deong

@deong@lemmy.world
0 Post – 74 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

It is unfathomable to me how Reddit isn't profitable.

Facebook makes a mint by telling advertisers, "trust us, we'll get your ads in front of people who might buy your product based on a lot of inference around their fairly generic profile data plus some tracking cookies". One guy should be able to sell a billion dollars worth of ads on Reddit. Just put up a form that says, "which subreddit do you want to advertise in?" and "what's your credit card number?". That's it. They have like 10,000 completely segmented markets just sitting there full of hundreds of millions of people who have self-selected to be members of those communities.

We spend hundreds of billions of dollars collectively trying to figure out which google search terms might find us a few more solid leads. Reddit has an amazing list of them for every company in the entire world. How in the everloving fuck have they managed to blindly bumble around for two decades without ever falling into the giant pile of money in front of them?

As an internal implementation detail, it's fine and pretty standard. Exposing it to the end user so that they have to know whatever janky-ass domain and capitalization you picked to run your application is braindead.

I've been saying for a while now that the actual test should be that you miss a couple. If you can look at a this 4 nanometer picture of what is either a bird, a sofa, or the titanic, and correctly tell me if it has part of one pedal from a bicycle in it, you're a robot.

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Or just use their built in sync and sign in one time, and all your addons will be installed and enabled for you.

If your argument boils down to "none of the browsers are exactly pre-configured for me, one of the 7 billion not special people on the planet", I’m not sure there’s a productive conversation to be had here.

I accept that I'm in the minority on these things, but I value simplicity really highly, and I mean "simple" as a very specific concept that's different from "easy". It can be harder to resolve library dependencies on a system where everything is installed using the native package manager and common file systems, but nothing is as "simple" as ELF binaries linking to .so files. Nested directories branching off of / is "simpler" than containers.

Do I have any practical reason for preferring things this way? Not really. There are some ancillary benefits that come from the fact that I'm old and I already know how to do more or less anything I need to do on a Unix system, and if you tell me I need to use flatseal or whatever, I'd rather just use users and groups and tools that have been fine for me for 25 years. But that's not really why I like things this way. I have no issue with embracing change when it otherwise appeals to me --I happily try new languages and tools and technology stacks all the time. What it really is is that it appeals to the part of my brain that just wants to have a nice orderly universe that fits into a smaller set of conceptual boxes. I have a conceptual box for how my OS runs software, and filling that box with lots of other smaller little different boxes for flatpack and pyenv and whatever feels worse to me.

If they solved practical problems that I needed help solving, that would be fine. I have no problem adopting something new that improves my life and then complaining about all the ways I wish they'd done it better. But this just isn't really a problem I have ever really needed much help with. I've used many Unix systems and Linux distributions as my full-time daily use systems since about 1998, and I've never really had to spend much effort on dependency resolution. I've never been hacked because I gave some software permissions it wouldn't have had in a sandbox. I don't think those problems aren't real, and if solving them for other people is a positive, then go nuts. I'm just saying that for me, they're not upsides I really want to pay anything for, and the complexity costs are higher than whatever that threshold is for me.

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I’m not sure “Twitter is not a backup service for your personal hard drive” is a point that needed to be made.

I'm a bitter, stagnant, arrogant old man. That this guy also can't write for shit is coincidental.

You can set MAKEFLAGS in /etc/makepkg.conf to something like "-j8" (where "8" should be something like the number of cores you have or maybe number of cores minus one or two if you want to leave some CPU capacity available.

However, the build instructions for a specific package can override these defaults. You'd have to look at the resolve-davinci package files to see if it does that for some reason that might be important.

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yeah, the smart teenager is going to be charging the adults in his life $50 to get their porn working again.

A good password manager will be encrypted on device using your master password and only the encrypted data ever synced anywhere. So if Bitwarden gets hacked, and the worst case scenario happens, that means an attacker makes off with the complete contents of your vault. But all they have is an encrypted file. To decrypt it, they need your master password. Bitwarden doesn't have the keys to lose -- they only have the lock, and only you have the key. So an attacker would need to compromise Bitwarden (the company) to get access to the vault, and then separately, compromise you personally to get your master password (the key).

Alternately, they could try to brute-force the master password offline. If you think you could guess a user's password if you tried 100,000,000,000 guesses, and each guess took you 1 nanosecond, you could guess all hundred billion in a little under two minutes. Bitwarden uses techniques to make it intentionally very slow (slow if you're a CPU at least) to generate the hashes needed to compare a password. If it takes you 100,000 nanoseconds per guess instead, then instead of two minutes, it takes almost 4 months. Those numbers are completely made up, by the way, but that's the general principle. Bitwarden can't leak your actual passwords directly, because they never get them from you. They only get the encrypted data. And if an attacker gets the encrypted data, it will take them quite a bit of time to brute force things (if they even could -- a sufficiently good master password is effectively impossible to brute force at all). And that's time you can use to change your important passwords like your email and banking passwords.

One important realization for people to have is that none of us get to choose perfection here. You don't only have to worry about Bitwarden getting hacked. You also have to worry about you forgetting them. You have to worry about someone figuring out your "cryptic messages that only I understand" scheme. Security is generally about weighing risks, convenience, and impact and choosing a balance that works best for you. And for most people, the answer should be a password manager. The risks are pretty small and mitigation is pretty easy (changing your passwords out of caution if the password manager is breached), and the convenience is high. And because it's, as you put it, "a pain in the ass" to manage good unique passwords yourself, virtually no one actually does it. Maybe they have one or two good passwords, and rest are awful.

Honestly the only thing Apple vets is that the app maker isn’t trying to weasel their way around Apple’s cut of the revenue. They’ll 100% catch it if you have a link to your sign-up page instead of using in-app purchase, but if you want to make an app called Threads and scam 300,000 people’s info, go nuts.

The Google Store is no better, but if I gave 1000 people money to spend on software, the ones who would be scammed out of the most are the people using these app stores. It’s an absolute travesty that Apple continues to get so much mileage out of their bullshit claims about their strict and thorough review process.

Also, I think it’s kind of hilarious that you just want a phone to work without you needing to mess with it, and then your phone cycle with Android sucked because you apparently picked something called the WileyFox Swift and started fucking around with bootloader replacements.

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Mostly you're paying so that never getting any resolution is someone else's fault.

There’s no real distinction between the two. We don’t have a definition of AI or intelligence — never have. Inside the field, ML has some recognized connotations, but outside of specialist literature, they’re just marketing fluff.

So your advice to any organization seeking to minimize illegal activity is to willfully ignore any trace of it?

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It's not like the Republican party was engaged in a large scale effort to cultivate disinformation from Russian trolls. The Russians were doing it on their own, and the GOP was just the beneficiary, playing up whatever random disinformation happened to pick up traction and occasionally reaching out to coordinate efforts.

And it wasn't "a few dozen Facebook ads" -- it was a pretty large amount of activity, including things like breaking into private systems and leaking information. But aside from that, you're basically making the argument that astroturfing doesn't work, and we know that's just not true. Having a million "ordinary citizens" extol the virtues of some position often just works better as a persuasive argument than having one or two celebrity endorsers, or at the very least it adds credibility. That's why people do it.

The current AI/LLM hype may or may not be overpromising what they can really deliver, but it's different than blockchain in that at least what they're promising to deliver is valuable. Blockchain still has no actual use outside of organized crime and financial speculation. No one actually needs decentralized currencies or NFTs or whatever. It's all speculators hyping why I should care so that maybe I'll buy Bitcoin and continue to prop up their investment.

LLMs actually solve real problems. Answering customer support requests is a thing nearly every company absolutely has to do today, and AI promises to make that faster and cheaper. They promise to make software development more efficient and cheaper. They promise to make communications better. Those are all incredibly valuable promises to be making. It's a reasonable argument to say it's all smoke and mirrors and they'll fail to deliver on that promise, but that's a different failure mode than NFTs or blockchain stuff where the technology works as advertised, but there's no actual problem of any value being solved by it.

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I don’t think it’s especially disguised…

The userland differences are not too great, but I would assume a kernel module as significant as a modern GPU driver is pretty deeply tied to Linux's kernel internals.

There are lots of problems here. First, if you have to "hack" something to get the code, then it likely invalidates your own defense that you thought you were allowed to release it. Second, even if you can prove that nVidia knows that they should have to GPL their code, you still have no legal right to hack something to get it. If the hacking is illegal, then it's illegal, even if it's done to enable an otherwise legal activity.

But for authenticating an event pass? That’s what NFTs were actually designed for. So it’s a little weird seeing one of the first large-scale uses of NFTs for their correct purpose getting hated on by everybody.

But this is an event pass for a league…as in, an organized and well-known central agency managing the event. You don’t need a blockchain for this, because you don’t need any decentralization. Just buy the shit from the trusted party who manages that transactional history in a database developed with 60 year old technology with none of the weirdness and problems of blockchains. If you don’t trust the event organizer, then a provable certificate that your pass is legit is worthless, because the event organizer can just decline to accept your pass anyway.

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I think the main issue with Arch comes if you try to use it like Debian Stable. Like, if you don't run pacman -Syu for a year, you probably won't have a bootable system the next time you try. How about six months? My guess is you'd still be stuck fixing shit. Where is the safe "X" in "as long as I update every X, I'll be fine?" Who knows. That's not a very well-defined problem.

I sort of understand the issue here. I use Arch because I'm picky about system things, and it seems to require going against the fewest strongly held platform opinions in order to get it the way I want it. In an ideal world, I'd get it set up that way and not need to touch it very much afterwards. Arch requires frequent touches. Fortunately, almost none of them require any real mental energy, and I'm willing to do the occasional bit of "real work" if needed to keep it going, but that's a trade-off that may be more painful for some than others.

Going from one app (iMessage) to two isn’t an unambiguous win though. All the iPhone users’ experience got worse.

To be clear, this is such minor shit that the real answer is, "ok, I guess we’ll live with it because that’s how we communicate with our friends now", but it is certainly nicer for them if everyone is on an iPhone and they don’t have to solve that problem.

I’d also say that those health issues are much more practically impactful than Instagram showing you ads for luggage when you’ve bought a plane ticket.

Caring about ad tech is a hobby. It’s as good a hobby as any other, but that’s what it is.

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/var/lib/flatpak/app/org.gnu.emacs/current/active/export/bin/org.gnu.emacs is not what I expect a Unix system to want me to type if I want to run Emacs. Nor is flatpak run org.gnu.emacs. These are tools built by someone whose mental model of running Unix software is "click the icon in the Gnome launcher". That's one aspect what I'm describing as not being "simple". I don't want my mental model of how to run Unix software to include "remember how you installed it and then also remember the arbitrary reverse-FQDN-ish string you need to use to tell flatpak to run it". If I'm honest, that alone is sufficient to signal it wasn't built for me. I could work around it for sure with shell aliases, but I could also just not use it, and that seems fine for me.

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If you’re on Wayland, you’re probably on your own, but Xorg almost certainly can support anything except stuff like RGB lighting and DPI switching and that sort of thing. "Normal" mouse buttons should just be generating events that you can see with xev, and then remap them with xkbcomp or xmodmap.

I use a Razer Naga Trinity with the MMO buttons on the side, and I configure it exactly how I want with a script that calls xkbcomp when my window manager starts.

But the fact that virtually none of those organizations use it tells us a lot. Companies that actually need to maintain standards and procedures do it by putting "Important Procedure v3.1-FINAL-FINAL.docx" in Sharepoint. Could they build something on a blockchain that would have nice properties? Sure. But they don’t actually care about those properties really.

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Pretty sure Samsung guarantees 4 years of upgrades and support.

The apology letter is a bug, not a feature. I want more companies to just openly and unapologetically say, "this is what we’re doing, and not everyone is going to like it, but it’s what we believe is the right thing, and we’re doing it." No one needs more bullshit in their lives. I don’t mind that he isn’t giving me a bullshit apology. I mind that he’s a lunatic and his ideas are stupid.

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Many of the people who currently experience the privilege will be pissed off and view it as unfair. But in reality they’re getting a taste of what other minorities already experience.

There are two competing lenses we can view this kind of thing through, and both are valid. First, there's the macro lens in which groups like women are significantly underrepresented, and most reasonable people believe that to be a problem we've created that we need to solve. It's not that women are bad at this job. It's that women have been pushed not to participate for reasons we think are bad. Through that lens, an obvious solution is to bias things in favor of women for some period of time to get to a steady state where the system won't automatically fall back into gender-bias as soon as we take our thumb off the scale. That's a reasonable theory, and pursuing it does a lot of good.

But there's a second lens in which individual people with names are trying to participate in the labor market. The fact that men have had a built-in advantage does not imply that any man looking for a job would only be able to get one by leveraging an unfair advantage. If we think talent and hard work are equally distributed through the population, then temporarily biasing things away from men is, to the man currently trying to find a job, exactly as discriminatory as anything that prior generations have faced. The fact that there's a societal good being pursued doesn't make that harm go away either. It is unfair, and we should recognize that. We may decide we have to do it anyway, but I'm not a fan of the idea that "let's mistreat them like other people were mistreated" is inherently a good thing.

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Mostly good advice. I disagree on the headless server part though. Most people who are interesting in learning "Linux” have a much less reductive idea of what that means than you do, I think. Specifically, I think becoming a comfortable, fluent speaker of a typical Unix/Linux environment and userland is probably the most important thing. I think the best way to start doing that is to just live in Linux, and you’re not going to do that on a headless server. Learning the GUI that your distribution uses to add users isn’t important, but having a GUI where you can run standard browsers and photo editors and such is important, because otherwise, you’ll spend all your time in Windows and never have the chance to develop fluency in all the stuff that is actually important.

Limiting yourself to only using command line stuff I suspect does more harm than good, unless you’re hyper-motivated to learn fast. For most people, the smoother path is probably more gradual. Start with Gnome or whatever and just use the computer. Over many years, you’ll learn a lot of piecemeal things just by becoming frustrated with some problem and learning how to solve it. I do think it’s good advice to do as much from a shell as you can from day one. Instead of using the GUI to copy files, learn to do it from a shell. Just don’t feel like you aren’t allowed to use Firefox to browse the web.

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You definitely should not run your own email servers, but he’s just saying to buy a domain and pay for a GSuite account (or Fastmail, Proton, whatever) to actually operate email on that domain. All those companies handle all the modern anti-spam functions for you.

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So your solution on Windows requires me to move all my files out of where they belong to process them? How do I get them all back when I’m done?

I knew how to write that find command. Didn’t need to search for anything. And because I know how to do that, I can also search for every pdf file modified since last month. I can spit out a list of the gps coordinates for every photo I’ve taken, ordered by latitude. I can find every Python script on my computer that uses Pandas. I can do a million things that boil down to "find every file that matches some complex filter and do something to it", and I learned one tool. I don’t need to learn one point and click app that converts comics, one that messes with photo metadata, etc.

I can sympathize with the idea that there’s a high learning curve. And there’s nothing wrong with trying to provide ways for people to use their computer that require less knowledge. But recognize that you’re asking for a crutch here.

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Yeah, that this is a name and logo that they even entertained for half a second is pretty strong evidence that they're not up to this challenge. This is like starting a law firm and calling it "Buttfuckers". No one is going to take you seriously, and you not seeing the problem means they shouldn't.

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I’m not in front of a computer to test, but the man page would suggest that chown -HR would do the trick.

They're not deliberately breaking it -- they just don't support it. "Deliberately breaking" has the connotation that it would have worked just fine, except they took some extra action to stop it. That's not true here. It would only work the way people want it to work if Apple spent a lot of money paying developers to make it work.

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There's always a router, and there's always a DNS server. Normally, your device is asking to join a network, and something on that network assigns it an IP address, a DNS server, and a gateway router to use. That's true whether you're connecting to WiFi or a cellular network. The difference is just which device is assigning you those things. You can also override that on your side by specifying a static configuration that can break things, but I don't think that's your problem.

"Private DNS Mode" here is only referring to whether or not you want to encrypt the DNS lookup traffic. That's certainly not a bad idea, but it's a separate issue from whether or not you have a working DNS setup at all. From the screenshot below, it looks like you do have a working DNS configuration. To connect to a server, you type the server's name (e.g., mobile.pornhub.com), your browser sends a DNS request to your DNS server asking it to return the IP address of that server, and then it uses that IP address to ask the server to send it a web page. You're getting to the part where you've asked the server to send you a web page, but the server is refusing because your browser didn't make the request over HTTPS (i.e., using encryption).

I don't know why that is, but I'd try the steps outlined here.

But that’s not the kind of privacy we’re talking about. Privacy discussions are largely about ad tech and tracking. The post here isn’t calling people idiots because he thinks Threads is more likely to leak your credit card numbers and nudes. He’s calling people idiots for not caring about tracking the way he does. And the reality is that there’s no real reason why they should care. The argument boils down to just, “c’mon, don’t you think it’s creepy?”. And if I say, “not really”, we’re kind of at an impasse. There’s just no obvious pragmatic harm you can point to to reason them over to your side. You may as well being trying to convince them to enjoy pineapple on pizza. If they don’t already, the game’s pretty much over.

It's been a while since I've had a Windows machine, but doesn't Windows index the content of files as well as their names? If so, that would have fairly profound differences from slocate.

It’s more, "oh, that video clip looks like shit, and every time anyone on this chat likes something, everyone gets spammed a repetitive long-form explanation, and we can’t add Jimmy to the chat because it’s SMS now and AT&T limits it to 10 people, and …"

In the bad old days, SMS was incredibly limited. Apple came out with iMessage, which was both a full IP messaging client with rich features, but seamlessly fell back to SMS, and that was amazing, because a lot of the people you wanted to talk to only had SMS. Google briefly had a similar thing, but whoever ran that product lost the weekly pistols at dawn match that Google uses to set corporate strategy, and hangouts lost SMS integration, which meant you needed two message apps — one for IP messages that was good and a separate one for SMS that sucked. And they were completely separate — no shared threads or history or anything. And then hangouts was killed anyway to make room for chat, or meet, or duo, or allo, or jello, or J-Lo, or Oreos, or who the fuck knows anymore-oh. And so for several years, if you wanted the only thing anyone in the US ever wanted from a messaging app, you had to get an iPhone, because Google kept killing their apps every year like, "hey guys, our new app still can’t talk to your mom, but we integrated the "hot dog or not" feature from Silicon Valley into it, and isn’t that amazing?"

Now, it doesn’t matter, because no one is limited to SMS anymore. Everyone could be on whatever IP platform. But Google still picked a fucking standard built by the phone company with crappy baggage attached like requiring a phone number to use it, and anyway, they’re so late that everyone already picked iMessage. Even if RCS was as good, no one wants to change a bunch of stuff to be no better than when they started, and RCS also still isn’t as good.

I use Arch because it is generally the easiest one I've found to pretend it's 2010 again. Most Linux distributions are fine, but they've all been busy trying to solve problems I don't have and accepting that some niche corner cases are fine to break. I'm just a niche corner case in general.

I have nothing against Wayland trying to modernize the UI stack, but if their answer to half the things I need is "well the compositor should do that" and the compositor doesn't in fact do that yet, then I don't want to use Wayland yet. I have nothing against Flatpak trying to modernize application packaging, but their current story for making applications available from a shell is effectively "why do you want to do that", and well...I do want to do that, so I guess I don't really want to use Flatpak yet.

That's just me. Like I said...I'm a corner case. I understand that everyone else wants their computer to be an appliance that does what most people need without requiring any tinkering. And I'm not opposed to getting rid of the need to tinker. I'm too old to view tinkering to make something work as I thing I look forward to. I just view tinkering as a one-time cost with perpetual returns. I'm OK editing an xkb file to make some obscure input device work the way I want it to, because that might take me an afternoon, and then I just have that device do exactly what I want for the rest of its life with no further effort. Make it so that I never have to edit another xkb file again and I'll be just fine. But you can't do it by just saying, "no more needing xkbcomp because it doesn't work anymore, and if you needed it, go see if the compositor vendor will write some code for you".