matlag
@matlag@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on With how the republican party works in 10 years the presidential candidate will be an open pedophile and they will say they defeated wokeness. 2 days ago:
Unfortunately, they’re more likely to convince their base that it’s ok to be a pedo if you’re chosen by God or some shit. The Great Order of Pedophiles may live on…
- Comment on It just keeps getting worse - Firefox to "evolve into a modern AI browser" 1 week ago:
So, AI will do the same thing as what light extensions already do, but consuming 4GB of RAM and maxing out CPU load?
- Comment on It just keeps getting worse - Firefox to "evolve into a modern AI browser" 1 week ago:
The fact that so many users go to a fork just because FF can’t get the settings right from the start should be telling! At this stage, every new version, I go through the settings to double check there is no “new feature” I don’t want enabled by default… So yes, I am tempted by Librewolf.
- Comment on It just keeps getting worse - Firefox to "evolve into a modern AI browser" 1 week ago:
First, there should be a survey on what users actually want, no?
Because if no one wants AI and it’s “always a choice”, what you really do is waste considerable resources with as the only results, more settings users have to go through before starting using their browsers.
- Comment on This long-term data storage will last 14 billion years 1 week ago:
I was actually thinking whichever company bringing this for the masses will abandon its support 5y later and 25y from now we won’t be able to read it at all, let alone decode the bits.
- Comment on This long-term data storage will last 14 billion years 1 week ago:
1 million years? You mean 200 top!
- Comment on OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates 4 weeks ago:
45+ minutes later and as many kWh…
- Comment on OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates 4 weeks ago:
China wins what? Except if they already won by far, they have similar AI, with similarly high costs and similarly low value, similarly not worth it. Either they also invest big and will crash just as hard, or they don’t and they’re just enjoying the show of US suiciding its economy through AI.
- Comment on AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright 2 months ago:
Reminds me that nurse interview in Spain during the blackout:
“But your hospital doesn’t have a backup generator?? -Oh we have solar panels, we could be running off the grid! But the power management system requires an Internet connection, and it’s down!”
- Comment on AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright 2 months ago:
Then tens of thousands or millions would die when a server goes down, but “shit happens” and there was a small line in the EULA where the provider deny all responsability if anythind bad happens from a service failure.
Thoughts and prayers, though!
Did you know that with our Super+ package, you get redundant servers switching automatically to the next working one?
- Comment on AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright 2 months ago:
That’s what customer support would have told the poor clueless customers if the hotline had not been an AI agent running on AWS!
- Comment on Mid Career Marine Biology 2 months ago:
Dear Assassin,
Where do I send all the corpses of you and your colleagues? I already have 2 here starting to rot.
Oh, I have traced back your address from your IP.
See you in a few hours!
- Comment on Republicans put tech firms in a vise on Kirk social-media posts 3 months ago:
Is that a surprise? Don’t we know enough that when they talk about freedom of speech, they mean they should be allowed to insult and incite violence against minorities, but critics against them should not be allowed?
- Comment on 4 months ago:
But they’ll likely be older, and learn to be more tech savvy to get around the block.
The school my kid attens provide Chromebooks, with a tight control of course.
That’s why 11y old had to learn from one of their classmates how to bypass the control. Thanks to tech protection they were safe from accidentally finding porn (did that ever happen to anyone in real life??) for at least one week.
The only part I mentioned was child development, which research has shown to have a negative impact (just like we did with cigarettes and alcohol).
We all agree. Yet I don’t understand why you so much want to defend a mechanism that is already failing its stated purpose. In case you missed it: it is a miserable total failure. It just increased VPN usage. That, and the massive data collection. Period. Nothing else achieved.
So now I guess it’s going to be ok to control VPN.
independent.co.uk/…/vpns-porn-online-safety-act-c…
That’s going to fail, by the way. Then I guess you must ban Tor at ISP level. Completely block it, for the sake of the children.
Then, then, then…
Then children are still exposed to porn, but we’re working on it! Meanwhile, would you come to the station explain why you visited that website and posted that nasty anonymous comment about the PM last wednesday night?
- Comment on 4 months ago:
And eventually, we always, always figure out their leaders don’t abide to the rules they set for others.
- Comment on 4 months ago:
Why do we regulate alcohol and cigarettes? Why dont parent’s just parent their kids? How would the kid even bave the money to buy them in the first place? To be clear, when these restrictions were being put in place, people absolutely had the exact same arguments you are making right now. The onus is on the parents.
And so now no kid can access alcohol or cigarettes, right? Right?? Aaaaah, yes they can…
Even kids with parents that have reasonable restrictions are easily able to access internet pornography because internet devices are everywhere. Internet devices are easier to access than cigarettes and alcohol, and can do just as much damage to their development. Why wouldn’t the government also control access to confirm someone’s age.
It’s going to have exactly the same efficiency: none. Kids educated enough to know they shouldn’t seek it won’t. The others will definitely find a way to get it. We will never hear about it after. There will be no report, stats, anything. How much stats have you seen on the efficiency of “anti-terrorists” laws?
Please do not respond to me about giving out your ID if you do not acknowledge my comment on use zero knowledge proof’s to verify you’re over an age.
I don’t acknowledge vaporware.
“Child’s protection”, “anti-terrorist”, “against pedophile” so many emotionally triggering words so that we slowly accept more and more control. Had this been proposed 10 years ago, people would have screamed this is “soviet-style”. Nowadays, it’s just one more small step.
I don’t give it another 10 years before you accept webcams in your house with IA monitoring you with complete guaranteed privacy as the IA is only to report cases of harm on children by their caretakers. It will just take a bit more push and a big case of child abuse on the news. We do watch people’s behavior outside the house, right? Why not inside? How many more kids are you ready to sacrifice in the name of privacy??
- Comment on 4 months ago:
The internet is different, and it’s currently the wild west.
As opposed to real world where I could buy alcohol without any problem at 15–16 and was offered cigarettes at the same age despite both being forbidden in my country? If kids wants something bad enough, they’ll get it. The stronger the ban, the higher the interest it creates for teens.
Again, if done correctly, it can be done privately and securely.
The only thing you could try is parental control on their devices. Be aware they will seek other devices outside, from their friends, etc. UK has seen an explosion of VPNs use since implementation of their control: it’s miserably failing already.
Or is it? Many adults went through the ID confirmation process…
Education: that works! Mindless coercion never works. But the advocate of these solutions know that very well. The kids were never their target.
- Comment on AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over 4 months ago:
We’ve been hearing about this decades.
Yes, you’ve been hearind that for decades, just like climate change: if you wait for an abrupt treshold with a clear before/after cut , you’re going to wait for a while.
China has developed an advanced high speed trains network. You have no idea how much US looks backward on that.
China still opens coal burning power plants, jut also a very large number of renewable and nuclear power plants. They’re serious about electrification.
They took the lead in scientific publication.
US needs to put up tariffs to protect its car makers from being wiped out by Chinese ones. Western car makers rely more and more on Chinese batteries suppliers.
All the signs are there. You just need to ackowledge them.
People underestimate just how corrupt, dysfunctional, and incompetent the Chinese system is under the CCP.
As compared to what? In the US, corruption is legal, it’s called campaign donation and SuperPAC. At this stage, elections pick which pack of oligarchs will rule: GOP donators or Dems donators.
If the system is so much better, where are the high speed trains, advanced power grid, decarbonation plan, school that can get high potentials to the top, decent healthcare system?
Where are the fruits of this less corrupt dysfunctional and incompetent system?
China’s isolation give it the illusion that it’s better, but in reality, it’s even worse.
Alother delusion from local US news. China is not that isolated, they have developed deep relations with a number of countries in Africa and middle east, and they’re a privileged trade partner with many more. Worse even: with the current US policy of tariffs, several countries that were reluctant to have deeper ties with China are pushed in their arms.
Every major Chinese achievement from their mass transit system to their big corporations to their economic growth to them pulling ahead technologically to so many more, all come with big asterisks attached that make them much more questionable.
Meaning what? Their high speed trains are absolutely working. In large cities, half of the cars in the street are electric cars, majority from domestic brands and a few Tesla. They have very advanced and very cheap mass transit networks.
As I was saying: it’s just like global warming: if you sit and wait claiming it’s not really happening and/or not that bad, you’re totally unprepared when disasters hit you.
The only thing I will agree with you here is their emonomy is not half as great as they want to claim. The estate market has been in a free fall in all but the big 4 cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guandong, Shenzhen).
But if the US wants to be the first power of the rest of the 21st century world, they need to wake up!
- Comment on PSA on privuhcy 4 months ago:
Yes, at least for Firefox:
- Comment on I'm setting up a Windows 11 laptop for my uncle. Is there a sneaky way to make it block right-wing bullshit websites? 5 months ago:
Technically that won’t be a baseless conspiracy theory though. Just not “the liberals”, and not hiding “the truth”.
- Comment on 5 months ago:
I do 1:1 videocalls on XMPP. Quite some clients implement that now. But there were no videoconferences until very recently. That’s changing, though. See Movim right now, for example.
Main 2 issues with XMPP are inconsistent clients (in terms of GUI but also features wise) and the incredibly, astonishingly, ridiculously sloooooooooooooooow evolution of the protocol through the XSF. Nothing can get in there until it’s “perfect”. Clients devs are reluctant to implement things until the extension is stable. And the best part is this approach hardly work: the best way to figure if something works is to deploy it in larger and larger scales and improve it on the way as you identify corner cases you didn’t think about. Not to review the description for months/year until it qualifies as literature…
- Comment on Welcome to the Labour police state 5 months ago:
Unfortunately France is only lagging behind, but on the same authoritarian path.
First thing done after terrorist attack: declare emergency state, a tool designed for cases where the state is at risk of collapsing because of invasion by a foreing country or violent insurrection…
The police gains the power to assign people considered at risk at their residence. Very first use: assign climate activists at residence during the COP.
Emergency state is reconducted multiple times without any rationale, other than vague “terrorist threat”.
One of the first actions from Macron once in power was to make it permanent, by passing its key elements in the law.
Protests against anti-social policies or for climate are now systematically met with a violent response. People come out with an eye or a hand missing due to flashballs and lacrymo grenades. Answer from the government is something like “they had it coming”.
Cases of activists and journalists intimidation by law enforcement are multiplying.
Give it a bit of time, and France will catch up.
- Comment on In 6 hours it will be illegal to say "I support Palestine Action" in the UK, with a sentence of up to 14 years in prison. 5 months ago:
So, if they shut down and a new org called “Palestine Initiative” that happens to be coincidentally led by the same folks… all good?
- Comment on Having the ability to lie and manipulate with no remorse will get you much further in this world than having morals and being correct 5 months ago:
Yeah, that’s what the rest of us try to convince ourself so that we can cope with it. That or the idea that these people must sleep very poorly thinking about what they’ve done, while we’re actually the ones who have poor sleep thinking about what they’ve done and feeling powerless.
- Comment on WhatsApp is officially getting ads 6 months ago:
It’s not just the funding, it’s the business overall. Public companies need to show growing revenues year to year, and worse: growing revenues with a minimum yield. A product can grow by attracting more users up to a certain point. Then the only way to grow is by making more money out of the same users base. If the revenue is based on ads:
- Extend the product so that the user’s engagement increases (channels/others kind).
- Add paying features (freemium approach, that includes blue stars or whatever the hell you want it to look like…)
- Serve them ads
Freemium is not always working well and Meta never used it. They have no new great idea to extend the product without eating their other products users bases. So the only one left is more ads.
Funding is not the issue, for-profit companies are. Non-profit is the way to go. Federation is even better as individuals/families/small organizations can run their own servers.-
- Comment on Liquid Trees 7 months ago:
Trees provide shades that cool down the cities. These algae don’t. The main benefit of these “liquid trees” is to reduce pollution. You know what reduces even more pollution? Electrification and public transportation. Combine both. You’ll need much less space for motor vehicles lane inside the city and no need for “depolluting” inventions. Add some bike lanes and you’ll still have plenty of space for trees. They’re better looking and will do the cooling job.
So, as I was saying: praising a less efficient solution that may bring new unexpected issues down the road because the efficient solution requires people to change.
- Comment on Liquid Trees 7 months ago:
The issue with trees is you need to adapt the city to them, you can’t adapt them to the city. And people have proven once and again that they would invent anything to not move by an inch when our way of life is put in question.
So we push forward with absurd solutions one after the other: carbon capture, atmospheric geo-engineering, a damned nuke in antarctica, and now “liquid trees”.
Because the alternative is to change our ways, and we can’t face that.
- Comment on Liquid Trees 7 months ago:
The issue with trees is you need to adapt the city to them, you can’t adapt them to the city. And people have proven once and again that they would invent anything to not move by an inch when our way of life is put in question.
So we push forward with absurd solutions one after the other: carbon capture, atmospheric geo-engineering, a damned nuke in antarctica, and now “liquid trees”.
Because the alternative is to change our ways, and we can’t face that.
- Comment on Future apocalypse movies won't have survivors scavaging abandoned cars. 7 months ago:
Except most modern cars have turbo and direct injections and are very sensitive to gas/diesel quality. Even your diesel car will break down on an aged diesel. If the tank is not full, it will have degraded in contact with air, and if it stayed too long, it may have absorbed too much humidity and will ruin your advanced diesel engine.
- Comment on conduwuit, “featureful fork of conduit” (Rust Matrix homeserver), is discontinued 8 months ago:
Really? Do you realize how many people we’re talking about? This is where the idea that the human brain can’t comprehend interactions with too many people.
“Multiple indepondant people” might be 5% of the people, some of them under the mob’s effect (wouldn’t engage alone).
Maybe we miss another point of view, but maybe we don’t. This may be a screaming example of what you get as a representative of minorities getting a bit of attention.