• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle



  • Honestly, ANY platform that obscures links through redirection should be considered unsafe. If you can’t verify the target URL before you click the link, then you are asking trouble. Twitter and similar platforms do this so they can track you more effectively. (In the past it also served the purpose of shortening links to SMS-friendly lengths, but that ship sailed like 10 years ago.)

    Not that visibility automatically would make it safe, but it is the bare minimum required as a starting point.





  • I think the idea of trying to convince the other is flawed in itself.

    In recent years I’ve come to this conclusion as well. For me it’s a matter of treating people the way I want to be treated — like an intelligent adult who can make their own decisions. I’m all too happy to discuss my opinions, but I’m generally not interested in persuading anyone, nor do I want to be persuaded. I am interested in information that is relevant, so that’s what I try to offer as well. If that information makes someone consider an idea they had not considered before, great! If not, that’s honestly fine, too.

    In movies you can change someone’s whole worldview with a rousing 2-minute speech, but in reality I think real change takes months or years. I don’t expect to reach a consensus with someone I fundamentally disagree with in the course of a single conversation.

    That said, I will admit that in my personal life this approach has its drawbacks. I have been criticized for being too passive and conflict-averse. I won’t pretend I have all problems of social dynamics figured out.



  • This is all great advice, but I do want to add that it’s mainly for beginners in one-on-one contexts, and not always appropriate when dealing with technical users in a group setting. For example:

    Find out what they’re really trying to do. Is there another way to go about it?

    It’s frustrating in online communities when someone asks a technical question and is met with an interrogation instead of an answer, on the assumption that they don’t know what they want to do. Not just for the person asking the question, but also for future people arriving at the thread with the same question. In some cases it really derails the conversation.

    Hierarchical threads like on Lemmy or Reddit tend to be better for this than flat threads or chat channels, since it’s easier to isolate and ignore red herrings. One reason I hate Discord and Slack for tech support.


  • I can’t confirm right now, but as I recall, macOS’s Spotlight search defaults to giving results from the Internet as well as applications, files, emails, contacts, and all sorts of things. It prioritizes local applications though, at least in my experience, and it returns those results quickly. On my work Mac, I’ve disabled most other options since that’s my primary use case for it. On my test Macs, there’s typically very little on them besides applications so I’m not totally sure how the defaults play out in practice these days.

    I’m a few steps removed from desktop support at this point in my career, so I might be a little mixed up or out of date in my understanding.

    I think there’s a lot to be said for having a single point of entry for search. Beginners might not distinguish between searching the web and searching local files. That’s a weird idea to me, but I formed my habits in an era before “web apps” and “cloud storage”. To me there’s a bold broad line between local resources and network resources, but for a new user I can see how this distinction would be confusing.

    I’ve found KDE’s system for search confusing, since it has two different system search bars as well as the folder search bar in Dolphin. I frequently find myself opening the app search and typing in some simple arithmetic, forgetting that the calculator function is in the other search field, unlike on Mac or Windows. This isn’t necessarily “wrong”, but I do appreciate having one less thing to hold in my brain when I’m working on Mac or Windows, and I think the unified approach greatly improves discoverability.




  • True for any company asking for anything sensitive.

    I’ve gotten scams from my internet provider asking me if I want to upgrade my plan with a new discount. Caller ID was spoofed and it sounded pretty legit, until they started asking me about my current plan tier and price. I was like “uh, you tell me. You’re the one with access to my account info.” After they hemmed and hawed about that, I just hung up.

    Honestly, you should be suspicious of ANY incoming calls at this point. There are convincing scams that spoof the voices of people you actually know using trained AI. It’s actually pretty easy to do now, since you only need a few seconds of audio to use as a training sample. Anyone who’s ever posted a video with their voice on social media can potentially have their voice spoofed. I’ve warned my family about this, since most of us have our voice out there somewhere.

    Phone calls are dumb. SMS is dumb. Phone numbers are dumb. Phone line security is basically non-existent. It’s wild that phone numbers have become the de facto ID on the internet; almost everything requires SMS auth to register now. PHONE NUMBERS ARE NOT PERSONAL IDS.


  • Sounds like a great idea. Plain English (or any human language) is not the best way to store information. I’ve certainly noticed mismatches between the data in different languages, or across related articles, because they don’t share the same data source.

    Take a look at the article for NYC in English and French and you’ll see a bunch of data points, like total area, that are different. Not huge differences, but any difference at all is enough to demonstrate the problem. There should be one canonical source of data shared by all representations.

    Wikipedia is available in hundreds of languages. Why should hundreds of editors need to update the NYC page every time a new census comes out with new population numbers? Ideally, that would require only one change to update every version of the article.

    In programming, the convention is to separate the data from the presentation. In this context, plain-English is the presentation, and weaving actual data into it is sub-optimal. Something like population or area size of a city is not language-dependent, and should not be stored in a language-dependent way.

    Ultimately, this is about reducing duplicate effort and maintaining data integrity.