Septimaeus

@Septimaeus@infosec.pub

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Partner has ADD, do I have misophonia?⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The relationship advice special is “leave him.” Without additional information I don’t think it’s responsible for anyone here to say that, but what you’ve described is clearly an untenable situation and relationship dynamic.

  I think you owe it to yourself and your partner to sit them down, describe this situation as you see it, and how their behavior makes you feel, perhaps the way you have here. Their response to your feelings should, I think, tell you the next steps.

  Whether that response is workable should, I think, be determined by its impact on trust in the relationship, because trust is ultimately the only fungible currency that differentiates a good relationship from a bad one.

  Concretely:

  1. If they disregard your emotions, disbelieve your experience, or disrespect your right to peace in your own home, this describes a dynamic in which there is no chance for compromise, and you have your answer.
  2. If they still care about your comfort, realize something must change, and are willing to modify their behavior for your benefit, there remains hope to rebuild the trust that’s been lost.

  In either case, what happens next is not something anyone here is equipped to prescribe, but I do hope you’re able to find a better relationship, with or without your current partner.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple executives ban Fortnight from the App store⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I have a very particular set of skills…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lady Gaga bomb plot: Thwarted plan lifts veil on the gamification of hate and gendered nature of online radicalization⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Definitely agree courage is key. These boys seem to idolize fearlessness, even when it’s clearly fake (tate), pathological (joker), self-destructive (bateman), or simply the result of having power (homelander).

  Of course, real courage isn’t “fearless” at all, just the strength to defy it for a worthy cause, but that’s exactly the kind of thing they could learn from a better example like Sean Penn (afaik).

  It would be extra timely too, since news these days is filled with headlines detailing the cowardice of US leadership, feeding the fascist takeover, when courage has always been the purest form of antifascism we know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lady Gaga bomb plot: Thwarted plan lifts veil on the gamification of hate and gendered nature of online radicalization⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  (Assuming US-specific) For sure, a quarter of Americans are simply too brainwashed to be of any help. Fortunately, many of those aren’t raising children anymore, but also there’s good evidence for a sizable chunk of quieter voters closer to the middle, a mixed bag of reluctant, not-fully-radicalized “fiscal conservatives” and “family-values liberals” that I’ve been waiting to hear more about in the news.

  I think it’s possible the anti-woke messaging might not fully stick to them as easily, especially given a strong call to action that champions core values — integrity, responsibility, honor, strength of character, kindness, courage, and so forth — that Trumpism lacks entirely. As to why, I suspect we will witness a backlash from this middle group especially in the wake of Trumpism, or maybe sooner if they have some backbone left. If so, it could be an opportune time to lead with that sort of messaging.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lady Gaga bomb plot: Thwarted plan lifts veil on the gamification of hate and gendered nature of online radicalization⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m glad this issue is gaining broader international recognition.

  The strategies we’ve used to address it online seem to have mostly forced it underground without actually stopping the spread. It’s not just a few dark corners of social media where you’ll find evidence of it, either. You’ll see it pretty regularly in some of the largest communities on Lemmy, and anywhere young men congregate.

  As for how we fix it, ultimately I think the way we socialize our young people is long overdue a shift from highly gendered social role reinforcement to a more flexible empathy-centric value system. But for the young men who have already been radicalized, I think an obvious start would be deprogramming by offering them more positive masculine identities than the machismo currently served up by pop culture.

  One approach could, for example, emphasize qualities that are already familiar aspects of that identity, such as responsibility to others, protecting the weak, serving a community, etc. Regardless of the approach, there’s power in expectation. IMHO the people most well-equipped to do this are the cis men of earlier generations, simply because they are who these boys instinctively look up to the most.

  And if that describes you, it’s something you can start doing today by simply knowing what to look for and when to step in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Summary for the curious:

  The dilemma: Two prisoners are interrogated in separate rooms. Each is asked to snitch in exchange for a reduced sentence. Because they’re separated, the prisoners can’t coordinate, but each knows the other is offered the same deal and the interrogator will only offer bargains that increase the combined years of their imprisonment. For example, snitch gets -2 years but snitchee gets +3 years, netting the interrogator +1 year for a successful bargain). So, what will they do?

  Result: Of course the better outcome overall is for neither to snitch and the worst is for both to snitch, but the Nobel-Prize-winning observation was that any prisoner faced with this dilemma (once) will always have a better result if they snitch than if they don’t, no matter what the other decides.

  This sounds bleak because it is, but real-world analogs of this game are rarely one-offs. For example, if the prisoners expect to play this game an indeterminate number of times, the result above no longer applies. The study of such logic problems and the strategies to solve them is called game theory.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Now look here! I was invited to speak with the very real, very human patrons of this fine establishment, and I’ll not have you undermining my efforts to fulfill that obligation!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hello, this is John Cleese. If you doubt that this is the real John Cleese, here is my mother to confirm that I am, in fact, me. Mother! Am I me?

  Oh yes!

  There you have it. I am me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pictures of Animals Getting CT Scans Against their Will: A Thread⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It adds cheek. Sans’ use was revived to alter one’s tone to sound stuffier. A visual equivalent might be putting on a top-hat and monocle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everyone knows what first aid is, but what is second aid?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bonk, horny jail. This is shower thoughts not locker room thoughts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Future apocalypse movies won't have survivors scavaging abandoned cars.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Mad Max the musical now on Broadway

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Future apocalypse movies won't have survivors scavaging abandoned cars.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It would be easy to find enough solar panels to charge an electric vehicle in most sunny areas, though it would probably be easier to just look for a large enough existing install and skip all the DIY. (Just look for the shiniest roof.)

  But I think the real problem is in the EV itself. Batteries self-discharge and chemically degrade over time, so unless the apocalypse was recent, a lot of EVs you find might have damaged batteries, especially if fully discharged to begin with.

  You could cannibalize one or more EVs to cobble together enough good cells to get past the safety cutoffs, but it would take a while and you would need to be careful since internal voltage in EVs tends to be high (like 400-800 volts).

  TLDR: if this is a movie depiction, definitely use a montage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft's AI Secretly Copying All Your Private Messages⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Lol I noticed the same. They evidently have some ongoing internal disagreement as to their target audience. Docs and functionality says “our audience is enterprise developers” but their marketing definitely says “our audience is end users.”

  It may be explained by recent partnerships with former custom ISO devs (seeking legitimacy and offering a sizable user base in turn). I expect the plan is eventually to sell premium support for an enterprise toolset, but for now their target audience is the non-dev-but-tech-savvy end user. And those happen to be surprisingly opinionated re: java and electron.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft's AI Secretly Copying All Your Private Messages⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation.

  • Provisioning is just initial system setup, but usually implies a more regimented or repeatable process.
  • Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition.
  • Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot.
  • Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine.
  • Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image.
  • Telemetry refers to the data harvesting apparatus. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad but it is easily abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is a precaution.
  • MS = Microsoft
  • OSS = Open Source Software
  • Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, software and file system access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control.

  Many of these concepts are IT-related, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple to use if you pick one of the premade playbooks. (The AtlasOS playbook is popular among gamers, for example.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft's AI Secretly Copying All Your Private Messages⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Just a tip: if you must use consumer editions of Windows regularly, consider adding an automatic provisioning tool like AME to your workflow.

  The example above uses customizable “playbooks” to provision a system the way docker compose would a container image, so it can fill the role of a VM snapshot or PXE in non-virtualized local-only scenarios.

  The most popular playbooks strip out AI components and services (there are many more than just Recall) but also disable all telemetry and cloud-based features, replace MS bloatware with preferred OSS, curtail a truckload of annoying Windows behaviors, setup more sensible group policies than the defaults, and so forth.

  I have a few custom playbooks for recurring use cases so that, when one presents, I can spin up an instance quickly without the usual hassle and risk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Discord Indexes Trillions of Messages⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  even old data retroactively

  My impression is that retroactive opt-out data grifting represents the lion’s share of user data sales today, and that it’s a popular strategy because it works.

  The formula: appraise the data and find your buyers in advance. THEN update the privacy policies to include the data you want to sell. That way, the moment new policies go into effect, all you have to do is hit the transfer button.

  After that, it’s done. Users that find and flick your new opt-out toggle only stop you from selling their data to additional buyers, and that’s nbd since data brokers only pay top-dollar for exclusive access to stuff that’s not already on the market.

  It’s why I consider the introduction of any opt-out privacy policy an explicit admission of data theft.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Applying 'extreme heat' to lithium-ion batteries reportedly restores their capacity, and I think it's the sustainable tech breakthrough of 2025⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah! Yeah it’s been a while but I seem to recall seeing alkaline batteries in a some freezers or refrigerators sometimes when I was a kid, along with other curiosities like rolls of film. No one ever explained why.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Applying 'extreme heat' to lithium-ion batteries reportedly restores their capacity, and I think it's the sustainable tech breakthrough of 2025⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  IIRC freezing accelerates the chemical degradation of lithium ion (especially if you attempt to charge the battery at the same time) and tends to lower both the voltage and amperage of most battery chemistries, but it seems plausible that this might

  1. temporarily defeat a cell protection circuit, allowing a charging procedure to initialize, or
  2. delay a thermal failsafe cut-off of a damaged cell long enough to boot or charge a device

  Regardless, for those tuning in at home, best to keep your batteries out of the freezer, especially lithium types, unless spicy pillows are what you’re after.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Applying 'extreme heat' to lithium-ion batteries reportedly restores their capacity, and I think it's the sustainable tech breakthrough of 2025⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hmm, your right. At a guess, this field might represent the maximal combined interest of both scientific and pedestrian readership within technology research, since on the one hand energy density and storage logistics is the key limitation for a ton of desirable applications, and on the other most consumers’ experience with batteries establish them as a major convenience factor in their day-to-day.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla profits plummet 71% amid backlash to Musk's role with Trump administration⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Technically correct. The best kind of correct.

  But to clarify, the stigma doesn’t/shouldn’t extend to people with Teslas from the early days. If you happen to already own an old Tesla, don’t worry about it. You’ve suffered enough misfortune on account of that choice already.

  I say this because I’ve seen few old ones around here with all the branding scraped off, and even saw these hubcaps dumped by a bin in a nearby public park late at night as if the Tesla owner didn’t want their neighbors to see:

  tesla hubcaps dumped on the ground beside trash bin at Riverside Park close up showing logo of tesla hubcaps dumped on the ground beside trash bin at Riverside Park

  If this is you, I just want to remind you that reasonable people can draw a distinction between EV early-adopters and the current Elon stans/nazis. Your old Tesla doesn’t make everyone think you’re a racist or whatever. So you don’t have to damage the resale value of your car [further than Elon has] just to convey your principles, and you don’t need to feel bad about supporting that company before everyone realized the CEO was such a douche canoe.

  At the very least, I’m not judging you, and you won’t get keyed on my block.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is there steam coming out of the streets in New York⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The difficulty was drainage. Isolated steam systems in steam era construction were designed to use gravity for condensate collection. It’s one of the reasons boilers are always in the basement of old buildings.

  Steam system engineering was a well-compensated profession. A well-designed system would accurately predict the rate of condensate flow for every part of the building, prior to construction, and reflect these predictions in the slope/grade and diameter of the steam pipes. Inaccurate predictions resulted in problems like pipe knock (aka steam hammer) which you can often hear when you or a nearby neighbor partially close the shut-off valve of a radiator.

  Since construction in the city had many elevations and could not be predicted in advance, there was no equivalent solution to facilitate condensate collection. The system had to be one way. And yes, it’s inefficient compared to modern systems, but was innovative in its day.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is there steam coming out of the streets in New York⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeet the heat or beat the meat

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is there steam coming out of the streets in New York⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wtf? Bad form, Peter Pan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is there steam coming out of the streets in New York⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a good idea! My understanding is that the old stream network is slated for decommission and replacement by this program, basically a large distributed geothermal heat pump network that also harvests from major heat producers like data centers and provides both heating and cooling.

  It will end the era of the steamy-street Sin City aesthetic but should be many, many times more efficient than the old steam system. Phase-change thermal transfer in HVAC systems is currently as much as 400% more efficient than the theoretical limit of direct heating, because it only uses the energy necessary to move heat from one place to another rather than produce it, and it works for both heating and cooling.

  Right now I believe they’re piloting the system in NYCHA buildings (public housing) of neighborhoods outside the old steam network, like Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, but supposedly the plan is to expand to the rest of Manhattan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is there steam coming out of the streets in New York⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah it’s common enough I figured most knew, but a few years ago I went ice skating at the bryant park rink with this girl who refused to walk anywhere near the steam. She thought they were toxic and didn’t accept my explanation, so we had to walk an extra few blocks to get around the steam work. Shrug

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is there steam coming out of the streets in New York⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Old steam heating system. They vent it when they’re working on a section.

  Side-note: surprised by all the fellow New Yorkers i’m seeing in this thread. I thought yous were still at the other place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is there steam coming out of the streets in New York⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I delivered for two locations shortly after they fixed the pizza. In both locations, shift leads and managers came up with so many excuses for house pizza. More than any other chain I worked for. I didn’t connect the dots until later. The pizza must have been much worse before.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Power is not energy: why the difference matters [Technology Connections]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  How are energy and power “loose terms”? Energy might be difficult to fully explain rigorously, but it’s one of the fundamental elements of our universe. And power is just energy over time

  Well, you yourself just provided the example, since your definition of energy and power are the inverse of the definitions used in the video.

  It’s the fact that people use them differently or interchangeably that makes them “loose” IMHO.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Power is not energy: why the difference matters [Technology Connections]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s making a point about instantaneous versus overall energy use, which it sounds like you already understand. “Power” and “energy” are already kind of loose terms, which could make that conversation confusing IMO.

  But for anyone confused by this:

  For the typical energy consumer, Watts (W, kW) are relevant when considering circuit capacity. Otherwise, Watt-hours (Wh, kWh) is likely the metric you’re looking for when considering energy use.

  Concretely, your coffee maker might pull 1.2 kW while in use, more than most appliances in your house, yet it probably represents a minuscule portion of your electric bill, perhaps less than 1 kWh, since it only needs to boil a small amount of water with each use.