Like the major point of Android’s success was that you could install literally anything… The great enshittification continues
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Maybe I am missing something, but I see nothing outrageous here. Power users can continue to install everything from every source, and developers will need to verify if they want to distribute via the app store.
I know several people, mostly over 60, who have been scammed. Some of them lost a small amount, some of them all their savings. The scams are real and nasty and non-tech people do need to be protected.
As long as they continue to allow me to install NewPipe, I’m mostly ok.
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Registration is required even if you are not distributing through the app store. See here.
I know people of all ages who have been scammed in many different ways. The age is irrelevant. Protecting people from scams is fine. BUT the limitation on downloads effects much more than that. I, for one, do not relish the removal of anonymity in a world where authoritarianism (regardless of political flavor) is on the rise.
@Vente You can install anything. But if you make an app, you can only distribute to 20 people before needing to produce you papers.
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Ohhh interesting. In the past years I have avoided the official app in favor of Vivaldi browser that works well enough, as m.youtube.com is quite usable. It’s a bit fuzzy, but it’s worth having an ad blocker and background playback for free. As a bonus, I can open several tabs. I’m not sure if NewPipe supports it, but it would not be a deal breaker for me… 
And it’d be grand if all the apps in the play store were absolutely, certainly, definitely not scams. But to my knowledge, the filtering has always been somewhat random and has always let plenty of cruft untouched.
The issue is people being shit, not people being able to share apps. This is once again, if it even is that — let’s not dive into that particular pit of cynicism right now, a technological attempt to solve something that isn’t a technological problem.
NewPipe can download videos. That’s useful for e.g. flights, where no internet will be available.
More importantly, it can download videos as audio, and save it into a directory that AntennaPod can read as a podcast. Thus I can queue YouTube videos as audio podcasts in my podcast player.
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Oh, that’s fantastic, I could watch videos when on a train where I don’t want to waste mobile data
I don’t think that problems can be categorized as technological or non-technological. Solutions can be technological in some cases, but practically it is always a mixture of stuff, and technology is a useful part of that.
I don’t think the point is filtering ex ante, especially for apps that don’t actively help steal money, just do something mildly nasty, like collecting your data. It is the threat of going after scammers ex post. It is a start.
Android has always been a closed garden, with the idea that if you are persistent enough you can let yourself out the gate. If you want freedom to install whatever you like and control over your device, you need to look elsewhere.
No, I don’t agree here, I’m afraid. If it were about apps “collecting your data”, things like Facebook would’ve been tossed out ages ago. But they aren’t, because collecting data is such a default thing with bigtech companies, these days.
It was always easy to do certain things, and they’re slowly but surely making the walls higher and the exit narrower. I’d love to look elsewhere, but there’s not much usable elsewhere to look at, at this moment. There’s postmarketOS, but that only works with a vanishingly small set of handsets, and there’s Jolla, and Ubuntu Touch if you squint, but that’s about it.
Mind you, I’m not against protecting users from Bad People, but I’m just not conviced that that’s the whole reason behind this latest change.
Another timelapse. This what I believe to be a pleated inkcap, parasola plicatilis, but I am no mycologist 
Apparently they grow during the night and during the day they die and release their spores.
I keep leaning towards more frames. This one was 1 per 40 seconds. Does anyone know if electronic shutter has any downside for these timelapses? I would like to “preserve” my shutter whenever I can.
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Thanks. Lovely. I live not far from Caio. As it was when I came to Wales in 1972. A more gentle age. 
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Now thats a bummer: Buyer receives detergent instead of $3,200 RTX 5090 in latest Amazon scam - NotebookCheck.net News
Time for a photographic excursion then 
?
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I came across this quote and thought others might appreciate it.
"The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut
Source: Poetic Outlaws
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“Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out.”
(…)
“The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man’s spiritual strength.”
Impressive the ways in which Tolstoy can compare counterfeit art to prostitutes, but I can’t say I disagree with his premise
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Is there an objective definition of Tolstoy’s concept of “counterfeit art”, other than “stuff I don’t like”?
Eg he considers Wagner’s operas “a type of counterfeit art”. In some other places his claim is that stuff produced “for gain” is “counterfeit art”, so I guess it rules out anyone who actually made a living from art, eg Mozart.
I confess that I do not know much of Tolstoy’s conception of art. I know a translated version exists on Project Gutenberg, but I have not read it yet.
I seem to recall from my undergraduate years that he had a handful of conditions for something to be true art. One of those being universality of experience (on the part of the viewer). Or something like that. I never understood it; but then I wasn’t in a mind to try. So much education is wasted on the young.
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Its changed. But relative to eveywhere today in Cymru it still has its charm.
Do you know Wales?
Given time & fair weather I’ll try to put a contemporary photo here sometime.
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