AnAmericanPotato
@AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev
- Comment on What is the minimum number of words needed to communicate 4 days ago:
I affect a British accent
Lower-effort life hack: wear a Canadian maple leaf prominently. Put a patch on your bags, get a baseball cap, wear a t-shirt. Project “Canadian” any way you can.
- Comment on Cloudflare blocking Pale Moon and other browsers with smaller user bases 5 days ago:
Disgusting and unsurprising.
Most web admins do not care. I’ve lost count of how many sites make me jump through CAPTCHAS or outright block me in private browsing or on VPN. Most of these sites have no sensitive information, or already know exactly who I am because I am already authenticating with my username and password. It’s not something the actual site admins even think about. They click the button, say “it works on my machine!” and will happily blame any user whose client is not dead-center average.
Enter username, but first pass this CAPTCHA.
Enter password, but first pass this second CAPTCHA.
Here’s another CAPTCHA because lol why not?
Some sites even have their RSS feed behind Cloudflare. And guess what that means? It means you can’t fucking load it in a typical RSS reader. Good job!
The web is broken. JavaScript was a mistake. Return to
monkegopher.Fuck Cloudflare.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Lots of recent (meaning past 20 years or so) research shows that our gut bacteria play quite a large role in our mental functions, too.
The concept of “the self” as a single, indivisible, unchanging thing is simply not compatible with observed reality. To be alive is to be in a constant state of flux.
Is there such a thing as an eternal soul? Uh, maybe…but if there is, it’s not going to be responsible for the things we typically associate with individual living people. It’s not going to have your sense of humor, or your memories, or your opinions, or your math skills. We enough about all of those things to confidently say they are not eternal.
- Comment on Is anyone else getting a bit of schadenfreude from the news each day? 1 week ago:
If someone was uninformed and misinformed enough to think voting for Trump was even remotely in their own self-interest in the first place, then there is almost no disaster Trump can cause that will not be instantly reframed as “just imagine how much worse it would be under Dems!”
Dying of COVID? Well at least you’re not dying from forced vaccination!
Layoffs due to tariffs? LOL what’s a tariff?
Can’t get benefits you need to survive? Well clearly the Welfare Queens left him no choice! It’s their fault!
It’s no coincidence that Trump in particular and Republicans in general relentlessly attack education and free information. They’ve already brainwashed enough of the population to win elections, and they want to make sure the general population has no way out of that hole. This is why they’re attacking Wikipedia and Internet Archive. This is why Project 2025’s first order of business is to eliminate the Department of Education. This is why Musk bought fucking Twitter in the first place, most likely. This is why they’re now trying to repeal Section 230 (with the help of some Judas Dems), so they can bully any web site into taking down any information they don’t like.
The information apocalypse is upon us.
- Comment on Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian 2 weeks ago:
Neat, I didn’t know that. I currently use Joplin this way, synced across my devices with Syncthing. Joplin also supports directly syncing to Google Drive or Dropbox (with optional encryption).
- Comment on Italy to require VPN and DNS providers to block pirated content 2 weeks ago:
I’m sure there will be workarounds.
I think there are plenty of people who would be pirates if it were more convenient, but I suspect the point of diminishing returns for legislation has already been passed. If you’re savvy and dedicated enough to use a VPN in the first place, then this probably won’t stop you. Non-tech-savvy people are already turned off of torrents for half a dozen different reasons.
DNS, though? That will block a lot of people from accessing things like Z-library, which is currently easy enough to access for anyone who knows how to use Google.
China’s measures have been largely successful, unfortunately. It’s still possible to VPN out, but it’s a risk a lot of people are unwilling to take since it could realistically get them in trouble. I’ve lost contact with some friends in China because we have no shared platforms and the increasing blocking measures over the past 10 years finally passed their tolerance threshold.
I guess I could figure out how to use iMessage, which AFAIK is the only end-to-end encrypted messaging service that still works (or at least the only moderately popular one). Makes me wonder how secure it really is if China hasn’t banned it…
- Comment on Is thinly-veiled political whinging really a question just because you used a question mark? 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on people who drink, how long do your hangovers last? 3 weeks ago:
About half a day. If it’s really bad, a full day.
But I don’t usually let it get that bad. Hydrating and eating properly before, during, and after a night of drinking will do wonders. Ideally, you should be hydrating all through the evening, not just chugging a liter or two at the end.
- Comment on Dell kills the XPS brand 1 month ago:
They’re like 20 years too late to start copying Apple here. Apple had their shit together with their product line for a good while after Steve Jobs returned and eliminated the absolute insanity of Apple’s mid-90s lineup, which had at least three times more models than any sane person would find useful.
But recently, Apple went off the deep end. Boggles the mind that “Pro Max” ever made it past the brain-mouth barrier in a boardroom, let alone into an official product lineup.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
30 years ago, maybe. Post-Napster, not relevant. Most online piracy is non-commercial now, and it’s still illegal across most of the world.
- Comment on DeArrow is an open source browser extension for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails on YouTube. 5 months ago:
A simpler, less ambitious alternative is Clickbait Remover: github.com/…/clickbait-remover-for-youtube
It replaces thumbnails with stills from the video. You can select between beginning, middle, and end.
It doesn’t change titles but it lets you force capitalization to lowercase, titlecase, or sentence-case. Keep in mind that this has no logic to retain capitalization of proper nouns no matter which option you choose. I set mine to lowercase just to have some kind of consistency, because I got sick of random ALL CAPS TITLES.
I haven’t used DeArrow myself. Crowdsourcing titles sounds interesting but I appreciate that Clickbait Remover behaves exactly the same way with 100% of videos.
- Comment on Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn 6 months ago:
Who do we arrest if a crime is organized via phone call on T-Mobile’s network
I guarantee you, T-Mobile does not hesitate to hand over any and all data they have to the government. And they don’t encrypt shit, as evidenced by their many many data breaches.
or via mail?
The postal service is from a different era, and has legal protections I wish online equivalents had. Logically they should. Realistically they probably never will.
- Comment on SanDisk introduces the first 8TB SD and 4TB microSD cards - Liliputing 6 months ago:
Not all use-cases require a high speed:capacity ratio.
I mean, I have an 18TB USB hard drive, which sustains transfer at about 50MB/sec in practice. It is nearly full, and its level of performance has never a show-stopping problem.
It’s hard to imagine a use case where a NAS would be a viable alternative to an SD card.
- Comment on CrowdStrike Isn't the Real Problem 7 months ago:
This doesn’t seem to be a problem with disaster recovery plans. It is perfectly reasonable for disaster recovery to take several hours, or even days. As far as DR goes, this was easy. It did not generally require rebuilding systems from backups.
In a sane world, no single party would even have the technical capability of causing a global disaster like this. But executives have been tripping over themselves for the past decade to outsource all their shit to centralized third parties so they can lay off expensive IT staff. They have no control over their infrastructure, their data, or, by extension, their business.
- Comment on Are jabronis a necessity for a social media platform to be successful? 7 months ago:
- Comment on 7 months ago:
Honestly, I don’t find this very creepy. This is information you are already putting out there for everyone to see. If I post a video of myself speaking, I am not concerned about people seeing how my skin vibrates in that video.
As video generation tools become more advanced, we will need better algorithms to validate videos. The bar for “fooling the vast majority of humans” is much, much lower than the bar for “being literally indistinguishable from a real video”. The main problem I see is that it’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game, and I don’t think any method you publish will remain valid for very long in practice. The same method will be used to improve the next version of video generators.
Also, lots of real videos use post-processing that might wash out some of the details they are looking for. Video producers might re-record lines so they don’t perfectly match the video to begin with. It’s been a while since I long time since a Samsung phone, but on my old S6, I remember that it always had a beauty filter applied to the selfie camera that made me me look like a creepy porcelain doll. I could probably make a deepfake of myself that looks more “real” than those real videos and photos.
