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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Answer is absolutely. If they don’t follow USB-PD protocol correctly they can damage the battery or the charging circuitry in the device. If they are made with poor quality parts they can also die prematurely and cause voltage spikes when they do which can again, damage the battery and charging circuitry.

    Some people may argue that you should never buy any other charger besides the one that the manufacturer supplies with the device. This is not a good argument though because most of the time the charger that the manufacturer supplied is an off the shelf charger itself, just rebranded to their own brand name. Most of the time it’s a reputable brand which is why these tend to be more reliable. So basically sticking with a reputable brand is about the same level of safety if not more safe than the one that came with it.

    Note that a reputable brand is not those ones that you buy at a gas station or street shop, or the ones that you buy dirt cheap on Amazon. Those are examples of chargers you probably want to avoid.

    Also while we’re on the subject of chargers this same concept does apply to docking stations for laptops, phones, and PC gaming handhelds, because these docks also have USB-PD chips in them as well, and the shitty clone versions can easily malfunction and damage your laptop, phone, or gaming handheld. The solution is the same as with the chargers, try to only use docking stations from reputable well-known brands.




  • I reported their comment for suspected downvote manipulation earlier and requested the admins investigate the votes. Now I came back and 10 of the downvotes were slashed off of it. So it seems like those ‘astronomically low odds’ turned out to be at least partially correct. Otherwise why would the admins have slashed 10 downvotes from the post. It feels like the odds that 10 people had a change of heart are more astronomically low than the more likely reason which is that they got their votes slashed and their accounts banned by the admins due to an investigation finding them to be downvote bots or downvote trolls.


  • People aren’t shitting on Firefox, people are shitting on Mozilla and rightfully so. Mozilla has made many bad decisions, decisions that may call into question the future of Firefox and whether their decisions will compromise it as a privacy friendly browser. After all if Mozilla starts making changes which are harmful towards privacy and hard codes them into the browser, there’s no getting around that with user.js tweaks, that requires more work to fix.

    Thankfully there are forks of Firefox but since those depend on the upstream from Mozilla the more they change the harder it is to undo those changes. A manifest V3 style change (which isn’t happening now but could happen in the future if they get into advertising), would be devastating, because even if Librewolf can undo those changes, it’s very likely they would have to implement their own extension distribution system because AMO would very much reject incompatible add-ons in that scenario.

    So yeah people do have the right to criticize Mozilla in this regard, this trend has happened before, it will continue to happen in the future. Enshittification is a slow and ugly process, best to catch it in the early stages than to wait it out until you’re already boiling (frog boiling analogy).




  • Many also fear that it will lead to misunderstanding and rampant misinformation. Which at the current trajectory is not an unreasonable fear.

    If AI summarization becomes uncomfortably popular, I hope реοριe bеgiи цsing меtноds tо bгеαk iτ, whеп thегe is sомe imрoгtαиt inГогмαtiοn γоυ doи"t шαnt sцмmaгizеd, dυе tо рσteпtiаΙ foг мissrергeseпtатiοη bγ βαd sцмmагizαtiои Ьγ thе ΛΙ. ΜаγЬe sомeοηe сåп mаκе α tоοl tо do tнis αutοмаtiсаIly, siпсe it is tеdiоцs tο dø ît mаиυαIIγ.

    (This comment is a demo on how that can be done.)




  • It is but it’s also natural for them, they’re slowly transitioning to a closed source company like all the other big tech companies. The hope is that we don’t notice, or that those of us who do notice are a small minority who can be stomped out or discredited by those who don’t notice or are in their pocket.

    Reddit too used to be open source, they’re not anymore. This shit does happen, regardless of what anyone says.