sobchak
@sobchak@programming.dev
- Comment on What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET 3 days ago:
In my area, some people put small solar nodes on top of high buildings (office, university, and apartment). The node on my roof can directly communicate with one of these nodes ~20km away. Pretty crazy tor something that can run indefinitely on a 18650 battery and small solar panel. I’ve heard some people just place “guerilla nodes” to extend coverage.
- Comment on Definitely the safest source for advice 3 days ago:
I always thought it was pleasant. Kinda like MXE. Have to be careful to get the ones with no other active ingredients though.
- Comment on Going to a Protest? Don't Bring Your Phone Without Doing This First 5 days ago:
Yeah, I’m guessing it’s so if you “hide” the network, it will still connect to it. Anyone can scan these advertisements, then go to wigle.net and likely get a good idea of where you live/work.
- Comment on Going to a Protest? Don't Bring Your Phone Without Doing This First 5 days ago:
Modern phones rotate random MAC addresses. For WiFi, capturing SSID probes can be enough to track somebody though (some phones also have some mitigation for that too, like not probing for an SSID after it hasn’t been seen for some amount of time). Even when turned off, many phones, including iPhones, turn into BLE beacons similar to AirTags, which can be used to track you.
- Comment on AI insiders seek to poison the data that feeds them 5 days ago:
I once saw an old lecture where the guy working on Yahoo spam filters noticed that spammers would create accounts to mark their own spam messages as not spam (in an attempt to trick the spam filters; I guess a kind of a Sybil attack), and because the way the SPAM filtering models were created and used, it made the SPAM filtering more effective. It’s possible that wider variety of “poisoned” data can actually help improve models.
- Comment on Stop using MySQL in 2026, it is not true open source 5 days ago:
Postgres is basically an open source version of Oracle DB. Much more featureful than MySQL. I believe Oracle bought MySQL just to kill it.
- Comment on China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible 6 days ago:
China is now the world leader in science by most metrics (largest proportion of the top 1% most cited papers, most publications to prestigious journals, etc). It makes sense, with their high population and their government willing to fund research. I’m guessing their culture is much less anti-intellectual than the West too, especially the US.
- Comment on Will the government be able to put 2 & 2 together 1 week ago:
It’s possible to probabilistically determine when an SSH connection is being used like a VPN, then block that traffic. If they go full Great Firewall.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 1 week ago:
The ultra-wealthy shooting for stuff like The Network State and corporation-governed city-states.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 1 week ago:
I think the wealthy will get US/corporate-friendly far-right governments in place in many of these countries before countries are able to isolate the US without collapsing their own economy. Seems to be the way things are going at least (far-right politics gaining support nearly everywhere).
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 1 week ago:
At the moment, it looks less like a regime change, and more like puppetting the same regime. It looks like the Maduro opposition in Venezuela doesn’t have support of the generals, so we’re just bribing/coercing the rest of the Maduro regime.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 1 week ago:
I’ve known people that have done that. They were very poor, and never stayed very long at their jobs, so nothing ever happened. As an mass organized thing, it could be an effective means of civil disobedience (Thoreau famously refused to pay taxes).
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Peertube, but requires taking care of monetization/donations themselves, and possibly needing to run their own instance(?). Discovery sucks (I think Peertube may be anti-algo similar to Mastodon) so they’ll have to take care of promoting themselves as well.
I think Nebula is a creator-owned platform, so very hard to get into. I’ve also seen that their privacy policy is not good.
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 4 weeks ago:
Not enough room in the GPU machine for all the HDDs I needed.
Also who got millions of photos at home?
People working on biological datasets.
- Comment on Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried 4 weeks ago:
If the corporate VPNs keep logs and allow government access, they will be allowed. That’s how it works in some (authoritarian) countries.
- Comment on Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried 4 weeks ago:
I believe China does statistical analysis to do stuff like detecting and blocking VPNs, suspicious looking ssh traffic, etc from home Internet connections not going to an approved business. It’s my understanding it’s very hard to get around the GFW at the moment, and pretty complex stuff is needed to mask VPN traffic to make it look normal (Project X, Xray, Reality, etc).
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 4 weeks ago:
Rsync, syncthing, backups, mp3s, photos, json files; idk, a lot of tasks involve large amounts of small files. I personally ran into this problem training models on millions of photos. My GPUs would only get up to 25% utilization with mirrored HDDs, so I had to switch to SSDs.
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 4 weeks ago:
HDDs have horrible random access times, so if you need to process or just copy a lot of small files, say photos, there’s a significant penalty.
- Comment on Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price. 4 weeks ago:
Alibaba has released Qwen models under Apache licenses (and they are some of the best models that can reasonably be ran locally). Some argue that models aren’t really open source unless the training code and datasets are made available though.
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 5 weeks ago:
It pretty much is the same thing. In theory, shorting the ETF will drive the price of gold down (until the short needs to be covered; like all shorts), because all accounts must eventually be settled. The price of gold is literally set by the futures market, which people with the appropriate approval can also short. Gold dealers literally look up the price on the futures market and add/subtract a few percentage points to determine how much to buy/sell physical gold for.
- Comment on Beans n Corn 5 weeks ago:
I don’t think it’s been proven that the nitrogen the beans/bacteria fix is available to the corn (before the bean plants die and decompose). Though, I have done this (along with squash), and it does seem to work pretty well. I think it gives you more vegetables per sq ft, than if you were to grow them all separately.
- Comment on Capitalism isn't the problem, THIS is the problem, and I've watched it roll over us for 40 years. [3 min. video] 5 weeks ago:
Humans lived in what could be described as a sort of primitive communism for most of the species history.
Basically, the society needs to be decentralized. If you can keep it sufficiently non hierarchal, there isn’t a lot of power people can get over many others. A problem I see with this is defending against large, centralized, outside organizations. So, I guess you’d need some federation-like structures. Some communes are pretty democratic and decentralized. The Zapitista territories are the best example I know of, of a large non-hierarchal federation of communities.
- Comment on Capitalism isn't the problem, THIS is the problem, and I've watched it roll over us for 40 years. [3 min. video] 5 weeks ago:
Small local businesses fuck over their employees too. Capitalism incentives it. It also incentives monopolies. And it seems when the wealth disparity gets large enough, it captures government and starts transforming into fascism.
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 5 weeks ago:
You can short gold ETFs. Gold is highly speculative and has crashed taking decades to recover (~1980-2005). It’s basically boomer-bitcoin.
- Submitted 5 weeks ago to games@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on Solutions for remote access? 5 weeks ago:
Port forward/poke holes in firewall + dynamic DNS.
- Comment on Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn 1 month ago:
I think California recently passed the Digital Age Assurance Act, which was backed by Google,Meta, and OpenAI. I think it goes into effect in 2027.
- Comment on ChatGPT is down worldwide, conversations disappeared for users 1 month ago:
I find it detrimental to my productivity when integrated into an editor/IDE. I’ve found the “autocomplete” causes subtle bugs that I end up overlooking because I’m trying to go fast and putting too much trust in the generated lines/snippets. Tracing down these bugs becomes a huge time-sink. I do use chatbots in the browser for various things; mostly as a kind of “search” for alternative ways of doing things, frameworks, libraries, and algorithms. Agentic vibe-coding is ok for small one-off tools/scripts you wouldn’t need to maintain, IMO.
- Comment on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out 1 month ago:
Indeed, and I give them credit. China is unironically leading the world in scientific progress. I wouldn’t recommend using their services though, for privacy reasons (same with the US).
- Comment on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out 1 month ago:
If you’re not paying, you’re the product. Even on Chinese services. Alibaba does train my favorite local models though (Qwen).