I used to make calls through MSN Messenger and it was a much better experience than Skype. Skype always seemed lower quality.

AI makes it different because this is likely dynamically synthesized speech that sounds real. Previous TTS engines wouldn’t have sounded real enough to be believable.

A phone company built this? Based.

Lenny isn’t AI; it’s just a collection of prerecorded messages.

I have a Galaxy S3 somewhere, which is apparently supported by PostmarketOS. Interesting.

Hart

My wife bought a Hart brand shop vac and it nearly caught on fire the first time we used it. We swapped it for a DeWalt branded one (which are not actually made by DeWalt) and haven’t had any issues.

I ran Tomato on mine. Liked it better than DD-WRT.

This confuses me because BlueSky does not have any federalization technologies built into it,

Bluesky is designed to be federated though. It’s just not fully available yet. Also, Bluesky is open-source, licensed under the MIT license.

Yahoo and AOL email are both still around and relatively widely used, and there’s plenty more that aren’t ran by large companies, like FastMail.

On mobile you can use ReVanced.

and Skype was worse than MSN Messenger. I’m still upset they killed off the better product.

Even if it were for sale, it’s designed to be decentralized so you couldn’t buy the whole network, just like you can’t buy all of Lemmy or Mastodon. That’s the theory anyways - I don’t think they’ve really executed on it yet.

Not 100% sure but I don’t think anything would stop either a fork or a new app that uses the same protocol.

We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem.

People complain that the mainstream sites are relatively closed ecosystems, but they also complain when those sites try to be more open ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ActivityPub is the protocol though. Mastodon is an implementation of the protocol.

Bluesky is (in theory) federated, but I think you can’t run your own server yet. We’ll see if they keep their promise.

Its protocol has some improvements over ActivityPub, for example you can use a domain name you own as your username even if you’re not hosting your own instance, and your user identity is portable in that case - you can move to a different instance but keep the same username.

Upstream is usually still your ISP’s network for a while longer. The splitter box goes into some other equipment owned by your ISP.

Well it isn’t shared before the upstream server, that’s what FTTH is.

FTTH just means that there’s fiber going into your house.

Most residential fiber internet connections use a technology called PON (GPON for gigabit or XGS-PON for 10Gbps). My understanding is that the fiber from your house goes into a splitter box in the street, which takes fiber connections from many customers (usually either 32 or 64 customers) and multiplexes them into a single fiber by either using different wavelengths of light or by time multiplexing. Upstream from this, bandwidth is shared.

The bandwidth is still shared… It’d be prohibitively expensive to have dedicated bandwidth just for your connection, and most customers don’t need anywhere near that. Unlimited, dedicated 1Gbps is around 320TB of data per month.

A business-grade connection has fewer people sharing it, but it’s still shared. The only fully-dedicated connections are enterprise-grade connections (like in a data center), and even then it’s an upgrade that costs quite a bit. :)

You’re right - upstream connections are usually fiber. In fact there’s a name for this type of network: HFC (hybrid fiber + coax)