Zak

Zak , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

I'm not immunocompromised or any other kind of high-risk and I wear an N95 mask in most indoor public settings.

I plan on doing it until something changes. That could mean any of:

• SARS-CoV-2 mutates into a dominant strain with a low risk of long-term disability
• A new vaccine is developed that reduces the risk of long-term disability following COVID, or probability of infection to virtually nil
• Monitoring programs, such as CDC wastewater testing show a low risk of infection

It seems to me people collectively decided to stop caring about COVID even though most of the risks that were present two years ago still exist. I would therefore ask the inverse: why stop protecting yourself before the danger is over?

Zak , 2 days ago

That's correct; the omicron variant that became dominant a bit over two years ago was more contagious and less deadly than those that preceded it. Current variants are similar to omicron in those respects.

The rate of long-term disability is still high.

Zak , 3 days ago

The article has a weirdly alarmist tone to it.

Yes, there are a bunch of people claiming to know loopholes in the law through which they don't need a license to drive and the county sheriff (who will absolutely arrest them for driving without a license) is the supreme authority. A few of them will resist the police with violence. People unsuccessfully advancing crackpot legal theories and a few isolated incidents of fighting the police are not a threat to the rule of law.

Zak , 6 days ago

Major privacy issues that come to mind include:

• App store lock-in on iOS combined with terms incompatible with the GPL mean that some of the most privacy-respecting software cannot be distributed for Apple's mobile devices.
• Apple proposed, but ultimately did not implement client-side scanning for end-to-end encrypted cloud storage. That such a thing even made it to the public proposal stage shows either incompetence (unlikely) or a lack of serious commitment to privacy (more likely). Apple's proposal may have emboldened EU regulators who are trying to mandate client-side scanning for encrypted chat apps.
• Browser engine lock-in on iOS means hardened third-party browsers are unavailable.
• The popularity of Apple's platform-exclusive iMessage service in the USA may be hindering adoption of cross-platform encrypted messaging. On the other hand, without it perhaps most of its current users would use SMS, which is obviously worse.

Zak , 7 days ago

How democratic of them.

Zak , 8 days ago

TikTok is really popular operating on essentially the same principle. I, for one want nothing to do with that.

Zak , 10 days ago

The charges are absurd

Why? Lying on the gun purchase background check form is a felony. It says so right above the signature line on the form. The evidence he lied on the form looks pretty strong.

I do realize the crime is not prosecuted often, but that seems like a mistake. The Charleston church shooter, for example should have failed his background check and been prosecuted for the same crime.

Zak , 9 days ago

27 CFR § 478.11 addresses that. The court is not making new law here.

Such use is not limited to the use of drugs on a particular day, or within a matter of days or weeks before, but rather that the unlawful use has occurred recently enough to indicate that the individual is actively engaged in such conduct. A person may be an unlawful current user of a controlled substance even though the substance is not being used at the precise time the person seeks to acquire a firearm or receives or possesses a firearm.

Zak OP , 11 days ago

Abandoned doesn't necessarily imply no longer useful. Sometimes, though rarely in the modern world software is finished.

I may give it a try. It does actually have the features I'm asking for.

Zak OP , 11 days ago

That's a valid point, though it looks like Popfile's installation instructions call for manually installing libraries, presumably current ones. I think it processes only text, not PDFs or images, which are traditional sources of vulnerabilities. I'm fairly certain it doesn't attempt to execute Javascript. It is, itself written in Perl, which is memory-safe.

It's worth considering security because there's so much malware out there trying to spread indiscriminately, but Popfile is less vulnerable than an Android app (which bundles its dependencies) or anything written in C (which is subject to all kinds of memory management bugs).

Zak , 12 days ago

According to a memory snapshot from Firefox 126 devtools, with uBlock Origin, immediately after a fresh page load:

• old.reddit.com: 52.54 mb
• new.reddit.com: 93.48 mb
• lemmy.world: 54.44 mb
• old.lemmy.world: 20.25 mb

I imagine both versions of Reddit would be worse without the adblocker. There are multiple frontends for Lemmy, and I did not test them all. Other browsers might differ slightly.

Zak , 12 days ago

Lemmy.world hosts at least five web frontends, which are in the frontpage sidebar:

• The default Lemmy UI
• https://a.lemmy.world - Alexandrite UI
• https://photon.lemmy.world - Photon UI
• https://m.lemmy.world - Voyager mobile UI
• https://old.lemmy.world - A familiar UI

It's possible to use other frontends as well, which don't necessarily have to be hosted by your Lemmy server.

Zak , 12 days ago

Are there React apps that don't have memory leaks?

Zak , 13 days ago

Not yet, but they're actively developing ActivityPub support.

Zak , 18 days ago

I would LOVE feedback from folks if you get a chance to try it out!

I have feedback completely unrelated to the recommendation engine: please consider using CSS prefers-color-scheme instead of defaulting to light mode.

Zak , 18 days ago

Privacy can mean different things in different contexts.

Some peoples' thoughts go first to sharing content with a restricted audience. ActivityPub isn't good at that since the admins of every server involved can access the content. That's also true of centralized social media, though sometimes the admins of those services seem farther removed from users' social lives. E2EE chat like Matrix and Signal are good options for that use case, and there has been work on adding E2EE options to some ActivityPub software.

I usually treat social media as public, so I'm not concerned with restricting access to things I share that way. I am, however concerned about service providers monitoring behavior like how long I spend looking at a particular post, or trying to track my browsing habits on third-party websites. Fediverse projects do not normally include those kinds of behaviors, and it would be scandalous if a service provider added them.

Zak , 18 days ago

I block ads pretty aggressively, and I find it surprising anyone else can tolerate the modern internet without doing so.

Zak , 21 days ago

Andrew Cuomo has not been convicted of a crime, so he cannot be sentenced to prison.

Zak , 23 days ago

People in Europe switched to internet based messaging (mostly WhatsApp) as soon as smartphones got popular enough.

Zak , 29 days ago

I looked over the metrics in the article and none of them approximate what percentage of Americans are struggling to pay their bills. That number probably closely approximates the percentage who think the economy isn't doing well. This is a different situation from people wrongly believing crime rates are high.

Zak Mod , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

This review actually tested the laser's output and found it to be 2mW, which should be fine for pets if you're not pointing it directly into their eyes (which I assume you wouldn't).

My one concern is that green lasers are actually diode pumped solid state lasers which produce green light by frequency-doubling infrared, and some designs can actually emit much more infrared than green. I'm not sure if the author tested for infrared.

Edit: I asked the author about IR and they got 2.1mW@1064nm, with the caveat that the laser power meter may not be very precise at low power levels. That's probably not dangerous.

Zak Mod , 30 days ago

One of the things that makes IR dangerous is that there's no blink reflex, but that's a problem when it's IR-only, or the IR is much more powerful than the visible light. There have been cases of green lasers where the IR significantly exceeds the visible light and the advertised power level, but that's not what was measured here.

The total power is under 5mW, which is low-risk even with a brief, accidental direct eye exposure.

Zak , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

more and more human labor to “pay back the debts” of previous generations

There is no law of economics stating that a generation of people has to consume more than it produces.

Zak , 1 month ago

While older laws concerning statutory rape criminalize sex with children by way of the idea that they cannot consent to sex, modern laws concerning sexual abuse of children usually don't reference the concept of consent. This allows for more severe penalties when there's actually no consent, as the offender can also be charged with sexual assault.

Zak , 1 month ago

Lemmy search works pretty well on larger servers, and they're indexed by major web search engines.

The microblog side of things is worse, with Mastodon long having near-useless search because it might "encourage negative social dynamics" or some such. Some other software, such as Akkoma has had better search, and Mastodon has recently improved somewhat for accounts that opt into being searchable. Mastodon directs search engines not to index most pages.

Some people get very upset about attempts to build general-purpose fediverse search tools.

Zak , 1 month ago

I think it's a small, but very loud minority who have unrealistic expectations about how other people will use data they share in a manner that's inherently rather public. I kind of see where they're coming from, but ActivityPub with open federation doesn't work that way.

Zak , 1 month ago

There are two general areas:

• The history of the internet is full of examples of companies taking data about or creative output from people and trying to make money from it without permission, in ways the original creator might not like. Nobody has gone there with a Fediverse scraper or search project that we know of yet, but it's going to happen if the Fediverse gets big enough.
• Some people want to be able to easily share things with a certain audience without them being easily discoverable by a different audience. There are of course privacy settings to control visibility and software like Matrix that provides not only access control by cryptographic security, but those add friction. It's only possible for this group to have it both ways if nobody develops good search tools, which turns some of them into bullies.

Zak Mod , 1 month ago

I told a friend who recently played through that game that Alan Wake needs an Acebeam X75.

Zak , 1 month ago

The proposed solution of an intermediate server caching embeds is needlessly complex. The first server a link is posted to can fetch the embed, then push it out to every server receiving the post.

Zak , 1 month ago

In this case, generating fake excerpts is not something a user on a server controlled by someone else can do; they have to operate a malicious server themselves. Defederation is a good solution to malicious servers.

Certainly someone very determined could spin up a bunch of malicious servers and put out a bunch of posts containing fake excerpts, but they'd need followers to get any reach on the microblog side of the fediverse. They could spam Lemmy communities, but users would notice and downvote/report the posts.

So I think "just defederate" probably is an adequate solution here, at least as things currently sit. Were the fediverse to grow by an order of magnitude, I think it would need a reputation system to add a bit of friction to a brand new server or user getting a lot of reach quickly.

Zak , 1 month ago

I think they mean like IRC, Matrix, or Discord: real-time chat rather than asynchronous. They may mean such a thing integrated into a Lemmy client, but it's pretty unclear in the original question.

Zak Mod , 2 months ago

Or an old one. We've had independent forums like candlepiwerforum and budgetlightforum for decades.

Zak , 2 months ago

I've found NPR to be pretty good at that. It's particularly apparent when it comes to Trump's lies about the 2020 election; they are consistent about pointing out when claims have been conclusively disproven, and often use the word "lie".

That said, I agree with Berliner's fundamental point; I've noticed an increasing slant in the stories NPR emphasizes. It's not that their reporting is unfair, but their choice of what to cover aligns pretty closely with the positions of the progressive left.

Zak , 2 months ago

Have you read Berliner's article yet? He gives three examples:

• NPR talked a lot about investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign while investigations were ongoing, but was "sparse" in its coverage of the Mueller report's finding that there was no credible evidence of such collusion.
• Hunter Biden's laptop, containing evidence of influence peddling was deemed non-newsworthy; Berliner believes it was newsworthy.
• NPR dismissed the SARS-CoV-2 lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory and failed to report on it seriously. While it is not the leading hypothesis, there's credible evidence for it, and at some points in the past the evidence looked fairly compelling.

These examples are very different from ignoring someone who claims without evidence that strawberries cause cancer, that the 2020 election was rigged, or that wildfires in California were started by Israeli space lasers.

Zak , 2 months ago

It makes some sense to me in that some media might contain any actual abuse, e.g. images generated and shared publicly by underage teenagers without any coercion. I think most of us would still consider it exploitative for other people to share and view that media.

Zak , 2 months ago

If your server has member accounts in the EU, or is publicly viewable in the EU, your service is most likely impacted by this regulation, even if you are not based or hosted in the EU.

I am not pleased by the EU's attempts to assert extraterritorial jurisdiction just because things are viewable in the EU, and I hope that non-EU countries will not cooperate with any attempts to enforce it. Of course they do have jurisdiction over big tech firms that have a physical and legal presence there.

Imagine Russia or Iran doing something similar and the problem becomes obvious. The EU can, of course create a Great Firewall and block internet services that don't comply with its laws, but I think most of its citizens wouldn't tolerate that.

Zak , 2 months ago

The article is aimed at people running fediverse servers, most of whom are not doing it as a business. Someone running a Lemmy server in Brazil shouldn't have to know or care about EU laws.

Companies who do business in those countries generally have a dedicated arm to deal with those countries

So do bigger tech companies that do business in the EU, and that's why they're unambiguously subject to EU laws.

Zak , 2 months ago

Southwest assigns you a position in line. You can pay for a better one. Their passengers don't spend a lot of time waiting in ad-hoc lines before their group is called like other airlines.

Zak , 2 months ago

Air springs with pushbutton height adjustment on a Subaru XT.

Zak , 2 months ago

No. You'll tell them what you like, but you might not tell them what you can't look away from.

The latter is more useful for manipulating you into buying stuff or just spending more time on their platforms.

Zak , 2 months ago

compared to the States, apparently bog standard there is like 87?

That's not quite accurate. Octane ratings in most parts of the world are RON, which tends to be 8-12 points higher than the more difficult MON rating. In North America, the average of the two is used resulting in a lower rating for the same fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating#Measurement_methods

Zak , 2 months ago

Overtaking damn near anything would redline the (very new, less than 10k miles) engine.

While this suggests it might have been underpowered, how high the engine revs during acceleration in a modern automatic transmission vehicle is determined by software that operates the transmission and the driver's control inputs, not how old the engine is. The designers of the car probably decided that was the best way to deliver the performance you asked for. They may even have been correct in that assessment.

Zak , 2 months ago

Doesn't seem to work.

$ curl https://threads.net/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:potus@threads.net

{"subject":"acct:potus@threads.net","links":[{"href":"https://threads.net/ap/users/17841445266116124/","rel":"self","type":"application/activity+json"},{"href":"https://www.threads.net/@potus","rel":"http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page","type":"text/html"}]}

$ curl https://threads.net/ap/users/17841445266116124/

{"success":false,"error":"Not found"}

Zak , 2 months ago

Weird, maybe you have to use an ActivityPub server to complete the lookup?

I was testing it with curl because my self-hosted Mastodon server doesn't find it.

Edit: alternatively, try doing a Webfinger lookup for @potus directly?

The leading @ is incorrect for a webfinger account lookup.

$ curl https://threads.net/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:@potus@threads.net

{"success":false,"error":"Not found"}

Zak , 2 months ago

Look up the block lists of popular servers. You'll find some examples of what you're looking for there.