rottingleaf

@rottingleaf@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think it’s that centralized. Just some elite somewhere pushes through what elites everywhere would want, and they try to do the same around it.

  Like spread of a disease.

  I think the way to fight it is similar. Unions, customer associations, parties (not for election, but for having as many people as possible for mutual aid and actions ; it might even be counterproductive to get into government, since that breeds expectations which are not delivered upon, which hurts the party ; better to do volunteer projects without using state power as much as possible).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Women’s ‘red flag’ app Tea is a privacy nightmare⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago⁩:

  “waaa somebody wants to solve a problem that has never affected me I’m the victim”

  Everyone has the problem that they’d want to discuss others behind their back. It’s not accepted because it doesn’t work to any good end.

  “omg what if people talk behind my back they might find out I’m an asshole? literally 1984”

  You won’t find out anything from this. People sometimes lie, especially in such situations.

  but if an article about cybersecurity gets posted and this is our first reaction, makes me lose hope in Lemmy.

  Human adequacy is a big part of cybersecurity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Selfhosted peer-to-peer reddit alternative built on IPFS⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago⁩:

  No fundamental difference between censorship for being an anarchist humanitarian and for sharing CSAM. There’s a hierarchy, the top of which either decides to ban you or press someone else to ban you.

  If the hierarchy is voluntary (as in paying attention to deletion\ignore messages signed only by those authorities you chose yourself), then both CSAM and anarchist speech will be shared.

  Best you can do without enabling censorship is to choose what you replicate (Freenet doesn’t have that, hence CSAM flourishes there, with this thing it might be less convenient - you’ll have IP addresses of all the pedos ; sharing CSAM is a crime so it hurts them, being an anarchist is not so it hurts anarchists less ; though some way to achieve pseudonymity with still only storing what you want would be good).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Women’s ‘red flag’ app Tea is a privacy nightmare⁩ ⁨⁨46⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree. High standards and common ideas of “right” are generally present among people insecure and easily gaslighted.

  Such as those that would use this app. Point?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gamers Bombard Visa & MasterCard With Emails and Calls Over Steam and itch.io Censorship⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s also why in the middle of the previous century propaganda was mostly aimed at women. That’s killing two birds with one stone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Women’s ‘red flag’ app Tea is a privacy nightmare⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Stats depend on perception. Where a woman reports abuse, a man often spends an evening drinking or something similar. Not reporting abuse.

  Expectations of men are too somewhat cruel. You should be grenadier-tall (or gorilla-wide, point being, you should look fit), with facial features like those of Kianu Reeves, with voice like that of Orlando Bloom, confident like some CEO, honorable like a samurai from some movie, yet able to override that honor at her whim and do any atrocity to make the world better for her. Like some picture of 1930s’ propaganda.

  If you don’t deliver, then she silently pities herself and silently looks down at you for that. But God forbid you seem like that picture in some regard and then inevitably turn out to be more human, that deceit she won’t forgive.

  It was a problem a century ago that women were mostly right-wing and chauvinist and traditionalist. Most of that has been undone, but not how women in average see gender relations.

  OK, so about the app - I won’t be surprised if it was an intentional honeypot, honestly, to expose those who will use it. And it’s a bad idea, there’s no way to verify anonymous accusations, which means it’s a tool for defamation of any man, and a way to discredit things of the kind written there at the same time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard and Visa face backlash after hundreds of adult games removed from online stores Steam and Itch.io⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  When there are enough competing parties, the argument of “I live in country A and I don’t care about B’s special services reading my messages”, where A and B are in a state of adversity, starts working.

  By competing parties I mean not just A and B, but a plethora of snakes in that pit.

  So - do it Elon. It’s fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard and Visa face backlash after hundreds of adult games removed from online stores Steam and Itch.io⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  And the reason sexual things had to be filtered was that they are harmful and skew kids’ perception of healthy sexuality.

  Gambling wasn’t considered healthy even where and when marrying a toddler was normal. After all, a traumatized person with unhealthy sexuality does generally understand they are traumatized, a person taught that addiction is normal - not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is Fediverse moderation, even more Draconian than Reddit?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Perhaps you were mostly in the right kind of communities on Reddit.

  Also I dunno what you’re talking about, I gave up on Reddit after being banned for like 10th time, the reasons all being “calls to violence” (that’d be about civil rights, democracy and such) or “ethnic hate” (that’d be about NATO allies not having a carte blanche to do whatever they want, specifically Turkey and Azerbaijan).

  I’m less reserved on Lemmy, and my views are around anarcho-capitalist (I’ll admit some Trotskyist and anarcho-syndicalist things appeal to me, so sort of left from the average).

  What kind of stupid s*** is this? Is the Fediverse just a safe space for leftists because of what happened to Twitter?

  It’s a hierarchical system. Want something better - design and implement a p2p social media with democratic leadership of communities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Peter Thiel Just Accidentally Made a Chilling Admission. Five Decades Ago, One Man Saw It Coming.⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, an oracle for the masses is something very convenient.

  Just remind me, who had the power - Alexander or his fortunetellers? Caesar or his fortunetellers? Or whether Delphi oracle ever managed to turn the religious part into power?

  BTW - I understand how such ideas can be out of sincere desire to help humanity. Magic thinking is natural, and some perception of the world is natural, and evolution is just not fast enough for the technical developments we have.

  And what I’d want in the future to account for that (sort of a panopticon, not because I’m an exhibitionist, but because you can’t make a subset of society always tracked and visible without making everyone always tracked and visible ; and lack of banking privacy, for example, in Scandinavian countries doesn’t seem to hurt them that much) might well be worse than what they want. A bit like Zamyatin’s book.

  It’s just that “might” doesn’t negate the fact that they are already doing a few very bad things, like genocide. Perhaps their mitigation is just not worth such sacrifices. Perhaps mine is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Startup Claims Its Fusion Reactor Concept Can Turn Cheap Mercury Into Gold⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, it’s also a bit of an equalizer in terms of electronics production, if it becomes cheaper. One of my pipe dreams for the future is that such happens and makes it a bit more decentralized.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Startup Claims Its Fusion Reactor Concept Can Turn Cheap Mercury Into Gold⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Cheap gold could have a good effect on analog electronics, including the hobbyist kind.

  I’m sometimes thinking that not everything needs a computer. If it does, many things are fine with a MC.

  And not just analog electronics honestly, hobbyist computing in the ancient sense, of making hobbyist computers and using them, might have a small rebirth.

  And mass-produced electronics would too become a fair bit cheaper to produce if gold were more widely available. Longevity, reliability. Maybe touchscreens’ economical advantage over physical buttons would be reduced even.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Startup Claims Its Fusion Reactor Concept Can Turn Cheap Mercury Into Gold⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Humans sometimes run out of things to want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US condemns French inquiry into Elon Musk's social media platform X/Twitter.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  There is that.

  American democrats, though, irritated me more until I’ve started noticing Republicans. They have that “parties switched in 1960s” myth (only parties’ ideas on race switched, while the main ideology of the democratic party is not too different from “progressives” of 1890s, those guys who advocated for prophylactic lynchings ; and it’s the same about Republicans, whose “anti-racist” ideas were just as Christian fundamentalism based as their today’s projects), and also the “popular party” myth (while even in appearances being something to the top of which only people born with a silver spoon in mouth can get).

  At the same time the “free speech” stuff over there seems to mostly be about “they in their totalitarian countries (or pockets of society dominated by the other party) are lied by their propaganda media, and we here are free and are told the truth”.

  Not sure it’s entertaining, it looks depressing. But I haven’t lived in the US.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia plans to boost presence in Israel with multibillion-dollar tech campus in north⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Israel has, compared to US, still cheaper human resources and probably no issue with security-minded limitations on technology transfer or whatever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia plans to boost presence in Israel with multibillion-dollar tech campus in north⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes. I personally haven’t bought Intel since they’ve shown themselves, or MS. And now I won’t buy NVidia (I have a good cheap GPU from them, though ; and they make FreeBSD drivers ; it’s unfortunate).

  I do use a PDA with Android with Google services.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Age-Checked Internet Has Arrived⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s just not true. People (including competent enough) are well willing to make the society worse for everyone if they are going to be gentry. That’s been this way for all of human history, thinking otherwise is that new thing of the 90s, when American exceptionalism has been expanded into “post-Cold-War globalist” world exceptionalism, similarly to how Judaism expanded into Christianity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Age-Checked Internet Has Arrived⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix that will get through through the cracks since massive established sites had to actually fear shutdown and losing all revenue unless they had robust gatekeeping mechanisms.

  There are technical solutions for p2p sharing with moderation. Not to prevent bad people from sharing their stuff, but to keep spaces clean for those who don’t want to see it.

  This is also true for communication, which is why Fediverse is not good enough. Hosted servers should be an optional part of the infrastructure, and the data (users, communities, posts …) shouldn’t be connected to them. Like with torrents you can host a torrent tracker, and you can host a BTDHT node, and you can automatically download and seed rare torrents, and none of this is connected to whatever people hosting major trackers decide.

  NOSTR gets that part right, but the user experience its authors imagine is not for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Age-Checked Internet Has Arrived⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not “support”, it’s already been done in practice.

  What they are finishing right now is the convenient way. To surveil 97% instead of 94%. And to make it official to reduce expenses.

  And sorry, but “moderate leftists” are those who made it happen, first dreaming how on big centrally moderated platforms the “bad” speech and people will be censored (how irritating it was that in the free Web those people could write whatever they wanted) and theirs won’t be, and propaganda won’t flourish, and after that dreaming how they can demand loudly enough that the platforms would work for them and not for themselves.

  I perfectly remember how people loving Steinbeck and expressing anarchist views would look at me like at an enemy for saying that Facebook, Twitter etc are bad and a trap, and such hierarchical systems can’t be good. That arrogant obnoxious “see, in the real society we collectively press for our rights and the rules are made and obeyed”, yes, I’ve met fools who told me things like that. Where’s your society now, bitch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  As usual, it’s the implementation that matters.

  Someone jumped at me for comparing EU and MAGA to Stalin’s and Hitler’s regimes, quote, “arguing in newspapers whose worker class has been liberated more”. Like they are not equal at all and all such.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MIT researchers have unveiled a portable, window‑sized device dubbed the atmospheric water harvesting window (AWHW) that can extract clean drinking water directly from air, even in death valley⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s such a thing as botulism ; so - once the toxin causing it has formed, it doesn’t matter that you kill the bacteria that produced it with boiling the water. The toxin itself survives much harsher conditions.

  I think it’s not the only danger which you haven’t considered here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doge reportedly using AI tool to create ‘delete list’ of federal regulations⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I was kinda agreeing with you, just clarifying on one nuance

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doge reportedly using AI tool to create ‘delete list’ of federal regulations⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, this reads … I dunno. Conspiracy-minded at best, I’ve read plenty of such and most was likely fake.

  To make it clear, I don’t consider deregulation something bad, when done as part of a system where it makes sense.

  Otherwise it’s like paying people for work - labor should be paid for, not paying is cheating, you need work done for you, all these are true, except when it’s a gypsy fortuneteller saying you have to pay lots and lots of money not previously agreed upon for lifting a curse, then you probably shouldn’t pay that person.

  When deregulation is done only partially and without “releasing” any of the political power held by private parties, just removing obligations accompanying it - then something is wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Foreign Censorship Threat: How the European Union’s(EU) Digital Services Act(DSA) Compels Global Censorship and Infringes on American Free Speech⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, of course, it’s different, our social justice struggle against hate speech and responsible media versus their fascist propaganda metastases and oligarchy-owned media.

  No need to think, just call whoever laughs at you delusional.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Alternatives are not so hard, if you allow everyone to exchange and use every currency. Then, well, you need to pay someone selling in currency A - you pay your B’s to buy some A’s and you pay with them.

  But there are lots of limitations on banking, some in good faith, and some to prevent mobility and make everything tracked. Possibility to track means possibility to decide who gets to do what.

  I think that’s why gold standard was dropped in the first place. When all money is guaranteed with gold, and gold (still does) buy money, you do have a universal currency hard to track.

  With decentralized electronic currencies the problem is - you need consensus. There’s no way around it at all. You can devise something to separate one consensus into a tree of subspaces, to make it more efficient in case an operation with a coin “123456” depends only on operations with coins from “123*” subspace, or something like that. Partitioned system. So then you don’t need consensus on subspaces untouched by your operation. But you still can’t have such an offline currency, because that depends on the finite amount of gold, while with electronic currencies double spending exists.

  And I don’t know if it’s possible to make such an electronic currency anonymous for outside spectators. Zero-knowledge and other buzzwords are good, but I don’t know how one can do this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Foreign Censorship Threat: How the European Union’s(EU) Digital Services Act(DSA) Compels Global Censorship and Infringes on American Free Speech⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  At this point this starts to mildly reminisce Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s German Reich arguing in newspapers whose worker class has been liberated more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doge reportedly using AI tool to create ‘delete list’ of federal regulations⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Soviet elites’ idea of power meant that.

  USSR in late 1980s sort of “resurrected” the Soviet system as something kinda democratic (well, democratic centralism is not exactly that, but decisions were made, and many true words were said, and the resulting course of action those elites didn’t like), so those elites (Yeltsin was a Politburo member, a reminder) just decided to flip the board.

  But yeah, I definitely think there’s a connection.

  And while considering them all-powerful may be wrong, Soviet propaganda had more levels than people thought. The fact that the narrative of many of those dissidents then is now similar to the narrative of ex-Soviet elites and their allies speaks for itself.

  The “visible” propaganda had different layers for kolkhozniks and for factory workers and for engineers and for artists. Everyone thought they could read between the lines, but that was too just a layer.

  After USSR “collapsed”, plenty of sects and ideologies emerged, and mostly those too were defined by Soviet propaganda - from political (sincere, not like those participating in the election, but like Limonov people and Makashov people and anarchists and communists, all of them) to esoteric (I don’t even want to list all of that), and of course the church.

  And now the Russian population is slowly transitioning from intoxication with that cocktail right to dissociation like with PTSD.

  So why did they decide to flip the board?

  Because only fools think that covert and conspiracy-minded and backstage and back alley actions are more true and sincere, or even stupider - advantageous for the weaker side. That’s exactly where smoke and mirrors work flourishes. The truest thing Soviet people had was the common public “official” set of institutions and rules, no matter how disgusting it was. By flipping the board they removed it, and the masses had no common point of reality anymore.

  So, why did I write this - yes. I think that’s what these people are doing in the USA, except the many-layered genius-class propaganda system is not existent there, but a few companies have been working hard for 20 years to create some kind of replacement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doge reportedly using AI tool to create ‘delete list’ of federal regulations⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Anyone who says “regulation is bad” is attacking the problem with too blunt an instrument.

  I agree.

  The urge to get rid of regulations is either driven by corrupt profiteering or by an ideology that’s too crude for the real world.

  It might also be driven by the feeling that it hits your enemy more than it hits you, but that was back then. Now it doesn’t, because the enemy has converted their regulations into real-world power and can scrap them all and still have it.

  BTW, I agree about “too crude”, actually ancap as it is itself doesn’t pretend to be anything else. That’s why I like it very much - most cases of marxism etc are directed at some imagined and idealized real world, or a miraculous solution allowing to introduce them in the wild and let them work. Ancap (just like left anarchism) explored mechanisms which can never be made 100% pure in reality, but benefit everyone when created. It’s more about designing new social systems than about ruining existing ones.

  Which is why I don’t like people making an association between ancap and Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand is a fan of monopolies and hereditary oligarchy. Ancap in its pure form has no levers for an oligarchy to maintain itself. It defines finite non-human-created resources as common, so its treatment of oligarchy is no different than left anarchism’s treatment of oligarchy.

  Getting back to regulations, I’ve recently had a wonderfully simple idea which doesn’t even seem that crappy. Separate all law into the constitutional part (and maybe some intermediate kind requiring longevity and not too complex) and the usual part, and scrap the latter and start anew with a bunch of referendums every 10 years. One can devise a system where representatives are elected into councils (ranked choice voting, proportional system), a few dozens of them with a few hundreds people in each, and each council decides on its own part of the laws (of course, using advice of invited lawyers and such), and then a referendum approves or rejects those projects. Where those are rejected, the process is repeated until there’s an acceptable variant.

  To make the laws used in daily life simpler and more democratic. Right now malicious parties can slowly skew laws in their favor over many decades. In such a system only the popular perception and shared knowledge will survive those many decades, while the actual law will be decided upon democratically. Thus a solution to one time’s problem won’t become a problem for another time. And the legal corpus will be compact, similar to that of western countries in 1950s.

  A lot of today’s problems is just legal legacy and sneakery. This way stuff that’s obsolete and stuff that has been sneaked in won’t have any effect on modern application of rights.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doge reportedly using AI tool to create ‘delete list’ of federal regulations⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not how I meant it when 10 years ago talking about regulations being a bad thing.

  I meant starting with copyright =\

  “AI tool”.

  I live in Russia and I’m pissed that they are making its gang in power look almost competent in comparison.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Future is NOT Self-Hosted⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I would say the future is in pooling resources.

  Like it happens with torrents. As one p2p protocol very successful.

  Self-hosting not applications, but storage and uniform services. Let different user applications use the same pooled storage and services.

  All services are ultimately storage, computation, relays, search&indexing and trackers. So if there’s a way to contribute storage, computing resources, search and relay nodes by announcing them via trackers (suppose), then one can make any global networked application using that.

  But I’m still thinking how can that even work. What I’m dreaming of is just year 2000 Internet (with FTP, e-mail, IRC, search engines), except simplified and made for machines, with the end result being represented to user by a local application. There should be some way to pay for resources in a uniform way, and reputation of resources (not too good if someone can make a storage service, collect payment, get a “store” request and then just take it offline), or it won’t work.

  And global cryptographic identities.

  Not like Fediverse in the end, more like NOSTR.