Yes. And that doesn’t excuse it; a moderator should be better than the community they moderate.

“childish trolls in this community”, “this community is full of trolls”, “90% of folks here dont get the issue and rather troll”

The people who coined the term “open source” are the same people who founded OSI. If you don’t like their term, don’t use it.

Yes. You are free to distribute it in any way you wish. Some methods, like printing books, have a raw material cost. You can choose to pay someone to distribute via that method, or if you really want to, you can do the printing yourself at no cost but your own time and effort.

If you don’t want to give it away for free, then just don’t make it FOSS. It’s that simple. People use free-libre licenses because they want to use that license model. If you don’t want to, then don’t.

Depends. What are you planning on using a VPN for?

If you’re in the position that the NSA is in your system trying to bypass SELinux, you have much bigger problems.

Besides, in that case, having it disabled is going to make it easier for them anyway.

A lot of this stems from instances running old versions with loose registration requirements, like no captcha. This is a problem in a federated system because there’s no barrier for a banned user to just jump to another instance.

Perhaps it would be a good idea if, when Lemmy has anti-spam measures implemented like rate-limiting and captchas for registration, it disabled federation with instances that are at a lower version, to motivate small instances to upgrade and enable the new features.

Good news, the GNU Image Manipulation Program is designed for manipulating photos

The employer doesn’t claim any intellectual property rights over my work product. I’m not able to find anywhere that the proprietary vendor does either.

You’re probably in the clear. Legalese isn’t so opaque that you would miss a section about this.

Of course, that doesn’t stop them from suing you if they decide your work could be very profitable for them.

Sometimes it can’t connect to the server (which is a completely stupid necessity).

That’s where it does the voice processing. The only processing it does on-device is the wake word and taking commands. Actually figuring out what you mean is done in The Cloud. Doing that on-device would not only make the devices significantly more expensive, but they would also rapidly become outdated.

The rest of your complaints are valid and I’ve experienced them all myself to boot.

Overkill and overpriced. If you’re on Windows, bitlocker is enough. If you’re on Linux, LUKS is enough.

I’ve used Apricorn drives at previous jobs. They’re cool and very much fit for purpose, but I’d have a hard time justifying the significant price premium when software is nearly as good, free, and works with any drive.

It wouldn’t be significantly different from any other access method.

Android provides this information natively under /sys. Exactly where depends on your version.

But if you want an app, merely searching F-Droid for “battery” produces a number of leads.

yet

Mounting or unmounting a filesystem won’t make a difference for drive longevity.

If you want to keep your backups secure, you want to keep them offline, so if you get ransomware it doesn’t encrypt your backup too. (Or if you just mistype a command and target the wrong device, folder, etc.)

But drive motor starts and stops are when the most failures occur. So the ultimate question isn’t how to make a drive last longer, it’s how you plan to handle it when the failure inevitably occurs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

Sounds like a weak argument. They’re not going to be inclined to operate a local ML system just for one or two people.

I would see if you can get a quote for locally-hosted transcription software you can run on your own, like Dragon Medical. Maybe reach out to your IT department to see if they already have a working relationship with Nuance for that software. If they’re willing to get you started, you can probably just use that for dictation and nobody will notice or care.

What, exactly, are your privacy concerns about this?

I would expect any browser to properly render a page, regardless of platform. Are you sure the page is mobile-friendly? Why do you say it’s “not great”?