Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go pair my bike with my phone so I can upgrade the derailleur’s firmware…

I agree that Snowden didn’t have much impact on a broad population, which is really disappointing. However, his leaks went a long way toward encouraging broad use of encryption on the internet. Before Snowden, http:// was a perfectly normal thing to encounter in your browser. Not it’s rare and triggers warnings when it is encountered. Similarly, encrypted SMS (iMessage, RCS, etc) is common, etc. Snowden’s leaks accelerated the deployment of all of these techniques, which is better than nothing.

Rivian’s CEO also says “AI Defined Vehicles” are the future and that this is what buyers really want, so screw that guy.

Social features do not make a social network. Maybe it’s just where I cycle (Northeast and Northwest USA) but approximately 100% of the people that I ride with post their rides to Strava. That is what makes it a social network.

Further, all of the alternatives that you listed have limitations that prevent them from being viable alternatives to Strava even if people were interested in migrating. Mainly these are related to device integration.

There are many alternatives for tracking and analyzing performance data, but I’d posit that that’s not what most Strava users do there. For most of them, it’s a social network, and that’s it’s focus as it goes public. There’s no alternative “athlete focused” social network that allows planning and organizing group activities, has tight integration of activity info (e.g. tracking that the group bike ride averaged 20mph over this route, or that person X and I competed in the same park run, and here’s the finishing time for each of us, along with a few photos and some performance data like pace and heart rate).

Because of investor pressure to generate actual meaningful revenue, Strava is going to rapidly enshittify leading up to their IPO and after it. The unfortunate thing is that they’ll largely get away with it, because there’s really no alternative for users to move to.

God how I miss living in an urban area. Until two years ago, I’d bike with my kids to their school every day. Where we are now, it’s 10 miles of deathtrap pavement away. ☹️ I wouldn’t feel comfortable riding most of it on my own, let alone with my kids.

Fuck cars. Quality of life is so much higher when you don’t have to depend on them.

You absolutely can store HIPAA data in the cloud.

Latency is one of the big selling points for Outposts. They have customers wanting to control industrial equipment from their cloud resources, but the nearest AWS region is too far away to provide the low latency connectivity they need. With Outposts, they get the cloud, but with on-prem network latency.

That was David Brin in The Transparent Society. He has continued to riff on the theme periodically since then.

What do you use for furnace/AC monitoring? Do you get data directly from the equipment, or just infer it from environmental trends? I assume the power data comes from embedded monitoring facilities in your UPS? What make/model do you have? I have a similar setup in my house, but it’s lacking a few metrics. Monitoring air quality (CO2, particulates, etc) would be nice, and my local electric provider sounds a lot like yours, so voltage monitoring would be great.

As noted elsewhere in the thread, they do support MTP transport, so it’s definitely not as user-hostile as it first sounded. Things like Calibre will still work. However, the fact that Amazon also removed the ability to download ebooks in the browser for offline transfer suggests where things are heading. IIRC kobos have some anti features of their own, but I don’t recall the details. I wonder if something like the Daylight DC-1 could be even better. It’s not just a nice reader, but a proper computer. At least, if it actually exists.

I’ve owned two Kindle devices over the years, and the ability to directly load content, without involving a third-party service, was a big part of what made them usable for me. If that feature is gone, these devices will no longer be viable for my needs.

And the enshittification continues…

VMs provide a meaningful security boundary between applications. Containers (docker, etc) do not.

People on lemmy really seem to spend a lot of time thinking and talking about reddit. Why is that?