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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 16th, 2023

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  • It is also worth considering that yes, MS and Google have definitely dominated the market through superior products, but the standards they’ve pushed for and established have also made it difficult for other players to enter. If we wanted to say that the federated nature of email is dead, I think that’s a fair argument still.

    Hosting your own email server is quite difficult. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to land in anyone’s mailbox without assistance. If you want to make a mailing list, you basically need to use a mailing service, lest you get blacklisted by major systems owned by MS and Google. Much of this is a byproduct of spam, by which I don’t blame Google and MS for doing their best to protect against, but at the same time they have more or less neutered some core aspects of what made email accessible.





  • Soulseek is a P2P file sharing system centered around music in particular. It’s pretty direct. Unlike a torrent where you’ll have multiple seeds for a single source, you’re connecting directly to other individuals for the content. It generally operates under the expectation that you’re also sharing something, and some users may opt not to allow downloads to people who do not also allow downloads from themselves. The downside to this system is you may need to wait for that person to come online before you can start a download, while with a torrent, other seeders can fill that gap.

    It’s survived as a pretty big platform for music hoarders to source hard to find material, but it’s so dead simple to use and it has a quick and reliable search. Nothing secretive about it, it’s basically just another P2P network that has more in common with Napster than the Pirate Bay



  • I see this comment every now and then, and it always forgets the cost of the transaction, confirmation time, and of course, the need for miners to exist to process these confirmations/transactions. The energy cost is extraordinary, and the end user is taxed for the use of their own dollars.

    It’s not really feasible on a broad scale. Bitcoin is a holding stock, not a valid currency. Its value only increases because it manufactures its own scarcity. And as its scarcity increases, it naturally moves toward centralization since mining becomes too large an activity for the individual to reap any benefit. You can argue for proof of stake to eliminate the need for mining, but then you open the doors to centralization more immediately.



  • Hey there, I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “first activated”. In general, you activate a SIM card, not a phone. This would be associated with your current phone plan, not the device itself. Your carrier would be able to provide that info. If you’re referring to when your phone was first purchased/turned on, then most folks tend to add their Google account during setup, which might be why there’s a suggestion to check your Google account to see when the device was added.

    The IMEI is potentially useful as it’s a device identifier, but generally doesn’t matter to anyone except your carrier.