Dark_Arc

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Honestly a huge portion of the problem is asshole drivers that just don't turn off their brights and their fog lights or that tailgate the vehicle right in front of them while their headlights are mirror level.

I've seen brand new trucks with LEDs that were so easy on my eyes then I've seen the exact same model of truck via rearview mirror only after I passed it because the lights were beyond blinding.

They need to enforce maximum luminosity laws with an iron first; it's ridiculous that people get away with this stuff.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Honestly it just feels like so much stuff is car hostile at this point... Like I went to leave a store the other day and I couldn't clearly see oncoming traffic because the shrubs were too high and right next to the road.

I wish I could say that was a really uncommon experience.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

This comment made me realize the article itself was written by a woman, which kind of surprised me given the era.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

It's weird how well this applies to various arguments I've seen on Reddit against Crytek regarding Hunt Showdown's recent issues.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Man, that's the kind of relationship I dream about... Though swap the climb for a hike because I'm deathly afraid of heights 😂

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Maybe, but also maybe not. A test that's targeted specifically at "do you understand how the government functions" is actually quite different from a lot of other tests and less likely to be subjective.

Like, if there was a question, what part of the government writes laws:

• Congress
• The President
• The Supreme Court

if you get that wrong, you probably shouldn't be voting.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Just did a refresher per your request... We did not ever to my knowledge use civics tests. We used literacy tests and what made them particularly offensive was they had various exemptions for white people or simplified variants for white people.

I am very icy to the idea of tests in general due to the effects having a "test" to vote could have. However, having a very low bar test of some sort administered without exceptions ... it might make sense.

We don't let people drive whose eyes fail a safety test. Maybe we shouldn't let people vote if they don't even have a surface level understanding of what they're voting for.

I'm not saying do it, but maybe we shouldn't totally write it off because of some bad behavior without any safeguards to prevent bad behavior.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

The bigger issue is monetization. YouTube is popular in no small part because creators are trying to make money.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Calling RCS an industry standard is a bit... Questionable. Still, I'm happy to see Apple finally implementing it so there's a good cross vendor texting implementation.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

I wonder how this scales to large voice rooms.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

That's really not even close to the optimistic scenario. It's arguably not even in the pessimistic scenario if you're not just in the "make stuff up club."

https://cdn.oceanservice.noaa.gov/oceanserviceprod/hazards/sealevelrise/2.0-Future-Mean-Sea-Level.pdf

We're talking at most half a meter of rise by 2050, at most 2 meters by 2100, at most 4 meters by 2150. The intermediate projection is a third of a meter by 2050. The optimistic projection (which we're not going to hit) is 3/20th of a meter.

Climate change is real. The risk of famine is real. The risk of global conflict is real. The risk of trying storms is real. However, "doomsday everybody dies" is not really on any serious projections. The worst case is "a lot of people in a lot of poor nations die and rich nations have more wars and more immigration."

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Yeah... Even as a third party, I definitely have not been enjoying the smell when I've bumped into it. I don't think it should be a criminal offense, but I hope we can move past "I need to light a thing on fire and just screw up the air for everyone in my vicinity."

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

My concern is more so if he gets elected, he might try to justify "emergency powers" citing political violence as history has shown with other authoritarians.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

I feel like I've seen a few of these in non-Nazi contexts ... But maybe I'm just being naive.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Agree to some extent, labeling things terrorist organizations is kind of a slippery slope in the post-911 US though.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Someone more talented than me could probably recover the phone number via edge analysis.

There's a good chance it's more for their post to not get taken down. That said this is from Twitter, so... IDK

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Plex is moving in the app direction... So Plex is probably moving away from what you want despite being one of the easiest options.

It would probably be helpful to know what you're trying to accomplish beyond "what". Like, why do you want to host your music and play it via a web browser.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

For my grandfather... The issue wasn't the shows, but he specifically wants a few news programs and will not under any circumstances go without them.

This was a problem for even going to Internet based streaming options because he just will not accept anything without those shows for more than a few months.

Meanwhile he also complains he doesn't have enough to watch and says he can't afford it (he can, he just doesn't like what it cost)... But those dang news channels... and just his outlook on TV in general.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

It's a shame, back when they were wikia and just hosted mediawikis with light ads, it was actually a really nice service.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

So, the web uses a system called chain of trust. There are public keys stored in your system or browser that are used to validate the public keys given to you by various web sites.

Both letsencrypt and traditional SSL providers work because they have keys on your system in the appropriate place so as to deem them trustworthy.

All that to say, you're always trusting a certificate authority on some level unless you're doing self signed certificates... And then nobody trusts you.

The main advantage to a paid cert authority is a bit more flexibility and a fancier certificate for your website that also perhaps includes the business name.

Realistically... There's not much of a benefit for the average website or even small business.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

I'd give up any and every gun point in favor of police reform, proper election and transition of power legislation, and climate change.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

I got banned from signal's subreddit for talking about how telegram works and the case for it.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

So most dorms don't want you using your own routers because a bunch of student routers causes A LOT of inference.

You should probably reach out not to the dorm folks but the university networking folks as they're the ones that will ultimately make the decision on whether or not to turn things off/disconnect you.

A cheap networking switch would probably be okay by them to get some more wired connections in your dorm room (routers aren't really a great way to do that).

https://www.amazon.com/Linksys-Business-LGS105-Unmanaged-Enclosure/dp/B00FV12VSW/ref=mp_s_a_1_1_sspa?crid=3PUXDK6TFLZIT&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.zm2b2eGNCSReGFJuUskv6-s3cUVDK12lfqOmf729Jjx1nw8mI07xRjx4RZCcnWDhplIUW-7IOfSn6R7TMu0yVy_k9hGXtOs0SNS7RO8sN4RI5aa_8-iwSOXz6biaUH5pE27eM8eYyBzJl9tkYxX4erfrbMwkWwhSrqIKQGOSqx1DQ1z5ZiDGCyQ_u0k8IhaN1Ra-Zpsr07cg-ZjJnDz6lA.iHHYMOhPc6OW0LmOOPkf8taxFxWnD5Sbwy_NxZwTQbU&dib_tag=se&keywords=network+switch&qid=1725717407&sprefix=network+%2Caps%2C186&sr=8-1-spons&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9waG9uZV9zZWFyY2hfYXRm&psc=1

As a secondary concern, using a router will cause a double NAT for all your connected devices (universities don't operate in the way ISPs do). That could cause some weird networking shenanigans, particularly for anything peer-to-peer like online games.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

I've been reading her book, the truancy thing is interesting. She had data that showed that kids that weren't showing up at school, particularly young ones, didn't learn how to read sufficiently well, and then fell behind in school and struggled to catch up, they then ended up struggling later in life, and often ending up either as victims or perpetrators of crime.

So, she used the California DA's office to enforce truancy laws across California, encouraged reaching out to fix the problems at home if at all possible, and also encouraged reaching out to folks that had been written off as "not caring" (she cites an example of a father that hadn't been paying child support but upon learning that his daughter wasn't going to school, started taking his daughter to school every morning, and volunteering in her classroom).

Of course this is all by her account, but that sounds overall quite positive to me.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

I mean there's quite clearly a victim here, the child.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Have you ever seen a vacuum chamber? Science does suck ... and it's fucking awesome at it. 🥁

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

I've been thinking postcard based account validation for online services might be a strategy to fight bots.

As in, rather than an email address, you register with a physical address and get mailed a post card.

A server operator would then have to approve mailing 1,000 post cards to whatever address the bot operator was working out of. The cost of starting and maintaining a bot farm skyrockets as a result (you not only have to pay to get the postcard, you have to maintain a physical presence somewhere ... and potentially a lot of them if you get banned/caught with any frequency).

Similarly, most operators would presumably only mail to folks within their nation's mail system. So if Russia wanted to create a bunch of US accounts on "mainstream" US hosted services, they'd have to physically put agents inside of the United States that are receiving these postcards ... and now the FBI can treat this like any other organized domestic crime syndicate.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

How would you feel if it was an independent third party (kind of an OAuth flow) with a well established presence and data policy?

(i.e., one with a face and name that you could sue if they did something bad with your address?)

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Hm... I'm not sure if this is enough to defeat the strategy.

It looks like even with that service, you have to sign up for Form 1583.

Even if they're willing in incur the cost, there's a real paper trail pointing back to a real person or organization. In other words, the bot operator can be identified.

As you note, this is yet another additional cost. So, you'd have say ... $2-3 for the card + an address for the account. If you require every unique address to have no more than 1 account ... that's $13 per bot plus a paper trail to set everything up.

That certainly wouldn't stop every bot out there ... but the chances of a large scale bot farms operating seem like they would be significantly deterred, no?

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Yeah, BlueSky has this concept of user moderation lists. It's effectively like subscribing to a adblock filter. There might be some things blocked by patterns (e.g., you could have one that blocks anything that involves spiders) and there might be others that block specific accounts (e.g., you could have one that blocks users that are known to cause problems, are prone to vulgar language, etc).

I think the problem with credibility scores in general though, is it's sort of like a "social score" from black mirror. Real people can get caught in the net of "you look like a bot" and similarly different algorithms could be designed to game the system by gaming the metrics to look like they're not a bot (possibly even more so than some of the real people).

This is kind of what lead me down the route of bringing things back into the physical world. Like, once you have things going back through the normal systems ... you arguably do lose some level of anonymity but you also gain back some guarantees of humanity.

It doesn't need to be the level of "you've got a government ID and you're verified to be exactly you with no other accounts" ... just "hey, some number of people in the real world, that are subject to the respective nation's laws, had to have come into contact with a real piece of mail."

Maybe that just turns into the world's slowest UDP network in existence. However, I think it has a real chance of making it easier to detect real people (i.e., folks that have a small number of overlapping addresses). The virtual mailbox the other person gave has 3,000 addresses... if you assume 5 people per mailing address is normal that's 15,000 bots total before things start getting fishy if you've evenly distributed all of those addresses. If you've got 3,000 accounts at the same address, that's very fishy. Addresses also change a lot less frequently than IP addresses, so a physical address ban is a much more strict deterrent.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

True, though presumably users in those places would be stuck with the "less trustworthy" instances (and ideally, would be able to get their local laws changed to make themselves more trust worthy).

It's definitely not perfectly moral... but little in the world is and maybe it's sufficient pragmatic.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

That's a false equivalence. Building up society as a whole is better than trying to determine "the most relevant" voices.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

https://ipfs.tech/

I think this is the main technology behind that and it is open source... I heard something about it years ago too. I've similarly never used it and am curious now that you mention it if anyone has. I'm unsure how to actually "use" ipfs and/or what tools might use it.

I'm kind of inclined to believe it doesn't work (or doesn't work well) otherwise it probably would be a bigger deal by now and there would be a lot to show off on the ipfs website.

Edit: It looks like this provides S3 compatible storage to IPFS. However, it seems more expensive than B2... So I'm not really sure why one would use it. You'd think IPFS would be attempting to undercut traditional providers.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Don't have a lot of time right now... But if your iTunes library is DRM free music files (Apple moved new purchases to DRM-free some number of years ago when Steve Jobs was still at the helm, however if it's a song you've had a really long time you might have to pay Apple for the DRM-free slightly better quality music file), you're in good shape with something like Rhythmbox.

On the office side... I'd try using the LibreOffice suite on your current operating system instead of office and see if you can get away with it. It's the best open source office suite around ... and it's cross platform, so you should be able to tell if that's going to be a problem without going all in.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Syncthing is not a backup tool and may very well destroy all your data on its own (though this is rare).

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

You could use kopia for this (but you would need to schedule cron jobs or something similar to do it).

The way this works with kopia... You configure your backups to a particular location, then in-between runs there's a sync command you can use to copy the backup repository to other locations.

Kopia also has the ability to check a repository for bad blobs via its verify function (so you can make sure the backups stored are actually at least X% viable).

Using zerotier or tailscale (for this probably tailscale because of the multithreading) would let you all create a virtual network between the devices that lets them directly talk to each other. That would allow you to use kopia's sync functionality with devices in their homes.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

They do have versioning: https://docs.syncthing.net/v1.27.7/users/versioning

Of course, you actually have to use that, it has to work, and you have to have a strategy for reverting the state (I don't know if they have an easy way to do that -- I've never used the versioned side of things).

I have had some situations where Syncthing seems to get confused and doesn't do its job right. I ran into this particularly with trying to sync runelite configurations and music. There were a few times I had to "force push" ... and I vaguely recall one time where I was fighting gigs of "out of sync" in both directions on something and just destroyed the sync and rebuilt it to stop ... whatever it was doing.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great tool for syncing things between computers; but I would not rely on it for backup (and prefer having a backup solution on top of the synced directories). There are real backup tools out there that are far better suited to this sort of thing. I suggested Kopia, you should get some integrity checking using its builtin sync (as it won't be able to figure out what to sync if your origin is corrupted); you won't get that with a straight up rsync or a syncthing, they're not application-aware enough to know they're about to screw you over.

Restic has a similar feature but I've always found Restic's approach much more frustrating and not-at-all friendly for anyone less than a veteran in systems administration. Kopia keeps configuration in the repository itself, has a GUI for desktop use that runs jobs for you automatic, automatically uses the secrets manager appropriate for your operating system, etc ... Restic you kind of have to DIY a lot of basic things and the "quick start tutorial" just kinda ignores these various concerns.

Even if you plan to just use cron jobs, Kopia will do sane things with maintenance. Restic last I checked you still need to manually run maintenance tasks and if any job maintenance or otherwise fails, you need to make sure to unlock the repository (which if you haven't set up notifications ... well now you've got a silent backup failure and your backups aren't running).

I just kept running into a sea of "oh this could be bad" footguns with Restic that made me uncomfortable trusting it as my primary backup. I'm sure Restic can be a great tool if used in expert hands with everything appropriately setup; but nobody tells you how to do that ... and I get the feeling a lot of people are unaware of what they're getting into.

The folks making Kopia ... they seem like they really know what they're doing and I've been very happy with it. We're moving from rsnapshot to Kopia at work now as well (rsnapshot is also fairly good you've got a bunch of friends with NASes that support hard links and SSH, but it's CHATTY and has no deduplication, encryption, data integrity verification is basically left to the file system -- so you better be running ZFS -- etc).

Duplicati's developer is back too, so that might be something to keep an eye on ... but as it stands, the project has been bit rotting for a while and AFAIK still has some pretty significant performance issues when restoring data.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

rclone or rsync is probably better but see my reply a few comments down (the very long one) about protocol aware cloning vs just cloning things at the file system

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

It's not a new problem; I remember back in 2016 looking up one MAGA supporter on Twitter that seemed EXTREMELY enthusiastic via reverse image search.

I ended up finding a girl in Brazil that had presumably never set foot in "Nebraska" where this MAGA supporter was allegedly "born and raised."

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

You're definitely catching some down votes for the title (which on its surface is pretty disrespectful of moderators).

However, a side wide ban for the one irritated retort... Does seem a bit much.

I suppose the Reddit site admin assumed the entire interaction was an effort to troll and upset the moderators of Wild_Politics.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

If you're on Android there's no hope for your soul. /s

(Written on an Android phone)

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

That's interesting.

I will say, I've heard from parsec folks that the Nvidia video encoders are faster than the AMD encoders (I forget who has the better encoder AMD vs Intel).

I run AMD on Linux, for that, AMD all day everyday ... Nvidia is just historically an absolute mess under Linux. This is true both for gaming and general desktop use.

I used Nvidia for a while on Linux in laptops and in my desktop and regularly encountered issues with KDE being functional as a desktop (like the plasma panel just ... no longer updating after playing a game, so I'd think it's still 6:30 until it was obvious that it was much later and my clock was stuck). That part of the situation has definitely improved. Now that Nvidia has Wayland support in place, it's a fairly reasonable GPU for the desktop.

The games I played I never had issues with rendering, but my friend who's used my old 2080 under Linux with more games has seen a lot of weird stuff. In Monster Hunter World he gets crazy white triangles that just flash onto the screen during some fights(not sure if that's the right term?). In the recent Hunt Showdown if his post processing is set to medium he'll get fireflies rendering at the top of his screen and flying a million miles an hour like a bad trip. Turning on DLSS or FSR significantly LOWERS his frame rate (for me it's a significant uplift).

On Windows, I haven't used AMD in a long time. My brother has a 7000 series AMD card; he had some issues for the first few months he had it. He was getting game crashes with AAA titles like Battlefield more than anything else, but I think he resolved that when he stopped using MSI Afterburner (?) I vaguely recall he had some program that was messing with the fan curve in a bad way and the card was not happy about it. In terms of actual rendering though, I don't think he's had any problems with graphical glitches or performance issues. It was just some of his high end games crashing before he figured out what was messing with the card.

A friend of mine is also doing AMD under Windows with a much older Vega card and has never had any problems I've heard about; other than we played Hunt Showdown the other day and he's suffering from the "all shadows are black" thing which affects any card that doesn't support DirectX 12.1 (for some reason AMD stopped DirectX support for that card at like exactly 12.0 it seems). In any case, Crytek is going to try and fix that for folks like him (and to be fair to AMD, it also affects some Nvidia cards as well, it just seems more AMD users were attracted for some reason).

I'd say VR and emulation might be a little outside of the typical workload most people are expecting from an AMD card. A 7700 XT should definitely be rendering more stable frames in general than a 1070 and support some newer features like AV1 and such.

The VR stuff, I've never done anything with that... But in an ideal world nothing you run should actually be able to crash your system. So, it sounds like there is some kind of bug there assuming you're actually getting a blue screen or the system just hangs and stops painting new frames.

If things are outright just powering down ... that's more likely to be a PSU issue (though not having enough power can cause all sorts of weird things to happen so that might be something to verify as well/make sure you've got a big enough PSU).

Reporting the rendering artifacts to the developers/maintainers of the emulator is probably your best path forward on that part.

There are definitely some market forces at play here as well with AMD just getting fewer bug reports filed against software and against drivers so... Some of the bugs that other Nvidia users championed to be fixed on Windows, you might have to champion and reach out to people to get fixed on AMD (on Linux swap AMD and Nvidia).

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

I think ... this is going to be an uphill battle. If you're in NYC, maybe you've got a shot (simply because there are so many folks around).

However, you're looking at a minority of a minority probably within a minority of folks that you'd find attractive that are in your age group (unless liking Linux is literally the only thing that makes someone attractive to you).

I've been off and on dating sites myself for years in the Northeast Ohio area. I've used them since my early twenties and I'm now 29 really only having had one relationship come from them that actually went past a few dates; that unfortunately ended last year ... and she was in the medical field and almost completely uninterested in computers (the outdoors is what we bonded over mostly).

My advice (speaking openly as someone that ... doesn't love where he ended up): keep an open mind, try and find hobbies that you genuinely like that are more likely to involve women, and just ... focus on meeting people.

Unfortunately for me, I've found most of my hobbies outside of computers to be pretty unhelpful in meeting women (e.g., one of them is hiking, while plenty of women do it at least occasionally, starting a conversation with a girl who's all alone in the middle of woods or in a group with her friends ... well I've yet to do it, despite being a fairly social person elsewhere these days).

If you're in college, definitely take advantage of the first few years when you're doing gen-ed classes to meet people outside of any computer science related major ... and maybe consider taking some classes that just are more likely to have women in them as electives. If someone you meet is not interested, take it at face value, maybe keep them around as a friend but move on, leave the "win over the girl that wasn't interested" stuff for the movies (I've never seen it work).

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

I think there were some social blunders and connections missed because I got a decent phone later than my peers.

I got my first basic phone (a phone which barely functioned and regularly crashed doing basic things) at 16 back in 2011(?) when many in my class had gotten a basic phone by 2008. By 2010, pretty much everyone had at least a basic phone, many had smart phones.

I wouldn't write this off as an irrelevant issue in a world where so much connection is done through phones (even if you personally don't believe you were all that affected). I do think my parents decision to delay giving their shy-ish child living in a rural area a good phone (solely because they didn't have one when they were kids) was a bad decision.

Actually being able to keep up with people between classes, discuss homework, to have gotten some pretty girls numbers earlier on, etc ... that could've really changed my high school and middle school (or at least jr high) experience for the better.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Sorry for the late reply...

Calls and texts aren't really a thing any more, and most people communicate through apps instead. That means that even without a phone, there's a pretty good chance you can still be included if you have access to a computer at home.

I find this varies a lot within different social groups ... some people I know use different apps some people don't use anything other than SMS/iMessage and/or maybe Facebook messenger.

My friends and I definitely communicated with Skype and things like that. I just never really had the chance to "grow my social network" if you will as a younger teen. Like summer 2009 I did a summer gym thing (my school let students take gym in the summer before high school for the high school PE credits and lots of kids did) ... if I had a cell phone there's a good chance I might have made connections with kids that had interests other than "get on the computer and play video games (and associated 'nerdy' interests)."

So in my mind, this means that not providing a phone doesn't cut them off, it just delays communication. That means they'll have less of a chance to become addicted to all the SM BS, while still being able to be included in things. I think that's a healthy boundary to set.

That could be fair; it just kind of depends on what their peers are doing. I'd also caution against artificially creating hard barriers that won't be for them later in life. My parents didn't lock the fridge they just said we couldn't have ice cream more than one time a week. It was ultimately on us to be able to honor that agreement.

Of course that wasn't a bullet proof "solution", I'm sure we snuck some ice cream here or there ... and I'm sure we got caught at least one. But, IMO that's just part of being a kid and a couple of bowls of ice cream when we broke the rule didn't hurt anything, the rule still did its job (keeping our diets tilted towards good).

That said, absolutely none of my friends communication during HS or my communication in college was productive. We didn't "discuss homework" or anything related to school, we merely arranged hangouts and flirted, with a little gossip to round things out. I highly doubt things have changed much, because that's just what kids do. When I was young, cell phones weren't a thing, and my sister spent hours on the phone talking about nonsense with her friends. That's just how teenagers work, if they're talking to friends, they're not talking about school work.

I think this varies too. Of what I remember of college, sure the vast majority of stuff was non-school communication. However, there definitely was communication over projects (especially if I was doing something with friends vs random people in class).

That said, I'll certainly be paying attention as my kids get older.

I think this is the biggest thing. Like, nobody can tell you how to parent your kid and I'm not trying to tell you what's right. I'm just saying, my parents took a hard line stance on this, based on some made up rules about what I should or shouldn't have that was way different than what nearly every other parent was doing. I didn't have the gumption (arguably due to a mostly unrelated, hidden, depression that my parents attributed entirely to "teenage angst") to advocate for that access or ask for help and largely just accepted my situation as the best I was going to get.

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

I've never gone to pride (because I'm a straight guy); but ugh, sorry you all have to deal with that. Those folks were also the worst when I was going to UA.

Maybe Tim Walz weirdo approach is worth a shot. Make some big signs:

I JUST 
LIKE
BEING
😡

I AM
HERE
FOR BIG
SIGNS

MY SIGN
IS 
*BIGGER*
THAN YOURS

(I have no idea if that would actually be a good idea, but the idea amuses me)

Dark_Arc , 6 months ago

Well, thanks for the "invite"... :) I'll keep that in mind for future years