cecilkorik @ cecilkorik @lemmy.ca

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”

I mean, if I didn't know better, I'd start to suspect that the large multimedia corporations building walled gardens of apps in closed Smart TV ecosystems don't really want you to be able to easily tell your mom how to watch shit for free. I mean they'll let you, if you really insist on having that app available, but someone will have to pay THEM money instead first (and probably let them spy on you). That's their racket.

The reason Plex can do it is because they do make money, doing shitty stuff like this to their users, so they can use that money to open these doors into SmartTV-land. The root of the problem is that your SmartTV itself (and your mom's) is a locked down proprietary piece of shit, designed exclusively for shoving all proprietary content these media companies develop down your throat, and there are few convenient workarounds that are available to us, because of course they make workarounds as inconvenient as possible.

Unless you're willing to ditch everything proprietary and insist on open technology for everything, which is hard on its own, you're going to end up with a janky mix of proprietary and open systems that always require some compromises, because the proprietary stuff forces us to compromise. It's literally a "this is why we can't have nice things" situation.

Welcome to the enshittification phase of the economy. Everything will be enshittified, even the economy itself.

"Blatant land and money grab with impossible grind. Offers pay 2 win, but even pay 2 win doesn't get you through the grind. I'm selling all the oil I can for in-game currency and it's not even making a dent. Huge rip off"

I trust the community, but not blindly. I trust those who have a proven track record, and I proxy that trust through them whenever possible. I trust the standards and quality of the Debian organization and by extension I trust the packages they maintain and curate. If I have to install something from source that is outside a major distribution then my trust might be reduced. I might do some cursory research on the history of the project and the people behind it, I might look closer at the code. Or I might not. A lot of software doesn't require much trust. A web app running in its own limited user on a well-secured and up-to-date VPS or VM, in the unlikely event it turned out to be a malicious backdoor, it is simply an annoyance and it will be purged. In its own limited user, there's not that much it can do and it can't really hide. If I'm off the beaten track in something that requires a bit more trust, something security related, or something that I'm going to run it as root, or it's going to be running as a core part of my network, I'll go further. Maybe I "audit" in the sense that I check the bug tracker and for CVEs to understand how seriously they take potential security issues.

Yeah if that malicious software I ran that I didn't think required a lot of trust, happens to have snuck in a way to use a bunch of 0-day exploits and gets root access and gets into the rest of my network and starts injecting itself into my hardware persistently then I'm going to have a really bad day probably followed by a really bad year. That's a given. It's a risk that is always present, I'm a single guy homelabbing a bunch of fun stuff, I'm no match for a sophisticated and likely targeted nation-state level attack, and I'm never going to be. If On the other hand if I get hacked and ransomwared along with 10,000 other people from some compromised project that I trusted a little too much at least I'll consider myself in good company, give the hackers credit where credit is due, and I'll try to learn from the experience. But I will say they'd better be really sneaky, do their attack quickly and it had better be very sophisticated, because I'm not stupid either and I do pay pretty close attention to changes to my network and to any new software I'm running in particular.

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Perhaps we should have a ranked ballot of different voting choices. /s

I skimmed through most of it, it's a huge and badly organized info dump, but it seems legit, most of the research was done through the internet archive and everything it listed is verifiable and reproducible, although as far as I can tell the link to the CIA is pretty weak and relies on a single news story with a single example alleged "CIA site" that allegedly leaked out of , it's not really that hard to believe that they would have such sites. Almost certainly all spy agencies do. It's totally plausible steganography, like the numbers stations on radio, or botnet controllers quietly directing their army of bots through normal-seeming posts on normal-seeming accounts on social media. Hiding operational information in plain sight allows a useful hidden communication method that doesn't raise any obvious alarm even if it is noticed to be a bit strange or dumb. It blends in perfectly with all the other strange and dumb content on the Internet.

Obviously all the sites are gone now and there's nothing of any particular intelligence value there but the appearance and contents of the sites are still available on the archive, and of course there are at least hundreds of them, in various languages, on various topics, with a variety of different technologies in use, but the similarities also seem pretty clear. It's not much of a conspiracy this is fairly basic stuff although of course we don't have rock solid proof I don't think that would really make it any more interesting. If the CIA did come out and say "yep, those were our sites" would it actually be any more interesting? would it be less interesting? or would it be the same interesting? I think it would be the same interesting. But that's just, like, my opinion.

Digital media deteriorates too, it can be corrupted subtly or obviously and it can fail catastrophically. Backups and archival especially over the very long term are not simple or straightforward, it's easy to make mistakes and for accidents to happen and a broken link in the chain can lead to the failure of the whole chain.

"Defense in depth" is a good principle to rely on here. Digitization of physical media media makes sense and the risks are on the whole probably easier to avoid since keeping multitudes of digital copies is logisticially trivial compared to making physical copies. But that doesn't mean it's without risks, and may fail against risks that a physical copy wouldn't. Both is better than either one, and either one is better than none.

That's right, these people clearly represent and are in fact the perfect ideal for all jews and the entire jewish religion, I can tell by the fact that every jewish person I have ever met is totally against this which means they're not real jews and hate themselves and their own religion. /s

We are monsters. I am ashamed for all humans.

I think you're missing mine. I know it's not clever. I think everything it creates is either slop, plagiarism and almost always both.

My point is: An arbitrary random number generator without any stable internal model of the world would still be a bad thing if it can, without any conscious intention, trick/confuse people into thinking its so awesome and clever that they choose it to be emperor of Earth, leader of the economy, decider of reality, and build it a great throne upon which they can worship it and and an altar to burn oil on as a sacrifice to the environment. That's what LLMs are doing. It doesn't matter whether the LLMs intend to, it doesn't matter whether they have intentions at all. What matters is that it's so "well presented" that people fall for it. It's the effectiveness it has at making people fall for it that's the problem. Dismissing those people as weak, naive, stupid can't be done because their actions matter, their votes matter, their financial choices matter, they're part of the civilization we live in, and frankly, they seem to be the majority.

Fooling people is evidently all you need to do to become President of the United States and Commander In Chief of the world's largest military with personal control over a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons. Fast talking computers could be dangerous when they're infinitely faster, and probably smarter and slightly less neurotic than the current president. "Hey, come to think of it, has anyone ever even seen the 2028 president-elect on anything other than a screen?"

That's arguing the same thing.

I was reading it as "Google Apple Facebook Associated Mafia" which also works.

Do you have to agree with everyone you give your money to? What sort of economy would that be?

Probably a pretty nice one, actually.

Yeah that would be bad. I think we can agree that if there's one thing that's even more important than the ideology of an author, it's definitely capitalism, which is conveniently not an ideology at all, just one of the fundamental laws of the universe. That's why it's important to not pirate things for ideological reasons.

I agree, until Canada Post is safe and Canada's new Housing crown corp is established and building a decent track record, I'm not even going to entertain the idea of buying up more of the private sector, which often just ends up being a government bailout rewarding bad behavior. Let Tim Hortons sink or swim on their own. Also fuck the TFW program in particular. That is all.

The government can stop abuse of temporary foreign workers without buying each company that does it though. That's not sustainable nor effective, That's like trying to fix a plumbing leak one bucket at a time.

Redesigning or removing the temporary foreign workers program could be effective, it just requires political will to endure the screaming and retaliation of private business interests who count on abusing it for profit.

Besides, even if the government WAS interested in buying Tim Hortons and there was a solid case for it, they should be financially responsible about it and do what private businesses do, abusing their own position to drive it into near-or-actual-bankruptcy before making their bid of pennies on the dollar to pick up only the parts that have actual value, like the brands and the store locations. If they wanted to try to drive it into bankruptcy, they might start by suddenly getting rid of their ability to abuse the temporary foreign workers program. Just a thought.

Uh, no... I am not sure if I should be flattered or offended, but I can assure you I loathe AI chatbots too. I am just your regular garden variety autist who found demographics a particularly interesting and deep rabbit hole when I was working on a mostly unrelated degree.

Intuitively cold winter air is cold, but that's just our perspective. From a physics perspective any air that exists anywhere on this planet at any time has still got huge amounts of heat stored in it (it's literally hundreds of degrees above absolute zero, the most blisteringly cold arctic air still represents a huge reservoir of physical heat energy even when it's cold enough to kill us). A heat pump doesn't care about how heat feels to humans, it uses physics: specifically evaporation and condensation of refrigerants to extract heat from the cold winter air outside (making that air even colder while the refrigerant absorbs heat from it) and move it indoors (making it warmer when the refrigerant releases the heat).

To use a water level analogy, the heat pump moves its heat out of an absolutely massive heat reservoir (the planet's atmosphere) that at any point might be slightly lower or higher than the level you actually want, and deposits the results of its pumping into a tiny reservoir (your indoor air) that it is responsible for controlling the heat level of. In both cases there is lots and lots of water (in the analogy, heat) available to pump around and the contents of your little tank makes no real significant difference either way, depending on how much water you need in that tank you can easily pump it in either direction you want, within reason, but eventually if the water levels start to get too different, you start running into practical problems with pressure and the amount of power you need to pump the water level up that high to overcome the height difference, and can also run into problems with inlets being uncovered if the water level drops too low. In the analogy this represents the range of temperatures and pressures where the refrigerant can still change between a gas or a liquid, which is determined by the design of the system and the refrigerant used.

Air conditioners do the same thing (in fact essentially ARE the same thing) as heat pumps, it just makes more sense to us intuitively because we're familiar with how they work, and are unfamiliar with the idea of this principle being reversed. Imagine if you put the hot-air blasting outdoor part of an air conditioner inside, and put the cold part that normally lives inside your house, outside. Now turn it on, and it starts working as a heater, and it's making the outdoors colder for no reason, and we call this "wasteful" but when you actually need heat it's actually not wasteful. So we add a reversing valve so you can make either end the hot side or the cold side, as needed, and you've got a heat pump. They sometimes select different refrigerants that are more efficient across the desired temperature ranges and they will have some different sizing considerations and mechanical needs to operate optimally, but fundamentally they're the same kind of machine, just with a slight rearrangement of the plumbing.