black0ut
@black0ut@pawb.social
- Comment on What's going on with the Systemd age verification stuff? 1 week ago:
He quit because of optics (understandably, Linux people didn’t like a Microsoft employee making software that was in almost every distro), but he still works with Microsoft and other Microsoft employees
- Comment on What's going on with the Systemd age verification stuff? 1 week ago:
The issue is that some idiot suddenly appeared on the systemd repo to immediately push a change that adds the posibility of logging the user’s age into systemd. The community complained and explained that nobody wanted that change, and yet this idiot pushed through, ignored the feedback, and ended up getting the pull request merged. Not only that, but the discussion thread was locked to prevent criticism, and the merge was done by Microsoft employees. After the merge, someone tried to undo the change, and the effort was blocked by a Microsoft employee.
Despite the excuses, Systemd is not an OS, and it doesn’t even need to comply with any age verification laws. The fact that someone went and implemented a deeply unpopular change into a system that shouldn’t even deal with that info and that is used by most Linux distros, just to aid a surveillance government in implementing better surveillance on the entire world’s users is what lead to the pushback.
Additionally, Lennart Poettering used Claude to review the pull request, and has been using it for developing SystemD. I’m not gonna go too deep into that, but trust me, it’s really bad.
Double additionally, Lennart Poettering also defended not properly securing this sensitive data, because that would be too bothersome for him.
- Comment on There's always money in the banana stand 2 weeks ago:
The country is too big! /s
- Comment on a VPN that is easily self-hostable and resistant to blocking? 2 weeks ago:
If you want a decently hidden VPN, I recommend setting up an OpenVPN instance, with a TCP tunnel, encapsulated within Stunnel. It manages to stay hidden even with DPI.
The setup is a bit convoluted, especially if you want everything to use certificates for maximum security. It’s also not the fastest VPN, and TCP isn’t the most efficient for a VPN. But it’s decent enough for a normal user.
You can set it up on both Linux and Windows, even having both ends of the tunnel on Windows, but it’s easier and better to set it up on Linux.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
I know we have !boneappletea@lemmy.world
- Comment on This Fall, Florida Students Will Be Forced to Take “Anti-Communist” Classes 3 weeks ago:
Communism itself hasn’t commited any atrocity. But some implementations of it have been attempted, resulting in authoritarian regimes that did commit atrocities. I’m not against teaching about those, so next time we try we can learn from our mistakes. But of course, communism = bad is not the way to do it, and communism = atrocities isn’t either.
- Comment on Lemmy.today is absolutely beautiful 4 weeks ago:
Which one?
- Comment on Lemmy.today is absolutely beautiful 5 weeks ago:
Rounded corners, the weird rainbow hue, glossy effects and css animations are like the piss filter of vibe coded websites
- Comment on Lemmy.today is absolutely beautiful 5 weeks ago:
That looks vibe coded
- Comment on AI blamed again as hard drives are sold out for this year 1 month ago:
I got a 16TB HDD for 300€, yesterday I looked at it and it was 800€ (apparently discounted from 1000€ lol)
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 2 months ago:
Hell, as far as I know, E2EE would be indistinguishable from client to server encryption, where the server can read everything. You can see the channel is encrypted, but you can’t know who has the other key.
- Comment on They removed the like button. What next, they gonna remove videos? It’s just gonna be ads??? 2 months ago:
Nuclear is not economically feasible and still does have its fair share of problems. It also generates waste, even if at far less scale than fossil fuels. Wind and solar are cheap and very scalable in most countries, which makes them economically feasible (and can also accelerate a move from fossil). Don’t be so quick to discard them.
As a matter of fact, last month, in Spain, we generated more energy just from wind than from nuclear. (31.7% vs 21.4%) source
- Comment on Fundies, fascists, and fundie fascist feelings don't care about your facts 3 months ago:
The paper was very poorly written. It has no structure, no argument, it’s short, and the author just writes the same 5 sentences over and over while changing a few words. That writing level does not correspond to a university student, and I would have gotten a 0 for it in 6th grade, regardless of the citations.
- Comment on Oh no! 4 months ago:
I use Unexpected Keyboard.
It’s mainly made for programming or using Termux, and it makes some special characters more accessible than the classic keyboards. It also has a mechanic for typing special characters that makes it faster to type. And you can enable a compose key, which is something I love to see on a phone keyboard.
Unexpected doesn’t have voice recognition though, but it can be enabled by installing a voice recognition app alongside the keyboard.
- Comment on Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal 4 months ago:
Yes. It loads faster, it has integrated quality levels that increase while loading (so a web hoster doesn’t need to have 5 different copies of the same image at different qualities), it has better compression and it also supports more features. It can also be lossless. Most importantly, jpeg can be converted to jpeg xl losslessly, and it will have the benefits of jpeg xl.
- Comment on Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman 5 months ago:
SMRs are snake oil. No SMR has really been built, and they share the exact same problems as “normal” nuclear. They’re expensive, still super slow to deploy, expensive to maintain and still produce waste. And all without the econony of scale which is what helps big nuclear reactors be “affordable”. You can read multiple articles on them, but here’s an example.
https://www.theenergymix.com/the-nuclear-mirage-why-small-modular-reactors-wont-save-nuclear-power/
Archived version:
- Comment on Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman 5 months ago:
Nuclear is not feasible and will never be.
For starters, it’s expensive. Really expensive. Insanely expensive. It also takes years to go online, and decades to decomission (which should be paid by the owner, but sometimes ends up being paid by the government because the owner went bankrupt or exploited a loophole). It’s also not quickly variable, so it needs a very constant demand.
Instead of investing in nuclear, one could invest in solar and wind. The latter can produce energy all day long, and if you have enough locations with wind farms, it starts averaging out and becoming constant. Both wind and solar are also quickly variable, so they can easily adapt to demand. They’re incredibly inexpensive and pay for themselves in a few years.
Batteries in the distribution network aren’t a good idea, and they’re also probably not gonna work. Even though they’re still cheaper than a nuclear plant, they’re pretty expensive and they have a lot of wear. Technologies have been advancing really fast, and we already have prototypes that look promising. However, they don’t make that much sense when you look at alternatives like pumped hydro. Pumped hydro is cheap, has a lot of capacity, can also quickly adapt to demand, and requires less maintenance than nuclear or batteries.
Another solution for energy storage is personal battery storage, which people install in their homes. Almost everyone who has solar already has a battery in their house, and even people without solar buy batteries to charge during the night and use up during the day. These batteries can be made with recycled electric car batteries, so they’re also carbon neutral and cheap.
And this is all without touching on the real issue of nuclear waste, which nuclear promoters always sweep under the rug. Yes, the amount of nuclear waste produced is minuscule. Yes, it’s not dangerous at all as long as it’s properly dealt with. Yes, it’s still better than the massive amounts of pollution that fossil fuels create. But it’s still a form of pollution, it’s dangerous when mishandled, and most importantly, it has to be kept in storage facilities for thousands of years. Those storage facilities are paid for by governments, which in turn are financed by our taxes. And we can only keep building them, because no waste goes out and new waste keeps going in. So even if the number in our electricity bill is small, we still pay more costs related to nuclear with our taxes.
TL:DR: Nuclear is expensive and slow to build and doesn’t adapt well to the variability of demand. Renewables, especially solar and wind, are cheap and effective, and there are many ways (not just batteries) to efficiently store excess energy to use during periods of low production. Nuclear also generates waste, which even though it may not be dangerous, is still expensive to store for thousands of years.
Disclaimer: I’m not endorsing fossil or non-renewable energy in any way, I’m all for net zero energy production. But nuclear is not net zero and not a good solution. We can completely ditch fossil fuels without relying on nuclear, and it can work. I live in a country where we’re decomissioning nuclear plants and we generate more than 50% of our electricity from renewables. On average, we generate close to the same amount of energy from wind than from nuclear (~20%).
- Comment on Trump memorandum brands anti-fascism and opposition to capitalism as “domestic terrorism” 5 months ago:
Minority Report is the name of the movie, for anyone curious.
- Comment on Apple steps up war of words with European regulators 6 months ago:
It doesn’t. It designs part of the chips that go into their phones.
Google also designs chips that go into its phones, and Microsoft has also designed chips and security co processors that have gone into PCs.
(Of course, I’d never consider a Microsoft “security co processor” secure, nor an apple or google one).
- Comment on Apple steps up war of words with European regulators 6 months ago:
Apple gets money from both their monopoly on user data and their high prices. That’s why it’s above Microsoft and Google in market cap, even though it doesn’t have nearly as much infrastructure and reach.
- Comment on The 2025 Ig Nobel Prize Winners 6 months ago:
There are many free and libre OCR programs, that have way more accuracy than an “AI”
- Comment on The McDonald's employee who called on Luigi has never received their "reward", folks chasing the 100k for Kirk may not either... 6 months ago:
It can’t be luigi because he was at my house at that time.
- Comment on How OnlyFans Piracy Is Ruining the Internet for Everyone | Innocent sites are being delisted from Google because of copyright takedown requests against rampant OnlyFans piracy. 6 months ago:
I mean like 89% of the shit on Reddit is some OF model advertising.
fr
This
Real
- Comment on Begun the kernel wars have 7 months ago:
Client side anti-cheat (the one installed on your PC) will never work, it’s just fundamentally impossible. They can restrict user freedom as much as they want, but the hardware still isn’t under their control.
The only reason they push for those kinds of anti-cheats is because they don’t have to pay for the extra processing of server side anti-cheat, and they also get the benefit of a backdoor into your computer that you may never fully uninstall without buying a new computer.
- Comment on The elders crave the slop 8 months ago:
Promotes crypto, it’s based on chromium and the CEO is an asshat.
- Comment on Statement on Stop Killing Games - VIDEOGAMES EUROPE 8 months ago:
Minecraft, the game that sold the most copies in history, has a huge infrastructure of community-hosted servers, some with tens of thousands of players playing at the same time. The community has created different flavors of the server software, optimized it, added mod support and even reprogrammed parts of it.
At this point, it’s hard for me to believe how someone could say a community can’t run game servers with a straight face.
- Comment on VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website. 9 months ago:
It really isn’t that slow, last time I tried to homebrew a working DNS tunnel it maxed my 100mbps card. I never needed the extra speed so I didn’t try to see how fast it could be on a 1gbps card
- Comment on Google confirms more ads on your paid YouTube Premium Lite soon 9 months ago:
I’ve started to go 15-20 minutes late. I’ve never missed a minute of movie, but I’ve skipped so many ads.
- Comment on Amazon is reportedly training humanoid robots to deliver packages 9 months ago:
If I get one of those, I’m definitely killing it and stealing its copper. Amazon can pay for the repairs.
- Comment on TIL my decision to drive a 22' full cab pickup truck and vehemently oppose urban zoning reform makes me a defender of social justice, a warrior for the downtrodden, and more progressive than 99% [cont 9 months ago:
I think it is, yeah. It has a metro station relatively close by, which food delivery people often use to get around the city center. The streets around it are also very walkable, and you can go by bike. I don’t think it is a problem for food delivery at all.
