orclev

@orclev@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re technically right but only because Taiwan (despite what China fervently wants) is a separate country from China. If you follow the official Chinese party line that they aren’t then yes you could make a modern phone entirely from parts made in “China”. It would at a minimum be more “made in China” than anything Trump is peddling as “made in USA”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s certainly part of it, but I’d use any mobile payment app, not just Googles one, but there’s basically zero competition there. Some banks apparently had their own mobile payment support briefly, but it seems like just about every single one of them has removed that feature and replaced it with a wrapper around Google Pay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is nice for Europe I guess, and I want to like the fairphone, but unfortunately it’s not viable for me.

  Besides basic phone features and the ability to run Android apps I have 3 requirements, 2 of which the fairphone fails at. I need it to be usable in the US on my phone carrier. I need to be able to use Google Pay or another mobile payment alternative (that’s accepted in most stores). Finally it needs to have at least a 48 hour battery life.

  Fairphone unfortunately doesn’t work in the US with most carriers, and the one that kills not only it but all the de-googled phones, it doesn’t support mobile payment of any kind. I’ve done a ton of research trying to find some kind of fix for that second point because I’d gladly use something like GrapheneOS if I could, but every time the answer I come to is it’s just not possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla's European car sales nosedive for fifth month as customers switch to Chinese EVs⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That is not even remotely why they added a tax on EVs. The reason they added the extra tax is because they make a ton of money by taxing gas and as EVs are gaining popularity they’re starting to see their tax revenues plummet. There is a nugget of truth in that some of those tax revenues are used to pay for maintaining the roads and that EVs do still put wear and tear on the roads, but it’s not that they’re destroying roads any more than any other car does.

  If you’re seeing a drop in road quality it’s because your government isn’t paying to have the roads maintained like they have in the past, not because there are more EVs driving around.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty sure he meant intentional.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can websites verify unique (IRL) identities?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Safe and private? Nope absolutely impossible. If you don’t care about privacy at all pretty much the only way to do it is to have your government issue you a unique hardware token and require that to access the internet and it shares your unique ID with the website. It’s not 100% impossible to spoof an identity as you could borrow/steal someone elses token, but if they were secured with a pin/password or basic biometric it would become significantly harder.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So I had this joke idea of “they’ll just start showing the ads to the AIs”, but the more I thought about it the more it started to sound less like a joke. Imagine if someone figured out how to cram ads into the AI training models and it skewed the outputs. Why astroturf when you can train the AIs to astroturf for you. This is some black mirror shit and now I’ve made myself a bit depressed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Less depressing example. A country (I think it was India but my memory is hazy and I’m too lazy to go google it right now) had a problem with a certain venomous snake. They decided to offer a bounty for every snake corpse brought to them. The goal was to incentivise people to hunt snakes. What actually happened was people started breeding the snakes to turn in for the bounties. They realized the program wasn’t working and cancelled it at which point the breeders dumped their snakes into the wild making the whole situation even worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon: New Terms of Service IP clause cannot be terminated or revoked, not even by deleting content⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So CAP theorem says you can have a distributed system with at most two of Consistent, Available, or Partition tolerant. I haven’t looked too closely into the federation implementation of Mastodon but I suspect they opted for Available and Partition tolerant (as Consistent and Partition tolerant would mean the entire network goes down when one node does, while Consistent and Available would mean once any node lost contact with the network it could never again rejoin). Since consistency is not guaranteed (and provably can’t be) there is absolutely no way to guarantee that deleting something from one instance will remove it from all instances even allowing for a very generous time span.

  TL;DR: You’re not just right, you’re mathematically right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨16 Billion Apple, Facebook, Google And Other Passwords Leaked — Act Now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Kind of both. The modern way of brute forcing is to just hash the 100,000 most common passwords, previously leaked passwords, and minor permutations of all of the above. It’s computationally and space intensive, but for a determined attacker entirely doable on modern hardware. That’s why complexity matters, because it’s not a simple iteration through every possible permutation, but a targeted search through a known password list.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨16 Billion Apple, Facebook, Google And Other Passwords Leaked — Act Now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Hashes can be brute forced, it’s just normally too expensive to do so for any reasonably complex password. If you’re using “password123” as your password even a hashed password is easily cracked (salting and peppering can help make this more difficult, although still not impossible).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3 million peers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Crypto is not anonymous, the entire concept of how it works is to be the worlds most public and distributed transaction ledger. It is more difficult to track than credit card transactions, but that’s a very big difference from being impossible to track. There have been multiple papers published at this point on how you can de-anonymize any crypto purchase.

  People really need to get over this idea that using crypto to buy things makes you anonymous.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Tests Removing Its Name From Bing Search Box⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Next time I need to explain what bikeshedding is I’m just going to point to this article.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The New York Times Just Published Some Bizarre Race Science About Asian Women⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well it’s also about supply chains. All the components are also made in China so you’d end up ordering the parts and then having to wait a month or more for them to be shipped to the US. If you want to avoid delays that means maintaining a significant stockpile of parts in the US that you may or may not ever actually use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨@chrlschn - Beware the Complexity Merchants⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My job has a 3rd kind of complexity, non-essential complexity, which is like essential complexity in that it comes from the business domain, but isn’t actually required. It’s non-technical decisions about how our apps and services must function that introduce all our complexity and massively complicates our code bases. At one point we literally have to attempt to predict the future because they adamantly refuse to simply ask the customer what they’re planning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Open question] Why are so many open-source projects, particularly projects written in Rust, MIT licensed?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The crux of it is that it allows for commercial use without needing to distribute the source code. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on who you ask. There’s basically a continuum for open source software with GPLv3 at one end and MIT at the other.

  GPLv3 guarantees that corporations can’t play games with patents or weird DRM to hobble an open source library and tie it to their closed source product. A lot of corporations will specifically bar employees from using GPLv3 code out of fear it could force them to open source their proprietary code as well.

  At the other extreme you’ve got MIT which basically says do what you want with it. Fork it, embed it in your projects, sell copies of it if you want. Anything goes as long as you include a copy of the MIT license along with your software.

  Rust tends to get a lot of commercial usage so GPLv2 or MIT tend to be chosen over GPlv3, and between them most companies feel more comfortable with MIT.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Spotify caught hosting hundreds of fake podcasts that advertise selling drugs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s more that most people just aren’t aware of any equivalent alternatives, or in some cases like where there literally aren’t any alternatives. Look at phones, both Apple and Google suck and their mobile OSes are terrible but what’s the alternative? Sure there’s a few Linux phones out there and that’s almost an alternative but it’s not there yet. You could go with a “dumb” phone, but for most people that’s not going to work. So you pick your lesser evil and bitch about it whenever the latest round of enshitification hits.

  If you asked most people what alternatives exist for Spotify they’d probably say Pandora, and maybe Apple Music or Youtube Music and then struggle to come up with anything else. The better alternatives are suffering from a massive discovery problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says its latest models outperform doctors in medical benchmark⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Wake me up when someone besides OpenAI says they’re the best at something. When a company releases a benchmark they designed that their own tool that’s generally regarded as not very good is suddenly the best at, that’s not news, at best that’s PR, at worst propaganda. This reeks of “we investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trakt Upcoming VIP Renewal Pricing Changes – Effective May 20, 2025⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Seems to be some kind of centralized streaming service catalog. Never heard of it before now and no idea why anyone would be willing to pay $30 for it let alone $60.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what are your thoughts on Bidirectional brain-computer interfaces ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It is simultaneously the most promising and most dangerous tech imaginable. There are so many amazing and wonderful things it could enable. There are so many horrifying and terrible ways it could go wrong. It has to be approached with utmost caution and incredibly well thought out regulation and standards. I’m not sure I trust any government or institution in existence in the world currently to manage it the way it needs to be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa among artists urging British Prime Minister Starmer to rethink his AI copyright plans⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolute fastest way to kill this shit? Feed the entire Disney catalog in and start producing knockoff Disney movies. Disney would kill this so fast.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨List of Alternatives to Adobe Programs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What about Krita? Not sure exactly what Adobe product it would be an alternative for though. I know a lot of what people use it for used to be done with Photoshop, but I think Photoshops core demographic is a slightly different use case. Also Inkscape as an Illustrator alternative?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Today it looks like the answer is technically none of them. The FAQ on bookshop.org claims they’re working with Kobo to add support “later this year”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MIT engineers create 'spaghetti' style metamaterial that could enable stretchy computer chips that are almost indestructible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is interesting in a “how far can you launch a pumpkin using an air canon” way, not a “you only need to cool this down to -40C to make it super conduct” way. It’s a fun experiment with nearly zero practical purpose outside of some very niche edge cases. Wearable computing is probably the only realistic one at the moment for a CPU that you can stretch a little and runs incredibly slow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Toronto company is deliberately spreading hyperpartisan lies on Facebook. It owns a page called "Canada Proud" and has bought more than $250,000 in ads targeting voters⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, so homegrown scum. I kind of lump them under the mega corporation header though as the goal for them is to eliminate regulations and oversight so they can pillage to their hearts content. Really trying to speed run that late stage capitalism dystopia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Toronto company is deliberately spreading hyperpartisan lies on Facebook. It owns a page called "Canada Proud" and has bought more than $250,000 in ads targeting voters⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Going to be real interesting to see where that money is coming from. My bet is some combination of the worst of the US political “thinktanks” like the federalist society, Russian assets, and mega corporations like Amazon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An Alarming Number of Gen Z Ai Users Think It's Conscious⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it still passing the Turing test if you don’t think either one is human?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TLS Certificate Lifetimes Will Officially Reduce to 47 Days⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Get ready for a bunch more 1 and 2 day outages because someone forgot/missed the deadline to renew some crusty server somewhere. This is such massive overkill for most servers. End users should start getting used to that expired certificate warning in their browser of choice and the process to tell it to continue to the site anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Opinion | I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, the article is right, but for all the wrong reasons. China is taking the lead globally less because of anything it’s doing but more because of what everyone else is. In many ways the US was doomed from the moment one of our two political parties decided its future was best served by appealing to the ignorant and uneducated.

  The GOP has spent decades attacking our education system and painting experts and the educated as the enemy all because they had the temerity to say the emperor had no clothes and point out the many ways in which conservative dogma fails. China got incredibly lucky to have just the right economy and connections in the 80s to become everybody’s outsourced manufacturing hub and has further benefited by the US attacking its own educational and research institutions.

  China hasn’t so much sprinted past the US as they have maintained their steady pace while the US shot itself in the head because the right hand wanted to be the one in charge of everything.

  Trump and the MAGA idiots are just the natural progression of the policies the GOP embraced starting all the way back with Nixon and his southern strategy and accelerated by Reagan and his economic policies.

  It turns out it’s hard to be a leader in a technological society when you put the dumbest people you can find in charge of things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users and employees⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Teams meetings aren’t really that much worse than Zoom, it’s mostly minor gripes, although there are quite a few of those. The Teams chat client on the other hand is an absolute garbage fire that’s significantly worse than Slack, Discord, or pretty much anything up to and arguably including IRC.

  An organization , “team”, channel, and chat are confusing as hell, that breakdown does not in any way align with the way communication works in a large organization. Why is there so little configuration available for notification settings? Why can’t I completely silence or ignore a “team”, channel, or chat? Why do I not receive notifications half the time for the things I actually want to be notified about? Why aren’t there threads or at least a sensible and easy to follow “reply to” option? Why can’t anyone seem to agree on the correct way to organize things? Half our groups are creating gigantic “teams” that include half the company, while the other half are creating shared channels nobody knows about. Both options suck.