cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would there be any merit in the idea of NATO waging a "benevolent war" (for lack of a better term) against Ukraine?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Tell that to Bosnia. NATO can do whatever it sees fit. It’s an organization that operates entirely by consensus. If they have consensus, they can do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to install my own OS on a "smart" TV? Is that a thing?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh absolutely. Smart TVs are completely under the control of the technology and media companies with very little hope for freeing them, except that you can still plug a computer into them to bypass all the “smart” features and just use it as a dumb screen with a smart computer instead. But they always seem to put a few new stumbling blocks in the way of both those options every year. That loophole will eventually get closed, it won’t happen overnight, but they will keep eroding the functionalities and convenience of doing so until few if anyone wants to do that anymore.

  Cars are nearly a lost cause too, except where regulations say they must use some standard like OBD2 for “emissions reasons”, although that is obviously a limited scope and manufacturers try to find any ways they can to sabotage it or otherwise avoid it. Appliances and “smart homes”, all the way down to the light bulbs and LEDs, have plenty of proprietary, locked down, unrepairable technology in them too despite reliable open standards being available. The war for total control over our digital devices is in full swing and there’s no area of our lives from large to small that isn’t a battleground. People need to keep prioritizing the freedom of their devices because once they get these technologies and features entrenched it’s going to be very hard to work around them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to install my own OS on a "smart" TV? Is that a thing?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, they did it with phones too. Android is just Linux. That was one of the main attractions, for me at least.

  At first, many people and groups supplied their own phone OSes. There was a whole thriving community ecosystem. Then they started to make it really hard, locking bootloaders and including critical pieces of hardware that didn’t or couldn’t have open source drivers (look up WinModems for a very early example of this technique, it remains really effective) or otherwise required extremely convoluted methods to access and the phone might function marginally without some of these fully functional, but at least you could still install a custom ROM on it if you were stubborn enough.

  But even that wouldn’t last. Nowadays they’ve made it literally impossible to defeat the security on most phones, in the name of keeping hackers and criminals out, but really a big part of their motivation is blocking these pirate OSes that let you actually control the hardware and software in your phone, doing criminally nefarious things like stopping them from downloading ads (the horror!) and preventing them from funneling all your data and activities back to Big Brother (how rude!) and worst of all updating it with modern functionality after they’ve declared it “obsolete”. The goal going forward is to sell you things that you don’t and can’t control, so they can shut them down or make them gradually more and more useless and make you buy new ones forever. They want you to have a subscription for everything including physical objects without realizing that you’ve been forced to subscribe to their regularly-scheduled-disposable-device-replacement-plan for no actual reason.

  They’re coming for computers too, or at least they’ll try. They want control of everything we interact with. For profit, mostly, but I wouldn’t rule out other motives. It’s a powerful thing when you have control of everything people see and do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I got a stainless steel one on Amazon, it’s relatively thick steel, I have no idea how you’d be able to break it with only your hands and feet. I agree the plastic ones are shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why I Haven't Seen Any Trump Supporters In Fediverse (Lemmy and Mastodon)?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the hard-right people have mostly self-exiled to their own echo chambers like truth.social and other places that are Donald-used-and-approved. I think he’s also active on Twitter again now that Musk has destroyed all content moderation on the platform. They follow their great leader and unless and until he starts posting his demagoguery on Lemmy they have no interest and no reason to come here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What self hosting feels like (It's painful, please help 🥲)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Matrix and its implementations like Synapse have a very intimidating architecture (I’d go as far as to call most of the implementations somewhat overengineered) and the documentation ranges from inconsistent to horrific. I ran into this particular situation myself, Fortunately this particular step you’re overthinking it. You can use any random string you want. It doesn’t even have to be random, just as long as what you put in the config file matches. It’s basically just a temporary admin password.

  Matrix was by far the worst thing I’ve ever tried to self-host. It’s a hot mess. Good luck, I think you’re close to the finish line.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So it’s not really FOSS at all, it’s just a loss-leader to draw you into the network, trap your data, and then enshittify and monetize as per standard practice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tunnelling a port from a separate computer⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can also automate this with autossh which is designed for exactly this kind of persistent tunnel. Although a simple “while” loop might seem like the intuitive way to keep it running, autossh is very reliable and takes care of all the corner cases for you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is the current temperature sometimes lower than today's low temperature? For example right now it 13F with a predicated low today of 16F!⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  a) Forecasts are very resource-intensive, they are performed on a specific schedule using a computational forecast model. Updating the predictions would require inputting new data and running the model again, and by the time they do that, the next forecast will already be out. b) Do they know it’s wrong? Where did you get the temperature? From an official weather station? If not, there is no reason to imagine that someone is noticing that this one particular model run was wrong in one particular spot across the whole country and trying to fix it in real time. c) If you did get the current temperature from an official weather station, that IS your update for it. Real time data from official weather stations is always going to trump the forecast model. What would be the point of updating the forecast when the current measured data from the weather station is now available? That’s like driving down the highway and saying “I was predicting my speed would be close to 65mph, but due to the heavy traffic I’m seeing today, I’m going to re-estimate my speed to be 45mph” when you have a perfectly accurate speedometer right in front of you telling you exactly what speed you are going at all times. Forecasts are only useful for the future, and they can be wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is installing a different OS/Custom Rom on phones a huge hassle?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re only lying as long as people can continue to over and over find their way around the obstacles they place in the way, and it gets harder all the time. They have more money and more resources and more organization than the hackers trying to defeat them, they’re winning the war of attrition. We may be able to make small breakthroughs here and there, but overall we continue to lose more and more territory, because the amount of effort is disproportionate to the goals. Most of what’s left of the custom ROM community has given up on the losing battle with manufacturers and providers and changed focus to the various freephones but even they have their own troubles and are fragmented and short-lived. Between carriers, manufacturers, and content providers the whole mobile ecosystem is designed to be impenetrable. It is intentionally a fortress full of deadly traps and open source supporters have no hope to breach it anytime soon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do any of you have that one service that just breaks constantly? I'd love to love Nextcloud, but it sure makes that difficult at times⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Never had a single functional problem with Nextcloud, other than the fact that it’s oppressively slow with the amount of files I’ve shoved into it. Mind you I also don’t use MySQL/MariaDB which I consider a garbage-tier DB. Despite Postgres not being the “Recommended DB” for Nextcloud it works perfectly for me. Maybe that’s the difference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Military Time vs 24hr?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s veeeeery not standard in Canada. I use it on my phone and most people who see it on the lockscreen treat me like I’m an alien, and it’s about a 50/50 mix of people who simply think 24 hour time is weird (but at least recognize it) vs. people who seem genuinely baffled by the digits they see appearing on my phone and don’t even seem to recognize it as a time at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why a ton, and not a megagram?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  No good reason, just historical inertia and resistance to change. People stick to what they’re familiar with, either the imperial system or to common metric units. Making a “metric ton” similar in size to an “imperial ton” arguably helped make it easier for some people to transition to metric.

  Megagram is a perfectly cromulent unit, just like “cromulent” is a perfectly cromulent word, but people still don’t use it very often. That’s just how language works. People use the words they prefer, and those words become common. Maybe if you start describing things in megagrams other people will also start doing it and it will become a common part of the language. Language is organic like that, there isn’t anyone making decisions on its behalf, although some people and organizations try.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are batteries in phones always measured in mAh instead of Wh like for example notebooks?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think they know about metric prefixes, Pip.

  Imagine if the marketing people discovered that they could advertise that it has 19 million uWh (in Doctor Evil voice). Don’t say it too loudly though, someone at Apple might hear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Totalitarianism. What are the good things about it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If you can prove beyond any reasonable doubt that someone is ignorant of facts, and then sure you can call it obvious and good. But when nobody can agree what is reasonable, why is your perspective of good the one everyone must follow? It’s not always obvious. Don’t pretend it is. And things that are reasonable and obvious to you aren’t necessarily reasonable and obvious to others. You aren’t willing to embrace the diversity of human experience and opinion, so you won’t get the benefits of that diversity. Just because someone else has a different idea doesn’t make it wrong. If you think literally every idea that isn’t exactly the same as yours is wrong, then we’re wasting our time here anyway.

  So again, why is your path the one we’re picking? Even if I do agree with it, I am not willing to agree to it blindly, I want to know why we’re supposed to follow your advice/instructions/demands. At gunpoint or otherwise. And that’s why I’ll never follow a totalitarian, because totalitarians never have to explain themselves, and generally won’t. I hope you brought enough bullets if that’s your plan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You must be mistaken. Everybody knows Garak is a plain and simple tailor, as he will cheerfully tell you in the face of whatever evidence you might provide to the contrary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVR hardware for frigate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I read the title as “NVR hardware for a frigate” and was like WTF kind of self-hosting are you doing with military hardware on a warship.

  Now I kind of want a warship.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Dumb answers are just the first step in iterating your way to the right answer, if you could see all the dumb answers that go through my head you wouldn’t feel so bad. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It does not need to go to earth. Take a 1.5v alkaline battery, connect one end of the battery to the other end – a large amount of current flows, no earth involved. The electric charge that a neuron can produce is basically like tiny cells of a biochemical battery. The problem is unlike a useful battery, the voltage difference between all the individual cells is not (and realistically cannot be) carefully organized in a series or parallel path from positive to negative, instead all the positive and negative connections are jumbled together into a complex network, meaning there’s no way of getting billions of volts out of it. It’s just not wired that way.

  Theoretically if you carefully constructed a series of hundreds of billions of neurons connected end-to-end-to-end in the right pattern you might end up with billions of volts (although end-to-end it would probably be the size of the solar system, so the billions of volts potential wouldn’t seem so impressive anymore on an astronomical scale) and you probably can’t pack it your neural-battery into a small space without the neuron’s insulator (myelin sheath) from breaking down and shorting out that voltage. Also it wouldn’t really be a brain anymore at that point. The complex maze of connections are what makes the thinking happen. If you make them all single-connected you’ve basically just got a really big, low capacity and relatively inefficient battery compared to better chemistries.

  Flowing all that current at once will certainly create a lot of heat though, you’re right about that. That heat is normally heatsinked by the intracranial fluids and conducted away by the relatively rapid bloodflow through around the brain to be dissipated in the skin and lungs. The brain is basically liquid-cooled and it’s a very efficient and tightly regulated system that rarely has issues. Such a high neutral output would probably overwhelm even the relatively robust cooling that bloodflow provides, though, leading to a condition called brain hyperthermia, which is part of the reason drugs like methamphetamine can be dangerous or fatal, as it can result in cell death, and in this case, probably brain death and overall death.