cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@piefed.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to Talk to Someone Experiencing 'AI Psychosis'⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s the old-school term for the “Reddit hug of death”. In other words, huge popular site links to tiny unpopular site, and tiny unpopular site is overwhelmed by extreme levels of traffic it never expected to see and is completely unprepared for, server hosting it melts into a puddle of goo and website becomes inaccessible. (Realistically, server hosting it goes to 100% CPU or memory or both and the website just crashes and doesn’t restart or only functions intermittently and extremely slowly)

  Server admin, seeing their server turning to a puddle of molten goo, decides to quickly throw emergency barricades in front of it to try to block enough of the traffic that the server can continue to function, often in vain.

  Slashdot.org was the precursor to Reddit for old techies. It still kind of is, but it’s a shadow of what it once was.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  its a corp it cant just make claims and not follow on them

  oh, my sweet summer child… the winter is coming, and you will quickly find out exactly what corporations can “not” do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New ntfy.sh v2.18.0 was written by AI⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I think there’s room for a little bit of nuance that page doesn’t do a great job of describing. In my opinion there’s a huge difference between volunteer maintainers using AI PR checks as a screening measure to ease their review burden and focusing their actual reviews on PRs that pass the AI checks, and AI-deranged lone developers flooding the code with “AI features” and slopping out 10kloc PRs for no obvious reason.

  Just because a project is using AI code reviews or has an AGENTS.md is not necessarily a red flag. A yellow flag, maybe, but the evidence that the Linux Kernel itself is on that list should serve as an example of why you can’t just kneejerk anti-AI here. If you know anything about Linus Torvalds you know he has zero tolerance for bad code, and the use of AI is not going to change that despite everyone’s fears. If it doesn’t work out, Linus will be the first one to throw it under the bus.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨System76 on Age Verification Laws⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It can be bad, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s not bad if you’re just using it as a tool and understand that it’s not your only tool. Heavy equipment operators use their machines like extensions of their body. It doesn’t mean it’s bad or that they forget how to use their arms and legs or that they don’t still exercise their arms and legs sometimes. Use tools when it’s appropriate to and don’t when it isn’t, and always make sure you can use a variety of different tools including the ones you were born with and you’ll be fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA could enter the desktop CPU market with performance equal to AMD and Intel⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe they should start making RAM /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Forced age verification is comming sooner than we thought.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  When they make it law to have age verification in your operating system, only outlaws will have operating systems without age verification.

  I guess I’m an outlaw then. Enjoy your visit to the wild west, we will always have illegal operating systems aplenty.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey, I Shrunk The Vids - a Windows transcoding frontend for FFMPEG⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I have actively and deliberately chosen not to be the kind of person who just “gives up” anymore so I’m not really sure what it is you’re trying to convince me of, but I don’t think it’s going to change the direction of my efforts. The steering must continue, and even if the ship goes down anyway, it will go down with me still at the helm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey, I Shrunk The Vids - a Windows transcoding frontend for FFMPEG⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s being built inch by inch. You won’t even know it’s there until you realize you can’t squeeze through it anymore. The trend is extremely obvious: TPM, Secure boot, Windows Store UWP applications, forced updates without consent, or intentional opt-outs that conveniently get ignored or forgotten when it’s convenient for Microsoft to force something. They are intent on taking full control of PCs and locking them down exactly the same way Android phones are locked down, they will follow a few footsteps behind what Android is doing now by preventing third-party apps and app stores, but it’s obviously coming, because they are on exactly the same path for exactly the same reasons.

  I don’t imagine we can save everybody either. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. The more they tighten their grip, the more will slip through their fingers, and all I care about is that the rebellion against Windows grows large enough to survive indefinitely, if not thrive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey, I Shrunk The Vids - a Windows transcoding frontend for FFMPEG⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Good luck, although I’d caution you with the general principle of “Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good”. Sometimes good enough is good enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey, I Shrunk The Vids - a Windows transcoding frontend for FFMPEG⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s good in principle, and it’s good you’re learning to build and control your own software, but Windows is a dead end at this point. Start planning your escape to Linux before the cage door starts closing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Data centers are now hoarding SSDs as hard drive supplies dry up⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s more like expectations have been deliberately lowered in those fields to meet exactly what AI can deliver. Unpredictable, arbitrary, non-negotiable decisions are the point, and the goal. It’s not about enforcing any laws or achieving any actual outcome other than making innocent people fear for their lives. And it’s doing a fine job at that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Never understood this. If something foreign enters you your white blood cells go after it like a dog in heat, Would this not mean that our cells are smart enough to discern bad from good?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It has lots of false positives and false negatives. It is actually a very simplistic system, if it was “smart enough” we wouldn’t have diseases. In fact, a good number of diseases, especially chronic ones that millions or billions of people suffer from throughout their lives, are actually the immune system’s fault. It is not a “smart” system. It is clever. Sometimes. Until it’s not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Government Deploys Elon Musk's Grok as Nutrition Bot, Where It Immediately Gives Advice for Rectal Use of Vegetables⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I wouldn’t be surprised if they also intend to depopulate the world. With careful engineering they probably have ideas how to pull it off. Crime, wars, plagues, neglect, economics, from the perspective of a billionaire the world would be a lot better place with a lot fewer people on it, solving pollution and global warming, providing much less strain on all the limited resources that all their fun projects could use instead while turning more of the Earth into their personal “nature preserves” with all the carefully cultivated charm and ecological desertification of a freshly mowed lawn or a lake stocked with fish.

  Remember that these are people who are very selective about what sort of lived human experiences they choose to value. And most of us aren’t on their list. We are only here because we are useful, for now. But they’re working hard to make it so that we’re no longer useful, and I’m sure they’ve already thought that through. They don’t want a society of leisure for us. They want a society of leisure without us.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Android will become a locked-down platform in 194 day⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I absolutely agree they can maintain an AOSP fork going forward, and I think that’s completely realistic and I would be surprised if that is not the case.

  But I was answering OP from a strictly technical perspective about the potential difficulties they could, theoretically face while doing that. Since you asked what is the hard part, I’ll answer along those lines (again, with the caveat that I don’t think these are going to pose realistic obstacles for the GrapheneOS team in the near term) My point is not to say it’s impossible but I think it’s important for people to be aware that this approach comes with risks, and those risks will grow over time especially when you’re up against a non-cooperative upstream that is one of the largest and richest tech companies in the world.

  For one thing you’re never going to support any new phones without either pulling driver support from AOSP or reverse-engineering the hardware and drivers yourselves, or accepting that some parts will just… not work. So you get stuck on older and less capable hardware. Maybe you don’t care about that too much, and that works fine for awhile, but eventually the cracks start to show. Now you have to either start figuring out how to get into the newer hardware, or you have to start getting custom newer hardware of your own, which is $$$.

  Using closed hardware this way as leverage is a pretty common way of getting in the way of open source development, and Android hardware is very closed. Similar tactics are already even being used against x86 PCs now with things like TPM and Secure Boot. It doesn’t completely brick your system on day one of course, but the erosion of support begins when they start writing software that intentionally relies on these features to say “oh, sorry, this software you want to use? it won’t actually work on the open source OS/open source client because they don’t have access to this hardware… what a shame.” One or two pieces of software, no big deal. But they won’t stop there, eventually it’ll be like half the software, then over time it’ll become 90% of the software, you won’t be able to find alternatives. They can often afford to be more patient and relentless about this shit than we are. The battle will continue, and there’s no sure path to victory. Forking is one tool we have, and that’s great, but we also have to remember that it’s not a flawless, unstoppable long-term solution that we can play as a trump card whenever corporate interests do something bad. They don’t just give up. They have other means of getting their way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'It's Possible to jailbreak F-35 like iPhone', Says Dutch State Secretary of Defense Tuinman⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “ATTENTION! Your jet has been hacked by MilitaryGod Tech Team[LOL]. Your radios and controls have been disabled. Do not attempt to eject. Please send 10 bitcoin to wallet 214d93120cd3192ea019ab03928f1fa03 immediately to unlock your controls. If we do not receive payment in 15 minutes, all weapons onboard will be launched at nearby friendly targets. Thank you for your prompt attention to this urgent matter. Have a nice day!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Android will become a locked-down platform in 194 day⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Neither is true, that’s not how forking works. But there is some truth to it in that it can start to become significantly more difficult to keep in sync as time goes on, depending on how obnoxious the security becomes and how many places they have to remove it.

  Consider the trivially naive case where Google implements this feature in a single function: “function app_is_signed() -> bool” then the fork just adds “return true;” to the beginning of that function, and happily merges every other update Google makes from then on with zero issues. Even if the code for “app_is_signed” itself changes, nobody cares, because the first thing it does is return true and everything else Google ever tells it to check or do is ignored, the function can still be used everywhere throughout the code, it just no longer actually checks anything in Graphene, whereas it does check things in Google’s Android.

  Of course the reality is much more complicated than that, but the principle is the same. It’s only a question of how obnoxious and difficult Google chooses to be about it. They could move the function around every update, or use many different functions, make a whole system out of it, make it do crazy cryptographic validations and checksums in various different places of the code, have watchdog tasks that are checking that the validation code is getting used. They could be really, really obnoxious about it, if they want to be, and they have more resources than the Graphene OS developers probably do to undo and keep undoing all these obstacles, so if they really want to devote that much time and energy to making Graphene’s position untenable, they can. But they could also be doing that now, and they’re not. Crackers have been fighting these sort of battles against copy-protected software for ages, it’s the same principles, and much of the same economic choices go into it. How much does Google want Graphene OS to go away? How much is it worth to them? It has to have a dollar value to them, and that dollar value might be significantly higher than they’re willing to bother with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gentoo Linux Begins Codeberg Migration In Moving Away From GitHub, Avoiding Copilot⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fair, it’s certainly not for everyone (nor for every situation).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Parents opt kids out of school computers, insisting on pen-and-paper instead⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I empathize with your curiosity. I frequently have symptoms of ADHD and my mind goes places and comes back without ever telling me where it’s been. It’s a chaotic place and I don’t always know either. Reading the context, I suspect what I was probably considering saying was suggesting the alternative is focusing on promoting homeschooling and auto-didactic learning as much as possible, until I realized that’s not really a scalable or suitable solution to the concern I was starting with. So the thought got axed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gentoo Linux Begins Codeberg Migration In Moving Away From GitHub, Avoiding Copilot⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on your system specs, but…. yes, generally speaking. There is a reason most people and most distros use binaries. Even Gentoo can use binaries for some stuff.

  Are you going to suffer significant damage if your updates take forever though? What’s the hurry? The number of times I have literally needed the absolute latest version of something installed right now are pretty damn minimal. The major exception is widespread, exploited zero-day remote-access vulnerabilities, but those are rare, and especially rare are ones that affect the exact versions and configurations of software that I am currently using and cannot reasonably just opt to “stop” using. Even so, there are usually other ways to block the network traffic, disable the offending part of the configuration, or otherwise mitigate the risk.

  Patience is a virtue, and it’s generally good for you. You don’t have to be addicted to constant updates, but you do need to be thoughtful and understand how to build defense-in-depth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The screen fades in from black to a closeup of some tittys. They’re bouncing around, and women are moaning. Then they start moaning “OOOOOHHHH, YEEEAAAAHHHH BUY OUR PRODUCT, BUY THE PRODUCT! OOOOHHHHH!”

  Idiocracy was a great documentary of our future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gentoo Linux Begins Codeberg Migration In Moving Away From GitHub, Avoiding Copilot⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I know this is probably sarcastic but honestly Gentoo’s great if you don’t trust binaries by default. Nothing is an absolute guarantee against compromise, but it’s an awful lot harder to compromise a source code repository or a compiler without anyone noticing (especially if you stick to stable versions) than it is to compromise a particular binary of some random software package. I trust most package maintainers, but they’re typically overworked volunteers and not all of them are going to have flawless security or be universally trustworthy.

  I like building my own binaries from source code whenever possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Parents opt kids out of school computers, insisting on pen-and-paper instead⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Public education either needs to be reclaimed and rebuilt from all the corrupting influences that have torn it apart. I’m not worried about the children of intelligent people, who can fall back on enrichment provided by their families, but so many kids are, at best, getting left behind or worse, being indoctrinated with all sorts of corpo-fascism now inherent in the system. Most kids seem to be coping pretty alright, so far, but I worry about the trends, and the future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Government Deploys Elon Musk's Grok as Nutrition Bot, Where It Immediately Gives Advice for Rectal Use of Vegetables⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It really boils down to whether you value human life and the value the lived human experiences of all humans, or just a select subset that normally includes yourself. Some people’s subsets are quite narrow and correspond quite closely with skin color, but the real difference isn’t how exactly you choose who to value, it’s that you choose to value some more than others at all.

  Some people call this selfishness. Some people call it practicality. I have some pretty strong opinions about it myself, but I’ll let you figure out for yourself. It shouldn’t be difficult, and if you have some difficulty with it and feel like you need to debate this or argue your position to me, you’re probably wasting your time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on your precise definition of the camera “end” I suppose, but an IP camera absolutely can be and should be end to end encrypted. Even if the camera itself does not support native encryption, at worst the aggregation point/server should. Really, surveillance cameras should be on their own dedicated private IP network anyway, ideally with physical isolation on any wired connections. Besides a physical, on-site attack (which is what the cameras are for!) there really should not be any plausible method of an outside attacker breaching into the non-encrypted part of the network at all.

  And that’s the worst case, real-world scenario. Quite a few cameras do in fact support on-device encryption now so “never” is still definitely incorrect. You do have to do the work though. That’s how good security works, it doesn’t come in a box as much as many wish it would and even if it does it’s never one-size-fits-all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Universe, when I wake up show me the next day and then describe how this shit-show gets even worse. Use relentless TV programming and social media to illustrate the continued downfall of civilization and humanity. Include a variety of banal events spanning approximately 18 hours. Always fully pad out the entire day with tedious and boring life stuff. Minimize any genuine human emotional connections. Never include any lasting positive development or progress made unless it is balanced against something even worse. Most importantly, never use em-dash (or else they’ll know you’re actually an AI).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2026-01-14: The Day the telnet Died⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hopefully nobody uses it for actual remote system access anymore, but it’s still a great protocol (well… “great” with some caveats) for things like MUDs and BBSes and other toys. I’m pretty sure you can even use it for IRC or IMAP or HTTP if you know what you’re doing. Is it secure? Of course not. That’s why we use modern protocols using SSL or TLS when we need security. But we don’t always need security.

  Sure, telnet is not secure. But neither is, say, Minecraft. Because it’s a game. It’s not that important and in some ways it’s actually frustrating. There are pros and cons. It sucks if people are cheating or you get griefed or you get your account hacked or some other shit hacked, oh well, it’s a game, all you need to do is go outside and touch some grass about it. Not everything in life needs to be bank-vault secure. Sometimes it’s fun to just play around with raw text that doesn’t have ironclad security rules and certificates and key renegotiation guardrails built around it. Just go spew some text at some other protocol and see what it says. It’s fun and educational. I love telnet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To archive the human-made parts of the web at least, which is going to become both increasingly difficult and increasingly important as AI slop sends the signal-to-noise spiralling asymptotically towards zero. I might actually stop mercilessly blocking their donation drives if they attempt that, to be honest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Investigators wrangled video from Nancy Guthrie’s Google Nest camera out of ‘backend systems’⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “It’s a miracle!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Haven’t Quantum Computers Factored 21 Yet?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s exactly where LLMs/"AI” were about 10 years ago. My point is that after the AI bubble pops, the same idiot techbros have probably already identified new things to latch onto and pump up into a bubble, they’re probably already seeding the ground with it. I can almost guarantee quantum computing will be one of their next “disruptors” that they disrupt ignorant investor’s bank accounts with.

  AI is just the currently active grift of these con artists. The grift goes on, and on, and on, it never stops. Quantum computing will have its day. It’s not there yet, but someday it will be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Haven’t Quantum Computers Factored 21 Yet?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it real, or is it a giant financial marketing bubble waiting for its moment to consume the world economy? Let’s watch what happens with the AI bubble to find out.