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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Lemmy is not encrypted, my comments are public, your comments are public, we both know that. Anyone with a raspberry pi or an old netbook can scrape them.

    If I use an encrypted service and all of a sudden everything that I thought was encrypted was decrypted by the service provider without my consent? That’s breaking encryption.

    If on the other hand I use an encrypted service and they tell me that they can no longer offer the service, my data will be destroyed after X days, and I need to find another way of storing my encrypted data because of privacy invading government policies? That is not breaking encryption.


  • For many things I completely agree.

    That said, we just had our second kid, and neither set of grandparents live locally. That we can video chat with our family — for free, essentially! — is astonishing. And it’s not a big deal, not something we plan, just, “hey let’s say hi to Gramma and Gramps!”

    When I was a kid, videoconferencing was exclusive to seriously high end offices. And when we wanted to make a long distance phone call, we’d sometimes plan it in advance and buy prepaid minutes (this was on a landline, mid 90s maybe). Now my mom can just chat with her friend “across the pond” whenever she wants, from the comfort of her couch, and for zero incremental cost.

    I think technology that “feels like tech” is oftentimes a time sink and a waste. But the tech we take for granted? There’s some pretty amazing stuff there.









  • good enough simulations that you can’t tell the difference.

    This requires us having actual conversations with those dead people to compare against, which we obviously can’t do.

    There is simply not enough information to train a model on of a dead person to create a comprehensive model of how they would respond in arbitrary conversations. You may be able to train with some depth in their field of expertise, but the whole point is to talk about things which they have no experience with, or at least, things which weren’t known then.

    So sure, maybe we get a model that makes you think you’re talking to them, but that’s no different than just having a dream or an acid trip where you’re chatting with Einstein.





  • Our experience is that basically the only really expensive thing is childcare. Are you eligible for subsidized, or free, care (or have trustworthy and willing relatives)?

    As for gear, babies don’t need much. But for what they do need, reach out to friends, neighbors, and family! We’re fortunate that we could have afforded everything new, but we really only bought a few things because friends and randos alike gave us so much free kid stuff (we bought a nice stroller, a baby basket, and an IKEA crib — basically everything else was a hand-me-down). Join local “buy nothing” groups, or parent groups (sadly they’re usually WhatsApp, but whatever). Most people hate throwing away stuff, and would rather it go to a good home.

    Look at programs for subsidized/free necessities like diapers. There are lots of resources out there, especially in cities.

    As everyone else said, no one feels ready. We certainly didn’t!





  • UPS and American companies in general

    But this is USPS, which isn’t an American company, it’s a US independent agency.

    Their mandate isn’t (AFAIK…) to make a profit, but rather to serve the mail requirements of a very large country.

    Personally, my experiences with USPS have been generally positive, from passports for infants to free change-of-address forwarding service to tracking down quasi-scam products from Amazon. YMMV though.