Em Adespoton

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  • 152 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • The problem is, once the middlemen gain power, they’re never gonna give you up. Music producers are a great example of this, as are telecoms companies.

    All the current SaaS stuff is similar; the offerings LOOK similar, but they’re explicitly designed not to be a 1:1 match, so you can’t just take your business elsewhere, just like the mattress companies of old.

    We’re even seeing this play out in the streaming video market, where each player has its own differentiator, moreso than we ever saw with traditional cable TV.

    Standards are great, but middlemen have no incentives to not subvert them.








  • The phone isn’t going to end up in China from people passing them hand to hand; they’re going to be collected somewhere and bundled for shipping in an EM-protected covering of some sort. The record of the route they took right up until they go silent will be available for every phone. Looking at an aggregate map of this data should give the police a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

    I suspect the difficulty is that the police need to get a data release from each individual involved and then get Google/Apple and/or the owners to voluntarily share the historical location data with the police… which most people aren’t willing to do out of an abundance of caution.



  • GPTs are designed with translation in mind, so I could see it being extremely useful in providing me instruction on a topic in a non-English native language.

    But they haven’t been around long enough for the novelty factor to wear off.

    It’s like computers in the 1980s… people played Oregon Trail on them, but they didn’t really help much with general education.

    Fast forward to today, and computers are the core of many facets of education, allowing students to learn knowledge and skills that they’d otherwise have no access to.

    GPTs will eventually go the same way.


  • Just remember that there’s a difference between good,truthful information from untrusted sources and mostly truthful information designed to deceive or misdirect.

    I see enough “news” presented inaccurately from “trusted” sources to take all reporting with a grain of salt, but also find value in reading reports from varying viewpoints to try and identify the actual established facts.







  • Big question is: who’s storing the email, you or them? Your mail clients handle POP3 and IMAP as well as SMIME and GPG so the server doesn’t have to have any special features itself.

    Since you want something your wife can manage, stay away from the forwarders. Whatever you choose, check Spamhaus and SURBL to see if the provider has a history of getting on their lists.

    Make sure you select one that can stay in business providing email service, so you don’t have to worry about the company collapsing/being bought out/pushing ads/selling PII/bundling mail with some more lucrative service.