cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@piefed.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gentoo Linux Begins Codeberg Migration In Moving Away From GitHub, Avoiding Copilot⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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’⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “It’s a miracle!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Haven’t Quantum Computers Factored 21 Yet?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord will restrict your account next month unless you scan ID or face⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fine, and I hate Discord’s general situation too, and I can’t wait for a properly federated self-hostable open source alternative to take off. But it just seems a bit knee-jerk or straw that broke the camel’s back to throw Discord under the bus specifically for this. To be clear, you don’t actually need to provide ID, you can either continue using a limited account (it’s barely limited at all in any serious way unless you’re using Discord for NSFW stuff) or you can attempt to validate your face with a camera instead, which supposedly happens completely on-device. Either one is a totally reasonable alternative.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord will restrict your account next month unless you scan ID or face⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fine if that’s your personal response. This still feels like a misdirected and ultimately useless response though.

  This is a government-created problem. Are we expecting widespread boycotts of Discord to change the government’s mind? Of course not.

  If it’s extremely bad for users, then users need to change their government. Yeah, yeah, I know the excuses for not doing that, they don’t listen, we are all powerless, it is the way it is, yadda yadda. It’s a lie. We are powerful, they want us feeling powerless so we can’t challenge them. Fuck that, challenge them. Government exists to represent us, it can exist in perpetuity only with our active and ongoing consent and participation. If people in totalitarian countries can overthrow their governments, so can we, we don’t have to do it overnight, we don’t have to do it over this one single isolated issue, but we can at least start working against them, eroding the structures that support them. Fuck governments like these, figure out ways to twist their arm, make things more difficult for them, and eventually, if we keep at it, we’ll get what we want. We hold the power here, not them. We decide what kind of society we want to live in. We need to stop abdicating our responsibilities as citizens and actively fight against this shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s great at software development though /s

  Remember that when software written by AI will soon replace all the devices doctors use daily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Western Digital details 14-platter 3.5-inch HAMR HDD designs with 140 TB and beyond⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Then they’ll come crawling back — although inevitably not until after they go whining to all the world’s governments about wanting a bailout.

  And don’t forget the part where, whether they get a bailout or not, they’ll still have to double the prices of everything to make up for all the money they lost on that stupid AI bubble exploding in their face (which all of us are somehow to blame for, obviously, which is why we have to pay them back for it)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The developers of PEAK, explaining how they decided on pricing for their game. ⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m Canadian, so I instinctively just round 5 bucks up to 8 bucks instead (adding exchange and tax)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG "won't be making absolute statements in either direction" about their future approach to AI use⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should I be using Debian?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Distro-hopping is very fun and educational, but don’t dump a working system for an experiment unless you’re forced to or you’re just a masochist.

  Play around with it, try and recreate your current setup within it, and once (if) you’re comfortable enough to do that, then consider replacing your main server with it.

  There’s plenty of more wild distros out there too. I love Debian, I use it a lot, but you’ll also learn a ton by trying to wrap your head around Fedora Silverblue, NixOS, Arch or Gentoo. It used to be a rite of passage to build your own LFS (Linux From Scratch) distro, not sure if people even do that anymore, but you’ll probably learn a metric shitton if you try.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I worked some prison and jails. They always put this big heavy green thing on you if your on suicide or solitary watch. My question is if Epstein was on watch then how did he suicide?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It was shallow because he was bleeding out at the time from all the gunshot wounds, give him a break, he did his best.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CEO of Palantir Says AI Means You’ll Have to Work With Your Hands Like a Peasant⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Mario has a brother, who I’ve heard of recently.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Also there’s a big part of this that is intentional sabotage and manipulation by a wide network of chaos-creators that mostly seem to lead back to Putin. When a former-KGB kleptocrat steals and controls everything in the world’s largest country and becomes effectively probably one of the world’s richest men, and then starts playing 4d chess with all the world’s other richest men, I guess it turns out you can probably cause a lot of chaos and quite possibly completely destroy the international global order.

  I’m willing to bet that is one of Putin’s goals, but it’s not his only goal, and just because he’s evidently accomplished it with gusto still doesn’t mean Putin is actually capable of accomplishing all his others goals of building or being part of any sort of new world order, because this chaos only destroys and tears things down. He’s got destruction down to a science, and I’m sure he thinks he can leverage that to create what he wants in the world, but he’s failed at that and will continue to fail. But he has proven he can fuck things up pretty badly for the rest of us, whether we want to admit it or not, so, personally I’m willing to give him credit where credit is due.

  The real question is, are we going to accept that what came before is irretrievably broken, and if we are willing to do that, what are we going to build in its place? Because with chaos comes opportunity, but those opportunities are few and limited. The chaos will continue, and the chaos can worsen. Significantly. If we’re going to turn this around, we have to be smart about it. There are a lot of paths that lead to very bad places, and only a few that have good endings. And you’d better believe that Putin and other forces of chaos are still going be trying to sabotage those too, even more aggressively as they realize their own dreams will never come to fruition.

  I think we’ve got to start by rooting out all the elements of corruption that have allowed this to happen, or else anything we try to build in its place will be built on quicksand. What exactly those are? I have a bunch of opinions, but that’s where the debate will start to happen, and I think we’re going to need to start having those conversations before we can really address this. We need to establish our philosophical foundations and values, agree that we all value human life, that we value all lived human experiences, and that all humans are created equal, and I think we can go from there to try to define and refine exactly what those things mean and how we’re going to implement those values into building a civilization that we actually want to live in and that other people want to live in too, where we can all agree on these things and find ways to pursue equality and happiness for all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How long does it take for pregnancy to become noticeable?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There is really no general answer to this that applies in all cases. It depends on a lot of factors, including what body shape and size you have normally, and what kind of clothes you’re willing to/normally wear, and who you’re hoping to hide it from, and how far you’re willing/able to go to try to hide it. There are always ways to hide it if you’re willing to go to extremes, in Victorian times people would just head off to some remote country estate and allow no visitors until the baby was born and they were ready to “return to society”. Of course that kind of pattern of unusual behavior can also reinforce any suspicions, so it’s always going to depend on who exactly you’re trying to hide it from and how much they already know about you or how much they might suspect that you’re pregnant.

  A casual stranger on the street who has no context about who you are or what you looked like before your pregnancy and only encounters you a single time might have a much tougher time ever confidently identifying you as “pregnant” beyond a reasonable doubt unless it’s really obvious and it’s not always going to be obvious for everyone with every body type even in the late stages of pregnancy, it may not even occur to them. On the other extreme, if you’re living with and trying to hide it from your mom, or your partner, or even a close friend, and they’re vigilant for the possibility that you might be pregnant and are paying careful attention? Good luck, they’re going to figure it out sooner or later and probably a lot sooner than anyone else because they have so much familiarity with you as a person, and even your habits and behaviors, and they might even start noticing some changes intuitively even if they aren’t visibly obvious, including changes that you might not even have noticed yourself. And that just snowballs into more careful attention and analysis until they figure out what is probably going on with you. Sometimes they might even know or suspect it before you do. It happens.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do video game skeletons put themselves back together?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The same reason ghosts and vampires often similarly reappear soon after being banished or defeated. All are undead, protected or animated by powerful magics, and you generally can’t just “kill” something that’s already supposed to be dead. Death no longer has meaning to it, its mere existence proves that it is beyond what we would normally consider death. At least not without exploiting some kind of specific weakness, using some elaborate ritual or calling ghostbusters.

  Zombies are sometimes considered undead too, and originally they pretty much were, but more recently they’ve mostly been modernized and adopted into a more pseudo-science existence where they’re simply dead-ish, but with bodies still animated by some kind of infection in the nervous system and brain that allows basic biological activity to continue. The biological activity, then, can still be stopped using most or all of our conventional methods of stopping unwanted biological activity.

  True undead are much more difficult to permanently end, and a skeleton is very clearly not using any traditional biological activity to exist, so whatever does allow it to exist isn’t likely to be stopped by our traditional methods of ending life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨At Davos, NVIDIA, Microsoft CEOs deny AI bubble⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Companies involved in large infrastructure build-outs are notoriously safe investments and never, ever, EVER end up with mountains of unservicable debt and a huge surplus of worthless, underutilized infrastructure that doesn’t fulfill any of its promises that inevitably gets sold off for fractions of a penny on the dollar. Except literally almost every fucking large infrastructure build-out anywhere in the world in all of human history.

  It doesn’t matter what infrastructure or investments you look at: highways, train tracks, communications, real estate, skyscrapers, power generation, power transmission, oil extraction there are countless examples of greed-blinded companies JUST LIKE HIS doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING and eventually getting absolutely destroyed over it. The larger the infrastructure investment is, the worse it gets. There are only a handful of well-known success stories (which are well known because they are notable, not because they are common), and enough failures to pave a road to the moon and back.

  Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and I’m pretty sure Jensen Huang was too busy shopping for new leather jackets during history class to be paying any attention.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's a good entry level printer these days?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Cheap?” Depends on your definition, but go for Prusa. Open specs, open ecosystem, open software, open upgrades. Tinkering is still completely possible (in some ways even easier) but unlike Ender 3 it is never actually *necessary*. The damn things just *work*, all the time, every time. They’re workhorses. Best of both worlds, in my opinion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If WWIII broke out tomorrow do you honestly believe america would win?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You might be underestimating just how many nukes there are. As a species, maybe we could survive a full-scale nuclear war, if they all go off under ideal conditions to minimize fallout and radiation spread, and it doesn’t range far enough or last long enough for the radiation to shorten lifespans or sterilize us into a population bottleneck, and the climate effects don’t make the planet uninhabitable so quickly that even with what remaining functional technology our increasingly limited population and damaged infrastructure can continue to cobble together, we simply can’t adapt fast enough (like most of the other life on the planet). These kind of play against each other a bit though, the safest places from radiation are likely to be remote, minor islands and places like Australia, but they have some of the least resilient infrastructure and are also going to be hit very hard by rapidly changing climate conditions.

  It’s not going to be a good situation and I don’t think we can really accurately predict whether human life will survive it, there are way too many variables. We are tough and resilient, but nukes will put the entire planet, nevermind human civilization as we know it, into a really really tough place which there may genuinely be no coming back from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SK hynix to spend $13 billion on the world's largest HBM memory assembly plant amid the worst shortage on record — South Korea facility to handle packaging and testing for AI memory campus⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll endure a little price gouging now if it leads to cheap memory in the future.

  …but we know it never works like that. Price gouging now, more price gouging in the future while finding creative new ways for shoving overstock down your throat whether you like it or not.