Ferk @ Ferk @lemmy.ml

Posts

0

Comments

285

Joined

4 yr. ago

what if, instead of a group of old men wearing weird wigs, it was actual representatives of the people chosen through democratic centralism?

You are assuming that people will never ever choose the group of old men.. or that the group of old men isn't gonna create an alternative progressive looking group that actually is just as bad, but happens to be very good at propaganda, marketing and appealing to popular social media poison trends / manipulation.

And I say "never ever" because the most dangerous thing is that a malicious group only needs to gain power once, in such a no-barriers system, to impose a dictatorship.

If electing officials were that easy, the people in Berlin would not have needed a referendum to push for this law, the elected officials would have pushed for it instead.

Of course, you can advocate for having direct democracy at any step of the way, but then you are essentially also doing separation of power, since you are essentially translocating the tribunal to the entire population, and it would be just as separate and varied as the whole country itself. I'd argue that direct democracy is the opposite of centralization of power.

It's so much of a hurdle that all fascist regimes have been forced to weaken the division and ultimatelly break it completelly in order to build a fascist regime.

A "progressive law" is easy for a fascist in power to overthrow if they actually are able to weaken the division of power.

Why do you think Trump has been able to do a lot more in this term than in the previous one? Because he has been able to weaken that division, the judicial system is on his side, and he has a lot more connections with people inside the state now.

Ok,. so lets imagine your example from Berlin: would the situation have been better if there was no division of power and the same group of old men in a tribunal were the ones deciding the referendum should be made, deciding what laws should be passed, how should they be written and in which manner should they be executed, with which level of strength?

Division of power also means that if a group of old men in the legislative dictates a horrible anti constitutional law, there's a chance the law can be repelled due to the judiciary being compelled to do so.

He didn't say that separation by itself is sufficient. So naturally just having separation is not enough.

However, it's a fact that a dictator needs, by definition, to break the separation of power in order to truly become the authoritarian leader with control over the country.

So NOT having separation of power is actually necessary to destroy a democracy.

I feel that trying to defend those things that someone would need to break in order to remove democracy is not a bad idea if we want to maintain democracy.

There are also a lot of other things that are necessary for a dictatorship.. such as the dictator not being held accountable (meaning.. transparency and mechanisms for accountability would be another principle to maintain democracy), or the dictator suppressing political opposition or dissent (so protecting opposition, whistleblowers and dissent, instead of prosecuting it would be another one). And I'm sure there are many others.

I mean.. sure, you can, in theory, have a democracy without those things... but the more safeguards you remove the more and more you are allowing traits of dictatorship to creep in..

HDR and EXIF are great changes.. APNG, if already being used for some apps/services, seems a logic choice. Maybe it'll finally mean the end of gifs once and for all?

What I'm more excited for though, is the improvements in compression that the article hints that are being worked on. Specially if it can beat other more modern formats that have added lossless compression like jpegxl. I feel it's best to have separate formats for lossless and lossy, to prevent the off-chance of lossyness getting through.

IANAL, but I feel that coffee shop case would not be different if the software were under AGPL... if you are providing a service to other people, even if "the other people" are the customers to your shop, it could be argued that under the terms of the AGPL (not to be confused with GPL) they should have the right to see the source of the service that they are making use of.

But if the SOWPL requirement really does apply to private code that isn't providing service to others, the implication would be that even if you are the only user (no coffee shop customer), and even if you are the only one who knows about it, you would still need to make the source code public in some way... which I feel this is very impractical and probably unenforceable anyway.

Even if you did block it, the fact that you blocked it is also trackable.. so it might actually single you out even more, and it'll still allow them to fingerprint your browser (you can test your fingerprint here).

It might make more sense to randomize / spoof the data so that it becomes inconsistent and useless so that you aren't identifiable.

alias lt='ls -t | less'

Good idea! I'll steal that but I would rather be able to give a directory path as parameter (and show in colors, and don't pause if less than 1 page of content, and support the scrolwheel), also piping ls forces it to be 1 single column so might as well show more details, personally I'm gonna use this instead:

    
lt() { ls -t --color=always -Fgoh "$@" | less -RF --mouse; }

  

Also, printf '\a' will output an alert bell character which should make the terminal beep/blink and be highlighted for attention by your wm/compositor if it's unfocused.

I have that aliased to a to get notified whenever a long running command finishes just by adding ;a at the end.

Aren't all motivations emotional?

I mean... what would be the "logical" reason to use FOSS? I feel you can't just use pure logic as a form of motivation, ever. Something that only uses logic and not emotions cannot take any action like a computer algorithm made of pure logic with no hard-coded instincts that simply operates mathematically, in reality there's no logical reason to act in one direction or another.. morals/goals are always emotionally grounded.

I feel the problem has more to do with social reasons, and pragmatic reasons.

What determines a behavior being "extreme" often has more to do with what is the average behavior of the people you surround yourself with. It's a relative term.

In a world where everyone used free software and saw that as the norm, with things being designed around software being free, someone going the extra mile just to use proprietary software would be seen as "extreme" too.

Also, I'm not convinced that the numeric balance of who killed the most from the other side in a war is what should determine who is in the wrong.

Looks like it's split in library and binary, the binary itself is smaller, but if you add the size of the library it would be about 10% bigger. At least judging by the package sizes.

• From https://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/r/rust-sudo-rs/
  • sudo-rs_0.2.5-5ubuntu1_amd64.deb 2025-06-13 15:46 536K
  • librust-sudo-rs-dev_0.2.5-5ubuntu1_amd64.deb 2025-06-13 15:46 580K
• From http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/s/sudo/
  • sudo_1.9.16p2-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb 2025-02-19 19:02 1.0M

That was long ago, I wonder if he might be using now GNU Guix, since it's a GNU project.

• Pretty Good Privacy (PGP): The first implementation of a set of methods used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, emails and files that ultimately became a standard called "OpenPGP" (RFC 4880), the program itself was commercial/proprietary. Sometimes "PGP" is also used to call the standard itself for short.
• GNU Privacy Guard (GPG): A popular Free and Open Source program from the GNU project that uses/implements the OpenPGP standards

If you are happy with the default, then just use the default.

Some of us use the terminal more than any other app, so I like my terminal to be super lightweight and snappy in all situations so it opens instantaneously (I doubt this one is like that though, if it has big dependencies like GTK / Qt), preferably if it does so without sacrificing in features (true color, things like sixel for graphics, allowing to set fallback fonts, maybe font ligatures, being able to set the app-id so my compositor can treat special terminal windows differently, etc).

I wonder if freeing up those resources also implies that much of the adware Microsoft often includes in Windows might be removed too.

if it's not: I'm skeptical that the gain in resources would be enough.

if it is: I'm skeptical that this OS won't be locked down as much as possible to prevent it to be used for anything useful beyond this specific gaming usecase and/or specific to pre-authorized devices.

I think Microsoft benefits too much from the adware they add to Windows to allow this new version of the OS to potentially be used as an alternative.

You can increase the number of items shown by bumping up the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults setting in about:config.

But you won't get a scrollbar even if you bump it till it goes beyond the height of your screen.

The approach to taxing isn't determined by this tool, but by the government. What this tool tries to prevent is hidden money exchanges, which affect both methods of taxing, not only flat taxes but also income-based taxes (since a hidden sale is giving the seller a hidden income and potentially placing them at a lower income tax class).

I'm expecting that if she has been scammed and her token was stolen, you can report this token to the police and they might be able to ask the banking system in which account was this token deposited, to hopefully trace the scammer back.

If so, this looks safer than the scams that ask grandmas to get giftcard codes.

But that's assuming that the token was obtained from grandm's bank and not that the grandma paid a scammer in some other untraceable way to obtain a fake token from the scammer. That would be a different kind of scam.

True. Also, it would be helpful to actually understand what kind of metadata is this referring to and specifically in which cases does this apply and which cases are exempt.. because I expect that if the design of a service explicitly makes it so all the metadata you can collect is not helpful/reliable, then you wouldn't be forced to redesign the service, you'll just provide metadata that's unreliable.

I feel these kind of measures never are really effective at stopping organized criminal activity (since those looking for a way will find it), what they are effective at is tracing/tracking non-criminal private use.

Does the DCO really offer a real guarantee? it looks like it just adds a Signed-off-by John line at the end of the commit, with no actual signature checking that enforces any particular version of a particular document is being acknowledged. IANAL but it doesn't look like something proven to work in court to give legal protection.

Sure, it's easier to simply add a sign-off-by line than actually accepting a legal agreement, so it reduces the barrier of entry, but if this were really enough to establish the conditions to shift liability then I don't see why companies wouldn't start using their own DCOs and extending them, essentially just being a more convenient CLA (which is a license agreement, not a copyright transfer, even if some might add terms that allow relicensing.. which anyway is already possible given the project is already MIT licensed).

I mean.. isn't the point of decentralization that you can build your own service with the same protocol and still communicate with the other services?

There are ongoing initiatives for alternative stacks speaking the AT protocol, like Northsky, or Indiesky.

There's also community-run labelers and blocklists for moderation. You can make the moderation stronger, what you might not be able to do is make it weaker if the PDS takes an account down fully, or the indexer/relay refuses to use it.