fiat_lux
@fiat_lux@lemmy.world
- Comment on Why you shouldn't annoy the butler 4 hours ago:
Thanks, I always try to include them, but I’m never sure whether to keep it as alt text or put it as a caption, or how well alt text works on Lemmy.
Out of curiosity, why do you find them helpful if it’s not for vision reasons? I apologise if that’s too personal a question.
- Submitted 10 hours ago to [deleted] | 4 comments
- Comment on The Epstein saga shows us the impotence of polite 'centrist' media – Greg Jericho 4 days ago:
How does fox news relate to this? It’s neither mentioned nor one of the sources linked to in the article.
- Comment on The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk: Ad makers will never say the quiet part loud, but they increasingly know that we're unhappy and looking for solutions. 5 days ago:
I have a few issues with substack, but truth be told, I dislike requiring handing over information to multiple services without seeing value upfront - and getting rid of obtrusive pop-ups does not qualify as value. Their willingness to platform Nazis just sealed my unwillingness into a conscious refusal.
In a similar vein, the corporate relationship adjustments you mentioned are also steps I’ve taken, but I’m inclined to agree with Naomi Klein’s perspective on consumer boycott being insufficient to address systemic problems. The general advice is to change what is within your power, but when you have close to zero power, does that advice then imply that you should try to do nothing or that you simply can affect nothing?
My substack qualms and the corporate relationship adjustments topics tie in quite nicely with a phrase from your substack that has been bothering me all weekend. It critiques my usual instincts for what to do as first steps, but it also articulates a problem I’ve struggled with for a while: “Documentation without transformation”.
Now I’m not of the opinion that we’ve ever truly been able to trust the information we consume as being objective truth, but AI has certainly suddenly increased the scarcity of reliable information.
The larger issue for me is that transformation is clearly necessary, but the scale of transformation required is so immense that it’s not something I’ve seen happen historically without also incurring immense suffering. This is not to say that the majority of humanity isn’t hugely suffering now, just that this kind of systemic change is one of those “this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better” type situations - in an acute way.
The usual trigger for change at this scale seems to be when realised losses of resource scarcity for too many exceeds the risk of setting what’s left on fire.
So we’re left with a situation where there’s potentially neither reliable documentation nor positive transformation. This does not spark joy.
I suppose my questions for you are then:
- what actions do you think would be sufficient to effect the systemic change necessary?
- how do you remain optimistic about this whole thing?
“I don’t know” is a totally valid answer to either too, in the spirit of acknowledging honest uncertainty.
- Comment on The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk: Ad makers will never say the quiet part loud, but they increasingly know that we're unhappy and looking for solutions. 1 week ago:
I haven’t got a substack account, or I would have subscribed, but I hope you keep writing. You’ve given me a lot to think about. While I don’t quite know what to do with these questions yet, or if there is even something I can do about them, they’re salient and framed extremely well.
- Comment on What are we being distracted from? 1 week ago:
The Epstein files obviously contain a lot of information about rape and trafficking, which is very understandably and rightly in the spotlight. But what the files also contain is very detailed information about exactly how our laws and financial systems are being actively exploited to maintain the power of a select few. That is something that is much harder to write a quick article about, by design, but we haven’t even seen some of these names mentioned in the media:
- de Rothschild (with a very illustrative diagram in EFTA01114424)
- Thiel
- Rockefeller
- Murdoch
- von Habsburg
And those are just individuals, not companies. We haven’t heard anything about JP Morgan Chase, Sotheby’s, Goldman Sachs… Or even the universities like Harvard.
You can’t usually pull a single short damning quote from an email for them because it’s not as simple as the horror of one person raping children, but it lays the foundation of how this horror was allowed to continue at such a large scale by so many people.
- Comment on Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” 2 weeks ago:
It’s a wonder people haven’t started throwing water balloons filled with mud and flour at the cameras. Perhaps he should be grateful that’s not a trend?
- Comment on Man posts his incorrect opinion online 2 weeks ago:
Same for Japan. No chance they’re wearing full hiking boots or sneakers inside the house in Japan - the shoe cabinet is built in right next to the front door of houses, tiny apartments, temples, many restaurants, etc.
- Comment on Recreating uncensored Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments 2 weeks ago:
I took a brief look at one and it seems they may have learnt their lesson from the first time around, unfortunately.
- Comment on Piefed admin settings that allow to enable or disable content filters (they are disabled by default, see body for details) 3 weeks ago:
Out of curiosity, what sort of customizations are you doing with it? I’m just a bit surprised that docker rebuild or a non-trivial fork would be needed, so I’m assuming they’re pretty big changes.
- Comment on Piefed admin settings that allow to enable or disable content filters (they are disabled by default, see body for details) 3 weeks ago:
I’m not a spice merchant, and most exploits rarely involve a single step. This screenshot is just a system design red flag.
You’re free to examine the repo yourself and find your own spice, my 5 min look tells me that piefed needs to expend a significant amount of effort on infosec to maintain user trust in the longer term.
- Comment on Piefed admin settings that allow to enable or disable content filters (they are disabled by default, see body for details) 3 weeks ago:
As others have pointed out, it does still require (with some caveats about the infra setup) the user to be an admin. But if someone manages to get in to the interface, or another person is granted admin access who shouldn’t have been, it makes it more risky than it needs to be. It also for me is a design choice that indicates other parts of the system should be carefully examined for how they’re handling and sanitizing input.
- Comment on Piefed admin settings that allow to enable or disable content filters (they are disabled by default, see body for details) 3 weeks ago:
Any webserver you browse is possibly capable of ACE depending on the implementation. When it starts to hold user data is when that starts to be a concern. The more points of entry. The more that needs to be secured.
I don’t have any experience with piefed admin, or any opinion on piefed itself. just too many years of web admin experience. And as soon as I see intentionally made doors that allow code input, I start to worry about how much experience the devs who made it have with web admin.
- Comment on Piefed admin settings that allow to enable or disable content filters (they are disabled by default, see body for details) 3 weeks ago:
Well, just copy and pasted rather than written. I would have hoped that infra read-level permission, infra write-level permission and admin interface permissions were all separate to begin with, even if the person who spun up the instance obviously has all three.
You do need a level of trust in an admin, of course, but wide open text boxes for putting in code are a questionable system design choice, in my opinion. It adds an extra point of possible entry that then relies on the security of the overall admin interface instead of limiting it to what should require highest level infra admin permissions to access. And if it is something that would be limited to someone who has those, then what is the actual utility of having a textarea for it in the first place?
- Comment on Piefed admin settings that allow to enable or disable content filters (they are disabled by default, see body for details) 3 weeks ago:
I get that many people are concerned about is scoring systems, but it seems a lot more worrying to me that it allows arbitrary code execution.
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 3 weeks ago:
Careful of your eyes! I’m pretty sure you need a special filter or telescope for the sun
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 4 weeks ago:
While the conclusion of it being replaced with an LED is obviously not what happened, I think it’s very possible that the sun was often orange for him when he was growing up, because of air pollution.
30 years ago, depending on where you lived, there were more cars on the road with less efficient fuel consumption, more people using fireplaces, more people burning trash, less regulation of various industries etc. Searching for images with the phrase “smoke pollution sun” will give you a lot of photos of orange suns, and they’re definitely not all altered for effect. I’ve seen red suns in real life too when wildfires are really bad near my area even though that’s thankfully rare.
We know not the sun itself that is orange, but in a polluted environment it certainly looks like it is - and if you don’t get a great education, I can see how you might think that’s the actual color of the sun.
