rottingleaf

@rottingleaf@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates⁩ ⁨⁨53⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago⁩:

  Reading all such things I’m starting to think “what if I can drive?” I’ve always thought I can’t, but since everyone around who thinks they can drive like suicide bombers, maybe I should find those driving lessons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft announces new Windows changes in response to the EU's (DMA) Digital Markets Act for EEA users, including Edge not prompting users to set it as the default unless opened⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Because laws were made by incompetent and malicious people.

  Laws should mandate protocols and formats, not implementations. Protocols and formats mandated by the law should be simple. The whole humanity was just fine transmitting telegrams by Morse code consisting of letter groups. Then it was just fine with fax. If what we absolutely require to stay productive needs to be so astronomically complex that one programmer, given ready libraries for XML, encodings, compression etc, can’t write a fully functional and usable by everyone editor for that in 1 month - then such a protocol or format is not good enough to be mandated by law.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft announces new Windows changes in response to the EU's (DMA) Digital Markets Act for EEA users, including Edge not prompting users to set it as the default unless opened⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  even then Libreoffice isn’t good enough for half the staff in my accounting firm because it lacks certain features for now.

  The worst part is where some functionality breaks in a document bigger than a holiday card. I mean formulae vanishing.

  I think OOO around year 2009 was very stable and without such annoying bugs. But I haven’t tested it there TBH.

  Seriously, feature parity is a dead end. If there were a cross-platform office suite that would at least support the absolutely necessary things with a format not much more complex than org-mode, big documents (300 pages without degrading performance) and UTF-8, it would be fine. I think. That format can even be XML-based, just … why would you have vanishing objects in a document past their certain number? Do they have an unsigned byte counter somewhere?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ross Ulbricht Got a $31 Million Donation From a Dark Web Dealer, Crypto Tracers Suspect⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree he’s not a criminal, but I also don’t understand why is it a pardon without abolishing the law by which he was convicted.

  And the way copyright is being treated today, where it’s applied only if you are not a big corp, sucks just as badly.

  In this case at least the guy is not in prison anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Decentralized Social Media Matters⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s the interaction model and there’s the technical organization.

  The interaction model you’re describing as good existed in unmoderated Usenet groups (personal kill lists to avoid reading something) and in Frost (vulnerable, abandoned, sad, I liked it more) and FMS on Freenet.

  However! As yesterday I was reminded, things to ban include not just “wrong” opinions, but also executable binaries with probable trojans inside, murder\rape\CP materials, spam, bots, stolen credentials.

  The problem of self-moderation being hard doesn’t exist. Today giving the user control over their communications came out of fashion, but just like for e-mail clients local Bayesian filters existed, one can do today - with even some local AI tool probably, somehow everyone pretends that for such purposes said family of programs doesn’t exist.

  At the same time ultimately someone should do the filtering. What you are describing is your own preference in filtering, some other people have other preferences. Expecting people to self-moderate posts with stolen credentials when they are the criminals those are posted for - would be stupid.

  So - it’s hard to decide. Fundamentally a post with CP image and a post with Gadsden flag are the same. They even have a similar proportion of people willing to ban them, bigger for CP, but one can’t just treat some point between them as a constant, for which a post reputation system should be designed, to collectively stop propagation of the CP image, but for the ancap flag image to still be propagated by enough nodes. That point will move, there might be a moment when CP becomes more acceptable for users in a segment of network (suppose there are many CP bots and we have temporarily failed to collectively detect and ignore bots), or there might be a moment when ancaps are so hated that they are flagged by bigger proportions of users than CP. One is still a violation and the other is still not.

  So - to avoid solving the hard problem, one can have a system similar to a multi-channel ( posts propagated all practical ways, #1 store-and-forward nodes - network services like news servers and nostr relays, #2 Retroshare-like p2p exchange between users - I’m ignorant in computer science, so my own toy program does this not very optimally, but rsync and git exist, so the problem is solvable, #3 export-import like in a floppinet, #4 realtime notices network service like IRC ) Usenet, with a kind of necessary mechanism being used as a filter - a moderation authority signing every post as pre-moderated, checked, banned and so on. The moderation authority shouldn’t be a network service, it should be a participant of the system, with its “signature posts” being propagated similarly to the material posts, because otherwise both the load on the moderation authority service would be too big and the moment it went offline you’d lose a lot.

  Then on every kind of posts exchange a storage server or a notice server or a user can set up whether they propagate further everything they have, or only material posts pre-moderated or not banned by specific moderation authorities, and all signature posts, or only said authorities’ signature posts.

  However the user reading a hierarchy in such a system sees its contents they should be able to decide by themselves, using logical operators and the moderation authorities chosen.

  If we assume that almost everyone almost everywhere doesn’t propagate things flagged as CP\gore\fraud, it would be hard enough for a typical user to get them, even if their setting is wildcard. While the “wrong” opinions they will get.

  Then they can add users with those opinions to a personal kill list. Just like in olden days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fake It Till You Make It? Builder.ai’s $1.5B AI Scam Exposed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The management tends to be in the ASPD direction, and the developers tend to be in the ASD and ADHD direction. Not the majority, not even many people, but there’s a substrate in the cultures, so to say.

  Sort of hostile kinds of mind.

  The management in such situations dreams of replacing all the developers with “AI” or making them low-paid maintenance element so much, that people of that kind already gloat in the interwebs before that has come even close to happening.

  I’ve seen a justification made that “it’s you nerd types who loved to promise replacing all other professions, especially management, in the 00s”, it doesn’t really explain anything, because in that course of thought you just replace lower-level programming with higher-level programming.

  But personally I think it’s very simple - the management thinks they are the most valuable people, they create the “ideas” and hire metaphorical brick-laying workers who then fulfill those genial ideas. They see developers as such.

  While developers look at this like people who are approached from time to time by clueless apes wanting something and thinking they’re visionaries, whose wishes need to be guessed, critically cleansed and cracked into something barely making sense, from which then a developer derives some specific project goal and makes the clueless ape agree that this is what they meant.

  The management works with social matters, the developers with, ahem, how the universe really functions, a level below. The management generally belongs to a culture where everything is weighed on their social level.

  OK, what I really wanted to say is that there are 3 “elements”, so to say, here, leadership, metis (in Ancient Greek) and labor. Management ignores metis, developers ignore leadership, unqualified labor doesn’t see the difference between these two, and since both covertly seek affirmation from unqualified labor, it’s a perpetual conflict.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Forget Big Brother. It’s the startups silently watching workers now.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  So why are we making the Combine from Vacuum Flowers?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Japan's animation industry has embraced AI⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The genre itself has become neutered, too. A lot of anime series have the usual “anime elements” and a couple custom ideas. And similar style, too glossy for my taste.

  OK, what I think is old and boring libertarian stuff, I’ll still spell it out.

  The reason people are having such problems is because groups and businesses are de facto legally enshrined in their fields, it’s almost like feudal Europe’s system of privileges and treaties. At some point I thought this is good, I hope no evil god decided to fulfill my wish.

  There’s no movement, and a faction (like Disney with Star Wars) that buys a place (a brand) can make any garbage, and people will still try to find the depth in it and justify it (that complaint has been made about Star Wars prequels, but no, they are full of garbage AND have consistent arcs, goals and ideas, which is why they revitalized the Expanded Universe for almost a decade, despite Lucas-<companies> having sort of an internal social collapse in year 2005 right after Revenge of the Sith being premiered ; I love the prequels, despite all the pretense and cringe, but their verbal parts are almost fillers, their cinematographic language and matching music are flawless, the dialogue just disrupts it all while not adding much, - I think Lucas should have been more decisive, a bit like Tartakovsky with the Clone Wars cartoon, just more serious, because non-verbal doesn’t equal stupid). OK, my thought wandered away.

  Why were the legal means they use to keep such positions created? To make the economy nicer to the majority, to writers, to actors, to producers. Do they still fulfill that role? When keeping monopolies, even producing garbage or, lately, AI slop, - no. Do we know a solution? Not yet, because pressing for deregulation means the opponent doing a judo movement and using that energy for deregulating the way everything becomes worse. Is that solution in minimizing and rebuilding the system? I believe still yes, nothing is perfect, so everything should be easy to quickly replace, because errors and mistakes plaguing future generations will inevitably continue to be made. The laws of the 60s were simple enough for that in most countries. The current laws are not. So the general direction to be taken is still libertarian.

  Is this text useful? Of course not. I just think that in the feudal Europe metaphor I’d want to be a Hussite or a Cossack or at worst a Venetian trader.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Japan's animation industry has embraced AI⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Возьмемся за руки, друзья, возьмемся за руки, друзья, Чтоб не пропасть по одиночке.

  Okay, I just always liked this song.

  What I don’t like is that a feel like that is slowly catching up with the rest of the world, not just the USSR.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Japan's animation industry has embraced AI⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Is that even a thing in Japan?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could You Prove You’re a US Citizen?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t see posts with apologies to sovcits for ridiculing them. Not the part about somehow proving you don’t owe money, but the anti-centralist parts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. Just like with reverse-engineering software and making unintented use of proprietary services, whistleblowing depends at nobody being able to threaten you with jail or worse.

  Your country should have made it law when Watergate and such were still fresh in memory. To make such mechanisms not just “de facto”, but “de jure” reality. Because any “de facto” either becomes “de jure” or vanishes without a trace.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft announces new Windows changes in response to the EU's (DMA) Digital Markets Act for EEA users, including Edge not prompting users to set it as the default unless opened⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I already use Linux and FreeBSD.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft announces new Windows changes in response to the EU's (DMA) Digital Markets Act for EEA users, including Edge not prompting users to set it as the default unless opened⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  IMHO modern personal computing is as bullshit as XV century tournament armor.

  Something should be done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta shareholders overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to explore adding Bitcoin to the company's treasury, with less than 1% voting in favor of the measure⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That is almost a fundamental statement, requiring logical proof.

  It’s like with a computer program that can contain vulnerabilities - fixing vulnerabilities might introduce new ones, and new functionality intended for security can contain new vulnerabilities in itself, possibly making the whole even less secure than without it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, it’s also that authoritarian leaders grow plenty of friends and relatives who’d done really fucked up things. It’s not in their control to just do the oppression legally and possibly to explain (as in “it was such a time”, “those were imperfect measures and we’ve found a better way”), if they don’t do serial murder\rape and drugs trade and racket and theft, someone of their surroundings will.

  That’s probably also why western political climates are slowly becoming more authoritarian - it’s the same mechanism, just much smaller and slower. Maybe it’s not drugs\murders\theft, but it’s gray legal area tax evasion, suppose. Then after a few years it’s something a bit worse, and so on, gradually.

  Like it’s impossible to make an eternal engine, it’s impossible to make a political system without this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think they have already switched and went back at some point?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I guess it wasn't a nazi salute after all⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Changing wars to be more democratic, so to say.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I guess it wasn't a nazi salute after all⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You might be right, but you are incapable of reasoning to support that.

  Also quite a few people who’ve contributed more to the humanity than you or me have minds with much worse rot than mine. Mine is, strictly speaking, not rotting, just weirdly designed, so it’s faulty half the time. =)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨X launches E2E encrypted Chat⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Encryption is easy, safe key exchange and extension (or whatever it’s called) for messages longer than the key is harder to make right. If every pair of people on the planet had a common ethereal endless source of entropy, then all they’d have to do is encrypt messages with it and provide address in that source.

  OK, I should go offline for some time

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta shareholders overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to explore adding Bitcoin to the company's treasury, with less than 1% voting in favor of the measure⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Frankly movement is all that matters. Too deregulated looks like cryptocurrencies, too regulated looks like PSTN which every phreaker could own, because it relied upon laws for its defense, not technical robustness.

  There’s no system that remains working when just kept standing, all that matters is that we can quickly rebuild any part of it. Which is why modern legal systems and modern Web suck so much, they’ve lost that trait.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta shareholders overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to explore adding Bitcoin to the company's treasury, with less than 1% voting in favor of the measure⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I like GNU Taler, and I would like there to exist not just such a payment system, but also an electronic currency system without blockchains (global synchronization is a pain), unfortunately currencies are not like most applications.

  I also wrote two smartass paragraphs completely wrong after this, and now thinking about it - Taler is as good a solution as possible. It’s basically what can be done. You can’t decentralize an issuer or a bank, except for the BTC way. If you can, then you can’t plug it in seamlessly , you need some synchronization (would be a shame if a failed transaction made it into Taler as passed).

  If I understand that correctly.

  Gosh. It’s year 2025, I’ve achieved nothing. I was blabbering on these subjects in year 2011! I’ll be 29 in less than a month. But so cool that someone is making the humanity better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta shareholders overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to explore adding Bitcoin to the company's treasury, with less than 1% voting in favor of the measure⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That happens to every currency, BTC is more volatile than many, but things can be priced.

  Also until twiddling is made illegal, prices can be set by some other currency or some function, and be calculated in BTC from that, and displayed on electronic price tags for example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta shareholders overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to explore adding Bitcoin to the company's treasury, with less than 1% voting in favor of the measure⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of scams are dependent on the presence of regulations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I guess it wasn't a nazi salute after all⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Then some worthless fool calls you a Nazi for mumbling Radetzky-Marsch all the time, or even having an autistic fixation on German and Austrian marches in general, or even on those of 30s, it doesn’t matter - liking to listen to something and supporting an ideology are completely orthogonal. And then your life doesn’t matter, and the worthless fool’s life does matter, because the worthless fool uses all the right words and connotations from modern popular culture, while never seriously discussing anything, and you are trying to make some order starting from whatever ends you have.

  Say, I live in Russia.

  Worthless fools here who happened to be lucky enough to have an environment, an education and a location to be liberal, - they use the word “bydlo” (Polish for cattle) for most of the population, their understanding of the mistakes and crimes made by their side in the last 30 years is “too busy to talk about this, something bad happened, but we are the virtuous ones”, and their plans for “after Putin” start with “how do we reform the state”, these bloody morons don’t even understand that any healing attempts for Russia should start with wide democratic participation with frequent rotation (so that everyone would have an experience of shortly doing a few kinds of something political by their 30s, it’s not about interest, it’s about knowledge of the workings of the state and even distribution of ability to affect things around us) in a non-opinionated system, because whatever they “plan” for the rest will be a bullshit spectacle otherwise, a repetition of 1993 and 1996, and also that their opinions what’s good and their wishes shouldn’t be used in those plans - they should only build a system to channel the opinions and wishes of the people.

  Say, I absolutely hate a lot of things about USSR, but the most important bifurcation point was during USSR’s breakup, when on the referendum the majority in most of the union members and their regions voted for the new union treaty, for preservation of the union and against its breakup. So the democratic action was to reform the USSR and not kill it, that’s what democracy is. And what Yeltsin, Kuchma and others did, with their own arbitrary agreement to which they had no mandate, was not democratic. Yet it’s the popular narrative in both ex-USSR (among worthless fools of liberals, not the wide populace) and outside that this was somehow the democratic path chosen.

  The fallacy was that Yeltsin and co are “democrats” and thus whatever they do and whomever they kill, these are actions in support of freedom and democracy.

  Then that same party\group\mafia continued on their path at breaking whatever fledgling representative democracy, even with those checks and balances often talked about, that the 80s USSR had built as part of Perestroika.

  I have not lost my thought. I wanted to say that this relatively recent example applies to every time you look at someone’s stated ideology and not what they’re doing.

  Elon did Starlink. IMHO that’s more important than everything that DOGE has broken and more important than Tesla.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I have an acquaintance that have their own "password system" that involves having a "core" set of characters, plus a few unique characters for each site; Is that system safe?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Obviously, my point was that remembering a word is easier than remembering a letter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I have an acquaintance that have their own "password system" that involves having a "core" set of characters, plus a few unique characters for each site; Is that system safe?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A phrase is better:

  unlucky friendly monkey got raped by feral donkeys the monkey ran away from donkeys led astray

  It’s not very different from a sequence of 13 symbols, but there are many more words in English lexicon than symbols in ASCII plus 10, and the password becomes easier to memorize.

  This is also an adaptation of a joke from a Russian cyberpunk novel, one of the last good things by its author, called “Labyrinth of reflections”. It’s still very good BTW.

  One my friend has a very good taste in books and poetry, but when you talk to him, you wouldn’t think that. He spews bullshit about “patriotism”, alternative history, “anti-male laws” and such, believes that he can feel energies, and the only way to notice there’s something much better buried underneath is to talk about random life events for long, not trying to fix on anything in particular or reason logically. Yet every book he’s advised has been precious to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Java at 30: How a language designed for a failed gadget became a global powerhouse⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I hated something about Python, and avoided it, until encountering Tcl which for me fulfills the same role that Pythons seems for many people, but Tcl is really much more pleasant. IMHO.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Java at 30: How a language designed for a failed gadget became a global powerhouse⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  JVM isn’t mediocre. Really-really.

  I don’t like something aesthetically about Java, can’t quite nail what, and don’t like long-long namespace strings, but these are my personal limitations.

  Ah. I also don’t like OOP.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Java at 30: How a language designed for a failed gadget became a global powerhouse⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  But!.. Sun Java included internationalized set of Lucida fonts with proper hinting. Oracle removed that for whatever reason.