By Trek’s logic, Tuvix’s identical copy lives in an alternative universe of some sort. And that’s really the only way to justify all this.

Ed: Also the “Oh wait, they can’t speak so someone has to speak for them” has some interesting implications, doesn’t it.

Don’t look in girls’ bags though. If you do, you may stare into the void for eternity or get eaten by a 6-dimensional space monster.

Don’t you know, fat people can’t be made fun of. It’s the skinny people who are funny, see!

Don’t see why not. You can download a database of hashes and compare that locally. Granted, those hashes aren’t “free”, but that’s due to the legal status of such material. The principle itself - comparing hashes - can be foss.

Yea people can look into the algorithms to see how they work and circumvent etc., but that’s no different than with… Anything else. If someone is motivated enough to distribute the material, they’ll make their own network. Foss doesn’t make any difference here.

I use Session Messenger, on the Oxen network. Love it on principle even tho the implementation is a bit lacking in places.

And there’s Tor… Which is what it is.

Cuz they just tend to be slow. I don’t know how these apps behave on a 1500€ phone, but I had a pretty beefy computer at my disposal these last 2 years and web apps are just always slower, usually much slower.

And back to phones, the UI of graphics web apps rarely considers them. Or they simplify the UI to the point of being unusably dumb.

And Paint… Yes true, but again do you understand “phone”?

I think it’s the transporter accident from ST:TMP. I didn’t know they can procreate.

Yea it’s not full-blown Photoshop layers in this regard. Still, with the amount of other stuff it has and for the price (or with just small ads and no fullscreen video ads or other crap), I really can’t complain. I’ve replaced amost every other app with a foss one, but there’s no good foss image editor. Pocket Paint and Litrato can do a few things here and there but not much and both seem abandoned.

Ed: Ok so PP isn’t abandoned and is quite nice in its own way but just doesn’t have the practicality for photo editing or meme making.

I sometimes use online apps when I need something specific and Christ that’s like the 6th level of hell on my old slow phone… Tho honestly I can’t imagine how an online app can ever be equal to a local one

PicsArt:

https://www.iudesk.com/ there’s a playstore link

Iudesk Photo Editor

Getting a 404 on that.

I find 95% of foss software to be better than the commercial alternatives, and I’m not joking. As for bugs, foss devs are usually faster to respond to bug reports and user requests too, unless it’s some mismanaged behemoth like Mozilla.

Thing is, commercial software can use the money for advertising and marketing. Foss, especially of the free to use kind, usually only spread by word of mouth, and even that only within the foss communities at first.

Let’s not get into examples, because I’m sure we can always find examples for every case and it often comes to specific preferences. My general point is, that people who think free has to be crap, and commercial has to be good, are categorically wrong.

It’s in fact backwards: if you do something only for money, you’re incentivized to do the least amount of work either for maximum effectiveness or to give yourself time to do stuff you actually want to do.

It seems like most FOSS I’ve seen is a free, buggy, alternative to mainstream software, which resolves a problem the user had.

I don’t know what kind of sw you use, but usually I find Foss software to be sleek, functional, fast with good support and updates, while commercial software is ridden with ads, trackers, bloat and bugs. Exceptions on both sides but the notion that free software is generally worse is categorically incorrect.

Everyone can contribute, but how do they make a living?

So first not everyone can contribute. Usually people who also use the software and have personal (or monetary) interest in it, contribute.

And why does everything has to be about monetisation? Yes, both people and gigantic corporations make money off foss in various ways, I’m sure others have explained that already. But people also do things for other reasons than just money.

But I’m just baffled how people so often declare that foss can’t work or that it’s qualitatively worse, even though the entire planet has been dependent on foss for decades.

No, just because someone sells something directly, doesn’t mean it’s inherently better.

I’d guess different setups both of the phones and accounts. For example if one has enabled Google location in settings, and stuff like location sharing isn’t disabled, the phone will be pinged much more often. Same if you have office documents on cloud, synchronisation with phone book and stuff like that.

And yea it makes sense that an account that’s more active is of more interest to ping more regularly. Maybe also for security too. Tho I don’t know if it has to be an actual conscious decision by the designers of the systems or just some AI algorithms doing it.

I wouldn’t be so stoked about it. Retail chains use alp kinds of dirty tactics to get products cheaper, this is probably one of them.

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There are a lot of phones that have some of the features - Sony has punchless displays, some cheap phones have headphone jacks, all the Motorolas have two SIMs, some phones have SD cards in shared slots, Pixels and some others have unlockable bootloaders, it’s just basically impossible to get one with all of this…

My bad here, I didn’t mean AAC, but ALAC (lossless) and other Apple’s own mp4 variants. Indeed not sure how’s the support in core Android, although I’d guess ALAC should be since it’s part of mp4 specification.

I haven’t goofed around with it in a while, but some ~10 years ago when I was doing tech reviews I was looking into ALAC quite a bit and was surprised how nice it is, and apparently easy enough to implement that even lots of hardware devices supported it without even advertising it. Also 3rd party audiobook players can often deal with Apple’s audiobook DRM.

Basically, Apple did surprisingly well with audio formats while also supporting some open formats (at least in hardware), so maybe that’s also a reason why I’m not so adamant about formats being 100% free from the start, as long as they get the codec ball rolling.

But again it’s been 10 years since I was looking into this closely so I’m very fuzzy on the details.