All power to you friend. Nevertheless it’s best to be informed, especially when attempting to make a better alternative.

Unfortunately there is a significant security advantage in using Google Pay or Apple Pay which no one has yet mentioned. When you make a payment with chip-and-PIN using your physical card, your real card number is exposed to the merchant. The proprietary wallet services on the other hand use a device-specific token in place of the card number.

In practice, this means that if a retailer is compromised, there’s no usable card data to steal or clone, which removes a large class of fraud that still exists with physical cards.

Maybe it would need to draw on experiences of moderating chat rooms and forums - these are very often done by volunteers who put a lot of time and energy into it because they believe in it.

There is also the “Web Of Trust” concept, where, given that everyone can prove their identity, people can then vouch for each other.

needs to quickly get past two network effects: the global network effect […] and the local network effect

Sounds like a job for Fedi-date! If you could somehow hook a dating app into the fediverse, then maybe it could survive long enough to get sufficient users. If it also offers more general IRL meet-ups (like meetup.com but without the corpo rent-seeking), then it could perhaps begin to get popular that way too.

traffic statistics (through creepy location tracking, even in the background unless opted out)

yes it’s definitely creepy when Google does it, but it provides invaluable data to other users - advance warnings of tailbacks whilst driving, and accurate ETA for public transport when using bus or train. Would be great if a privacy-respecting way to do this could be found for OSM & its ilk.

Once you’re used to it, you can use the two separate clipboards independently. Say you wrote a sentence like, “one two five four three”, you can correct it by selecting “three”, cutting with Ctrl-X, then selecting “five” (meaning it is now in the selection buffer), hitting Ctrl-V to paste “three” from the clipboard, and then finally middle-click where you need to paste the “five”.

compatibility layer upon layer

I can understand the sentiment, but don’t ignore the real advantages to the proton/wine way of doing things.

For instance, some old games won’t run on modern Windows but will run on Linux under proton/wine.

It’s also just a lot easier for game companies to target a single platform i.e. Windows. When Valve first released their Steam machines, a few AA games were released natively. For several of those, the native builds no longer work and you now need to run the Windows version under proton/wine.

often social eng attacks rely on a vulnerability as well e.g. getting your mark to open an Excel file that exploits a vulnerability in MS Office.

yes I’m using my regular email and messaging family members using theirs.

It’s working fine, except for the occasional issue like I mentioned, i.e. sending multiple emails for one message.

I don’t know what it’s doing about encryption - it seems to use it when it knows the other party supports it, but that’s not my priority at this point, my aim is to encourage people to move off WhatsApp (this is what all my chatting takes place on). I’m kind of using the family chat as guinea pigs really.

Nice, I’ll give it a whirl. Their their website says, “ArcaneChat is a Delta Chat client” so maybe it deals with the issues I’ve had better.

bug reporting

I’m looking for projects I can contribute to in some way, so definitely not averse to bug reporting. From some discussions on the forum, the way I’m using it isn’t really supported and they’re really aimed at people who want to chat securely without being tied to proprietary networks. But I’m certainly not the only one who would prefer not to use proprietary chat protocols like WhatsApp, but there’s just too many other people I’d have to convince to switch to yet another chat app. Delta Chat / ArcaneChat really seem to offer a way forward for people like me, but the chat experience for people using regular email clients has to be very good - people get annoyed quickly if they receive 5 emails in a row each containing a single picture followed by a 6th email that just contains text (which is how my attempt at a message sharing some photos came through for email users)

what is this, is it anything like Delta Chat? (i.e. the UI of a chat app but using email for sending/receiving messages)

I’ve been trying out Delta Chat for messaging my family. It’s a bit kludgy and messy though, at least when interacting with others who are using regular email clients. For instance, it sometimes sends multiple emails rather than bundling it up as one.

No need for “AI”

whisper is AI, it’s even made by the Big Bad, OpenAI themselves <cue boos and hissing from the peanut gallery>

A statement released by the university said a “single shot was fired on campus toward a visiting speaker. Police are investigating now, suspect in custody.” A university spokeswoman later told the New York Times that police had determined the person detained earlier was not the shooter, and that no suspect was currently in custody.

Looks like the guy initially arrested turned out to not be involved (maybe just another guy with a high powered rifle? Don’t know, must make things hard in the US). Or have they since arrested someone else?

You think if people who publish their work publicly didn’t research things like this, they would just never be discovered?

At least this way, we all know about the possibility, and further research can be done to see what can mitigate it.

well obviously it won’t, that’s why you need ethical output restrictions

Yeah I’ve noticed it sometimes seems to get worse. Don’t know what phone you use, but when I use Google’s voice-to-text on Android, I often have to correct mistakes, because it tries to do it word-by-word, but sometimes what I actually intend is not clear until I’ve spoken the whole sentence - and for whatever reason, Google very rarely goes back and changes a word it’s already transcribed. For instance, if I say, “I think your speaking” it’s not yet clear if that should be a “your” or a “you’re”, and it won’t become clear until I complete the sentence/clause.

If I want to dictate a long piece of text, I will use OpenAI’s text-to-speech, which is almost flawless (it doesn’t start transcribing until you’ve finished everything you’re going to say). I appreciate some people don’t like OpenAI, but to be honest, Google isn’t much better, and likewise Apple is not a lot better than Google.

Well spelling was solved even earlier than that, with rote-learning at school in combination with the very environmentally friendly technologies known as the paddle and cane. What was wrong with that way of doing things?? Is it progress? Or were things better in the old days?

In any case, all the words in the sentence in question are spelt correctly - the problem is grammar. Correctly determining if the grammar of a sentence is correct is a much harder problem than simply checking the spelling of words against a dictionary.

I’m using voice to text like right now

AI really has come a very long way hasn’t it. It was not that long ago that you had to train the computer on your own voice and even then accuracy was annoyingly bad. Now it can transcribe speech from just about anyone at much better levels of accuracy.

Yes you got it! The person I replied to was talking about those inline grammar checkers you have in word processors, which are pretty limited in value so I wanted to show what you could do with an LLM, and how it can go beyond just correcting but also helping learning.

I did think about adding a sentence to say to imagine writing in some important official context e.g. a letter to a government agency rather than a comment on Lemmy, but decided in the end it would probably be obvious.

It’s a *lot* better these days. Here’s how you could use it to improve the English in your comment:

Can you point out and characterise the grammar mistakes in the following sentence, with tips on how the writer could avoid similar mistakes in future - “I must admit its been a while, but all these things where horrible last time i played with them.”

Sure — that sentence has a few grammar issues, each pointing to a common kind of slip. Here’s the breakdown:

1. “its been a while” → “it’s been a while”

Mistake: “its” is a possessive pronoun (like his, her, their), while “it’s” is the contraction of “it has”. Fix: Use “it’s” because the writer means “it has been a while”.

Tip: When in doubt, try expanding “it’s” to “it is” or “it has” and see if the sentence still makes sense. If it doesn’t, you probably want “its”.

2. “where horrible” → “were horrible”

Mistake: “where” (a location) is confused with “were” (past tense of are). Fix: Use “were” to correctly form the past tense of “to be”.

Tip: Say it aloud—“they were horrible” sounds natural, while “they where horrible” doesn’t. If it’s a verb (they were), you want “were”.

3. “i played” → “I played”

Mistake: Lowercase “i”. Fix: Always capitalize “I” when it’s a pronoun referring to oneself.

Tip: This is more about habit than logic—just train yourself to always type “I” in uppercase, even in casual writing.

Full corrected version: “I must admit it’s been a while, but all these things were horrible last time I played with them.”