Mikina @ Mikina @programming.dev

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482

Joined

2 yr. ago

I've been using it for almost a year by now, and so far I didn't have any problems. I've not considered that problem though, so it might be happening and I was just lucky.

WhenI was setting it up, it took me only like two hours tops. The ansible project is well documented, has a clear setup guide, and the process is really just getting server with ssh access, changing DNS, changing around 5 values in the ansible config and running it.

As far as I know the Discord bridge has some limitations, the major one being that IIRC it doesn't atually support calls. But just for chatting across servers it has worked well for me.

There's also the fact that you have to either trust the project with your password (as in, the the bridfe adds a matrix bot that runs on your server, but needs your pssword), since I think it uses the web version in the background (but then you can also use it for DMs and any server), or set up a bot on the discord server you want to bridge, which obviously cant be done if you're not an admin. It's a foss project, but there's always a small risk of it gping rogue.

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Its pretty well documented and easy to follow, it took me only like an hour to setup.

I'm hodsting my own Matrix server with WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord (you don't need a bot for that, you can just share your login with the bridge) and Messenger bridge. I have all my IMs in one app, don't have to install spyware on my phone, and I can make bots that troll annoying people that message me on any platform.

Hosting it was super simple, thanks to the Ansible project that's extremely robust and well done, I literally just got a hosting, domain amd changed like 5 config values to enable the bridges I wanted, gave it an IP and ssh key, and ran it. And if I need to update, I literally "just update" (it's all wrapped up into "just" tool), and it eve handles cases where I didn't update for a while, failing graciously and telling me what I need to do maually, usually just rename some config values.

I wholly recommend it. You probably wont convince your friends to switch from

<insert app here>

I'm using a small instance on Hetzner, for 6$ a month. You could in theory get a free oracle cloud instance for it, but I didn't manage to get one.

And you can easily share it with anyone interrested, make them an account, so they can also consolidate their DMs. I'm sharing it with a few friends and colleagues.

I've seen this warning in a lot of apps, like Teams, Messenger or some authenticators, and some of the time I could simply ignore it and continue using the app. I think some of apps simply use it for push notifications that I can get by without.

Not all, though. Sometimes it simply doesn't work.

Yeah, I knew about that and the imminent Gulf stream troubles, but I never saw the actuall numbers. Like, I knew it was bad, but seeing how unimaginably large the numbers are is terrifying.

Wait what?

is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour

That's a fact I'd like to forget.

I usually just look into the docs, for most of the more basic things, search engine will find you the related function, and the docs usually have usage examples.

Also, learning to work with and read a documentation will be one of the best skills you can acquire as a programmer. I was so glad I was used to docs, because when I started to work with libraries that are under NDA (porting games on consoles, most prominently PS5), where the only resource you have are docs and internal forums without any kind of tutorials, being able to figure out what you need from docs is really nice skill to have.

I have tried using AI for non NDA programming questions, and usually I've ran into an issue that it simply just halucinates even on basic questions. For example, I was trying to figure out how to prevent Quest from sleeping, so we can run long-running automated tests, and all of the solutions were adb parameters that do not exist. Unless it's something super basic, AI will probably just send to you the wrong direction.

My favorite example, that made me realize how much must illness like this sucks, was this hbomberguy video about Tommy Tallarico, the guy behind Video Games Live.

I tried it like a year ago, maybe more, and it wasn't ready for that. The battery life was awfull (which was a SW issue of the OS not being able to stand-by properly), and accepting calls wasn't really reliable. It's more of a gimmick and great as a side-phone, but I wouldn't use it as a daily driver.

But the situation might've changed.

I was one of the first generations that had smartphones and social networks and accessible games (1996), and I spent most of my childhood just sitting home playing games. I was thankfully still forced to do sports, so I at least don't look like the negative nerd stereotype, but while I'm glad for it, I don't remember almost anything from them and simply suffered through so I can get back to a PC.

It has fucked up my life pretty considerably, and I've spent the last few years trying to unfuck it and do something else. But learning how to spend time in your late 20s, when literally the only thing you've ever done is sit at a computer is super hard, and everything feels like a boring waste of time, and I keep cycling between giving up and just continuing to ignore the problem, especially when something happens and I'm stressed, or alcohol that allows me to at least somehow function outside at events. Which I've done kind of succesfully, DJing and organizing events for local subculture, but I simply can't do that sober no matter how I try.

And that's after I spent almost a decade of trying hard to change it, including professional help, and my deep hatred for social networks and enshittification keeps me from at least wasting time on FB/IG/Twitter or other timesink sites, and I don't watch movies or tv shows.

I can't imagine what it must be for people used to just watch shows all day, while also being content with using TikTok and IG, and while I started playing at ~4 y.o on Dreamcast, got a phone during elementary school and Facebook during highschool, you now get toddlers playing on tablets or watching YT.

And now, we add AI to the mix, where you don't even have to formulate your sentences properly to be able to message someone, or invest effort into reading more difficult or longer texts, since you can just summ it or get an AI to write it. Generation that grows up with this as something normalized will be fucked up beyond recognition.

I can do that and more on my Pinephone running Kali Nethunter. While it's mostly a gimmick with awfull battery life, I've already used it a few times mostly in regards to wifi pentesting for my cyber-sec job, i.e when going to lunch onsite and you notice a new wifi AP you didn't see when inside the office you're working on.

And since it has an USB-C, I can simply plug in a dock with two USB-As, Ethernet, PD and HDMI, to turn it into a full-fledged Kali desktop.

I've heard that this kind of s(h)itting is (or was?) common in some Asian countries. Learned that when someone left shit all over the toilet at our company, in places where it would be basically impossible to get to unless you were sitting like this.

Tbh I'm not sure, I vaguely remember that hashes did play a role in how chatcontrol works, but I think it wasn't looking just for 1:1 match of known illegal content, but also for some signs? I remember reading that it had awfully high false-positive rate, which someone has to check. https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

According to the Swiss Federal Police, 80% of the reports they receive (usually based on the method of hashing) are criminally irrelevant. Similarly in Ireland only 20% of NCMEC reports received in 2020 were confirmed as actual “child abuse material”.

It works simillarly to an IRC. You have a server, that server can have channels, I think it can even do voice. But, unlike IRC, you can also use your server to talk to people on other servers, similar to how Fediverse works - if I have a server hosted on myserver.com, and someone else has a public room on server otherserver.com, I can either join the room@otherserver.com or message person@otherserver.com, all from my account on myserver.com.

And bridges are basically just bots that run on your own server, and by scraping websites/using API of the service your bridging they create a private room i.e Messenger@myserver.com, with subrooms per chat, and the bot then sends every message it recieves signed into your messenger account to the room, and vice versa - anything you send there will it forward to the real messenger, basically allowing you to chat with people on messenger through your matrix server. Which solves the problem of "Each of my friend is using different messaging service, can I have them all in one app? (The app being Matrix client)".

I have a pretty fucked-up thing of my own doing, that happened out of gross misunderstandings combined with being young. I heavily regret it, and when I realized it, I was trying my best to make up for it, but it's still unforgivable.

My first relationship was amazing, and since it was a girl from a larger and tight-knit familly (middle of 9 children, we were around 15), I spent a lot of time with them and the time with them was the best part of my life so far. But, being pretty close, they playfully insulted each other, with creative insults being basically a norm and a form of affection. It was fun, but it normalized a behavior that doesn't really translate well outside of that group of friends.

I was also at the time really interested in the whole decadence, from Oscar Wilde to Huysmans, Baudelaire, Rimbaut and the bunch, their lifestyle and pose resonated with me. And for my next relationship, at around 19, this led to a pretty awful catastrophe of a relationship. I met someone with similar interests, and we eventually developed a relationship based on exactly that pose. Lots of alcohol, grand gestures, lot of arguing but then making it up. It was theatrical, we were basically imitating relationships as we saw in the likes of Total Eclipse (Verlain vs. Rimbaud, it's... not exactly healthy). We were awfull to eachother, but it was all just a part of a consensual game that sprung from the art we were both so obsessed about. We both are nice, non-confrontional people, I'm sure it didn't stem from some kind of sadistic desire to hurt on anyone's part, the relationships both of us had before and after that attest to that. But we were young, and trying to impress eachother, and we started taking it too far. It basically turned into a full-fledged abusive relationship. Or rather, the nights were like something out of a Wilde's novel, full of absinthe, fighting and make-up sex, and mornings were compensating for it with a loving and caring relationship, but it all started as a consensual game and a pose we both were ok with.

Eventually, it turned out that one side isn't really as ok with it as it seemed. When that realization drawn on me, I was horrified. It was all good fun, we were living the live from the art we so loved, but it was never about seriously hurting or abusing the other one. When I found out, I immediately stopped it and we have tried for the next year to make up for it. It was a loving and caring relationship, we were nice to each other and I was doing my best to make her life better - not because I was trying to make up for it, but because that's how we both do all of our relationships. We were happy for a while, but it didn't last long, because some abuse you can never make up for.

I beat myself over it to this day, that I didn't realize it sooner. We were basically LARPing decadence and somewhere along the way it crossed a line, which one of us didn't notice, and the other didn't speak up until it was too late. We've eventually talked about it years later, and we agreed that it was a young and stupid thing to do. We're on an ok terms now, but it's definitely something I don't want to ever do to anyone again - and I never did.

I'm a fan of self-hosted Matrix server. You can get a dozen of bridges for those stubborn people that refuse to leave messenger/whatsapp/telegram (at a loss of encryption, and they still get your convos, but at least you don't have their spyware on your mobile and you can have everything in one app), while also being decentralized.

Self-hosting a server is actually really, really easy. It took me like half an hour, because there is an amazing Matrix Ansible Deploy script, that has a pretty easy to follow documentation, and is also one of those super-rare projects that just works. Even if I forgot to update my server for several months, I could literally "just update", and the script is clever enough to figure out what changed, tell me what I need to update in the config files (which are still only like four rows of stuff I needed to setup), and it is a really smooth experience. Even when you want to set up some bridges, for most it's literally just adding "

<service>

I mean, Apple is one of the companies that volunteered to the current optional version of ChatControl. They are already sending your messages and photos to EU to scan for "illegal" content.

I'd also add that IMO, it's also heavily caused by misalignment of social network personalization algorithms. It's very probable that someone developed a ML algorithm during the early years of FB/YT/Google (not LLM, just some kind of feedbacky ML), that takes data they have about you as input, and selects what posts to show you next to maximize your time spent scrolling on the app.

You have unimaginable amount of data (with literally billions of active users), and it could've been running and getting better for the last decade.

The algorithm gets better and better at gluing you to the screen, at manipulating and changing people. My theory is that one of the best ways how to keep someone glued to a social network is radicalization and introduction into a conspiraci theory. It probably removes you from "normal" people around you IRL, because you're now wierd, you feel smart because you've "figured out the truth", you don't spend time with people around you or read "traditional" media, because they are lying and don't get you, and the only safe space you have is the echo chamber on the social network. That sounds like a pretty good recipe how to keep people interacting on the platform, and there's not really a way how to prevent it, assuming it's a ML algorithm driving it. No one knows how it works, and it only works with one goal - maximize app time at all costs.

Just take a look how good some ML models are at the task of "text -> image". Now imagine it has billions of people and a decade to experiment, with a task "person -> next content to show". It's horrifying to think about what it would be able to manipulate you into, and it is even better at it that the image models, because it had exponentially more data and room to experiment in real time on real people.

Also - there's no way how to fight back. Even if you know about it, there are tens of thousands people like you, who are also "immune" to this approach. But the ML algorithm gets to experiment on them, and if there is a way how to manipulate even them, it will figure it out. Because it knows what approach won't work on people like you. The only way you can prevent this is by not using anything that has a personalized feed - no Google search, no FB wall, no YT recommendations, etc. This probably doesn't lead to radicalization in this case, because the goal is to keep you in the app, not radicalize. For now, at least. Thankfully, people managing the biggest social networks are reasonable people who are just running a business, and they have no reason to change the goal of the algorithm into something else than screen time, right?