I am several hundred opossums in a trench coat

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • You’re mostly right. Newer devices won’t share their entire app list by default, at compile time you need to enumerate every app you want to query for, or add what are essentially a list of intent filters (which are like “I want to talk to apps that take this kind of message and payload”). There is still a permission that lets you list all apps like you were able to on pre API 30 devices, but Google makes it pretty difficult to get onto the app store in that state.

    You can still send intents as much as you like though (as long as you know the recipient), since they’re the basis for all inter-process communication.

    My point is more that an app developer can’t and doesn’t need to use the play store to get the list of apps you have on your phone. This requirement to have the play store almost certainly isn’t malicious and I disagree with the notion that apps shouldn’t be able to use what is essentially system infrastructure to improve their apps. That said, given this is an app targeting the fediverse, it would have been nice for the developer to have made a universal APK build that didn’t require the Play Store.




  • Social media is not a good replacement for real life community (look through my comment history and you’ll see me expressing exactly that repeatedly), but we can’t be oblivious to the fact that for many children their only connection to fellow queer people may be online. If you live in a small town or community where there are no other openly queer people, or if your school, peers, and parents are hostile to queer people you won’t have much choice in where you find community.


  • Emily (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    Are you Australian? That just feels like kind of a US centric lens to analyze this through, though you’re right that loss of community is a byproduct.

    Like, I’m not exactly happy with the Albanese government, but I would say that most negative LGBTQ things they have said or done have been cowardly attempts to avoid drama from the Liberals, not active bigotry



  • I briefly worked for a company who worked on household power technology. Their product would attempt to predict energy prices, weather patterns, and usage to sell your excess energy at peak prices. Like discussed in the article, this company collected usage data and controlled the sale of energy back to the grid centrally. They did this because it meant they could better train their prediction models and run them on more powerful hardware. The controllers would have needed internet connectivity anyway to query energy prices, and putting the prediction on device would have just made them more expensive and worse. Even when I worked there (back in 2015 I think), they were already very aware of the threat vectors discussed by this article and took some measures to prevent it.

    In my opinion they were (/are, still exist) a responsible company run by competent people. They did not collect the data out of “greed”, and I strongly suspect that the people in these comments implying that the data is collected to be sold have never actually worked in the industry and have very little idea of the specific value of energy usage data. I can’t really speak authoritatively for other companies, but I would guess that, like the one I worked for, their products are internet connected simply because it improves the product. For example, people expect things to be controllable or viewable from an app from anywhere, and that requires internet connectivity.