perestroika
@perestroika@lemm.ee
- Comment on Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos 6 days ago:
In my experience, the API has iteratively made it ever harder for applications to automatically perform previously easy jobs, and jobs which are trivial under ordinary Linux (e.g. become an access point, set the IP address, set the PSK, start a VPN connection, go into monitor / inject mode, access an USB device, write files to a directory of your choice, install an APK). Now there’s a literal thicket of API calls and declarations to make, before you can do some of these things (and some are forever gone).
The obvious reason is that there are a billion fools whom Google tries to protect them from scamers.
But it kills the ability to do non-standard things, and the concept of your device being your own.
- Comment on Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos 6 days ago:
The countdown to Android’s slow and painful death is already ticking for a while.
It has become over-engineered and no longer appealing from a developer’s viewpoint.
I still write code for Android because my customers need it - will be needing for a while - but I’ve stopped writng code for Apple’s i-things and I research alternatives for Android. Rolling my own environment with FOSS components on top of Raspbian looks feasible already. On robots and automation, I already use it.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s X blocks links to Signal, the encrypted messaging service 2 weeks ago:
Tox is nice.
The typical pattern over here: if someone uses Signal, you guess they’re some military type (wants things to be secure, but wants it easy). If someone uses Tox, you guess they’re some hacker / anarchist type (wants things to be secure, but also anonymizable, even if it’s a bit harder).
- Comment on Lemm.ee is recruiting new admins! 5 weeks ago:
I appreciate the effort of running this place - it’s working well from my perspective - and hope you find the colleagues you need. :)
Myself, I can’t volunteer - I already moderate a few communities elsewhere, my time is limited, and I’m politically too partial. I also cannot say that I fully agree with local federation policy.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
I’m a bit late to this discussion, but I needed to get my first taste of political censorship on Lemmy first.
My experience was with the “hexbear.net” instance (former Chapo’s Trap House subreddit) which is currently federated with “lemm.ee”.
It shows up nicely in the feed, but if you go there to discuss, you get banned in a moment for stating commonly accepted facts because you’re “reactionary” - Wikipedia is also reactionary, as well as mainstream news - while users praising dictatorial regimes get upvoted and aren’t getting moderated.
Complete echo chamber. At such servers, there’s also no obvious recourse to get a ban or deletion reversed.
I would avoid federation with such places.
- Comment on ‘Do not pet’: Why are robot dogs patrolling Mar-A-Lago? 3 months ago:
Level 3000 hack: compromise security with drone fleas that jump onto drone dogs.
Level 9000 hack: join the pack with a drone attack dog.
- Comment on 'Global Oligarchy' Reigns as Top 1% Controls More Wealth Than Bottom 95% of Humanity 5 months ago:
Suppose the global population is 7 billion. One percent is 70 million then. Neither “you and me” or “EU and me” are suitable candidates. The population of the EU is ~450 million, the population of the US is 330 million.
Some informative graphics, which by the way contradict the title claim of the post. So the 1% = 95% claim might be wrong. Wikipedia says that 1% = 46%.
- Comment on Killer drones pioneered in Ukraine are the weapons of the future 11 months ago:
Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.
As far as I know, the routine in the current war is - the AA gun is on a truck that moves 80 km/h, the drone comes in 300 km/h, one or many truck crews position themselves on likely vantage points for intercepting, and the rest is luck.
- Comment on Killer drones pioneered in Ukraine are the weapons of the future 11 months ago:
Both of you are right.
It’s difficult, but how difficult depends on the task you set. If the task is “maintain manually initiated target lock on a clearly defined object on an empty field, despite the communications link breaking for 10 seconds” -> it is “give a team of coders half a year” difficult.
If it’s “identify whether an object is military, consider if it’s worth attacking, and attack a camouflaged target in a dense forest”, then it’s not currently worth trying.
