• 3 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I used an app called Noice from F-Droid which has a lot of pleasant background noises (including white noises which I sometimes use while sleeping). One update, the author suddenly added internet permission, pulled out all the noise music files from the app and put them behind a server. Now it only works if you have an active internet connection OR you buy a premium.

    Thankfully, I still have the last “good” version.




  • Paying education loans even after 20 years of working in public service? Seems like a failure of the education system. I’m from Europe, also been to India a lot on business, and never have I seen anything of this magnitude. You can get a good education even in India for a very nominal tuition fee that middle-class parents are also able to cover without taking out loans. For poor families, it’s virtually nothing in good state universities. The idea is that education will empower even the poor and they’ll be able to get a good job and become tax paying citizens. Not like if you’re poor, we’re still gonna crush the heck out of you with more debt. The latter seems to be the strategy employed in the US. In most European countries, education is virtually free covered by taxes. Of course taxes are high but it benefits everyone in terms of healthcare and education. Is that really so bad? Isn’t it the government’s job to make sure EVERYONE has access to good healthcare and education? Then why does it feel that it is a money-oriented corporation running the country rather than a government?

    Sorry, went on a rant there. Whenever I see something like this it just makes my blood boil. Teachers, firefighters, nurses still paying student loans after a decade or two, that’s a failure of the education system right there.










  • On iOS, unlike Android, Firefox doesn't come with extensions. No ads are blocked. Even if I use Safari and Adguard extension, it doesn't block YouTube ads. Brave works like a charm in this regard. I've opted out of all telemetry stuff that I could find, and btw even Firefox opts into everything by default. Any other open source browser you can suggest that blocks ads including YouTube on iOS?






  • It’s not on F-Droid, likely because the swipe implementation that they’ve injected doesn’t have an OSS license. There’s a whole discussion on it in this thread. There’s no privacy issue here as the fork also doesn’t have network permissions or anything, but I can see why they’d be skeptical adding this piece of code to the main repo which has a proper FOSS license.