adespoton
@adespoton@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Netflix mulls introducing free ad-supported tier. The circle is complete 1 day ago:
I remember when I had to set my VCR to record a program I wanted to watch; if YouTube gets that bad, I’ll just do the same thing; pre-record the video stream and skip the commercials.
- Comment on Netflix mulls introducing free ad-supported tier. The circle is complete 1 day ago:
The difference is that my ad blocker is quick and painless to set up, where TiVo involved some capital and planning.
- Comment on Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed? 5 days ago:
That’s how epistemological analysis works… if the general structure is the same but everyone pulls different meaning out of an event, something probably happened. If everything lines up exactly, someone probably faked the letters. If there’s totally conflicting stories, the record has been tampered with too much to say anything. If there’s no record, there’s nothing to say one way or another.
- Comment on Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed? 5 days ago:
You realize that a significant portion of the bible is the collected letters and works that were at the time (that it was assembled) considered credible, right?
There’s a period of around 80 years that’s pretty hard to account for, but unlike the four gospels where there’s little corroborating evidence that tracks back into that 80 year period, the epistolary works are pretty likely to be authentic. They also reference a bunch of other letters that didn’t survive, something that tends to make them more likely authentic than not. And they involve people who were eyewitnesses of a man named Jesus (or Joshua or Yeshua if you prefer) and his younger (step) brothers.
The rest of the statements about him were solidified by 80 years or so after his death, but all the accounts don’t quite line up — which is actually a good argument for them being based on actual events.
So while there may be plenty of room for debate as to how much of the biblical teachings actually originated with a man named Jesus, his actual existence seems more evident than, say, Shakespeare.
- Comment on Disable windows updates 1 week ago:
Put it behind a PiHole that drops all traffic to Microsoft servers?
- Comment on a 320 year old elf marries an 80 year old human: Is the elf robbing the cradle, or the grave? 5 weeks ago:
Isn’t Mrs. Claus technically an elf?
- Comment on 4ish years ago when I bought a house I was convinced not to get a house inspection, would it be crazy to get one now just to make sure it's all good? 5 weeks ago:
It’s not miserable, just different. But not too different — I’ve lived in districts with 3k people and cities with 1.6m and found that the big cities are mostly just clusters of little 3k communities squished together, with a few differences like 24/7 activities/clubs and arenas. And cheaper food.
I saved up for 19 years to buy a home, and even then almost missed the opportunity. At this point, I’d buy a 200k home in ruralia in a heartbeat as long as it had reliable affordable Internet and somewhere within an hour’s drive that had stores I could shop at.
But it all depends on what you already know how to live with.
- Comment on American wanting to move abroad, what's the best bet for an registered nurse? 1 month ago:
Spoken like a true neglected 13 year old boy.
As you get older, you’ll find that actual relationships are more rewarding than trolling.
- Comment on American wanting to move abroad, what's the best bet for an registered nurse? 1 month ago:
Worth noting that the Prime Minister does not have the same executive powers as the President. If Polivere actually wins a majority of seats (unlikely), he’ll still have to work with everyone else to get things done.
It’s more likely the conservatives will win just enough seats to have to run a minority government and work with the Liberals, NDP, BQ and possibly Greens. And I don’t see the current conservative party surviving more than one election cycle.
- Comment on American wanting to move abroad, what's the best bet for an registered nurse? 1 month ago:
If you don’t want to move far and want a similar but more centrist culture, you could move to Canada — this would make it easy to move back in the future if you want. And unlike many Americans, as a RN, you could actually move without much difficulty. I know a number of RNs who have made the move and are happy about it.
- Comment on Why do arranged marriages persist in many cultures? 1 month ago:
Yes… and someone to their liking has the possibility to be a more stable, longer lasting relationship. Plus, they’ll come with a stronger support network.
So if you think of a marriage as being to promote stability and perpetuate humanity, arranged marriages make sense. If you think of a marriage as something based solely on romance, the experts are obviously the people getting married.
Personally, what I’ve seen in western society is that people tend to live common law, and when a couple feels like they’re fairly stable together and they want to have children, then they get married.
This obviously doesn’t work in a society where you don’t get to try out living with someone first, or where birth control is frowned upon.
- Comment on Phones have unique phone numbers, why dont computers have unique computer-numbers? 1 month ago:
That’s like saying “why isn’t my phone number that I set up on my own POTS network usable on the international telephone system?”
If you’re behind NAT, you aren’t technically on the Internet; that’s why you need Network Address Translation in the first place.
IPv6 fixes this by letting every conceivable device have its own address on the Internet, but that comes with its own security and privacy issues, so it’s rarely used.
- Comment on Phones have unique phone numbers, why dont computers have unique computer-numbers? 1 month ago:
All you have to do is buy your own IP, and you can use it whenever you want. You don’t have to use one given to you by the upstream gateway via DHCP or BootP.
Of course, you need to make sure the upstream router is configured to not drop addresses it didn’t assign itself.
- Comment on How do passkeys work across devices? 1 month ago:
Definitely. Costs extra, has an extra step to set up, and has an extra step to use, but is so much more secure.
That said, biometrics are better than “1234”. I have no issues with people who have bad password hygiene moving to biometrics, which at least add an extra barrier for account compromise.
But for the rest of us, physical security tokens are definitely the way to go.
- Comment on How do passkeys work across devices? 1 month ago:
I’ve got a pair of YubiKeys that I use to back my passkeys. Works great; I’ve got passkeys that work within the Apple, Microsoft and Google ecosystems and don’t have to worry about password prompts for the most part — but I DO need a YubiKey handy to validate that it’s actually me at the device.
My keys use both NFC and USB-C and work across all my passkeys supported devices when I add in a USB adapter.
- Comment on Is there a way to post video on Lemmy? 1 month ago:
Sounds like a client limitation?
- Comment on Why do people still eat beef when we know it's terrible for Earth? 1 month ago:
Along with the other answers:
Because cooked cowflesh smells delicious, and there are companies out there that are willing to capitalize on that.
The bigger question is: why do people still drink cows milk? And the answer to that one is all about politics and power.
- Comment on My friend's boyfriend's therapist said that he is an abuser who is trying to look like the victim. What does this mean? 1 month ago:
Sounds like a potentially healthy relationship; I’ve had lots of similar ones on the Internet over the years, usually focusing on special interests. Although if someone tries to make it romantic I mention I’ve got a SO and have no interest in changing that relationship. Never had anyone try to push things further anyway or manipulate me. One of the benefits of the Internet is you can usually just drop the relationship if you need to.
- Comment on Phones have unique phone numbers, why dont computers have unique computer-numbers? 1 month ago:
Along with the other comments on UDID, IMEI and MAC, I’d just like to point out that phones don’t have phone numbers.
On land lines, the number is assigned to the line that goes to your house from the local operations center; on mobile phones, the number is linked by your carrier to THEIR SIM card that you stick in your phone.
eSIM almost gets there; instead of a physical card linked to the phone number, all the logic and secrets are stored in a secure enclave on your phone and THAT is linked to the number, which is in a directory managed by your carrier. It’s linked to the phone itself because of the phone’s IMEI.
- Comment on My friend's boyfriend's therapist said that he is an abuser who is trying to look like the victim. What does this mean? 1 month ago:
I can’t tell if he’s actually bad or not.
You know what? Neither can we.
People don’t tend to be “good” or “bad” but usually just have various strengths and weaknesses. It sounds like this guy has an intense need for external validation, and your friend has an intense need for emotional attachment. As long as they stay as just friends and don’t become codependent, that should work out just fine; he’s probably right that as a romantic relationship there’s pretty much no way this one will work.
And that’s ignoring the “do either of them have abusive or manipulative tendencies” angle. The big thing is that neither of them should depend solely on the other for emotional fulfillment.
- Comment on [Serious] Do you know of any processed snack foods with some vitamins? 1 month ago:
Applesauces with no sugar added?
Refusing anything but water isn’t necessarily bad.
He probably wants things with a predictable mouth feel and neutral temperature that aren’t overpowering.
Hotdogs tend to be popular (the cheap ones).
If you haven’t tried cheese toast, it may be an option, although you need to be careful about the type of cheese.
Also worth trying baby carrots and seedless grapes that don’t have browned ends and are off the stem.
Something else that may be useful is having him help make some snacks; kids will often eat things they’ve made themselves when they won’t accept the same thing from someone else.
If you can afford it, you could also try a sampling party where you buy a small portions of 5 or so similar items at a time, and get him to taste them all and tell you which is the worst and best. Don’t bring “will you eat this” into it at all: it’s a game and he has to rank them. In order to rank them he has to taste them.
- Comment on Do straight lines and flat planes exist in nature? 3 months ago:
Is the Higgs Field a flat plane?
- Comment on What kind of a gift can you give your teacher out of respect, but that doesn’t get mistaken for romance? 4 months ago:
One thing I haven’t seen yet: if you can, loop your parent(s) in on this. They know the situation better than the Internet does, and if someone tries to turn the situation into something weird, they should have your back. And they’ve got some life experience to help you with your note.
- Comment on Is HTTPS a scam? 4 months ago:
What? I’ve got all sorts of self hosted websites. Encrypted by HTTPS. No permission needed. If Let’s Encrypt vanished, I’d just switch to self-signing my certificates and using a pinning service.
- Comment on Is HTTPS a scam? 4 months ago:
Do you take login credentials that could be skimmed and used for identity theft?
Maybe this one will strike home for people who think it’s a scam by The Man:
With no HTTPS, every single thing you do on the web can be monitored by your ISP’s automated tracking system and sold to data warehouses that then sell the data on to AI aggregators who can profile your activity to figure out how to shape your future behaviour based on how you responded in the past.
And HTTPS isn’t just about protecting secrets, it’s about validating the communication channel hasn’t been tampered with. Without it, anyone between you and your destination could be modifying what actually gets sent back to you, injecting anything from malware to slight changes in text content based on the above profiling info.
HTTPS is part of what keeps the web free and federated.
- Comment on Introducing Mozilla Monitor Plus, a new tool to automatically remove your personal information from data broker sites | The Mozilla Blog 4 months ago:
To me there’s always an ick factor in giving any place that much information about me to do something on my behalf.
What I’d really like is a subscription to the list of 190+ data broker sites so I can run a script myself to check for PII and request removal if found. Bonus if Mozilla provides the script in a format I can review and run.
- Comment on What’s Usenet and how can I access it with modern hardware (phones/laptops)? 4 months ago:
The Internet is a network of networks. Nowadays, everyone tends to have always-on connections to the entire thing, but back in the day, many of the networks spent a lot of time disconnected from each other. Usenet was designed to mostly transparently handle this by the local network having an aggregating server that would collect all the local activity and share it with other Usenet servers when it could reach them.
Remember that even the local activity was people connecting with teletype terminals and dialing up over modems from remote systems. Long distance trunking fees were a big deal, and Internet routing had to deal with the possibility that there was currently no route to the destination address.
- Comment on What’s Usenet and how can I access it with modern hardware (phones/laptops)? 4 months ago:
Usenet has its own protocol (NNTP) where digests of messages get passed from server to server, eventually making it out to all (or most) servers that host a particular group (like alt, sys, gov, etc.). In essence, it’s a federated digital bulletin board of bulletin boards. Many servers don’t participate in some groups such as alt.binary.*.
Usenet pre-dates the world wide web, and even pre-dates Gopher. It was designed such that a Usenet server could spend most of its time disconnected from the Internet and accumulate local posts that would then be federated in a digest when the server dialed up and connected to other servers.
The main NNTP network eventually made its way to a centralized web-accessible service and most places that used to provide an NNTP server (which was most ISPs in the 90s) eventually shut their servers down and only provided gateway and email services.
The protocol still exists though, and there’s still a small connected network.
In reality, Lemmy is the spiritual descendant of Usenet.
- Comment on the best time to find another job is when you already have one. How does it look like in your case? 5 months ago:
I just keep open lines of communication with key stakeholders and HR people in the industry. If I were laid off, they’d all know and I’d have a few offers on the table to pick from within the week.
- Comment on What's with the 'Thanks' people? 5 months ago:
That’s so very Indian :)
First time I saw it, I almost replied with “but… you already did?”