rwhitisissle @ rwhitisissle @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

The theory of simulation does not address intelligence. Intelligence abstractly is something that exists inside the simulation, it may value nothing outside the simulation. You thesis is lacking evidence.

I think you mean "it may value nothing inside the simulation." Because what you wrote doesn't make any sense as it's written. In either case, my "thesis" is not a thesis. It's an observation of similarity. Both beliefs presume some kind of external motive force behind the universe's existence. I never made any argument about the intent or abstract values of whatever that thing may or may not be or how it perceives the universe it "created." I think the only thing lacking here is your reading comprehension skills, as you're clearly adding unfounded assumptions onto my observation independent of what was actually stated. Also, I posted that like a fucking month ago. Either you're necroing dead threads looking to pick a fight or whatever instance you're posting to fucked up its syncing with its federation.

A “typical” home user, whom I assume is less knowledgeable about technology, is probably the person who would benefit the most from strict firewalls installed on their device. Such an individual assumedly doesn’t have the prerequisite knowledge, or awareness required to adequately gauge the threats on their network.

They also would not realistically be doing anything that would cause open ports on their machine to serve data to some external application. It's not like someone can just "hack" your computer by picking a random port and weaseling their way in. They have to have some exploitable mechanism on the machine that serves data in a way that's insecure.

Would this not be adequate rationale for having contingencies, i.e. firewalls? A risk/threat needn’t only be an external malicious actor. One’s own mistakes could certainly be interpreted as a potential threat, and are, therefore, worthy of mitigation.

I am assuming that there's a hierarchy of needs in terms of maintaining any Linux system. Whenever you learn how to use something (and you would have to learn how to use a firewall), you are sacrificing time and energy that would be spent learning something else. Knowing how your package manager works, or how to use systemctl, or understanding your file system structure, or any number of pieces of fundamental Linux knowledge is, for a less technically sophisticated user, going to do comparatively more to guarantee the longevity and health of their system than learning how to use a firewall, which is something capable of severely negatively impacting your user experience if you misconfigure it. In other words: don't mess around with a firewall if you don't know what you're doing. Use your time learning other things first if you're a not technically sophisticated user. I also don't exactly know what "mistakes" you'd be mitigating by installing a firewall if you aren't binding processes to those ports (something a novice user should not be doing anyway).

Well, no, not necessarily. It’s important to understand what the purpose of the firewall is. If a device can potentially become an attack vector, it’s important to take precautions against that – you’d want to secure other devices on the network in the off chance that it does become compromised, or secure that very device to limit the potential damage that it could inflict.

You just wrote that "One’s own mistakes could certainly be interpreted as a potential threat, and are, therefore, worthy of mitigation." The best way of mitigating mistakes is by not making them in the first place, or creating a scenario in which you could potentially make them. Prevention is always better than cure. You should never open ports on your local network. Ever. I don't care if you have firewalls on everything down to your smart thermostat - if you need to expose locally hosted services you should be maintaining a cloud VM or similar cloud based service that forwards connections to the desired service on your internal network via a VPN like Tailscale. Or, even better, just put Tailscale's service on whatever machine you're using that needs access to your personal network. And, yes, if you're doing things like that, you would also want robust firewall protections everywhere. But the firewall simply isn't ever "enough."

Anyway, just my 2 cents. The more you know and do, the greater steps you should take to protect yourself. For someone who knows very little, the most important thing that can help them is knowing more, and there is a hierarchy of learning that will take them from "knowing little" to "knowing much," but they shouldn't/don't need to concern themselves with certain mechanisms before they know enough to reliably use them or mitigate their own mistakes. That said, if you are a new user, you're probably installing a linux distro that already comes with its own preconfigured firewall that's already running and you just don't know about it. In which case, moot point. If you're not, though, I'm assuming your goal is learning linux stuff, in which case, I've gone into that.

I think the person you're responding to already knows that and the implication of "the bad things they've done" is that they mean "the bad things their nation has done." It's a problem that Japan (or more specifically, Japan's government throughout the years) seems to have more than other nations because it's historically made a big show of its status as the only nation to ever suffer the use of nuclear weapons, and has plenty of memorials and museums to remember the event, while militantly denying, internally and externally, its own history of incredible violence and cruelty towards neighboring countries.

Gaslighting comes from the movie Gaslight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslight_(1944_film)). It refers to the practice of lying and manipulating someone into questioning their own recollection of events and general memory in order to cause them to doubt their own sanity, mental faculties, or perception of reality. This is not gaslighting because you are not being lied to about events that have happened. You're being lied to to try and convince you to not do something that you should/would typically want to do for yourself. These are different things.

That's not what gaslighting means, OP.

It’s about momentum.

Once again, the popularity of something is not what defines its status as a utility.

If I stop using Whatsapp, I now have to convince everyone I’m in contact with to also use the alternative when msging me before I can actually stop using WhatsApp.

Yes, that would be devastating, wouldn't it? "Hey, I'm not on WhatsApp anymore. If you want to reach me, please send me a text message or an email." Wow. So difficult. \s

I am confident the EU could do it. A complete transfer of ownership isn’t necessary for other countries to use exported services as public utilities. Public-private partnerships exist.

Could do it and "has a reason to do it" are very different things. There is no motivation there because WhatsApp and other, similar services, are ubiquitously available. It would be a largely pointless endeavor. Also, the EU has the same style of media freedom laws as the United States. If they ran a service, they wouldn't be able to censor the content on it. Like, legally speaking it couldn't. Hope you like a state-run platform for European Nazis....because that's what you'd get.

“American freedom of speech = Nazis get to speak” was your stance before. Now it’s "Anything but American freedom of speech = government censorship". What am I even supposed to say here?

You implied America's first amendment was a "government problem." I described what would happen if the United States got rid of it. I don't know if you need to say anything, but you might want to brush up on your reading comprehension skills.

First off, I think you are being very rude. I didn’t call you names or make assumptions, so please treat this with more respect than a Twitter thread.

I'll think about it... ...Okay, I thought about it. No.

Olvid, a French alternative to WhatsApp, was made in 2019. It took a law passing last month banning all ministers from using non in-house messaging services to stop people from using WhatsApp. I wouldn’t consider that “trivially easy”.

Except in your own example, a viable alternative was immediately available. Users didn't switch because they didn't have other options or were physically limited from using anything else. They just preferred to use WhatsApp. Switching to an alternative was trivially easy. People just didn't want to because of personal preference. It would be trivially easy for me to stop drinking coffee every morning and only drink water - there's nobody pointing a gun at my head to make me drink coffee - but I like coffee and would be annoyed by giving it up and probably have a hard time quitting. The same is probably true for many people. Should access to coffee be considered a utility? Probably not.

I already said this is a “government problem”. I said this in reference to the US government, because this isn’t really an issue for most countries :/

You mentioned WhatsApp. Several times. WhatsApp is owned by Meta, an American company. If you want it to be a public utility and its owned by an American company, which country is going to be the one to make that happen? Also, calling "completely eradicating the first amendment in order to make it so that the American government can forcibly seize and censor people on its new state run social media websites" a "government problem" is an atomic bomb level of understatement.

First off, I think you are being very rude. I didn’t call you names or make assumptions, so please treat this with more respect than a Twitter thread.

When businesses ask you to contact their help-desk via WhatsApp, it’s a utility. When people call and message friends, family, and colleagues almost exclusively on WhatsApp or Messenger, it’s a utility.

Except...no, it's not. That's an extremely naive understanding of what a "public utility" is. A public utility is not defined by how many people use something. Public utilities are essential services that typically operate on economies of scale. That is to say services without realistic replacement and which have large upfront creation and maintenance costs and which only make sense to provide access to a large number of people. You can't replace electricity with some alternate source of power. It's electricity. Same for water. They're fundamental services that are required for other services to exist. Without electricity you don't have phone or internet. Without water you can't have sewer systems or indoor plumbing.

WhatsApp, by comparison, is trivially easy to replace. A business chooses to use WhatsApp for customer service. They could just as easily setup a Discord server or just establish an 800 number for you to call. They have immediate drop-in replacements. Arguing otherwise is sort of like arguing that Coke should be considered a public utility because a business serves Coke products. They don't have to serve Coke. They could serve Pepsi. Or anything else.

Also, your reasoning is kind of skewed, because in order to even use something like WhatsApp, you need other, already existing services. Namely internet access. It makes literally no sense to say "WhatsApp should be a utility" without first arguing that "internet access for all individuals at a national level should be a public utility." Which I would personally argue is something that does qualify as a utility, far more than any specific social media services or app, and the fact that it isn't is a huge problem for the United States.

Godwin’s Law People preaching [insert terrible belief] on a government platform would be removed and charged for hate speech just as much as they would be if preaching these things in public spaces.

Oh, okay, "Godwin's Law" is it? Cool. Here's an actual law. Like a literal piece of legislation that exists: it's called the First Amendment. I don't know if you're just speaking from a non-American context, or just don't know how "freedom of speech" is codified into law in the United States. Maybe you're a kid or something and just haven't learned that in school yet. But freedom of speech in public places is universally protected under the constitution. Like, there are still public Klan rallies in certain parts of the country. This is what allows those to happen. If the United States government maintained its own social media service, it would functionally not have the power to moderate any content that was not explicitly illegal. Bigotry and hate speech are not illegal under the constitution.

Probably lukewarm take: Social media shouldn't be a utility because it provides no social value or improvement of quality of life in the same way other genuine public utilities like electricity, water, sewer services, or general access to the internet, might. It's also putting the government in a position in which it functionally would have to provide a platform for everyone equally, Neo-Nazis, climate deniers, anti-vaccers, and every other person with "insert terrible belief here" included.

Ultimately, saying social media should be a public utility is like saying casinos and strip clubs should be public utilities. Just because it's fun to use doesn't mean it's good for society or come anywhere close to meeting the definition for the level of necessity typically attached to something as a public utility.

They pretty much all say that South Africa presented a case in the Hague that argued that Israel has violated the 2nd article of the international genocide conventions and that Israel has acted with genocidal intent towards the people of Palestine. Or is there something else of note that isn't being discussed? Like did a horse briefly get loose in the court and they had to stop proceedings to try and catch it?

And like most things related to Linux on the internet, the consensus is generally incorrect. For a typical home user who isn't opening ports or taking a development laptop to places with unsecure wifi networks, you don't really need a firewall. It's completely superflous. Anything you do to your PC that causes you genuine discomfort will more than likely be your own fault rather than an explicit vulnerability. And if you're opening ports on your home network to do self-hosting, you're already inviting trouble and a firewall is, in that scenario, a bandaid on a sucking chest wound you self-inflicted.

There's also the pure reality that, yeah, it's easier today to get a project off the ground than ever before, and AI is good at that, but you know what AI is absolute shit at? Modifying ludicrously cumbersome, undocumented, brutally hacked together legacy code and addressing technical debt - the two most common tasks of most actual software engineers.

I fully believe we'll get a standardized 60 hour work week before we get a 20 hour one. Hell, I'm pretty sure we'd relegalize slavery before we get a 20 hour work week. Your average American will bend over backwards for a chance to please "the boss" and actively rat on their colleagues for avoiding work because our cultural understanding of loyalty is functionally equivalent to boot licking.

Comfortable middle class. Upper class people have full time servants. They don't come to your house. They're just always there.

Religions and philosophical traditions frequently have overlap. It's not really an either/or situation.

What part of this is a meme?

Parody homage.

Git checkout -b branchprotectiononlyworksifyouarenotsetupwithadminprivilegesontherepoingithubthismeansyouhowardgodammit

Instead of either, it's good to have a more descriptive primary branch:

git checkout -b dontwritetothisbranchdirectlyyougottaopenaprfirstandhaveitreviewedandapprovedandthenpasstheautomatictests