flatbield

@flatbield@beehaw.org
12 Post – 618 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Interests: News, Finance, Computer, Science, Tech, and Living

Nice. I like Kinsinger as a person and respect him. Have no idea his policies but they are at least sane.

Thanks for the heads up. Short answer for me is that I joined for a civil place on the Threadiverse not a walled garden. So if you guys leave the Threadiverse I will have to find a new home.

So I think you all will need to decide where to take this community. I will understand whatever you all decide. Just please communicate it clearly when the time comes.

Thanks for all of the hard work you all have done and are doing.

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Firefox is far from irrelevant. Pure stupid click bait. Market share of courses is a sad thing and may lead to irrelevance when most web sites stop supporting. In the late days of Netscape and the early days of Firefox that was the case... lack of website support. I am just starting to see that again.

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Management greed, stupidity, and self serving is perennial. Nothing new there.

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Sounds like Rush was one of those risk takers and visionaries. These sorts of people hold themselves up as beacons of light and others do too until the risk taking catches up.

I remember I had a boss that liked some book they read about one of these sorts of people. My boss even had the company buy each of us a copy to read. I skipped it. What I remember though was the the guy died while doing one of their risky things maybe 6 months later. Just thought it was classic. Guy held up as an example by people in authority shows how stupid those people are by getting himself killed.

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Great example why guns are just bad. To many impulsive and abusive people with them. More guns, more death.

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I am not sure why anyone cares. As far as Reddit, I moved on last year.

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Relax. Just use a different server. May not be exactly accurate either. How in the world do you have any idea who uses what server. I have never used this server.

One way is join the FSF and use their server. There are others or host your own too. The load and cost needs to be spread anyway.

People keep talking about going to another platform. Personally I think a better idea would be to develop lemmy to deal with these issues. This must be a fediverse wide problem. So some discussion with other admins and the developers is probably the way to go on many of these things. Moreover you work with https://opencollective.com/, can they help. Beyond this, especially CSAM, there must be large funding agencies where one could get a grant to get some real professional programming put into this problem. Perhaps we could raise funds ourselves to help with this too.

So frankly I would like to see Beehaw solve the issues with lemmy, rather then just move to some other platform that will have its own issues. The exception may be if the Beehaw people think that being a safe space creates too big a target that you have to leave the Threadiverse to be safe. That to me seems like letting the haters win. It is exactly what they want. My vote will always be to solve the threadiverse issues rather then run away.

Just my feeling. There may be more short term practical issues that take precedence and frankly it is all up to you guys where you want to take this project.

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The thing you getting wrong is if you go to /r/technology you are only seeing one subreddit on Reddit. It is not all Technology forums on the internet nor is it even all the Tech stuff on Reddit. You never see it all. The world is big, you never will. You just though you were because Reddit is well known, and the Technology sub-reddit is well known to you. You made a choice just to use that subreddit still and Reddit has no interest in federating with other sites. At least on the Fediverse you can see most things on the Fediverse if you choose.

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I totally do not get why people have to try to prove to themselves that masks do not work. More than likely they do especially if you have a new good well fitting mask changed frequently and you use and change it properly. There is also the question who it helps more, you or the people around you.

A huge problem during the pandemic was mask availability, and people using them properly even if they had a supply to do that which mostly no one did. So result of mask use is a good question but it may say nothing about how well masks used properly work.

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It was always kind of a scam. Computers always had color temperature settings. It is a sad fact that they use to all be set to around 9300K color temperature which is very unnaturally blue. Best color rendering is actually 6500K and people like me always reset them once purchased. You can also set them lower then that too say 3400K too.

Reason device makers used high color temperature was showroom. Two displays side by side, the lower color temperature will look yellow and no one will buy it. All about customer manipulation and marketing. As an engineer this always bothered me. Sell something not configured correctly to get the sale.

The one way lower color temperatures are better is that the eye is not as well corrected in the blue so vision should indeed be sharper with Amber sunglasses for example. There is some science behind that. Same for sleep issues. Lot of the other stuff seems more marketing and questionable.

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Supply chain attacks also show one reason that using older software like Debian stable may be a better plan for things that matter. All new software versions need some time to be tested and vetted.

It also shows the importance of security in depth. That less is more in terms of code dependencies and complexity. That knowing dependencies is as important as knowing your code.

I would consider the xz incident to be a success. The supply chain attack was found pretty rapidly. We have already seen many of these and we will see more. Ones I remember off the top of my head include Linux Kernel, NodeJS, Python PyPI.

I would not over blow this. Security is an ongoing activity and all security is porous.

This is the thing about Chrome and the whole Chromium based ecosystem. Why on earth would anyone use a browser from an Ad company.

By the way. They are planning on putting it in Android apps too. So there one gets little choice. A non-starter like Apple where you cannot even load your own apps and app stores or Android from an Ad company where you can with effort at least choose your own software and even image your own OS.

The biggest issue is who pays for the server infrastructure at scale.

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Yes. This is why I would never use an iPhone. Closed walled garden. Cannot even load apps from other repos.

China is the one county that could just tell Russia to get out of Ukraine. Same with North Korea. Just look at who they hang out with and you know quite a lot.

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Only my personal opinion. Seems very odd that they would sign an NDA. The deal is that when two companies meet it is more common that both companies will say that they do not want to exchange confidential information. There might be exceptions to that... but generally one should always say NO. Then only consider if there is a very good reason.

Other thing I would say is that NDAs have a scope. So you cannot really evaluate the NDA unless you read the document and know the scope. Could have been very limited scope.

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I am still not clear what supposed crime he has committed other then pissing powerful people off. He should get a reward for that.

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That's great. Get in charge of something that has value. Learn nothing, listen to no one. Impulsively change stuff and fire people some of it in pretty self serving ways. Destroy the value of the organization. Basically bankrupt the organization. Stop paying your bills. Try to make people pay more for every inane thing. Totally loose all credibility of the organization and yourself.

What a stupid plan. Only good thing about Twitter is it does not really matter. The federal government does matter and is not a business... so no.

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Such a laugh and after putting in arbitray rules himself. If he is such a democratic guy maybe he and the board shoud be able to be voted out by the membership too.

Sounds liked a bad idea. Who wants their voice out there... just seems like a security issue.

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Yes we know who Musk is... and it is a very mixed bag. Some where around the time he became the world's richest person I feel like something changed and he went over the top or over the edge. Not sure which.

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Personally I think it is a couple of things. My experience while being on the net for 35 years or so is that moderation on one hand and on the other hand a bit of a thick skin and a "Do Not Feed the Trolls" attitude is required. I have encountered trolls on Reddit and on Usenet which was way before Reddit. Yes I was on Voat awhile with you too... so I know what you mean.

Why? One it is a number of things. Good communication only happens when both parties are trying. So bad communication is more probable then good out of the gate. Plus the numbers game again. One troll can ruin the day of 100 other people. There always seem to some people that actually enjoy the trolling thing. Plus most of us are better at talking then listening. The internet is mostly a safe space for talking. Not so much always for listening.

Finally with all of its issues places like Reddit and other moderated forums are pretty effective. The people that do not like them are the Trolls. They will tend to leave and go to the free speech places which means those places have a much high density these days.

I also wonder if this has something to do with the breath of society and ways of being. There has always been part of society with this rough and tumble male culture where might makes right. Maybe it is some of that and how that part of society struggles with modern sensibilities.

Anyway my theory.

I do think it must be hard for some of the mods. Me I can just walk away from this madness. Mods if you have put your heart and soul into it... well harder. Still how can it be much clearer. Time to move on for them too.

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I am not sure I agree with their interpretation of the numbers. Inflation is not back to 2% and is unlikely to return there. Interest rates are high on loans. Stock market is not that up... just more recovering and the next 10 year return estimates are more like 6% not like the 10 or 12% people saw in the prior decade. Gas I do not use so I do not care. Geopolitics is concerning. Climate change is concerning. Internal politics is concerning. Both news and politics truth does not seem to matter... sensationalism seems more important then constructivism.

Hard to find positives. Maybe macro employment numbers are good. Not sure about working conditions or if incomes have matched inflation. Probably not universally. We may have avoided a recession I guess that may be positive. Money Market, CD, and Bond interest rates are up which is nice for some.

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Why is belief in freedom, fairness, honesty, truth, knowledge, and acceptance of diversity considered hating the US. At the same time some how is authoritarianism, exploitation, lying, manipulation, ignorance, and tribalism loving the US. That is like saying left is right, up is down, dumb is smart, totally bizzare.

I think I remember Intel saying that 64 bit on the desktop was not needed. They are great at making meaningless predictions it seems.

I would not call it a next step. Just another option. The big downsides include much larger on block storage size and worse yet much bigger memory foot print since your app cannot benefit from shared images. Worse system integration too.

In a world where block storage is huge and cheap and memory too maybe less important. I would not say it is without issues though. Maybe convenient but not optimal in a lot of ways.

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We have one. It is "Free and Open Source Software". By the way. I use Linux all the time.

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It is all public just as most forums on Reddit. No real difference. No difference with Usenet either. Relax.

Same here. I am a US citizen.

I even have people in my family that voted for this guy and may again.

The options we have are limited. Biden who is really too old. Trump who is too old not qualified and self serving. Nikki Haley who probably cannot get nominated.

Edit: Most people want Biden and Trump to not be running but we will probably be stuck choosing between these two. In the primaries I will not vote for either. In the general election I will never vote for Trump.

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He did. Back then you forget you had all closed systems. I spent something like $10K on my first Mac, all the hardware and software and that was 1988 dollars. Now we have open systems, open browsers, lot of open protocols. I have not used much for closed stuff since 2000. Also software and hardware costs have plumetted. FOSS won.

It does not mean that there are not other challenges. Hardware has never been really open. Products have never been really open. The public or business for the most part has not chosen open. The service and server nature of most produces these days is another issues. Another is that tracking and advertising is the business model of most of it. AI is another challenge. Patents and other monopoly supporting laws are still acting too.

The article is frankly a bunch of FUD.

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That does kind of tell you something about their fees.

Just check everything. These things can sound authoritative when they are not. They really are not much more then a parrot reciting meaningless stuff back. The shocking thing is they are quite good until they are just not of course.

As far as leaks. Do not put confidential info into into outside sites like chatgpt.

I love the fake budget concern. Like who believes taking money from the IRS saves money.

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Why on earth would you promote discord on a FOSS forum. Just say NO.

Question: Unless your an enterprise or certifying software for an enterprise why do people use RHEL? There are just so many other options without the drama.

No people are pretty stupid. The problem is that humans are not thinking creatures. We by in large are feeling creatures that sometimes think. Often the thinking part is used to justify how we feel, not the other way around. This is why emotive arguments are more important then fact.

The other huge issue is attention span. We are all very busy. The sheer effort to understand an issue is beyond most of us most of the time. We all have to farm that out most if the time.

Humans have huge blind spots. So yes we are all pretty stupid.

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This is the thing about libertarianism. Sounds good until you realize that the liberty part is only for the select few.