wampus

@wampus@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SEC says it will deregulate cryptocurrencies with 'Project Crypto'⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a really good way to bribe politicians and public figures.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to the new world of risk: Microsoft cuts off services to energy company without notice⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In many cases, I’d say it’s because they aren’t IT or IT Security focused businesses. A pizza shop, clothing retailer, or whatnot, needs IT stuff to function, but that’s not the focus of their business. Hiring an IT team at IT worker rates is expensive, especially as a support/tertiary role for your business.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China exports state propaganda with low-cost open source AI models⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  America / Trump’s EO’s on AI basically say they need to tune their models to be as racist, or more racist, than Grok currently is. So, I mean, Pot meet Kettle.

  At least with China’s approach they seem to be ‘saying’ the right thing with regards to open sourcing it and having a more collaborative approach internationally. The USA and Trump is just “NO DEI AT ALL!!! MAKE IT SUPPORT DEAR LEADERS RIGHT THINK OR NO GOVT CONTRACTS FOR YOU!!! THIS IS NOT BIAS, THIS IS US REMOVING BIAS!!!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Women are anonymously spilling tea about men in their cities on viral app⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Outside of the crap going on in the US fascist resurgence, women are generally defined as a minority that requires equity / special benefits and protections. Making an app to “protect women” by crowdsourcing information about potentially predatory / negative men is viewed as ‘good’, and would likely be ‘ok’ by many western country standards.

  Making an app about women, with similar ‘experiences’ reported by guys, would be considered predatory, and would get shut down.

  We can already see plenty of related things out and about – like “women only” companies getting applauded by govt / media, while the same sources shame any business that doesn’t attempt to get 50%+ women on staff. We shut down gentlemen’s clubs for being discriminatory, but we cheer women’s only spaces. Genders are not treated equally in the public’s eye, and it generally skews in favour of benefiting women at this point, especially once it hits media/govt/courts.

  I think this is the more realistic take on how it’d play out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share In USA⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup. Lack of game support is a big roadblock – having just one or two friends on linux makes finding games your group can play together a real headache.

  Another weird-ish hiccup, is the lack of good/cheap/trustworthy tax software. Installing windows once a year to do taxes is bonkers. Some solve it by having a VM that runs windows that they only use for taxes, but that isn’t really a fix. You’d still be a microbitch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, cruise lines opening back up and returning to business as usual after COVID, basically made me stop paying attention to a lot of this individual-targeted climate change stuff. That was a perfect and fairly natural way to end that high pollution luxury oriented industry, but everyone basically said “boomers still like cruising, so fuck the planet”.

  If boomers and rich people can continue to pollute at incredible rates, just give me my stupid plastic straw back. At least that way I can drink a full mlikshake before my straw turns into paper mache, while I watch the world burn.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oculus founder Palmer Luckey leads group of tech billionaires launching new crypto-bank — aims to fill the void left by Silicon Valley Bank's 2023 collapse⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s hilarious in a way that Thiel, one of the billionaires who triggered a liquidity crisis that sunk SVB, is off proposing to fill the gap that he created. It’s also entirely fitting with the conspiracy theory of the tech bro fascists wanting complete autonomy to setup electronic fiefdoms.

  I don’t really get how this would work though, in more practical terms – as a lot of the crypto stuff is just antithetical to the banking industry. Like even the whole schpiel the crypto bros often go on about how you can send money quick from wallet to wallet, with the old “OMG we did it! How can banks be so stupid and slow!”. It’s largely due to regulation. Like anti-money laundering regulation, where countries don’t want citizens funding things like foreign terrorist groups with untrackable/unblockable wallet to wallet money transfers, so they tell banks they gotta scrutinize every transaction quite a bit, under threat of hefty fines – and where the govt can overtly tell banks to block payments to unfriendly countries (eg. Iran).

  Meh, it’s clear they won’t care about the fundamentals at all, nor do they care to understand how the industry works. They’ll likely use the bank to undercut existing players, while propping it up by manipulating the stock / piling in their billions. The regulation comment is a misdirect, alot like claims of wanting to be regulated were a misdirect back with FTX – these guys are far more likely to aggressively lobby for / pay the republicans to dismantle regulations in their favour, changing the landscape to their personal benefit. After the competition starts crumbling / they start moving towards a monopoly, they’ll either turn it into a regular bank in terms of service (but under their control of course), or they’ll intentionally tank it to gobble up whatever reserve/insurance funds exist, shifting that wealth into the billionaire’s pockets too, and leaving people with few options other than “under the mattress” for their savings. That’d make people almost entirely dependant on maintaining a regular working income, completing the tech bro fascist wet dream of having indentured slaves that can’t push back against any of their bullshit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is the manosphere on the rise? UN Women sounds the alarm over online misogyny⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally, I don’t mind seeing when comments are heavily down voted. If an opinion is unpopular, that’s ok, especially in some areas where you generally know there’s a likely bias in the audience.

  What annoys me is seeing comments removed / silenced by mods when the comments dont align. If the comments calling for explicit violence or using overt slurs, by all means censor. But many online spaces will eliminate even respectful / neutral comments simply because they aren’t in line with that narrative.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨News outlets in crisis mode as Google-led AI search push crushes website traffic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it became inevitable that traditional ‘sites’ were going to be in trouble once AI bots gained ground. The user interface is much more organic / user friendly, given that it can be conversational.

  It’s why big corps were so quick to start building walls/moats around the technology. If end users had control over what sites their AI bots used to pull information from, that’d be a win for the consumer/end-user, and potentially legitimate news sites depending on how the payment structure is sorted out. Eg. Get a personalized bot that references news articles from a curated list of trusted / decent journalist sites across a broad political spectrum, and you’d likely have a really great “AI assistant” to keep you up to date on various current events. This sort of thing would also represent an existential threat to things like Googles core marketing business, as end users could replace many of their ‘searches’ with a curated personalized AI assistant trained on just reputable sources.

  Big tech wants to control that, so that they can advertise via those bots / prioritize their own agenda / paid content. So they want to control the AI sources, and restrict end users’ ability to filter garbage. If users end up primarily interacting with an AI avatar, and you can control the products / information that avatar presents, you have a huge amount of control over the individuals and their spending habits. Not much of a surprise.

  It’d be cool to see a user friendly local LLM that allowed users to point it at reference sites of their choosing. Pair that with a news-site data standard that streamlines the ability to pull pertinent data, and let news agencies charge a small fee for access to those APIs to fund it a bit. Shifting towards LLM based data delivery, they could even potentially save a bit in terms of print / online publications – don’t need a fancy expensive user-facing web app, if they’re all just talking to their LLM-based model-hot AI assistant anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Her screams…': Horror as innocent Chilean tourist in New York snatched by NYPD, 12-year-old daughter left alone on streets⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You can get banned here for similar reasons as you’d get banned from things on Reddit. In theory the federated setup helps to mitigate it somewhat, in that if you get banned from your primary instance you can hop over to one that’s a bit more agreeable to your perspective and continue on.

  For example, I was recently banned from LGBTQ+ on, I think the world server, cause I posted a fairly benign straight opinion to a post that had an image basically asking for cis commentary. It had like 5-7 upvotes, about 13-15 down votes at the time the mods kicked me out – so even amongst the community it was a bit wishy washy, but the mods still opted to take action. On Reddit, that might’ve gotten me flagged / banned site-wide, depending on which White House narrative the company is marching to on that day. Here I just lose access to the LGBTQ+ community, shrug at them echo chambering up, and continue about my day.

  In terms of “Why do we only control the speech of leftists”, I imagine it’s because the threads you continue to access are left leaning – meaning those left in your bubbles, are the left-leaning sorts saying they’d been banned. Right leaning comments, and even (in my view) some centrist / neutral comments, still get people banned. These days we all basically have to assume that there are companies / algorithms creating bubbles in online spaces; you need to temper it with a good bit of secondary sources outside of ‘social media’ to get a more accurate picture of people’s mindsets/trends. Eg. Social Media + direct views of national/local news paper sites + in person discussion with various sorts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Big Tech Wants to Become Its Own Bank⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  SVB was intentionally crashed by tech bros like Peter Thiel, likely as a strategic move to lobby for change in the banking sector / to gain more access for tech companies. The bank operated in a risky space, with too high a concentration of tech bro customers. This left them exposed to Thiel and crowd going “Hey, look at the balance sheet, if we all withdrew our money at once we can pop this bank and trigger a discussion about banking regulations / reform!”.

  So, no one forgot, it’s all part of the same larger plan really.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CVE Board members launch the CVE Foundation, a dedicated, non-profit to continue identifying vulnerabilities, after the US ended its contract with Mitre⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, though that’s part of the problem that the States is whining about. US taxes paid for the service, which lots of other nations/foreign companies used.

  Things like Libraries require taxes to operate. You’d likely be annoyed if you were struggling, and then found out your gov was using your taxes to pay for a bunch of foreign countries to have libraries. And then you find out that those foreigners are able to use those libraries to make good money, which they don’t use to support their libraries, cause the States is already covering it. So you’re paying taxes, and struggling to do so, so that EU companies can reap profits and live comfy.

  And yes, charge a fee. That’s basically what I’ve said, no? That there’s a value add, and that there are ‘professionals’/companies using it who aren’t paying for that value add. So something like a fee for frequent pulls against the vuln feeds, to replace whatever funding the US gov was giving, would make sense to me. though I suppose this has now been kicked down the road till next year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CVE Board members launch the CVE Foundation, a dedicated, non-profit to continue identifying vulnerabilities, after the US ended its contract with Mitre⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but that’s sort of the point I was making… it was a data repository used by “thousands and thousands” of security professionals and organizations. So people who were generating revenue off of the service. I mean, they’re professionals, not hobbyists / home users.

  I’m not an American, but in terms of everything running like a company/for profit, I’d say that its best if things are sustainable / able to self-maintain. If the US cutting funding means this program can’t survive, that’s an issue. If it has value to a larger community, the larger community should be able to fund its operation. There’s clearly a cost to maintaining the program, and there are clearly people who haven’t contributed to paying that cost.

  In terms of going back to whatever, the foundation involved is likely to sort out alternative funding, though potentially with decreased functionality (it sounds like they had agreements to pay for secondary vulnerability report reviews, which will likely need to get scaled back). Maybe they’ll need to add in a fee for frequent feed pulls, or something similar. I wouldn’t say it’s completely toast or anythin just yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CVE Board members launch the CVE Foundation, a dedicated, non-profit to continue identifying vulnerabilities, after the US ended its contract with Mitre⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m honestly not totally sure what to think about this one, though I recognise that it’s a big shift/likely a negative overall result.

  Reason I’m humming and hawing, is that there are lots of expensive cybersecurity type ‘things’ that rely on the CVE system, without explicitly paying in to that system / supporting it directly, from what I recall / have seen. Take someone like Tenable security, who sell vulnerability scanners that extensively use/integrate with the CVE/NVD databases… companies pay Tenable huge amounts of money for those products. Has Tenable been paying anything into the ‘shared’ public resource pool? How about all those ‘audit’ companies, who charge like 10-30k per audit for doing ‘vulnerability / penetration tests’.

  IT Security has been an expensive/profitable area for a long time, while also relying on generally public/shared resources to facilitate a lot of the work. Maybe an ‘industry’ funded consortium is the more appropriate way to go.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should visitors to a country (tourist / visa-holders / people staying temporarily) have the right to criticize the government? When should an immigrant have the right to criticize the government?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Lots of people seem to think it’s either or, and it really shouldn’t be, in my view. (I’ll note I’m canadian, since it seems to matter to some these days).

  The argument that foreigners shouldn’t be allowed to protest is to me somewhat valid, but with a bunch of reservations. Peaceful protests, publishing op eds, (obviously) University papers, online posts, and other ‘regular’ forms of expression I’m totally in agreement that they should be allowed to express themselves/participate.

  But we’ve also seen cases in Canada where our immigration levels got so high, that we literally had CCP organized protests in favour of a detained Chinese CCP Billionaire, as well as the tearing down of “peaceful protests”/awareness things in regards to HongKong and the crack down the CCP did there. We’ve seen large, organized groups of Indian students – their messages of “go get free food” being amplified by foreign controlled social media – draining our food banks dry, the loss of that social support helping to fuel class conflicts and increased animosity towards Indian people as a demographic. We’ve seen ‘protests’ leveraged by foreign powers to sow discontent and animosity intentionally, and/or to control the narrative around news stories.

  And that’s really no surprise: one of the stated methodologies of authoritarian regimes, for attacking democracies, is to basically sow civil unrest through the amplification of contested issues/topics. They’ll amplify/fund controversial right-wing and left-wing viewpoints in order to cause internal conflict. They’ll hype up race conflicts. Like how the majority of people are totally fine saying both “Hamas is bad” and “Israel’s genocidal actions in gaza are bad”, but somehow it’s always framed as just a 2 sided thing where you’re on one side or the other, is great for authoritarians: why fight a democracy, when you can make it fight itself. If we’re accepting Students/people from authoritarian regimes, we have to be realistic in acknowledging many of these people will share the regimes beliefs, and will be actively working against our governments / peoples. They aren’t the stereotypical refugee seeking a better/freer life, but rather people with malicious intentions and a desire to disrupt.

  So I’m fine with such people having visas and non-permanent citizenship revoked if the person’s involved in criminal activity (violent protests), and/or if they’re a primary organizer/instigator/funder of such things, or (as was the case with some ‘student’ groups in Canada) they’re actively coordinating their protests with foreign embassies/agents. I’d also be in favour of increased scrutiny of people from such regions when it comes to long term stays / partial immigration (where they don’t renounce their former non-democratic country). Lots of countries also expect singular citizenship, I see no particular issue with western democracies at least requiring that their citizens not support/be registered citizens of authoritarian dictatorships. If you want to live in an egalitarian/democratic country, you shouldn’t be supportive of authoritarian autocracies/dictatorships.

  And again, similar to the note about ‘one side or the other’, in terms of free speech, most folks generally recognise that there are some reasonable restrictions / repercussions involved with it. Hate speech, explicitly calling for the killing of some group of people or what have you, clearly not a ‘right’ for most sane people – at least, not one that wouldn’t come with consequences. In the same way that the left is fine boycotting Musk for his Nazi salutes (he’s free to express himself as a Nazi, and other people are free to take issue with that / not support him because of it), foreigners explicitly challenging the existing norms of society should be prepared for potential consequences if they do so in a manner deemed inappropriate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I mean......if you really think about it.....⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’d have to gender swap all the non Fry characters into obsessed sex addicts wanting to jump Fry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IRS braces for $500bn drop in revenue as taxpayers skip filings in wake of DOGE cuts⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t disagree with you – I believe their line of reasoning was along the lines of getting all the operating funds needed for the ‘government’ from revenue generated from tariffs. One reason for aggressively slashing social support systems could be that they want to shift people’s dependency for those programs more directly to corporate interests such as Google and Apple – many tech companies have ‘interests’ in the medical field after all. The one area they would likely still want to maintain govt functions in, are military in nature – the theory is that they want what are essentially geo-distant corporate city states that are connected via the internet, and protected by orbital weaponry / nuclear arms. Setting up a few blocs of this nature, and having them constantly feign conflicts with each other, will help to keep people placated as well, in a sort of horribly Orwellian sense. That sort of concern isn’t really something for the ultra wealthy to be bothered by though, which’s one reason oligarchies are so dangerous.

  Still looks like the USA is sorta heading in that direction a bit, though obviously any of my musings are just guesses based on conspiracy theories I find plausible – so I doubt it’d play out that way any time soon or anything. If there were ‘real’ flags of that sort of thing being imminent, I imagine some people in the govt would be making even more noise to us commoners, hah.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IRS braces for $500bn drop in revenue as taxpayers skip filings in wake of DOGE cuts⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And loss of trust / stability of the government makes the tech industry’s push for corporate controlled ‘freedom cities’ much easier to get agreement on, allowing America’s rich oligarchs to quite literally establish their own baronies ;P

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IRS braces for $500bn drop in revenue as taxpayers skip filings in wake of DOGE cuts⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I seem to recall hearing Trump officials/project2025 sorts say they wanted to do away with income tax, replace it with tariffs. So, I mean, the IRS falling apart and not being able to collect income tax is sorta… on the roadmap, isnt it? Like issuing this warning is prolly just gonna be taken as a goal milestone achieved on the plan… ??

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord going public. Plz help a future refugee.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks, appreciated.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord going public. Plz help a future refugee.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Silly question perhaps, but I haven’t tripped across it on the site for Revolt – is there a relatively straight forward server version for self-hosting, or is it just that the source is on github and you can compile it in theory if you feel like goin through that process… ?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digg is about to be rebooted. Thoughts?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Reddit’s seeing membership outflows resulting from their more draconian policies. Reddit boss restarts a competitor platform so that he can try and recapture users by owning his own competition, while trying to pretend like there’s no conflict.

  idk. Seems pretty suspect to me. Lemmy seems ‘ok’ for news aggregation, and it has a more community / local vibe to it. For example, I can have more confidence that the feeds I see on Lemmy.ca are more controlled / accountable to Canadians, rather than the heavily Americanized subs that exist in Reddit. And I can pick and choose which other subs to see, with better understanding of the likely biases that I’ll encounter. This sort of end user transparency is really refreshing, especially given the burbling propaganda war being waged by the Americans at present against Canada.