Copying my comment to OP below - it might be worth checking:

Check your inotify maximums - this is the system which monitors directory contents and notifies applications of changes. These maximums used to be pretty low, but should be high enough for most users these days. Do you tend to work with multiple directories containing lots of files?

See what you get when you run these two commands:

sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches
sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_instances

You can increase them temporarily like so and see if it helps:

sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288
sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_instances=1024

If it does help, add to /etc/sysctl.conf (or a file in /etc/sysctl.d/).

Check your inotify maximums - this is the system which monitors directory contents and notifies applications of changes. These maximums used to be pretty low, but should be high enough for most users these days. Do you tend to work with multiple directories containing lots of files?

See what you get when you run these two commands:

sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches
sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_instances

You can increase them temporarily like so and see if it helps:

sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288
sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_instances=1024

If it does help, add to /etc/sysctl.conf (or a file in /etc/sysctl.d/).

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

Yes they should, however often they are not allowed to disclose such information. Over the last couple of decades, governments have realised that they can sidestep onerous legal principles such as innocent until proven guilty by requiring financial services companies to enforce KYC rules and the like. These rules were sold to us as a way to prevent the mega rich from dodging tax and organised crime from freely spending and moving their money, but surprise surprise governments have no qualms using them against people who are not so clearly in the wrong.

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.

I’ve been using Zoho for about 6 months and have no complaints. I pay about $12 a year for a couple of gigs of storage - not a huge amount, but enough for personal email as long as you delete stuff fairly regularly.

You can create up to 30 email aliases, which I use a lot. For instance, I have an email address for newsletters, a couple for generic web logins, and then some specific ones for important accounts such as banking.

It’s easy to make filters to sort email as it arrives. This is how I handle the “priority inbox” situation. Any email from my family or other important senders is all put into a single folder, and I have an email app on my phone which checks this folder and notifies me of new mail. All other mail is either moved by other filters e.g. newsletters or just left in the inbox.

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”.

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.

Firefox has Firefox Relay, which lets you create aliases (they call them masks) for one destination email for free

https://relay.firefox.com/

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>

How many people listed in the credits of your favorite show do you truly think own one, much less multiple Porsches?

I don’t think those people are responsible for pricing. The Porsche comment was a flippant way of pointing out the whole parasitic machine that sits atop the actual creatives - the actors, the set designers, the script writers, all those people that you and I do want to support. All those people are not involved in pricing decisions or exclusivity contracts, and they’re mostly paid a salary so by the time a movie or series is out, they’re already on to the next job. By refusing to subscribe to all the myriad streaming services, you are mainly putting pressure on those executives to make a more appealing product.

I think you’re right in that it’s very reminiscent of US tipping culture (I’m not in the US), in that the people at the bottom are the ones who do the real work and yet they don’t get a fair share of the profits and instead have to take on unfair risk (i.e. the risk of not being tipped).

That said, I need to confess that I’m partly playing devil’s advocate, I pay for Netflix and just the other day I paid YouTube to “buy” a digital copy of a movie - for the exact reasons you said, I want to support the creative people behind the shows & movies I enjoy. I just don’t think it’s accurate to say that there’s a moral requirement to pay for entertainment, especially given how unfair the system currently is.

what would happen if nobody paid and everybody pirated

they wouldn’t just slowly starve to death you know. they’d start making the price more competitive and the service more user-friendly before they’d even had to pawn a single Porsche.

In all locations presumably? Do you know if it’s indistinguishable from you being at your main residence? Like are there any technical ways a service you’re connecting to could tell that you’re going through a VPN? (Just curious BTW!)

Sharing knowledge. Lots of people are not primarily motivated by greed.