melmi
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Reverse proxy 6 months ago:
It definitely encrypts the traffic, the problem is that it encrypts the traffic in a recognizable way that DPI can recognize. It’s easy for someone snooping on your traffic to tell that you’re using Wireguard, but because it’s encrypted they can’t tell the content of the message.
- Comment on We keep measuring everything's value with something that continuously loses value over time 6 months ago:
I just don’t understand why you want to copy-paste ChatGPT. Surely the parent commenter could access ChatGPT if they wanted, so you’re not bringing a new perspective. If “content” is all that matters, you could generate a thousand different ChatGPT responses and reply to their comment with each one, but that’s not acceptable. Why not?
People come here for a conversation with other people, and copy-paste ChatGPT responses don’t actually contribute to that. If all they want is information/content, there are better places to find it. They could use ChatGPT, sure, but they could also use Wikipedia or even an economics textbook. It’s up to them. Even if they use ChatGPT, they’d probably prompt it a few times in a few different ways to get the best info for them.
If you really want to use ChatGPT in your responses, why not add your own voice? When I suggested commentary I don’t mean that you should just prompt ChatGPT into pretending to be a human, I mean that you should add your own perspective. Editorialize. Pull out the good bits.
- Comment on We keep measuring everything's value with something that continuously loses value over time 6 months ago:
Because if people want to see what ChatGPT says, they can ask it themselves. You’re not contributing anything by copy-pasting from ChatGPT. If you have commentary on what ChatGPT had to say, that could be different, but you literally just used ChatGPT’s output as your whole comment.
- Comment on Authelia + Bitwarden + other selfhosted stuff 6 months ago:
Goes to show I don’t know much about SSO I suppose. Time to do some more research
- Comment on Authelia + Bitwarden + other selfhosted stuff 6 months ago:
I had issues connecting to Nextcloud from mobile clients when using Authelia, they didn’t like it, but if there’s a workaround for that that’s great
- Comment on Authelia + Bitwarden + other selfhosted stuff 6 months ago:
Most things should be behind Authelia. It’s hard to know how to help without knowing what exactly you’re doing with it but generally speaking Authelia means you can have SSO+2FA for every app, even apps that don’t provide it by default.
It also means that if you have users, you don’t need them to store a bunch of passwords.
One big thing to keep in mind is that anything with its own login system may not be happy about being behind Authelia. Nextcloud for example won’t work. You can retain separate logins, or use LDAP.
- Comment on So today I finally deleted the bird app 6 months ago:
That’s I guess why CSEM is used, because if the images are being shared around exploitation has clearly occurred. I can see where you’re coming from though.
What I will say is that there are some weird laws around it, and there have even been cases where kids have been convicted of producing child pornography… of themselves. It’s a bizarre situation. If anything, seems like abuse of the court system at that point.
Luckily a lot of places have been patching the holes in their laws.
- Comment on So today I finally deleted the bird app 6 months ago:
CSAM is supposed to be more explicit that the images are essentially crime scene photographs, and to emphasize that it is Abuse first and foremost and not merely pornography.
- Comment on ‘Section 31’ Movie Director Says It’s A “Different” Star Trek + New Character Details Revealed 7 months ago:
I have nothing wrong with lighthearted takes on Trek, but choosing to make the movie about “fascist space emperor joins the CIA” lighthearted seems like a dubious choice. I guess we’ll see how they portray it but given how Trek has handled S31 so far, I don’t want to get my hopes up.
- Comment on Star Trek: Infinite Ends Development – Trek Central 7 months ago:
I tried to play it when it came out, but there were some visual issues that started to give me a migraine so I put it down and just haven’t picked it up since. At some point I’ll give it another shot and see if they fixed the migraine issue haha
- Comment on Star Trek: Infinite Ends Development – Trek Central 7 months ago:
There are two Star Trek total conversions for Stellaris, even, each with their own unique approach. New Civilizations might even be a little better, imo.
Also, Resurgence already came out, to mixed reviews—but no microtransactions! It’s coming out on Steam in May, but that’s because it was a timed Epic exclusive.
- Comment on Proton Pass breaks prowlarr on firefox since today 7 months ago:
Why would a random browser extension take it upon itself to snoop on your traffic to ensure that the websites you’re using can’t be used for illegal things, and then intentionally break it if it detects something it thinks it’s illegitimate? That’s a huge overreach. There’s no “legal reasons” that would justify a breach of privacy like that. It’s just malware at that point.
No, I think this is just a bug. Especially since people have reported that the extension breaks other websites too.
- Comment on Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media 8 months ago:
The microblog side of the fediverse is really hostile to scraping or indexing of any kind. On the one hand, I get the idea of safe spaces and not wanting your data to be public, but then why are you on an instance that federates openly?
It seems to me that anything that’s being federated out by ActivityPub is public by nature. If you don’t want it to be public, you should use a whitelist, or just don’t post it publicly.
Idk, I guess I just don’t get it.
- Comment on Everyone makes incest jokes about Adam and Eve and their children but they never mention that there was another woman named Lilith (Adam's first wife) who would have added variance to the gene pool. 8 months ago:
Incest doesn’t inherently cause genetic disorders, it just increases your chance of being born with recessive genetic disorders. Most of those disorders are mutations, and if the Garden of Eden is so perfect there probably aren’t genetic disorders to start out with, meaning incest is fine from a genetic perspective. All the genetic disorders would be mutations later down the line. Maybe they’re punishment for the original sin or something, to fit it into the themes of the story.
- Comment on Diagon Lemmy - A Queer-friendly, Harry Potter-themed Lemmy Server is now live (before you block me instantly, please hear me out) 8 months ago:
Harry Potter spaces are not unique in creating structure. There are tons of fandoms, with millions of members. It’s not the first modern fandom by any means either. It’s not like if HP suddenly disappeared there wouldn’t be any fandoms of equivalent or larger size to provide “structure” to vulnerable people. Lots of them have more queer people in them too, and less transphobia.
I’m not sure what makes Harry Potter uniquely digital in your mind either. I’m sure you can interpret it as being about that, but I don’t think that’s the interpretation most people walk away with. Even if it really is a lens some people use to understand the Internet or whatnot, I certainly don’t think it’s the first story to be used in that way… There are a lot of stories that can claim that title that far predate Harry Potter, many of which have fandoms of their own.
I just don’t think HP is an essential backbone of culture. It’s important to a lot of people, for sure. And I can’t imagine what it’s like to realize that the creator of a work that’s so important to you is a terrible person. That has got to be a really shitty situation to be in. But there are other fandoms out there. There’s other great fiction, written by authors who won’t weaponize your consumption against minorities. It’s not a dichotomy of either you embrace Harry Potter or you must write your own.
- Comment on Diagon Lemmy - A Queer-friendly, Harry Potter-themed Lemmy Server is now live (before you block me instantly, please hear me out) 8 months ago:
I don’t think it’s particularly hard to find authors who aren’t actively spreading hate, actually. And I don’t think Rowling’s level of transphobia is a particularly specific purity test.
Plus, Rowling takes an active role in promoting hate. She’s loud about it. She has a big platform because HP is so popular, and I think that makes her especially dangerous.
She certainly seems to put her money where her mouth is too.
- Comment on Diagon Lemmy - A Queer-friendly, Harry Potter-themed Lemmy Server is now live (before you block me instantly, please hear me out) 8 months ago:
I love to be able to reclaim works from their hateful authors, especially cultural ones. I’m a big fan of Lovecraft, and that dude was hateful. He makes JK Rowling look sweet and kindly. But it’s a lot easier to reclaim the narrative and make it a part of our culture when the author is literally dead.
Lovecraft is a cornerstone of modern fiction, despite being a bigot. We can acknowledge how he was a terrible person, even analyze it, but we know that our enjoyment of Lovecraftian fiction isn’t benefiting Lovecraft’s hateful causes, especially because the work is public domain.
In contrast, JK Rowling is not only still alive, she is active and vocal about her hatred, how she spends her money towards hate, and how she considers support of Harry Potter in light of her hate to be support of her vile views.
Consumption of media is not a passive action. Even if you do not actively give any money to the franchise, promoting the franchise encourages other people to do so, and then their money goes to fund hate.
I understand that HP is important to a lot of people. It was a cultural phenomenon. But we aren’t leaving it behind just because JK Rowling said something offensive. We’re leaving it behind because the author is actively using our consumption to fund hate and campaigning to deny rights to trans people.
There are plenty of other forms of media, new and old, that aren’t being piloted by known bigots. If you want a cultural backbone, using one that is currently controlled by a bigot will probably make a lot of trans people feel unwelcome at best and at worst, if HP continues to be a cultural phenomenon on a large scale JK Rowling will use the platform and the money to further the oppression of transgender rights.
- Comment on [deleted] 9 months ago:
Ending prices with 99 is manipulative. We accept it from businesses because we’re conditioned to, they’re businesses after all! Being manipulated by businesses is just how society operates, part of the environment we live in. But if an individual offers us something for a price ending in 99, we’re much more likely to be suspicious of it.
The article actually explicitly mentions this, and suggests you list things for 25 under instead of 1 under, for example, as it won’t immediately trigger recognition that you’re doing this.
- Comment on Star Trek: The Deep Space Nine episode that predicted a US crisis [bbc.com] 9 months ago:
No, there may be inequality and bigotry in some solarpunk fiction but unlike cyberpunk it’s not about “our heroes fighting the system that will almost inevitably crush them”. Solarpunk is innately hopeful, and there’s conflict (kinda intrinsic to storytelling) but it doesn’t require the existence of inequality or bigotry, and a lot of solarpunk fiction explicitly doesn’t have any bigotry in it period.
Cyberpunk might be about “our system sucks, and our heroes may or may not want it to change”, but solarpunk is about “the system of the modern day was bad, and so we replaced it entirely”. The “punk” part doesn’t require that the heroes are individually punks within the context of their own world, it’s called punk because it’s in contrast to our modern system. Also because -punk is kinda a generic term for genres at this point.
- Comment on Should instances defederate with other instances anymore if we can filter instances out on our end? 10 months ago:
There’s a difference between defederation policy and ban policy. You could have a server that is very lax on defederation, only defederating for abuse and illegal content that can’t be stopped through moderation, while implementing a standard or even fairly aggressive enforcement policy for individuals, both local users as well as remote users. The idea is that you ban offending users, while only defederating in extreme cases.
The problem with defederation is that it splits the network apart. Trying to make defederation a last resort doesn’t necessarily mean one is a freeze peach instance. Defederation policy is an entirely different beast from moderation.
That said, my understanding is that Lemmy’s moderation tools are pretty lackluster at the moment, and so a big part of the reason that some instances are quick to defederate is that it’s difficult to moderate between poor mod tools and small volunteer mod teams. It’s easier to just defederate.
- Comment on If the kids didn't mutiny, would Picard have been killed when the turbolift fell? 10 months ago:
The ending was decent. It ended right where the book series it’s based off of has a 30-year time skip, so it worked out pretty well for them. They have plenty of time to come back to it and still keep continuity with actors too FWIW.
- Comment on Trek Club 11 months ago:
This is true, but also it’s implied in technobabble that replicators operate on a lower “molecular” resolution whereas transporters operate on a quantum scale. I rationalize this as a space saving measure; when you’re transporting living organisms, you need perfect precision, and thus a full pattern buffer worth of resolution. This is clearly expensive to store, so much so that it decays over time unless you do something tricky.
Replicators use a lower resolution scan, as you can just reassemble protein molecules into the right shape most of the time. Eddington complains about this issue. (The non-canon TNG technical manual mentions tanks full of protein sludge used for replicators.) Now, is this actually detectable by a human palate? Eh, maybe.
I imagine if you were to beam a plate of non-replicated food though, the full flavor profile wouldn’t be lost. It’s specifically the low resolution of the replicator tech.
- Comment on Trek Club 11 months ago:
I largely agree with your analysis here. My point was that the way the economy is portrayed is such that we don’t get to see much of how it actually works, meaning that a lot of our understanding is speculation based on a handful of lines.
Meanwhile, they’re still participating in the aesthetics of commerce within the Federation, and literal commerce beyond its borders. The idea that there’s a currency used for trade outside the Federation, but citizens get everything for free within it, is a popular interpretation but it’s never actually explicitly stated within the text outside vague mentions of a “Federation credit”. It’s personally my favorite interpretation, but I think everything’s vague and in the background enough that I can see how people can walk away with different interpretations. Just look at that Ex Astris Scientia article; I even disagree with where some of the evidence should fall on whether it’s pro- or contra- money.
The wildcard here is that we see Federation worlds that seem to still use money, namely the Bolians who are members of the Federation, but the Bank of Bolias is a major financial institution.
- Comment on Trek Club 11 months ago:
The show is also about a space navy that has near total autonomy on the frontier, securing the interests of the Federation while inducting new worlds into its ranks, with our heroes being the Good Guys who are high ranking officers in the military who give orders and investigate conspiracies and hold life and death in their hands as they fly around their heavily-armed “totally not a warship” exploration vessels.
It’s very Space America, and at times almost libertarian in its politics and non-interference. It’s not even explicitly socialist, all we know is that they don’t use money, except when they do. The writing is sort of fuzzy on the matter, which results (regardless of the intention) in an economy that doesn’t actually seem that different to our modern day. There’s no money, but people still own businesses and talk about buying stuff, which allows for the economic system to fade into a sort of forgettable background space.
Besides, Star Trek isn’t necessarily about a socialist future. It’s about a post-scarcity future. I think that’s a key difference. I’ve spoken to many conservative fans who say that they believe that capitalism is the only way that we can achieve a post-scarcity future, i.e. invent replicators. Because Trek isn’t about a worker’s revolution, it’s about the slow progression of technology, followed by a nuclear war, and then at some point they just sort of got rid of money because it was obsolete. All we even know about it is from one-off lines.
There’s a bunch of info on the economy of the Federation in this article on Ex Astris Scientia.
It makes me think of the Culture series, another sci-fi universe I’m fond of. It’s even more leftist-coded than Star Trek, yet somehow Elon Musk is a fan of it and names his rockets after ships from the books. Apparently Jeff Bezos is a fan too. Ugh. And as a result, a lot of people’s first introductions to the series is through these awful people, since it’s a lot more niche than Trek.
- Comment on Identifying Cat 11 months ago:
They even show up in Star Trek Into Darkness as furless cat girls that the writer claims are the same species even though they’re clearly not. Memory Alpha dutifully lists them on the Unnamed Caitian page, but amusingly doesn’t actually call them Caitians explicitly.
- Comment on How did money work on deep space 9? 11 months ago:
You can buy alcohol cheap from a store in real life, along with all the ingredients to make drinks, yet people still go to bars where cocktails cost more than a meal. They’re not going just because of superior bartending skills, they’re going as part of the experience of drinking with other people. Because on DS9, your other option is basically to drink in your quarters, which is no fun.
There are more options for food on DS9, but people still go to Quark’s for the atmosphere. It’s lively and fun, which is probably hard to come by otherwise on a remote space station.
- Comment on Ransomware 11 months ago:
Well, the question still remains of “symbiotizing what”? Fungi on earth range from saprophages, which decompose dead matter into nutrients, to mycorrhizae, which form symbiotic relationships with plants which produce nutrients. In either case, they’re feeding off of things, it’s just the source that varies. All living things need to gain energy somehow.
The mycelial network is spooky and probably feeds off something more abstract, since sci-fi and all that. That said, maybe it’s in some sort of symbiotic relationship with the multiverse itself? There’s so much energy in a galaxy, let alone a multiverse worth of galaxies, that it’s not hard to imagine a fungal network feeding off just a tiny fraction of that energy. And interstellar space has relatively low energy, so it makes sense the network wouldn’t build hyphae there.
You’re right that they never said it only works in the Milky Way, I had just assumed that since it peters out at the border of the galaxy that it ends there. And if it resumes in another galaxy, it seems like it would be discontinuous and thus a separate organism. But I suppose if you imagine it as a wholly separate subspace realm, with hyphae that connect out wherever there is sufficient “energy” of whatever sort it feeds off of, it makes sense. That could be a cool twist indeed!
I would give anything to be an astromycologist - Comment on Ransomware 11 months ago:
That’s true, it spans the entire multiverse but only within one galaxy. It’s odd, but it’s cool that the network is so deeply tied to the Milky Way, just in every reality.
It makes me wonder what the network is actually feeding off of. Life? Some sort of nebulous “energy”?
Not something that they need to answer, but it’s just so cool to think about the mystery of it. I love fungi, and I love the mycelial network as this truly cosmic-scale organism living in subspace, holding the multiverse together. It’s beautiful.
- Comment on Ransomware 11 months ago:
I’m confused how something could connect all of time and space together without being omnipresent. It seems to me that the network is omnipresent by definition, because it exists everywhere.
- Comment on Semantics: Who is more disliked? 11 months ago:
Marco has so much charisma. A huge part of his insidiousness is just how charming he is. There are points you almost wonder if he’s really the bad guy.
On the other hand, Winn isn’t as charming, she’s not particularly sympathetic for most of the series. She’s kinda just hubristic and antagonistic, and isn’t very good at pretending to care about anything other than her own power grabs.
Plus she’s way less hot.