube Premium, Disney combined, it is almost laughable.

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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de to c/interestingshare@lemmy.zip
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