TheFogan
@TheFogan@programming.dev
- Comment on Extreme wealth inequality is baked in to the system 3 days ago:
True, but the point of the simulations is basically debunking the idea that even when capitalism “works”. IE the hypothetical perfect scenereo where everyone starts off with the same, has the same chances of getting good and bad opprotunities, that the the fairness systematically fades out of the system the longer the game runs.
I recall an economics class once where they started out playing monopoly, but giving everyone different starting amounts of money… and basically demonstrating that well over 90% of the time… the advantages basically determined the game.
- Comment on Extreme wealth inequality is baked in to the system 3 days ago:
Another simulation… that’s mainstream in american society… Landlords Game – IE what’s now Monopoly. By definition everyone starts with the same amount of money, and it ends with one person massively ahead and everyone else going bankrupt.
- Comment on Why is #FFFFFF white, but mixing red green and blue paint is black? 4 days ago:
Basically yes, look up additive vs subtractive colors… that’s why for a monitor you need RGB, but ink cartrages are Cyan Magenta and Yellow
In short, colored light, and pigments work in opposite ways. Basically all visible light mixes together to make white light. a blue object, basically absorbs the red and green light, allowing only the blue to bounce back… so mixing more colors, means less light. until almost nothing gets out (hence black).
- Comment on When DinoCon is doing more than the US Gov 5 days ago:
- Comment on When DinoCon is doing more than the US Gov 5 days ago:
Sadly there’s a lot of intelectuals that were involved, Lawrence Krauss, Noem Chomsky, Steven Hawking just scratching the surface.
- Comment on Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State 1 week ago:
The point is whether or not it happens, as a parable it’s validity is sound. Point is, if even if the current government has nothing but good intentions and would never use the information to do anything you don’t agree with, and you are in perfect agreement with the current government. There is always the risk of either the government changing or someone stealing the information from the government that could weaponize it in ways you would never want.
- Comment on How are locks and keys mass produced? 2 weeks ago:
2 fronts I’d say.
- Yeah it makes it clear someone breaking in, was doing the effort to conciously get into something that he wasn’t permitted to rather than just, opened the wrong door.
Also would point out, low knowledge low effort crooks, really 9/10 situations there’s an easier way to get in than the lock. Your house is far more likely to be broken in by someone smashing a window rather than picking a lock.
- Comment on it's true 2 weeks ago:
As Mitch Hedberg would say
They used to use it
they still do.
But they used to, too!
- Comment on How come decades in the 1900s look fairly well differentiated but from like 2004 on feels like a giant run on? 2 weeks ago:
I think there’s a bit of that, but also a bit of… unsubtle enshittification. I mean the obvious, AI features that nobody likes getting crammed into everything. Apples Intelligence making siri unable to do simple tasks it used to be able to do easily.
A lot of people would be happy to pay premium price for things that do exactly what they want. But more and more software companies are reversing what they do… and even when they do what you want, you still have to be vigilant on them changing their minds and removing features, or adding subscription costs etc…
- Comment on 'Fake it till you make it' insinuates fakers stop being fake, once they make it; reality seems to suggest otherwise 2 weeks ago:
Well depends, I think some industries just are fake in general,
Chiropractors, stock traders that aren’t using insider information etc…
- Comment on The one tool more effective than censorship is noise 2 weeks ago:
Yeah honestly I feel that’s the universal problem the world in general has.
What’s worse, our “vetted” sources have all been compromised. Mainstream news is corrupt as hell… all owned by a tiny portion of rich assholes. As trust in them wanes, the focus moves to the “independent” creators on youtube, and instagram influencers, podcastors etc…
Of which many of them are actually getting paid by the same billionares, as scandal after scandal shows, and of course rich monstrocities like Meta, Google, Musk… have the power to signal boost the ones they want to, and to minimize the growth of ones they don’t.
- Comment on The rise of Moltbook suggests viral AI prompts may be the next big security threat 2 weeks ago:
Did they actually honor it? I recall quite a few people tricking AIs into like, saying they will sell a car for $1, but the company not honoring it.
- Comment on The rise of Moltbook suggests viral AI prompts may be the next big security threat 2 weeks ago:
You know, in IT security, the weakest link will always be the users… they are easy to fool, they just blindly trust whatever you tell them.
But now, thanks to AI, computers will finally catch up to humans in their ability to be tricked. No longer will you need human users to set their password to easy things to remember. Our new AIs will actually be capable of shortening their encryption key to a common name, and leaving them on post it notes on their desks.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
I guess my point is federated services, at least prior to a world where they become mainstream, are only particularly good if
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You have a group of people all willing to use them together (IE Matrix, Friendster etc…), Join as a group don’t expect to find other specific individuals.
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If you do want to meet people, you are looking for pretty broad categories encompass millions. IE on lemmy you can certainly find an anime community, you won’t find an active jujitsu kaisen community.
Anyway so my point on things like Dating, Linked In etc… those topics are likely to be the last to have a hope in the federation, because their services on their own, require users, but more importantly those users have to be localized (IE dating sites need, both a high volume of users, and those users need to be in close geographical proximity, and have some reasonable male to female ratio, and then have some level of common interests). A linked in needs… job seekers, and companies/head hunters. Of which you can’t expect companies to put in resources without a large userbase… and you can’t expect the userbase to grow without company usage.
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- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Is there even really a function for linkedin without… well what it is? The last people to adopt new and open source tech are… corporate executives, and to my knowledge the whole point of linked in is, a psudo job hunting web page, with some social media pages as a secondary (of which people are only going to be posting “work hard” and “I work hard” kind of messages because… well they’d never post something that might make them less attractive to employers.
- Comment on Has ICE negatively affecting the protection money income of US organised crime? 3 weeks ago:
Actually I imagine the biggest thing of the “protection money” racket concept… to my understanding that requires being the most dangerous thing in the area. While the obvious concept of protection money is it’s to prevent the group you are paying from robbing you… it is kind of protection in the sense that a small time crook wants to rob stores in a mafia controlled area, the mob will go after him.
I’d imagine an army sized groups breaking down doors etc… means paying the mob ain’t that good of a deal.
Also I’d say… I’m pretty sure most organized crime, has their own code of morals. Ice thug may be outside many of their standards.
- Comment on How does capitalism differ from crony capitalism? 3 weeks ago:
Would TRUE capitalism have any problems?
Well only a TRUE Scottsman could tell you how TRUE capitalism works.
But OK so in short the gist of theory in capitalism.
Free market ideas - IE capitalism with no government oversite. If a company makes shitty products, someone else will make a less shitty product and all consumers will switch, or if a company starts dumping toxic waste into the drinking water, people would figure it out and stop buying that product… Parts of it are kind of a pipe dream because, some products are inherantly expensive to get started in. Lets face it, Facebook, Windows etc… aren’t dominant because their products are the best, pretty sure you could poll their userbase and find abysmal satisfaction among them. Yet even a giant as big as google, can’t accomplish the resources needed to compete in those markets… let alone a startup out of nowhere.
Now regulations obviously that’s where crony vs regulated comes up in discussion.
Obviously to me the big part is, safety matters. First off the bat, information, consumers can’t even make decisions if they don’t know. If you are putting poison in food, or calling something healthy when it’s loaded with crap, consumers have to know that.
Environmental is a bigger problem. Obviously requiring you to shield and not leak toxins into the drinking water… is a big problem, and it creates a huge problem, as the companys selling gas, or manufacturing chemicals etc… that spend less on safety are at a huge advantage in pricing to the consumer, who can’t tell why the more ethical companies are so expensive, only that they are more expensive. But the more safety that’s required, the higher the bar to entry is…
- Comment on YSK what legal rights you have in encounters with ICE 3 weeks ago:
You have rights this is america *
- Rights should be exercised at your own risk… Courts may change their rulings on them at any time, and not even the best lawyer on earth can revive after you’ve been shot in the head.
- Comment on Can we make federation less dependent on domain names? 4 weeks ago:
I mean DNS is always the issue… but then that’s kind of the double edged sword as well isn’t it?
Conceptually 4 options come to mind.
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DNS as current - weakness domain name changes or DNS outages or poisoning
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IP address - Issues, migration etc… some instances may need to move services etc…
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SSL private/public keys - probably the strongest I’d imagine. only real weakness I can see is… 1. it has no ability to find a server, and I guess if a server is hacked and it’s private key is stolen, federated servers would not be able to spot the imposter.
I do think 3 might be the strongest option. I don’t know anything on how lemmy etc… works. I’d imagine a strategy would be, When A and B federate with eachother, A records B’s Domain name, IP, and public key (and B gets A’s as well), if DNS goes down attempt recorded IP. If neither work wait for an incoming connection and if the new connections public key matches an existing public key, it assumes the identity.
But as far as the user side I don’t really know. Obviously we can only match users as their domains. I can’t imagine how I could find you again with gammaray@sh.itjust.works when sh.itjust.works domain is unregistered.
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- Comment on How do I make the Wordpress media library be somewhere else? 4 weeks ago:
It’s been a long time, but… wordpress is all sql isn’t it? Shouldn’t it just be, make a backup of the mysql database on the old server, install mysql and restore the database to the new server, and then point the word press servers configuration to the new database?
- Comment on Opera: A Legacy Browser Lost | Why the modern hollow shell of Opera has made it impossible for me to recommend a former favorite. 4 weeks ago:
For me it’s kind of an honesty thing. The biggest thing is if they are lying to their customers there… also apparently lying about where it’s based (They are in Lithuania, which has manditory data retention laws), only using panama as a tax haven.
Bottom line is, it’s about trust… They have a history of lying about a lot of small things, which then makes me think twice before trusting them with bigger things.
- Comment on Opera: A Legacy Browser Lost | Why the modern hollow shell of Opera has made it impossible for me to recommend a former favorite. 4 weeks ago:
I mean to me one of their huge red flags is their advertising. IE my big never using nord, was one of their commercials where basically it was voicing a guys vacuume, smart TV and Alexa, and vacume etc… talking about him behind his back. Which then the narrator is “Your devices are all talking about you behind your back, get nordvpn to protect yourself”.
That and many more were just blatent misrepresentation of what a VPN can and can’t do. (point being, in the real world… everythings running https or some level of encryption. If your devices are compiling information, it’s via their connection to their services. Of which a vpn isn’t going to do jack to protect you from.
Also a lot of shady things still within there, 2019 they had a major data breach, Many complaints on their service auto renewing.
you can get a summary of a lot of parts of it with windscribe.com/vpnmap
(site catalogs data breaches, complaints etc… with VPN services).
- Comment on Opera: A Legacy Browser Lost | Why the modern hollow shell of Opera has made it impossible for me to recommend a former favorite. 4 weeks ago:
Yeah sorry I phrased that bad, I meant to be listing smaller browsers that are also chromium. Point I was going at was most all the niche browsers are also chromium based.
- Comment on Opera: A Legacy Browser Lost | Why the modern hollow shell of Opera has made it impossible for me to recommend a former favorite. 4 weeks ago:
Big mystery to me, where the hell is opera getting so much money to shove in front of every youtube channel out there. It seems to be one of those things that every creator starts recomending at the same time… which automatically makes me cringe because, well obviously almost everything that has a huge influencer push, is complete garbage (air up, honey. nordvpn etc…)
- Comment on Opera: A Legacy Browser Lost | Why the modern hollow shell of Opera has made it impossible for me to recommend a former favorite. 4 weeks ago:
I feel like googles just used it’s monopoly so strongly to make everything be chromium.
Looking at stats counter.
Chrome - 75.45, edge 9.55, safari 5.37, firefox 4.32, opera 2.13, brave 1.17.
so… in short of their listings, 88.9% are chrome based… safari being the largest non chrome based browser. Firefox being the only other one with enough userbase to even get on the list.
My only guess is that google’s made their services a big enough pain or enough favoratism that even microsoft decided they didn’t want to try and work around it.
To which I also have to note, how few browsers aren’t chromium… IE Brave, Vivaldi etc…
I’ve started using zen browser myself, but I find it kind of odd that there’s so few firefox based browsers… which is something that I’ve found kind of baffling… considering I haven’t really found any negatives in using zen for about a year… Google’s always been, a huge threat to preventing adblockers etc… for years, is it just a lack of ideas of what to add to firefox.
- Comment on With what's happening to Grok AI, from a socialist perspective (Marxist or not), how do you think AI would be taken care of? 4 weeks ago:
I don’t disagree on that… Especially the leaders. Schumer and Jeffries have proven again and again that they find progressives a bigger threat than republicans. However we have seen it is possible to get progressives past them and into power. Aside from violent revolution I don’t see anything else that represents a way forward.
- Comment on With what's happening to Grok AI, from a socialist perspective (Marxist or not), how do you think AI would be taken care of? 4 weeks ago:
Well we can fully agree, democrats are republican light. The bottom line is most democrats are opposed to rational policies like, removing ICE, DHS, Regulating AI etc… All politicians who are for any of those things, are democrats, no politicians who are for those things are republicans, and the system does not allow 3rd parties. Point is the only strategy within voting… is.
Primary all centrist/moderate democrats with someone that actually stands with the majority of people. Support those primary candidates as best as possible, and then vote for whoever the democratic nominee is, as I still would hold that the worse democrat is still currently better than the best republican.
- Comment on Does anyone else feel like "analog" stuff is more "tangible"? 4 weeks ago:
I mean there’s 2 sides. Analog fails in more gradual forms. Digital obviously has the advantage of… replicating massively over large distances very quickly… IE your document could be backed up to a remote server as often as you save it. Versioning can exist so, you can have every change every update… differences between the file at 3:33 and 3:34 pm.
True on the gist that, a single corruption can’t hit a whole typed document usually, IE your 20th keystroke on a typewriter can’t randomly damage the first 19 characters.
I would say though digital excels in being able to be replicated, and versioned.
- Comment on When I first heard of the term "nuclear family", I thought it was referring to the fact that 20 century families had to deal with the constant fear of losing their family to a nuclear bomb. 5 weeks ago:
But all homophobes are secretly Lindsay Graham
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Based on the looks of it… a forbes article rewritten in AI to be an affiliate link to be reused as an ad link for proton mail.