I have an Anker nano II that get's very hot while charging my laptop (~25-35W average). I should run a thermometer on it. If I held it for more than a second, I might get a burn.
I lost my facebook account about five years ago--total outright account ban. No recourse at all. It happened to a group of about 10 people that had been administrators of a local non-profit's facebook page and who had managed groups for the organization in the past. Our non-profit was non-denominational and helped local teens with after school type programs. We never knew why our personal accounts were banned. Best we could figure was that we used a tagline in the past in some facebook comments and posts that later got co-opted and spread by a "white power" group in the USA. We were located in Canada.
At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.
I had to rebuild my social media profile and our organizations profiles and I lost 14 years of Messenger conversations, posts, and photos. These memories were just gone. It sucked. For the non-profit, it meant lost donations and lost connections for our alumni. Keep your own content off-platform.
Buying an Oculus actually did allow me to successfully restore my wife's Facebook after it was hacked, thanks to finding probably the same thread you're referencing.
The amount of emotional capital held in various platforms is terrifying when you consider how easy it is to be locked out.
I now regularly "takeout" all of our actively used platforms and store them on physical media.
This is corporate fraud and I would love there to be an internal email discovered, "Hey, our game plan is to control the Oculus ecosystem purely so people have to buy it if they want their Facebook account unbanned (which we'll randomly do on occasion, to ensure this happening)"
I registered an instagram account to share my art, and was banned entirely, immediately, before I could even upload an avatar, with zero explanation. I emailed several times, did the license scan thing, and even messaged support from my personal account, and I still have never gotten any sort of explanation.
shrug This and that other thread today about Slack just seems to be what happens when you're determined to remove as many humans from your processes as possible.
Try Pixelfed or even Bluesky. Pixelfed is the fediverse alternative to Instagram, and there are some independent app devs working on Bluesky apps to be similar in look to it.
You won't find the reach, but you'll find a little community of other artists that can be a lot more personal & fulfilling than you would find on mainstream social media.
I know this happens with a lot of companies but I see this as a direct consequence of Mark Zuckerberg owning companies
Everybody knows his history. Yes you can, "steal an idea". He does it to everyone. He did it to Snapchat. It shouldn't be a surprise the things he owns are substandard garbage
> At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.
This is one of the weird things about social media; it can be extremely valuable to people, but there's no way to actually pay the company providing it for the privilege of having a fair manual review from customer service.
The internet has been like this forever. In the 90s I was banned from hotmail for having an inappropriate email address because my last name is Cummings. No recourse for some idiotic regex filter.
I guess the only solution is to self-host. I've even been migrating my dedicated server to a homelab I'm slowly building. But that's a very time-consuming option, has a high chance of breakage, and not even available for 99.5% of people. And most people don't wants to spend hours and hours of private time to babysit own email server, which is understandable. Finally, it's not free.
I wonder what would have to happen for people to become more digitally sovereign, but I doubt it'll ever happen. If anything, we're going in the other direction.
> The problem arises since computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, but interpreting words of this kind requires considerable ability to interpret a wide range of contexts, possibly across many cultures, which is an extremely difficult task.
Humans have issues with such tasks, too, apparently. Hence their push to change IT terminology, e.g. master -> main git branch.
Indeed, I got my Hotmail suspended because of something not terribly different. Thank God in those days not every account insisted on 2fa through email
This is wonderful. You should be proud. It's a fun recreation and it was fun to use. Back when I was using XP (2004-2010), I had a 19" black CRT monitor. Once I got a laptop, it became a second monitor. I got whatever the family didn't want and the few things I scrounged from used computer stores. In 2010, I jumped to Windows 7. The theming of Windows XP always reminds me of seeing it for the first time, how colourful and inviting it looked.
I like having my media locally, non-drm and under my control as well. I've grown-up in an era when media flowed freely on the Internet (music, tv, movies, books, academic papers, games and software). It takes a minimum of effort, but it's also not sorcery. It's just a collection of files sitting on a hard drive. I then have layers of software (docker containers) to serve those files and keep databases with metadata listings up-to-date. I also enjoy cataloguing and maintaining my own media. It's a passion and a pastime. That's why I continue to save media.
Unfortunately, I usually find out about things that directly affect my employer (government) on local subreddits before I find it through any other source. I will read CBC/Radio-Canada and TVO (public broadcasters for Canada and Ontario)
Even a regular mobile connection 4G-5G can feel spotty with connections/disconnections dropping for a few seconds. I spend some time every summer in rural Haliburton Highlands/North Hastings (middle Ontario), cellular reception is hit and miss, one bar maybe two, voice calls, when successful, sound awful and text messages frequently stay unsent (or send multiple times inexplicably). Unless you can afford starlink, or drive into the next town and hit the library wifi, you're out-of-luck. As you're driving cell service will drop depending on elevation. A quick check of facebook messenger and maybe loading a webpage for information. Forget a fancy app.
I actually like this idea in theory. Except, it wouldn't allow for students to find flexible part-time work.
As an example, I was a university student in Canada ~15 years ago. I lived with my parents, driving 30 minutes each way to attend classes. I had car insurance, gas, a cell phone, tuition, parking and books to pay. Tuition was costing 6000$ a year over 5 years. Being in humanities, I chose my own course schedule. I would often have classes 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday. I would work nights and weekends 25-33.5 hours most weeks..Most part-time employment worked around student hours and allowed some flexibility. Once I graduated and had a full-time salary position, I had much more free time and struggled to not feel lonely in filling up that time.
Wow. The ease-of-use is insanely good. I haven't figured out yet how to move clippy to a different location on the screen (rather than centred), but it works well. I have multiple models downloaded and am chatting already!
