planish
@planish@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Banana 2 days ago:
Thanks Thursday Next’s Dad!
- Comment on What options of resistance are programmers creating to not submit to AI culture? 1 week ago:
This is honestly a lot of the problem: code generation tools can output thousands of lines of code per minute. Great, committable, defendable code.
There is basically no circumstance in which a project’s codebase growing at a rate of thousands of lines per minute is a good thing. Code is a necessary evil of programming: you can’t always avoid having it, but you should sure as hell try, because every line of code is capable of being wrong and will need to be read and understood later. Probably repeatedly.
Taking the approach to solving a problem that involves writing a lot of code, rather than putting in the time to find the setup that lets you express your solution in a little code, or reworking the design so code isn’t needed there at all, is a mistake. It relinquishes the leverage that is very point of software engineering.
A tool that reduces the effort needed to write large amounts of human-facing, gets-committed-to-the-source-tree code, so that it’s much easier and faster than finding the actual right way to parse your problem, is a tool that makes your project worse and that makes you a worse programmer when you hold it.
Maybe eventually someone will create a thinking machine that itself understands this, but it probably won’t be someone who charges by the token.
- Comment on Insuranace is a joke 1 week ago:
Insurance being a negative expected value isn’t the scam. Insurance not paying for the thing you bought the insurance to pay for is the scam. They’re supposed to be working from the same agreement you’re working from, not some other one they made up that’s worse for you at random.
- Comment on Insuranace is a joke 1 week ago:
Or to put it another way: insurance should pay out the amount you could get if you sold your car, not the cost to buy another similar car.
Why would an insurance company think that OP would get less money selling the car than anyone else would get selling the same kind of car, though? It’s one thing if all the listings are for much higher prices, but if those listings are selling at that price, then that’s the market value and the insurance company is provably misunderestimating.
- Comment on Supporting the future of the open web: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy 4 weeks ago:
Cloudflare wants the web to be made of web pages. But they also have an interest in the web being at least slightly dangerous (so there’s an incentive to buy their protection services), and at least somewhat hard to make work well when served from a potato (so there’s an incentive to use their CDN to shave off those milliseconds of latency). And, as a large provider of excellent and often free services, they end up as an administrative single point of failure and thus a potential point of control. It’s a lot easier to wiretap one Cloudflare DoH resolver than thousands of ISP routers across dozens of ISPs, for example.
None of this is because Cloudflare is somehow Bad People; they’re powerful and thus dangerous, but not, as far as I can tell, evil. The worst thing about them seems to be that they’d prefer to stay out of content moderation completely rather than try to find and boot all the Nazis, which looks like it might be an incorrect position that is possible to support with arguments.
- Comment on How do AI data centers manage to *consume* water, but when I cool my house, my A/C *makes* water? 2 months ago:
Why would they design around evaporative cooling when water consumption is a problem?
- Comment on Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet 2 months ago:
Is it filled with the type of people that one might wish major governments could stop, though?
- Comment on Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet 2 months ago:
ZeroNet
What’s up on ZeroNet these days?
- Comment on Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet 2 months ago:
Capitalism runs on top of government. Governments create and enforce the notion that a human, or a fictional human with fractional ownership (corporation), can in turn own arbitrarily large and important objects.
This is often done at the behest of said arbitrarily-large-and-important-thing-owners, who also come up with other similarly terrible ideas to have the government do.
- Submitted 2 months ago to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world | 62 comments
- Comment on As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution 2 months ago:
Probably not any existing systems; you can still finger and thus demand censorship from a block producer, and you end up with situations where you just can’t host the chain anymore because it’s full of pirated MP3s or whatever now.
And they introduce new problems around having to globally replicate everything and thus getting the net performance out of the system that you get from the worst server involved.
If you need to track some kind of root signing key for a whole p2p system, or something, maybe you can stuff it into Ethereum somewhere. But I don’t think you can get very far trying to actually run a service out of a globally replicated database, and even then you’d have hundreds of operators in legal trouble rather than no operator.
- Comment on As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution 2 months ago:
Something like Tor only solves half the problem. A Tor hidden service still has physical reality and a person who is hosting it, and who can be held responsible for failing to register the thing with the feds or file a moderation transparency report or whatever the latest nonsense is. The anonymity network helps to hide where the equipment and who the operator ism but there’s still a single point of failure.
We need a way to run online communities that are not online services: no single point of failure, no individual or partnership describable as a service’s operator, and no meaningful way in which one person provides access to the system to another person.
- Comment on As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution 2 months ago:
You may be looking for The Promised LAN.
- Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2025 has begun! 3 months ago:
How did that happen?
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
Yeah, a TPM is, essentially, a piece of bondage gear. It’s shackles put on you to try and convince someone else of what you can’t do. It has niche applications but it’s not a valid thing to require of the general population.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
Computers have systems (BIOS, EFI, ACPI) that give the people who make the machine responsibility for providing a standard, publicly-defined way for the OS to enumerate the hardware, and to use the hardware in a basic way even if the OS has never heard of it. Linux can get a kernel panic on the screen even if it has no idea what your GPU is, because Efi understands it and Linux understands EFI. It is set up this way partly because there’s a real possibility of hardware being added or removed, partly because people routinely mix and match parts, and partly because IBM mistakenly designed a good system that was easy to work in and not one that kept them in business.
Phones (and phone-derived systems like the Raspberry Pi and other single-board computers) don’t implement a standard. The hardware and its boot process assumes tight integration between the hardware and the software, usually to the point where the bootloader refuses to load anything not signed by the device manufacturer, unless it is satisfied that it has been given that manufacturer’s permission to be unlocked. (Computer secure boot implementations generally trust, for example, Microsoft, as well as the machine owner, who can load their own keys.)
Instead of the CPU developers releasing example EFI implementations, they release forks of the Linux kernel that they maintain as long as that chip is the latest chip they sell, and then fork off the mainline kernel again for their next chip. And the device makers ship devices by starting with the chip maker’s kernel, customizing it for the device, giving it a “device tree” that tells it everything that is supposed to be in that particular device, and shipping it. For a few years they port patches from the current kernel onto this forked kernel, and then they stop. With no standard to develop software against, and no documentation for what’s in a device and how to use it like there is for the standard’s interfaces, the only practical way to run software on a device is to start with that patched kernel.
Mainline Linux refuses to adopt and maintain the chip and device makers’ low-quality, chip-and-board-specific kernel changes (often because they break the kernel for other uses), so you can’t generally use a mainline Linux kernel instead. If you tried to tease out and improve the device-specific patches to the point where mainline Linux would take them, the device would be hopelessly outdated by the time you were done and you would have dozens of job offers to occupy your time as a highly skilled embedded Linux developer. The work is not practical given the tiny number of people who would benefit from it for a particular device, and how little it pays off compared to just buying a new device with a more up to date forked kernel available.
“Maintaining” a device for LineageOS or other open software eventually collapses under the weight of mainline Linux’s changes and the necessary chip and device maker patches no longer being practically reconcileable.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
I don’t think this is going to change the overall situation, it’s just a single point new system requirement, like the plausible GPU was for Vista.
Now, if they start expiring the old TPMs every few years, and Windows 12 needs a TPM 4.0 or something, then this will change the overall situation. At least on the Windows side.
- Comment on Etsy cracks down on 3D printed products — new rules exclude many 3D printed items from listings 4 months ago:
Etsy IIRC is not meant to be a general marketplace: it’s meant to be for handmade or flea-market vintage type stuff.
They then have to turn that into hard rules, and one of them is you can’t just manufacture stuff and turn around and sell it: manufactured stuff has to be old enough, and I think they have a particular year.
3D printing is a lot like manufacturing, and a little like making by hand. The more people use it like manufacturing, the less Etsy will want to have it.
- Comment on Organic Maps migrates to Forgejo due to GitHub account blocked by Microsoft. 6 months ago:
Just because someone does something instead of fighting a war doesn’t make whatever they actually did do right. They could also do neither thing.
- Comment on Organic Maps migrates to Forgejo due to GitHub account blocked by Microsoft. 6 months ago:
I didn’t ask whether it was better or worse than declaring a war; it’s clearly less bad than starting a war.
But that doesn’t mean it’s right. Maybe doing neither a war nor sanctions, but something else, or nothing, is the right thing to do.
- Comment on Organic Maps migrates to Forgejo due to GitHub account blocked by Microsoft. 6 months ago:
Does that work?
Is it right to tell random people “hey you, it’s your job to break local laws and topple your dictator, we could invade you with actual trained military people but that would be inconvenient for us”?