balsoft
@balsoft@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder 7 hours ago:
Well, yeah, the dev environment was compromised but the author restored everything and checked that it all works.
Personally I use Pipepipe and Outertube on my android phone, and just watch through a browser with adblock on my Linux phone. Although I don’t watch youtube too often, especially on my phone (maybe twice a month or so), I didn’t notice any issues with either of those methods, and never got any ads either.
- Comment on Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder 8 hours ago:
BTW you can/should install an alternative YT frontend on smart TVs, if you want to watch YT and are forced to use a smart TV. Even something semi-suitable like Pipepipe will do, but there are also frontends more suited for TV use, e.g. SmartTube
- Comment on Rent is theft 2 days ago:
It depends on what is meant by “ownership”.
Personally I’m in favor of some modified version of the chinese system where almost everyone “owns” a home, but their children can’t inherit it. I think technically the state owns all the housing, and provides people with a cheap/free lifetime lease of some kind. There should also be a limit on how many properties a single person can own, and renting those places out should be banned.
And then as a compliment there should also be some excess state-owned social housing. There are edge-cases where for one reason or another you can’t/don’t want to own.
So yeah in general I think we need to abolish the concept of homeownership as it exists in the west.
- Comment on Rent is theft 2 days ago:
Even if you misinterpret the argument that way, social housing could be provided for free at the point of use, with no rent to be paid. The main distinction is whether the housing is owned and controlled by private or public entities; the former will necessarily demand a profit to be made, the latter can operate “at a loss” by spending taxpayer funds as a social service.
- Comment on Rent is theft 2 days ago:
Generally yes, because you are also building up equity that way. Renting is just money wasted down the drain.
- Comment on YSK that everything the New York Times about Donald Trump actually happened 2 days ago:
Who are the “good guys”? The only remotely non-evil person who had a serious bid for president is Sanders, the rest are straight up pieces of shit who bankroll genocides, bomb civilians, and empower their billionaire donors. Even then, Sanders is ineffective, somewhat zionist, and old, and I don’t see a viable young replacement even for someone like him.
In the US, the political mainstream isn’t “good guys vs bad guys”, it’s 80% hitler vs 100% hitler.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
The benefit of the fediverse is that it’s trivially “forkable”. If lemmy.world and other big instances get overwhelmed with bullshit, I fully expect that many smaller chill/focused instances will defederate and keep on doing their own things, chatting only with each other. Perhaps there would also be some in-between, instances which are federated with both worlds, and where you can get a combination of tons of niche information/entertainment but with bots, and a small amount of genuine human interaction. I hope if that ever happens, lemmy-the-software gets sorting algorithms to deal with these situations.
- Comment on How accurate is this? 4 days ago:
TBH like a half of those questions is something I could ask when I was younger, and the other half might have been asked by my friends when they were high. I hope I didn’t upset the retail workers too much…
- Comment on The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K 5 days ago:
Nah, honestly, I think stuffing an entire computer inside a monitor and relying on it to generate/show content is a bad idea no matter what software it runs. A dumb TV + a small computing dongle requires only a tiny fraction more labor to produce than a smart TV, but it’s so much easier to upgrade in the future if you decide you need faster boot times or wanna game on the TV, etc. And if the TV breaks before the dongle does, you can also buy a new TV and keep all your settings/media without transferring anything.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Honestly it’s not the worst idea, the french have tried something like that during one of their revolutions.
Semi-relatedly, I’m salty they didn’t push for duodecimal numbers and base metric on that, it would incorporate the only good part of imperial system & 12-based time system, not only into measurements but also all other aspects of life.
Then they could make time consistent too, maybe have like 10000 (20736 in decimal) “metric seconds” in a day (which would mean 1 “metric second” ≈ 4 “normal” seconds) and derive stuff from there (e.g. 100 “metric seconds” in a “metric minute”, 10 “metric minutes” in a “metric hour”, 10 “metric hours” in a “metric day”). Would be really quite neat.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Of the two, Celsius is less arbitrary because it is based on actual measurable reproducible things and not “we threw in some salts in water, and guesstimated a human body temperature”. It also makes a lot of sense in our post-industrial society because we do/don’t want to freeze/boil water almost every day for a variety of uses. Water is both an extremely important substance for humans and its freezing/boiling points occur in everyday life (unlike air or common metals).
- Comment on 1 week ago:
To be fair, it’s the other way around. Kelvin scale is Celsius scale shifted by -273.16 ℃.
- Comment on France will replace Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, Webex and others with its own sovereign video conferencing application "Visio" for public officials 1 week ago:
Yes, the reasoning behind this is sad, but the outcome is very positive.
- Comment on France will replace Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, Webex and others with its own sovereign video conferencing application "Visio" for public officials 1 week ago:
These particular news are based and a long-term good for the humanity. Moving from spying corpo slop to an open-source solution is a win-win for the french people. Sad that it is only happening now, this should have been done decades ago, the US empire and its corporations have always been evil. Now they are just showing their true face to europe and the US population.
- Comment on Exploding 🌳🌲🌴🌳🌲🌴🌳🌲🌴🌳 1 week ago:
It’s not just about the temperature, it’s also about how quickly the temperature is dropping. Usually when the temperature goes down, trees do some “clever” shit with the sap inside them, specifically so that there’s less moisture in them and when it freezes and expands the tree doesn’t crack. However if it drops too quickly the trees can’t do their magic quickly enough, too much water freezes, puts too much stress on the tree and it may crack.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 weeks ago:
I do see your point and I’ll actually upvote you here. But I do think there’s a meaningful difference.
Software is just an idea written down rigorously. Various societies created various conventions and social contracts to control dissemination and usage of ideas, both in their pure and written down forms. Capitalist societies generally defer to the author of the idea for how they want it handled (at least for the first few decades), so that the author can earn some money from it (of course, even ideas are monetized under capitalism) - this is patent and copyright law.
The free software movement is just a novel application of the copyright law. By sharing ideas freely but with a license that forces everyone using the idea to share their derivative ideas freely as well, it is attempting to destroy the spirit of copyright law by using the letter of copyright law.
With all this in mind, let’s examine what it would mean to add the “don’t be evil” clause to an otherwise FOSS license.
- In ideal circumstances, a society’s system of laws and social norms should incorporate “don’t be evil” in it already. Hate speech and nazism should be prohibited and punished.
- In ordinary circumstances, such as neoliberal capitalism, there are agencies that will be acting in bad faith but will stand above any laws, be it geneva conventions, hate speech laws or (boring) copyright law. You won’t be able to enforce a “don’t be evil” clause against the CIA or ICE. They can just take your software and use it. This is partially applicable to our current situation.
- In extraordinary circumstances, such as capitalism in advanced decay a.k.a fascism, the law will be ignored by most evil actors anyways. Law is just a social contract and fascism is deliberately breaking all social contracts. Nobody will enforce copyright law in favor of an individual FOSS developer, especially against someone who’s on the side of the regime. This is also applicable to our situation.
There is some edge-cases in the middle where a “don’t be evil” clause might make a bit of sense. If the contract law (which includes copyright law) is still well-respected, but the social contract itself is falling apart around it, it might be used to prevent some nazis somewhere from using your software for a short while, but that situation is always unstable and does not last. In any case nazis are known for ignoring all social contracts, including court orders, so even this is questionable.
There are also downsides in any “don’t be evil” clause, because it requires you to rigorously define what you mean by “evil”. This is actually really hard to do well without relying on existing laws (which ruins the point), and will usually either leave nazis leeway to get away with using it, or harm legitimate users, or both - especially because legitimate users are less likely to try pushing the boundaries.
This is explicitly different from what Bluesky is doing. They are hosting known nazis. Nothing is stopping them from banning ICE and making it into a point of pride, it is really easy. There is no downside, no legitimate user hurt. It’s as easy of a decision as one can make.
To reiterate,
So the mastodon service supports Nazis.
Mastodon-the-service doesn’t really exist (unless you count mastodon.social). But the fediverse in general is not supporting nazis. Nazis are banned and defederated.
Mastodon-the-software may “support” nazis in the same way as printed books or the idea of how a gun works supported nazis.
They’re providing software to Nazis, and I don’t really see how that makes them better than providing a place to post.
Bluesky is categorically worse because it doesn’t have the “don’t be evil” clause in the software licenses either, and it is hosting nazis directly on the platform they run.
- Comment on AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow 2 weeks ago:
I’m not sure it’s targeted at anyone “important” (what a classist term!). It is just analyzing the situation and predicting what happens next, for you and I to be prepared. It also hastens the end of the bubble ever so slightly, which is good - the sooner this poison-laced bandaid is ripped off the world’s economy, the faster we can start to rebuild something more meaningful, but now with new productivity tools by our side.
- Comment on AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think he’s necessarily a genius, but he is a force for good and a great writer. We do need someone to keep saying the truth, keep saying what’s right and what’s wrong, this is literally how we win the information war currently waged against us.
It’s the same of the genocide experts calling out genocide, or the eco-activists calling out climate change. It might be obvious common sense to you, but it might not be to other people, and this is precisely why it needs to be shouted from every rooftop we have available.
Oh, and also, if you actually read his works he clearly does more than just state the obvious and coin new terms (even though both of those are important too). He is deeply and intimately familiar with the technical and social structures of the modern internet, his analysis of various phenomena and trends is usually on-point and has some predictive power. Most importantly he offers solutions to the issues facing us, and practices what he preaches too.
- Comment on Tips 2 weeks ago:
It didn’t last because the will of bureaucracy was placed before the will of the people, it was a long decline of democratic rights of the working class started under Stalin and continued by all following leaders. It was not due to socialism per se, more due to the specifics of CPSU politics. China seems to have figured out a better way to do democratic dictatorship of proletariat and is successfully combining aspects of capitalism and socialism, to both make the country appealing to capitalist investors and also build up a socialist economy to bring the living standards up. It’s not perfect (and is definitely not “the end of history” by any means), but it is doing fine as an interim solution.
- Comment on Tips 2 weeks ago:
A soviet era russian also had access to free healthcare, free childcare, free higher education, cheap (sometimes free) housing, excellent (for the time) public transit, and a safety net for unemployment or old age. Oh and there was ample opportunities to build community ties so that if something did go horribly wrong and you needed that help. Capitalism in decline will give you none of that.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 weeks ago:
I’m not defending anyone. I am just looking at a stated claim (Bluesky is as bad as Twitter because they verified ICE) and evaluating if it has merits.
I don’t think that’s the claim, at least that’s not the way I’m reading it.
Bluesky is knowingly hosting nazis. The verification here just displays the mens rea: rather than them just not noticing the account, they know about it and still haven’t banned it.
I don’t think Bluesky is as bad as Twitter right now, neither is the OP. However, what we recognize is that this is the quintessential beginning of a Nazi bar, which means it will eventually become as bad as Twitter.
As long as I am reasonably in control of the information that I can access, I see no point in complaining about it.
I think there is a significant problem in platforming nazis. It gives this vile ideology a voice and a means to spread. Especially given the state of media literacy and critical thinking in the West, a lot of people don’t know how to control which information they see, and makes them susceptible to this manipulation. Fascism is rising through social media misinfo right now, as we discuss this, so it is very important to complain about it as loud as possible.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t call it “endorsing”, but I would call it “platforming”. blahaj.zone is platforming you, lemmy.ml is platforming me, bluesky is platforming nazis.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 weeks ago:
They have already posted a job ad to join a violent fascist paramilitary in their profile.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 weeks ago:
Good to know there’s a second full-network relay (assuming this is what it is). Last time I checked all third-party relays only indexed some sections of the network.
Conceptually relays are the indexers of the network, you can view individual PDSes without them, but you won’t get cross-PDS discovery; this is because PDSes don’t actually federate with each other.
This means that in practice, relays define what it means to be “on bluesky”. If you are banned on all relays, your PDS becomes just a weird standalone microblog.
And in any case this is all a bit academic, bluesky are hosting nazis on their own PDS, bsky.social.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 weeks ago:
What I am “OK with” has no impact whatsoever in “what actually gets to happen”. I rather not waste my energy on the things that I can not control.
You are in control of which social media you use, and even more so in control about which companies you choose to support or defend. You are currently spending your energy defending a company that is hosting a de-facto nazi account on their servers.
Let me rephrase the question. If a newspaper you enjoy reading started publishing a column from Gestapo, what would you do? Would you boycott and complain? Would you just complain and keep buying it? Or would you keep buying it and defend their actions by “well I can just skip that page with the nazi propaganda on it”?
It would. They would just do it from unverified accounts. Worse still, they would be able to post it and completely deny it if confronted about it.
There is literally nothing stopping them from doing it now. Having a verified account does not impede their ability to create fake unverified accounts in any way.
Spammers also get to send millions of messages every day for “free”, but we mostly ignore it because we are able to filter them out. Sure, it would be great to completely get rid of spam and the phishing industry… but there is no way to completely get rid of them that does not involve increasing the surveillance aparattus and given more power to a centralized enforcer, so if I have to choose between spammers and corporate-controlled communicatioins, I will take the spammers any day.
I would agree with this (except bluesky is also corporate-controlled). There is no way to completely cut out spam, including nazi spam.
But in this case someone from Bluesky looked at this account which self-identifies as a nazi organization, and hasn’t banned it. It is clearly different.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 weeks ago:
Truth Social is running Mastodon under the hood. But nobody considers it a part of the fediverse, because even if it had federation turned on it would instantly be defederated by 99% of instances.
I’m sure there are nazi lemmy instances out there, but they are all defederated from the lemmyverse. This is the correct approach, decentralized platforms are somehow doing a better job at this then the de-facto centralized bsky.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 weeks ago:
No, I don’t expect them to ban anyone from the government.
So, you would be OK with a newspaper accepting ads and publishing an opinion column from Gestapo or SS? They were official government organizations after all.
And, no, I don’t think it would be wise to do it: verifying the account does not mean they are supporting it, it just means they are making sure that whatever crap ICE is saying can not go around without accountability.
You are once again presenting a false dichotomy. Banning ICE would not let them post Nazi propaganda on their platform at all.
That’s how decentralized systems work. Bluesky does not control who I get to see.
- Bluesky is centralized, they operate the only full-network indexer of their network, they get to control what accounts can post to all frontends
- They are hosting the ICE account on their own server and domain. They definitely can control that, even if there were other indexers available
So not only would be OK with a newspaper publishing an opinion column from SS, you would even buy that newspaper because you can just skip that page and read the other interesting stuff.
ICE or any other institution can not buy its way into manufacturing propaganda.
They literally can. Except in this case they didn’t even have to pay, the corporate overlords of bluesky will let them post propaganda for free.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 weeks ago:
Nazis are quite good at bending or evading rules to further their agenda. They will push the boundaries of what’s acceptable by using creative allegories or dogwhistles. Moderators are supposed to moderate assuming goodwill from participants, this should not be the case here because ICE is not operating in good faith. Me thinks a job ad to join the modern Gestapo (which is already in ICE’s profile) should be grounds for a ban.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 weeks ago:
Bsky is actually quite centralized. Bluesky the company owns the only full-network indexer (I think they call it a “relay” or something), which collects posts from all other servers and allows those posts to be rendered by various apps (e.g. bsky.app, but all other frontends use the same indexer). They could just ban them at indexer level.
But even that is moot, because they are letting them host their account on a server Bluesky the company owns, bsky.social.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 weeks ago:
It is a lot better. If you let Nazis join your platform, your platform is now a Nazi bar. Ban them, don’t let them spread their propaganda.