Samsung is under pressure, though, both from governments (EU Cyber Resilience Act will have consequences for unmaintained devices) and from the markets, bringing economic pressure from consumers who no longer accept their two years of updates when competitors offer a better deal.

I don't buy the "faster charging" scam, that's just burning through your battery so you'll need to buy a new phone sooner. I can wait 30 minutes per day to get my phone charged up, I don't need 200W to hit my phone battery. If anything, the fast charging is a tacit admission of phones needing to be charged often, covering up their terrible power consumption or small batteries.

I like them for nostalgia reasons, but definitely not for quality reasons. Though I must say, the rail service has refreshed them a few years back and they're not as bad as they used to be, though it does feel like they're the model that breaks down the most whenever there's some sort of extreme weather

The biggest problem is acceleration, though, which is still an issue for lines with many stops like the ones you see here. I imagine they'd do a lot better in countries that have lines where trains can go at least half an hour without stopping anywhere.

Maybe we'll see the return of double deckers once Tesla makes its first double decker car (I'm thinking "terrible electric RV with a tiny sleeping area on top") so they're cool again.

That's a load-bearing "could" if I've ever seen one.

I don't really see the point of these new authentication methods. OpenID had federated authentication years ago that was actually used by a bunch of sites like stackoverflow. Native browser support is nice (as long as browser addons can be used to manage credentials) but I don't really see that big an advantage to good ol' OpenID.

OpenID died in the federated space because developers couldn't be bothered to trust anyone but Google, Facebook, and Twitter, so I'm not sure why things would change now, unless the big auth providers shut down their OAuth APIs in favour of fedcm.

I know that train model, we had them here too; they're pretty heavy and expensive compared to the lighter rail models that many companies are buying now. It has quite a heavy frame compared to newer models.

I also suspect most tesla workers don't come by train anyway, so they don't need that much capacity.

What also doesn't help is that Samsung and other western targeting brands are facing pressure to maintain their software and do the bare minimum for security updates, while these Chinese brands usually get away with one update or less.

Lemmy is search indexable. It includes the necessary metadata headers to link back to original domains as well, something other ActivityPub implementations forgot.

The user base on Lemmy is tiny compared to Reddit, though. Same with Mastodon vs Twitter. The problem isn't search indexing, it's the user base being several orders of magnitude smaller.

If you search for topics where Lemmy has a lot of posts (Linux distros, for instance), you can already find Lemmy in the search results every now and then.

Link detection is flaky as hell, especially for special characters. They rarely work reliably. URLs themselves don't contain unicode. They use basic ASCII and anything beyond that needs to be encoded in some form. The link you posted isn't a spec-compliant link, it only works because Lemmy apps and browsers are nice and do the conversion to the real URL for you. According to the spec:

When a new URI scheme defines a component that represents textual data consisting of characters from the Universal Character Set [UCS], the data should first be encoded as octets according to the UTF-8 character encoding [STD63]; then only those octets that do not correspond to characters in the unreserved set should be percent- encoded. For example, the character A would be represented as "A", the character LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH GRAVE would be represented as "%C3%80", and the character KATAKANA LETTER A would be represented as "%E3%82%A2".

If you use usernames as identifiers (which, again, are optional) like Lemmy does, databases and external entities will use the percentage URLs, not the readable ones. Unicode domains will have their xn-- form stored as well. It's up to apps and browsers to decide those and turn them back into unicode. It's not really relevant what apps and browsers show you when it comes to the technical interoperability of users.

ActivityPub itself has wide support for various languages, including having different names and content for different languages. The username (actually preferredUsername) is transmitted through JSON, which is by definition UTF-8, so most encodings in use today (not that weird Japanese one and that other Asian encoding that's not UTF compatible) will Just Work™ assuming the necessary URL encoding and decoding logic is added in the right places.

I think Lemmy can be patched to accept unicode characters as usernames, as the current limitations in code and in the UI are just choices made during development. I don't think it'll add much, though.

The ads Discord implements aren't like the ads that track your every move online. This is basic product placement. I'm not even opposed to that as long as they keep it minimal and remove that shit from the paid subscriptions.

Signal doesn't have anything close to the Discord experience. It lacks basic interaction patterns like channels. Voice calls work completely differently from a conversation standpoint. I don't think Signal even implements threads, if it does I've never been able to find them. The UI for managing things like emotes/sticker packs is a lot better, especially for communities.

The there are the advanced features. Webhooks are used quite often for automation. Forums and discussion boards are used by larger communities. Roles and access control don't exist in Signal because it doesn't have a concept of communities.

Discord is much closer to Slack and Teams and Mattermost than it is to Signal and Telegram and WhatsApp and iMessage. On the protocol level, all of that could be implemented by exchanging special messages between devices, but the only app Signal devs want you to use contain none of that. Signal does have stuff Discord doesn't have, such as encryption and cruptocurrency built in, but neither seem to be dealbreakers for everyone else.

You don't need to use Discord, nor do you need to use Signal. I have Signal, but nobody else does. You don't need to convince me, convince everyone else, because my Signal conversation list has been empty for months since I last reinstalled my custom ROM.

I'm sure Signal can be used in the same way as Discord, in the way you can technically run a copy of Microsoft Word on the PlayStation if you stack enough hacks on top of each other. For the vast majority of the user base, that's not going to happen.

Looks good because URL beautifiers catch that, but the actual URL you linked is https://ar.m.wikisource.org/wiki/%D8%AA%D9%81%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%B1_%D8%A7%D8%A8%D9%86_%D9%83%D8%AB%D9%8A%D8%B1 and relying on URL detection has proven to be very unreliable. For instance, Wikipedia links often lack closing parentheses, or closing parentheses and other punctuation get added to links accidentally.

Hex-encoded URLs are technically valid, but not very readable to humans.

ActivityPub users need to be identified by some identifier in the URL, and Lemmy chose the user name to be that identifier. As a result, non-Latin usernames become… complicated. Just the right-to-left nature of scripts like Arabic alone would break UI design. Technically you could hex encode usernames and assume them to be UTF-8, but it'd be a massive pain that'll undoubtedly break compatibility with other services.

You can use your display name to freely enter just about any name. Usernames are almost entirely irrelevant to Lemmy as far as I'm aware; I think they only matter in mentions (although that's a choice as well, on the ActivityPub level there's no need to do that). The display name should cover the "it looks really cool" component. As you've maybe seen already, you can include names, flags, and emoji in there as well!

With the current username system, there are more possible usernames than there are grains of sand on earth, per server. I don't think we need a bigger username pool. We may need a better way to tag people, though, but that's also true without different character sets.

But Discord isn't ad driven, it's driven by their premium subscriptions and their weird store. I'm sure they sell message data to AI companies like every other messenger these days, but they're not a messenger like Signal is; they're a space to hang out and game.

If anything, the exclusive deals mean your community posts only make it to fewer AI services. Publicly accessible places like Lemmy are scraped to death and share all manner of user behaviour by design.

As long as you don't try to replace Signal by Discord, I don't really see the problem to be honest. I'd switch to Matrix once Element becomes faster and less buggy and has decent video streaming capabilities and some of Discord's features, but with the way things are going that'll take a couple of years.

And they don't sell to Facebook, nor does it sell any ads to advertisers willing to pay that rate, so that's a rather useless statistic.