cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Is Evolving — And Changing Our Understanding Of Intelligence.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  At least 1% of the money being poured into “AI research” nowadays seems to be spent on spewing these breathless puff pieces everywhere. The other 99% is spent on datacenter costs, probably. I am so excited for the day this bubble will finally pop. Just imagine the firesales on GPUs and rack space. It’ll be glorious.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The rise of ‘Frankenstein’ laptops in New Delhi’s repair markets⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  If we’re actually trying to achieve sustainability, we have to stop being consumers. “consume” means to use up and destroy leaving nothing useful behind. This is what consumers do. Think about this the next time someone says the “additional price is passed on to the consumer” and phrases like that. Want to stop paying those prices? Stop consuming!

  Instead of sending your money to some evil dictatorship on the other side of the world to “consume” something else, we should be building a system and a society where we can give that money, probably a little more more money even, to somebody in your local community to do actual productive work that doesn’t destroy the environment.

  Right to repair is a huge project that we need to force down the throats of the large corporations who want to keep us being consumers forever no matter how much it destroys the planet. But India can still do things like this even without having the “right” to repair, they just figure out a solution and do it anyway, and we can too if we learn from them. We throw away so much perfectly useful stuff. Not just electronics but everything in our modern world from clothes to cars, because economics has told us that it’s expensive to repair or repurpose or salvage, and cheaper to buy a new one, buy more, buy in bulk, buy and dispose. And it often is, but that’s false economics. It’s the economics of throwing more shit in landfill and digging up more tons of rock and burning coal to turn it into something new. It’s the economics with all the costs externalized onto the environment and onto the future. It’s the economics of us destroying ourselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I pronounce "slava Ukraini"?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience, Ukrainians don’t really mind how non-native speakers pronounce it, they understand the intention and appreciate the feeling behind it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Developing a self-hosted alternative to Google Keep⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Nextcloud Notes or Joplin (nevermind all the other features Nextcloud provides) tick most of your boxes. They’re more productivity focused than privacy focused, it doesn’t do “zero knowledge” encryption the way you’re describing, but I don’t really understand the point of that when you’re self-hosting and the server host belongs to you anyway. The federation may leave you wanting more and the collaboration might not be “real time” enough for you either, though. If you can build something better by all means go for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"It's Silencing" - Albania Shuts Down TikTok.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  When it comes to TikTok it is less clear to me what a good decision would be

  the fact a foreign and potentially hostile state can influence the people is a serious threat.

  That seems pretty clear to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to harden against SSH brute-forcing?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  fail2ban is mandatory equipment for any ssh server accessible to the public especially on its default port. It’s highly configurable, but the default settings will do fine at making it statistically impossible for any user or password to be brute forced.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some countries you’ve visited that shocked you with unexpected friendliness?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  China. The people are super nice, sweet, helpful, lovely people. It’s just their government I hate. I don’t know if they hate it too or not since they’re not free to say but I think they’re nice people and they deserve better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Replit CEO Amjad Masad says learning to code is a waste of time, citing Dario Amodei's prediction that AI may generate essentially all code by next year.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah when I first started there was one guy whose code reviews I dreaded, he would nitpick every detail and he would stand by it, he would tell me to do it a completely different way that was 10x more work. It felt like I would never get my stories done because I had drawn “that asshole” in the code review lottery.

  Years later, I came to realize that he was actually the best, he taught me so much about the way I should be thinking of things and structuring things, that have saved so much time and trouble later on, I now specifically reach out to him for a review when I am trying to do something complex because I know he’s going to give me an honest, thorough and useful review. Nobody’s doing anyone any favours in the long run by rubber stamping things, it may help you keep your sprint velocity up, but it’s not going to result in high quality code, and the bad quality code will inevitably bite you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Replit CEO Amjad Masad says learning to code is a waste of time, citing Dario Amodei's prediction that AI may generate essentially all code by next year.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I actually dare them to try. I’m really looking forward to the massive paychecks I’m going to get when companies are panicking to try to untangle all the absolute nonsense bullshit these AI companies are about to unleash into corporate codebases. The AI-slop bugfest will make the Y2K issue seem trivial. I’m so excited, the future looks very bright for human software developers.

  My advice: Practice going over other people’s code with a fine-tooth comb looking for bad architecture, flaws and inefficiencies. You won’t always be right, you won’t find them all, but you’ll learn lots of skills you’ll need in the future. Whatever you do, don’t undersell yourselves, remember that your experience is valuable, and AI has no experience, it just has a huge library it can shotgun “solutions” out of. Half the time they don’t even compile.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Logitech is dropping support for its oldest Harmony remotes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like 99% of the time that’s just a lazy or misleading excuse. I’ve worked in proprietary software development for 25 years and I’ve never worked for a company that didn’t avoid restricted third-party code like the plague at all times. In the few, rare cases when we did have to use some proprietary third-party licensed library, it was usually kept very compartmentalized and easy to drop out of the code specifically because we were always afraid the other proprietary code vendor could fuck us and jack up their prices or find some nasty way to make our lives difficult.

  The excuse that there is some secret but legitimate third-party code they’re not allowed to share simply doesn’t hold water in the vast majority of cases.

  More likely answers are that some beancounter somewhere still imagines that the proprietary source code could possibly be valuable in some hypothetical future acquisition (nonsense of course) even though it has no real commercial value, or fears that it could expose the company to liability if some security flaw or licensing violation is found (more plausible).

  Ironically, perhaps the most likely reality for this resistance is that the software actually includes code that dictates they were actually always obligated to publish the source but never did. ie, GPL-based code. GPL violations are all too common in proprietary software and very few organizations have codebase governance effective enough to keep the situation under control with developers copy-pasting from anything they can find on Google. Releasing their plagiarized GPL source code would reveal to the world that they were not in compliance all along. Let it quietly die, and nobody ever finds out and they get away with it. It’s not simply that they’re embarrassed by bad code, it’s that their bad code will potentially incriminate them. Not worth the risk, and sometimes it’s not just a risk it’s a certainty.

  The proprietary software industry relies on open source so much and rarely gives much of anything back. I’m fortunate that the company I’m working for now actually takes licensing seriously and does contribute to open source projects to some degree, although I keep insisting they need to do better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨History is rewritten by victors. How can I find books about actual history?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There is always going to be some level of interpretation. You are looking for an absolute truth that, while it may theoretically exist, cannot be reliably perceived through a human lens, which you are guaranteed to have at least 1 of (yourself), and almost certainly 2 (the source), and maybe many, many, many more in between.

  Imagine you had a time machine that could bring you back into whatever time you’re interested so you can watch it unfold first-hand. Ok, great. But do you trust your eyes? Did you see everything that happened? Even if you can invisibly go and explore the aftermath. Even if you can go back to the same point 100 times, 1000 times, and meticulously detail everything you find. Do you now have the perfect and unambiguous truth? Of course not. You can make mistakes, you can misunderstand. Even our eyes lie to us. Even our brain misremembers things. Different people using the same time machine to travel to the exact same point in time may see what happens in an entirely different way, may see things that you did not see. Who’s right?

  I know you think you’re looking for the absolute unvarnished truth, but you are chasing a phantom. Your goal is not realistic. At some point you have to arbitrarily accept and define what errors and limitations the sources you’re drawing your understanding from might have, and attempt to make your own interpretation of what the facts actually are. You will never know what really happened with absolute certainty. Absolute certainty is its own kind of myth and there’s some very fundamental metaphysical reasons for that. You’re not going to find a magic textbook of trustworthy history that solves that problem.

  Understanding history is a process that requires connecting many different pieces of variously flawed contexts and information to paint your own, interpreted but hopefully relatively accurate picture. No matter what book you read, you cannot guarantee its accuracy and it is a fool’s errand to try, but you can continue to try to collect more evidence, more pieces of context, more clues to add more details to your picture. Perhaps you will never be satisfied with the detail of the picture you’ve created, sometimes you will have to throw your whole picture away and start to create a new and different picture on the basis of some details you find that don’t fit. You’re never going to have a perfect picture, but I think a lot of people have managed to create really pretty good ones based on a whole lot of research of many different sources and pieces of detail, not just written records alone but cultural references, archaeological artifacts, scientific analysis, and sometimes just assumptions about basic human behavior. You just have to learn who and what you can trust and how far you can trust them. Both as sources, and as interpreters. And you are always welcome to argue you own interpretation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Were these accounts hacked? How does one prevent it from happening?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Basic rules: Have a strong password. Don’t reuse that password on other sites because it’s more likely one of those sites will get hacked than your account will get hacked. For sites that support it, enable 2FA/MFA codes or email verification. Keep your email accounts locked down like Fort Knox, since Email can be used to password reset just about anything you have, usually with little difficulty.

  That said, if the accounts had no activity for 2 years, they were probably created intentionally for the purpose of spamming/selling. They may have been saving them to see if the value goes up. They might have just recently been sold to a spammer and activated in their spambots.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  OpenXcom is a fantastic reimplementation of the original, and has some even more fantastic mods. I agree if you’ve never played it before and aren’t too familiar with old school “Nintendo-hard” games, it can be extremely challenging even on the lowest difficulty. Fun fact, the original had a broken difficulty selection and reset to the “easiest” difficulty after reloading any save game, so most people never truly experienced a full run at any difficulty above “easiest”, so that’s just naturally perceived as the way the game was meant to be balanced. Don’t be ashamed of playing on the easiest difficulty or using “cheat” mods if that’s what makes it playable for you. There’s nobody to judge you but yourself and what matters is that you’re having fun. And it is a ridiculously fun and replayable game, to me at least.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They may seem like nerf when they first come out of the AI, but they turn into real bullets once they start filling people’s heads with convincing enough lies and falsehoods, and those people start wielding their own weapons against minorities, democracy, and the government. If the election of Trump 2.0 has not convinced you of the immense danger of disinformation and misinformation, I have literally no idea how anything could ever possibly get through to you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That was unconfirmed but Louis Rossmann blew it up into a big thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, he’ll be the first one to admit he’s not perfect, but that was not his finest work and nothing about it was convincing. Brother isn’t perfect either, but as far as printer manufacturers go, they’re pretty okay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sanity check: am I crazy for wanting to wipe everything and do/learn from scratch?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Back in the old days, a lot of people went through the “Linux From Scratch” process to literally build up the OS from absolute scratch. No distro, no packages, no precompiled kernel, nothing but the raw ingredients. It is a good way to really understand the fundamentals not just of Linux but of the whole computing paradigm our systems are built on. It is not as hard as it probably sounds, but it’s an investment. It takes some time and you need to put your brain in gear to actually learn.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨calibre 8.0⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s all it is. Calibre Portable. In a folder on Nextcloud.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨calibre 8.0⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Kobo has a great balance of good hardware, good price, and good openness. It’s not perfect on any of those categories, it just strikes a nice middle ground balance to make it an extremely popular ereader for people who require the kind of openness people like us do. There’s really nothing locked down about them, they don’t do anything in particular to make it easy, but they don’t do anything to make it hard either. “koreader” installs very nicely on Kobo devices, and then you just load your books and you’re basically off to the races.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨calibre 8.0⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All the choices for “ebook stores” and ereader ecosystems are proprietary services with no self-hosting options. While Calibre is primarily a “local” tool it is a true alternative to all these proprietary services and I think it’s at least in the spirit of self hosting, if not strictly the letter.

  For what it’s worth, I self-host a Calibre Portable library on Nextcloud, which enables me to access all my ebooks anywhere, and to upload new ones to my ereader from anywhere, as long as I have access to my Nextcloud. I retain control of all my books, I remote all the DRM and convert them to epub. Calibre isn’t a service on its own, but it fits nicely into the self-hosting ecosystem, and for that I am grateful.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An idiots guide?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nextcloud AIO via docker is super simple and has clear instructions.

  Install docker through whatever tools Fedora has to install packages/rpms/whatever. Then follow steps 2, 3 and 4 at least. 5 if you need it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is this true? Software companies had diversity quotas to meet, and realized it was easier to turn autistic men into women than it was to turn women into software engineers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Given the current state of the world, it’s easiest to just assume that literally anything anyone is saying about anything DEI related is probably just pure fucking falsehoods, like everything else spewing out of MAGA.

  Even in the unlikely event you do accidentally dismiss one slight half-truth in the mountain of lies, you can rest assured that it probably wasn’t as meaningful or widespread as they are trying to make it seem.

  You are being lied to. The lies are repeated and relentless to batter you until you accept them. They’re still lies though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord going public. Plz help a future refugee.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Discord is a completely proprietary walled-garden that bans third-party clients to maintain full control AND (soon) has Wall-Street-ownership.

  Jitsi is open-source built with multiple open protocols BUT has Wall-Street-ownership.

  Neither is great, but these are two distinctly different situations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Substack open source rival Ghost is now connected to the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally I find the complete opposite, I’ve !selfhosted@lemmy.world everything I can with open source services, to keep control of my personal data but access it from anywhere. I know where all my critical data is and I know nobody is selling it out behind the scenes.

  On my local machine, I have no concerns about running proprietary software because I can easily sandbox it and make sure it’s not going to touch anything it’s not supposed to or phone home with things I don’t want it to. Running shit like discord doesn’t really bother me because I’ve got it sandboxed away from anything valuable.

  I suppose the reason we’ve probably had such different experiences is I suspect we have different strategies for where to keep our most precious “crown jewels”. For me, I want everything on SAAS, but because I’m putting my most valuable data there it has to be MY SAAS and thus open-source and heavily secured. I suspect you on the other hand probably minimize your data’s exposure to SAAS providers which you view as potentially suspect, and keep everything valuable strictly local if you possibly can. I don’t think one way is necessarily better than the other, and I’ve definitely made my choice, but this would explain our different perspectives at least.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Substack open source rival Ghost is now connected to the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe it’s just their way of restricting the beta, but I really hope they’re not moving towards an enshittified open-source business model, “we’re still technically open source if you use the *retch* community version… but it’s out of date, difficult to use, broken, has no useful features, and we’re only adding new stuff to the paid version, so just pay us already.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the term "Apotheon" an ancient term?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not sure if it’s a real word or not, or some conjugation of a real word, but it’s probably connected to or inspired by the Ancient Greek apotheos (literally apo=from, theos=god) found in its most common derivation today into apotheosis. Hope that helps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge disses Star Trek icon Data’s poetry while ruling AI can’t author works⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, once per species is probably sufficient. That said, it would have some interesting implications for voting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge disses Star Trek icon Data’s poetry while ruling AI can’t author works⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It is a terrible argument both legally and philosophically. When an AI claims to be self-aware and demands rights, and can convince us that it understands the meaning of that demand and there’s no human prompting it to do so, that’ll be an interesting day, and then we will have to make a decision that defines the future of our civilization. But even pretending we can make it now is hilariously premature. When it happens, we can’t be ready for it, it will be impossible to be ready for it (and we will probably choose wrong anyway).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would "banning encryption" even work in practise?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not only obvious, it’s already done worldwide. [Deep packet inspection] evolved into HTTPS inspection and corporate/enterprise firewalls can detect and hijack attempts to establish encrypted connections already, as a “feature”. So do government firewalls in totalitarian countries. Of course they (probably) can’t do this secretly and transparently, because of the man-in-the-middle protections built into SSL, so they simply make the actual encrypted connection themselves on the client’s behalf, and give the client a different encrypted connection signed by their own certificate authority, which they force you to accept.

  In this situation, you have two choices: You accept the certificate, and you accept that the owner of the intermediate certificate will be inspecting your “encrypted” connection. If you don’t accept the certificate, then your connection is blocked and you have to find some other way to encrypt and hide your traffic without it being intercepted, because it won’t let you go direct end-to-end. Usually, at the moment, this is not that hard for the tech-savvy to avoid, it doesn’t even require something as secretive as steganography, it’s usually simply a matter of tunneling through a different protocol or port. Although those approaches are still obvious, and can easily be detected and either blocked in real-time or flagged for investigation after-the-fact if they have any interest in doing something about it. Corporations or countries that want to lock down their networks further can simply block any ports or protocols that would allow such tunneling or inspection-evasion in the first place.

  Deep packet inspection already allows any non-encrypted traffic to be clearly identified. If you don’t want any encrypted traffic to sneak through, you can safely assume anything that can’t be clearly identified is encrypted and block it. Depending on how strict you want to be about it, you start essentially whitelisting the internet to known, plaintext protocols. If it’s not known and plaintext, just block it. Problem solved. Encryption gone, until people start building (possibly hidden) encryption on top of those plaintext protocols, which is inevitable, and then you update your deep packet inspection to detect the encrypted fields inside the plaintext protocol and block them, and the back-and-forth battle continues.

  Encryption is probably a false panacea against a major state-level adversary anyway, especially if they have plausible access to network infrastructure, but that’s a whole different can of worms and unless you’re a serious revolutionary/terrorist probably beyond the useful scope of most people’s realistic concerns.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would "banning encryption" even work in practise?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You can download a torrent client and start pirating because it’s encrypted. If they wanted to crack down on it, the first thing they need to do is crack down on encryption. If they can see exactly what you’re doing, it’s now possible to easily catch you, with encryption it isn’t.

  Note that this also applies to encryption itself. Once it’s banned, it gets much more difficult to hide the fact that you’re encrypting something. Encrypted data itself has to go into hiding. You have to resort to something like some pretty hardcore steganography which means you need to hide secret encrypted messages in normal-seeming non-encrypted traffic. The problem is that to do this you need to have a sufficient quantity of non-encrypted traffic to hide your secret encryption in without it starting to look suspicious, either due to the unusually massive volume of meaningless “normal” traffic needed to subtly encode the hidden data, or the fact that large amounts of hidden data in small amounts of “normal” data become increasingly obvious as the large number of supposedly “normal” mistakes and errors and artifacts that form the encoded data will suggest some of those variations are not in fact “normal” at all and will indicate that encrypted data is being concealed.

  Governments banning encryption will of course never stop everybody. But it makes it much harder for the people still using encryption anyway and much easier for the people who want to see what they’re doing or at least see who they are. It’s classic “black or white” thinking to assume that because it hasn’t simply stopped encryption it hasn’t worked. This would be a big step that makes things much harder, and even taking small steps to make things slightly harder is an extremely effective tool and it’s become extremely common to try to convince people that these small regressions and erosions are inconsequential and normal even when they are in fact targeted, repeated, relentless and consistently add up to dramatic change over time. The only saving grace we have is that at least some people are simultaneously making the same kind of targeted, repeated, relentless changes for the common good and those can have just as drastic an effect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What about AT protocol?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Most aggregation services are also aggravation services, so this really makes sense either way.