deathbird
@deathbird@mander.xyz
- Comment on What are your VPN recommendations for accessing self-hosted applications from the outside? 4 days ago:
I would not recommend relying on Tailscale. They have been soliciting a lot of venture capital lately and are probably going to go for an IPO sooner or later. I would not put a lot of trust in that company. The investors are going to want their money.
- Comment on Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits 6 days ago:
I think it’s good that Reddit is trying to continue to allow adult content within the legal framework in which it must operate.
I guess what I’m not clear on it is what the legal framework is for verification services. Absent rules that require robust privacy protections market forces will push a race to the bottom in terms of cost and data security will be the first to take a hit.
I know this might seem weird but I think this is one of those cases where a blockchain based smart contract might be the best solution. I’m not exactly sure, as any system that allows one to consume content generally also allows one to copy it, but having a system defined in code in a publicly auditable manner that cannot be changed without notice seems to me to have the capacity to grant the most reassurance.
I mean I assume that all the verification company is doing now is verifying a person’s age and then giving a kind of authorization token that’s cryptographically secure that basically says “the owner of this cryptographic key is of age”.
- Comment on Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits 1 week ago:
Keeping the age verifier seperate from the content host is good. Destroying the files used for verification is good. On paper it’s not too a bad system for age verification, but it really hinges on if you can trust them. Given the track record of basically almost every company and government ever…
- Comment on Pentagon to start using Grok as part of a $200 million contract with Elon Musk's xAI 1 week ago:
I for one am celebrating the Trump administration’s commitment to ending US military hegemony.
- Comment on Japan using generative AI less than other countries 1 week ago:
Oh no, not quality and craftsmanship!
- Comment on What would you do in this scenario? 1 week ago:
It’s not the power coming in like this as such but how close it is to the downspout. And I mean, if the power has to be there, the downspout really should be moved.
- Comment on What would you do in this scenario? 1 week ago:
Am I the only person wondering why the downspout is right by the electrical wires in the first place? I don’t know all the things there are to know about code, but that seems bad, if for no other reason than it can result in things like this.
- Comment on Windows 11 has finally overtaken Windows 10 as the most used desktop OS 2 weeks ago:
It takes 7 seconds for the terminal to load on my brand new laptop. I’m sure there’s some way to fix it, but that…just enrages me.
- Comment on Windows 11 has finally overtaken Windows 10 as the most used desktop OS 2 weeks ago:
And it’s dog shit too.
- Comment on Senators Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Guarantee Military Right to Repair Its Equipment 2 weeks ago:
The US military is not for national defense, it’s a pay pig for a handful of corporations.
- Comment on Senators Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Guarantee Military Right to Repair Its Equipment 2 weeks ago:
When civilians want something, it’s always “those poor corporations!”
At least with the bill focused on military you can put forward the importance of “combat readiness”, “supporting the troops”, “taxpayer dollars”, and other things that politicians often say they care about.
- Comment on AI Utopia, AI Apocalypse, and AI Reality: If we can’t build an equitable, sustainable society on our own, it’s pointless to hope that a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us. 2 weeks ago:
They are examples of complex and difficult tasks that humans are capable of when working together, implying through comparison reordering society is also achievable.
- Comment on AI Utopia, AI Apocalypse, and AI Reality: If we can’t build an equitable, sustainable society on our own, it’s pointless to hope that a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us. 2 weeks ago:
The worst person you know is still just a meatbag, same as anyone else. Jeff Amazon himself has no power but what others, operating within one weird system, grant him.
Problem is we let the pricks run things, or we become the pricks ourselves.
Trick is figuring out how to stop both those things from happening. Must be tricky, given how it keeps happening. But we’re a clever species. We landed on the moon, took pictures of the backside of our star, spilt the atom, etc. We can figure out good economics and governance.
- Comment on ‘The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it’: the terrifying truth about why Tesla’s cars keep crashing 2 weeks ago:
Move fast and break things, but it’s a passenger vehicle on a public road.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 3 weeks ago:
Once again trying to do a good redstone in Minecraft. But mostly just mine and chill.
- Comment on The Trump Administration is Building a National Citizenship Data System; State and county election officials can now check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists. 3 weeks ago:
I mean, you do, but… Often you just attest citizenship. Not sure if it’s checked on the backend or not. And illegal immigrants often have SSNs, just not their own. That’s how they can work much of the time.
- Comment on Facts and minds 3 weeks ago:
Without seeing the studies, it’s hard to know if they were good studies that support her position or not.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
This is an excellent policy position, if only the argumentation wasn’t dogshit. I am begging everyone even vaguely lib-left, stop writing like this. If you’re trying to write a petition, open letter, or public statement, for the love of god write it for people other than yourselves or just don’t say anything at all.
Internet censorship is bad for alphabet people, but it’s also bad for the straights. It’s bad for everyone. It’s just bad.
Freedom is for everyone. And Heritage wasn’t coming to the parade anyway.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
The only org they call out by name is The Heritage Foundation.
I assumed that they were already skipping the parade.
- Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not 4 weeks ago:
- Idgaf about China and what they do and you shouldn’t either, even if US paranoia about them is highly predictable.
- Depending on the outputs it’s not always that transformative.
- The moat would be good actually. The business model of LLMs isn’t good, but it’s not even viable without massive subsidies, not least of which is taking people’s shit without paying.
It’s a huge loss for smaller copyright holders too. They can’t afford to fight when they get imitated beyond fair use. Copyright abuse can only be fixed by the very force that creates copyright in the first place: law. The market can’t fix that. This just decides winners between competing mega corporations, and even worse, up ends a system that some smaller players have been able to carve a niche in.
Want to fix copyright? Put real time limits on it. Bind it to a living human only. Make it non-transferable. There’s all sorts of ways to fix it, but this isn’t it.
- Comment on Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users 4 weeks ago:
As explained, it’s not even quite user identification, but rather verification of a unique individual. The ability to identify that an account is held by a unique person (as opposed to possibility being one of many puppet accounts) is pretty useful, particularly if it’s not possible to backtrace it to an otherwise identifiable person.
Even so, the problem I see with this system is that a person has to be careful to never, ever, ever associate their unique ID with themselves, though there will be constant pressure to do so.
- Comment on Israel once again openly declaring genocidal intentions against civilians from the very start. 5 weeks ago:
Tbf, this is just declaration of intent to commit war crimes, not genocide.
- Comment on How Do I Prepare My Phone for a Protest? 5 weeks ago:
So first, even here we see foundation money and big tech, not government.
Facebook, Google, etc mostly love net neutrality, tolerate encryption, anf see utility in anonymous internet access, mostly because these things don’t interfere with their core advertising businesses, and generally have helped them. I didn’t see Comcast and others in the ISP oligopoly on that list, probably because they would not benefit from net neutrality, encryption, and privacy for obvious reasons.
The EFF advocates for particular civil libertarian policies, always has. That does attract certain donors, but not others. They have plenty of diverse and grassroots support too. One day they may have to choose between their corpo donors and their values, but I have yet to see them abandon principles.
- Comment on How Do I Prepare My Phone for a Protest? 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on People with social anxiety disorder have a different gut microbiome - transplanting their microbiome to mice causes the mice to suffer from increased social fear 5 weeks ago:
Further evidence that we’re all just billions of microbes standing on top of each other in a trench coat.
- Comment on Founder of 23andMe buys back company out of bankruptcy auction 5 weeks ago:
Actually an interesting turn of events. Sounds like she’d been fighting hard to get it back, but they’d been fighting her on it.
Not sure what it all means, but there’s something going on there. It’s all very unusual.
- Comment on 'We're done with Teams': German state hits uninstall on Microsoft 1 month ago:
Spread responsibility thinly across as many organizations and departments within those organizations and across as many legal thresholds as you can to minimize blowback when something inevitably has to be held to account.
- Comment on 'We're done with Teams': German state hits uninstall on Microsoft 1 month ago:
I would say “even busier” and “over-integrated” rather than “incomprehensible”.
Not to start a fight or anything, but it almost reminds me of emacs, because it’s like someone started with an idea for one kind of program, but they just kept adding and adding and adding to it. But emacs at least is free, flexible, long established, free, and quirky.
- Comment on We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink 1 month ago:
Not so much because Elon is the way he is, but because the company is vital to the national interest.
- Comment on United Nazis 1 month ago:
“German Foreign Minister profers an invalid defense of a rogue nation’s killing of civilians” to “she is a war criminal herself” to “Nazinazinazi”.