TootSweet @ TootSweet @latte.isnot.coffee

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2 yr. ago

I interpreted it the same way devexxis did, but on rereading, I think you're right.

Wow. I couldn't possibly be any more your opposite in this regard. I try very hard not to run proprietary software. For safety reasons. And when I do run proprietary software, I do my best to sandbox it. I don't let my Nintendo Switch talk to my home network often. I hacked my robotic vacuum cleaner not to phone home. I do my (U.S.) taxes on stupid paper because there aren't pure-FOSS options for filing electronically.

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." - Linus Torvalds

Open Source software is (caveat, qualifier) safer than proprietary software. (And I'll get to the caveats and qualifiers later.)

Software exploits are possible only because of mistakes, oversights, negligence, or mistaken assumptions on the part of the developer of user of the code. More eyes on the code help suss out those mistakes, oversights, negligence, and mistaken assumptions, creating a more secure (and bug-free) piece of software.

Besides that, companies that make proprietary software have incentives to put evil things into said proprietary software that endanger you to enrich them. (For instance, phone apps collecting personal data about you only to sell to advertising companies.) Companies that contribute to open source software also have incentives to put evil things into open source software, but when everyone has access to view the source code, it's a lot harder to get away with that. (Not to say it's never happened that purposeful vulnerabilities have gotten into open source software, but it's a lot easier to catch such vulnerabilities in open source software than proprietary software.)

As others have said, the way algorithms related to security are designed, the security doesn't depend on keeping the algorithm secret. (But rather, keeping a "key" -- a bit of data generated by the algorithm -- secret.)

Now, caveats.

I do believe there is some extent to which open source software is trusted to be safe even when the "chain of custody" is questionable. There are ways to ensure integrity, but there are repositories such as NPM that carry large amounts of open source software that is used by huge numbers of people on a regular basis that don't utilize sufficient integrity checking techniques. As a result, there have been a few cases where malicious code has sneaked into NPM and then into codebases.

There are also cases where governments have gotten malicious code into open source projects. (Though, I'd expect that's more of a problem with proprietary software, not less.)

Actually, the answer turns out to be pretty interesting.

The short version is that what colors are considered "distinct" are heavily influenced by culture and Newton, from whom we get ROYGBIV, came from a culture which valued the dye called "indego."

Edit: It also seems Newton thought the number 7 had cosmic significance and thought there ought to be 7 colors.

More info in this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf7WT6TLy8s

Let's see if we can get them to to sixth largest!

Yeah. I'm definitely for some pretty seamless integration. Probably in the optimal case:

• The wikis would be hosted on the same domain as the Lemmy servers.
• Any account you had on the associated Lemmy server would automatically exist to the wiki as well.
• If you were logged into Lemmy, you'd also be logged into the wiki.
• Only mods would be able to enable wikis but the process of doing so would be trivially easy.
• I'd personally say that it makes the most sense to just have the mods link the associated wiki from the sidebar rather than creating new special interface features to add a link outside the sidebar or whatever. (Unless some kind of plugin infrastructure that would allow that already exists.)

But all that can be done without putting any wiki-specific code into the Lemmy or Lemmy-UI source repositories, which I think is preferable for the same reason you wouldn't add flight simulator code to a spreadsheet application. (Ok, maybe a bad example, but you get my point.)

Edit: And I'll admit there are both upsides and downsides to my approach here. One downside would be that some Lemmy instances would offer attached wikis and others wouldn't. It's possible it also just wouldn't catch on at all and nobody would enable attached wikis as a feature if it was a whole separate step to setting up "Lemmy".

Mostly I mean the wikis for really informational subreddits like /r/bodyweightfitness or /r/personalfinance. Those would usually be the best place to get information on whatever topic that wasn't mostly sponsored propaganda. And it had uses that the threads didn't fill because the wikis would take a comprehensive view of the subject matter whereas threads would be about one or another detail.

Who knows. Maybe I was the only one who felt like they got benefit from the wikis. Ha!

Trippy and wholesome. Love it!

Just what comes to mind. Es Posthumus and Two Steps From Hell don't really have lyrics (or at least none my brain gets distracted by.)

I find Lazy Eye by The Silversun Pickups is very chill. Good "studying" music.

Beyond that, mostly music I'm very familiar with and listen to a lot. Music I know so well it doesn't surprise me at all.

I don't want to be constantly comparing Lemmy to Reddit, but on Reddit, the wikis were invaluable. As helpful as the threads were, the wikis frequently had amazingly useful info.

That said, I'm not sure I think adding wikis to Lemmy is the right way to go. "One thing well" and all that.

Maybe instead, some ancilliary wiki platform that can be run alongside Lemmy that lets a community mod easily set up a wiki that can be linked to in the sidebar?

Or we could go really simple and just link specific posts in the sidebar with useful information of the kind you'd otherwise put into a wiki.

I had some hands-on computer repair training at a private school once. One old machine wouldn't boot, complaining that it couldn't find the keyboard which was plugged into it. I unplugged it while the computer was on. At the time, unplugging a keyboard while the computer was on was... not a good thing. There was a little curl of smoke, a scorch mark on the motherboard, and a sustained tone from the chassis and that computer breathed its last.

Later, in college, I used the "net send" command on random people in open labs just to watch how confused they got.

Oh I'm with you. There used to be (though I haven't been able to find any lately) Tor web gateways that would let you visit a tor site without having to run Tor or Tor Browser yourself. They don't protect your identity when you use them the way using Tor Browser protects your identity, but they could be used. And some onion sites still come up as results when you search DDG for something like "Hidden Wiki site:onion.pet". The result doesn't link you to the .onion address, but to a .onion.pet address that takes you to the same page/site.

As far as Tor and speeds, I think Tor imposes very large latencies (that is, it takes a few seconds to get a download started), which is more what you're experiencing when you notice sites "being slow" when browsing through Tor. But bandwidth isn't affected all that much.

One caveat, though. When downloading through Tor, your request is being proxied through a chain of proxies. If any one of those is slow or purposefully limits speeds, that will limit your bandwidth. That's a problem, maybe 30% of the time or so. But there are commands you can use to tell Tor to "please select a different route." After doing that once or twice, you'll generally get a decently fast "circuit."

Just as a test, I downloaded the latest Arch Linux ISO (which is 853MB in size) from here both via Tor and directly. Direct took 7 minutes 36.324 seconds for an average speed of 1.869MB/s. Tor took 9 minutes 26.627 seconds for an average speed of 1.505MB/s. In short, a pretty moderate difference in speed.

And, yes, this is a highly unscientific, n=1 test, but I think it's pretty well in line with what I've seen in the past.

I guess I must not mind whatever speed limits there are, because I use yt-dlp over Tor frequently.

I'm not sure what you mean by "you can't index onion links in search engines", though.

Closest thing I've found was /r/OpenDirectories on the site that shall not be named. Which is to say, no there's not really any such thing as "Pirate Bay but for direct downloads." At least not that I've found.

Pirate Bay but for direct downloads does seem like something that might be able to thrive on the dark web, though, doesn't it? I wonder why something like that hasn't become a thing and gotten big.

I suppose some site that just acts like a searchable directory of links to IPFS could be used in combination with IPFS web adapter sites. But I haven't found anything like that.

Mine was pretty spontaneous. I was studying psychedelics at the time (just because they're fascinating) but I've never done any before or since.

It was... hard to describe. It lasted several days at least, but my sense of time was greatly altered and it's hard to say how long exactly. I remember feeling like my mind wasn't fighting against itself the way it usually did. It felt like everything I did, my whole brain was all working/pulling in the same direction. Pretty much all I wanted to do was meditate for hours on end, and doing so was a wild experience with some very interesting visuals. I also came to some revelations about the nature of reality. (Though looking back, those revelations were the logical conclusion of several beliefs I had held before this experience. I think this experience just brought those multiple unrelated beliefs together and crystalized them into one cohesive worldview.) I did experience some synesthesia during the experience as well. The kind wherein seeing somebody else experience something, you feel it in your own body. I was watching a dancer on TV and feeling the proprioceptive feelings I imagined she was feeling.

Edit: I should add that it never really "ended." It tapered off over time until I was (in some ways) back to normal, but I couldn't identify really when I was back to normal. It was more like asymptotically approaching normal. And, I'll also say that in other ways, I'm still changed by that experience. And only for the better.

First off, you're awesome and so is your daughter!

It does seem like there are at least two potential aims here: to make a game and to become a better coder.

If the primary aim is to make a game, there's RPGMaker. I'm not very familiar with it, but from what I understand it's a lot more drag-and-drop game assembly than programming, though it does have some scripting capabilities.

If the aim is more about becoming a better coder and expanding her capabilities, PyGame is a very popular Python library for making games. And Python is widely touted as "a great beginner language."

Python is (qualifier, qualifier) "slow," and so it's possible she'll run into some limitations there as well, but I'd imagine it should be a ton less restrictive than Scratch, and well up to the task of "a trimmed down 'legend of Zelda: link to the past.'"

Java is a language that people make "real" games in (like the original Minecraft, for instance.) But... and this'll be a controversial statement, but... my experience is that it makes people worse coders. As in, it causes brain damage that is either overcame later or negatively affects their coding abilities for the rest of their careers. Python is very much the opposite; it's the kind of language that makes you a better coder for having worked with it.

I've been working with Golang and Ebiten lately, and I'm enjoying it, but it's definitely a very "really real" programming language that may require a certain amount of background knowledge to appreciate the simplicity of. It's an option, though. And I do believe it would be the kind of option you'd use if you were making a "real game" (like the kind that would be sold on Steam.) At her age, I probably would have been excited by the fact that that option also gives you a bona fide .exe file.

Of all of those options, I'd probably be most inclined to nudge her toward PyGame/Python but lay out all the options above (along with any other options you come across.)

Good luck to both of you! It's always awesome to see 10-year-olds getting into game development. When I was 10, I wrote games and other programs in QBasic. That's a dinosaur these days, but your daughter's interest in software development may well turn into a lifelong interest and fulfilling career like it did for me.

Nazis aren't people who say some anti-semitic stuff sometimes. Nazis hurt and kill people.

Agreed. Wasn't trying to say otherwise. But I'd think recovering nazis are frequently "people who say some anti-semitic stuff sometimes." I've known people who have deconverted from both mainstream religions and cults who have needed support in the transition out, and those folks were "kindof brainwashed but working on it." And I don't think nazi groups are entirely dissimilar from cults.

I don't remember which episode specifically, but I remember Ian Danskin ("Innuendo Studios" on YouTube and creator of "The Alt-Right Playbook" series) making some points about how it's good to have spaces meant for people who are "kindof a nazi, but working on it." (He also said those spaces need to be kept well away from safe spaces for marginalized groups, which of course makes sense.)

No no no. That's not how dogs would wear pants at all!

I've run into a couple of cryptobros on Lemmy, but not many.

These programs you're referring to are voluntary, right?

So, the folks who would be against such programs on that basis think that if a(n arguably former) nazi enters the group not yet fully free of the bigotry they've taken concrete steps to overcome and says something, say, anti-semitic, if the program doesn't kick them out on a zero-tolerance policy, then the program is supporting (or at least insufficiently condemning) anti-semitism?

Edit: on rereading, I get the feeling you're saying something more like some people think having anything to do with (even recovering) nazis is tacit complicity or something.