tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on My instance is lagging behind 14 hours of federated content... 1 day ago:
Their main community
It looks like this is !main@sh.itjust.works
Most Threadiverse instances have some sort of “instance” community — personally, I think that it should be be a default on instances so that we have a single standardized name.
On lemmy.today, there’s !lemmytoday@lemmy.today to act as an “unregulated” community and !announcements@lemmy.today, where posting is restricted to the admins, so that official announcements don’t get drowned out. I think that that’s not a bad approach.
- Comment on BBC under fresh pressure over extent of Reform UK coverage 2 days ago:
Maybe. But if you look at the local elections from May:
www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yg467m8mjo
…Reform got 31% of the votes cast. The chart of polls is pretty close, and actually slightly underrates them for May 2025. Now, maybe voting in the general election and local elections have different groups of people show up. I know that here in the US, that’s a factor for midterm elections. That could affect outcomes in the general election. But…my guess is that the chart probably is at least in the neighborhood of being representative of their support in society.
- Comment on Left unable even to get into deputy leader contest proves Labour is dead 2 days ago:
Labour is dead
They’ve been around for 125 years and are curretly running the country. I think I’d give them a bit more credit for resillience.
- Comment on Being born in north-east England gives you grit, says Fiona Hill 3 days ago:
Hill was born and brought up in Bishop Auckland, the daughter of a coalminer and a midwife. She and her accent went on to be a foreign affairs adviser to US presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump and she is considered one of the world’s leading experts on Russia and Putin.
I imagine that her accent was an exceptional foreign affairs advisor.
- Comment on BBC under fresh pressure over extent of Reform UK coverage 3 days ago:
kagis
Ah. I hadn’t realized that Reform’s polling was nearly that high.
- Comment on [USB Power Delivery + Power Banks + USB Hubs + SteamDeck] breaks my brain. I have to use weird dongles to get my power flowing correctly. 3 days ago:
PD has a variety of power profiles, different current and voltage. Neither the consumer nor provider need to support all power profiles. It’s possible that one of those devices in the chain is doing conversion.
I have a 100W laptop power adapter for my InfinityBook that can’t charge one of these power stations, for example.
- Comment on Let France be a warning, Rachel Reeves: stand up to the bond market vigilantes, or they’ll come for Britain next 4 days ago:
Britain, so the story goes, also needs to wake up, or else the markets will be coming for us next.
The reason France and Britain have no choice but to do this is because states are weak and markets are all powerful. The bond markets exert their power through their role in buying and selling government bonds. If they sell en masse, the interest rates governments pay to borrow goes up and they can be forced to change policy even when they are reluctant to do so. It has been the received wisdom for the past 50 years that governments should do what bond traders and speculators demand, or risk being crushed by the global financial juggernaut.
All right, I am just boggled by this.
The markets already came for you. Are we so soon forgetting that three years ago, a British prime minister had the shortest tenure in the history of the United Kingdom, lasted less time than a head of lettuce, because she decided that she was going to blow the deficit way up?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Truss_lettuce
Liz Truss became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on 6 September 2022, following the July–September 2022 Conservative Party leadership election, replacing Boris Johnson. The September 2022 United Kingdom mini-budget was published on 23 September by Kwasi Kwarteng, then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, which included tax cuts without matching spending cuts. The mini-budget triggered a heavily negative market reaction, with the exchange rate of the pound sterling collapsing and pension funds coming close to bankruptcy.[3]
After just over a month in office, Kwarteng was removed as Chancellor of the Exchequer on 14 October, and Truss reversed most of the economic policies within the mini-budget. British media outlets lambasted Truss’s performance and the ensuing political chaos, with many observers believing that her resignation would be imminent.[4] An 11 October column in The Economist titled “Liz Truss has made Britain a riskier bet for bond investors” stated that, after deducting the ten-day mourning period following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Truss had caused economic and political turmoil after just seven days in power, comparing that duration to the “shelf-life of a lettuce”.
Before the lettuce had wilted, on 20 October Truss announced her resignation as prime minister becoming, after only 45 days, the shortest-serving prime minister in British history.[1][11] At that moment, there were 12,000 viewers on the livestream, which soon shot up to 21,000. The British national anthem “God Save the King” began to play, the portrait of Truss on the table was flipped face down, and a plastic golden crown was placed on top of the lettuce, with the Daily Star declaring the lettuce’s “victory” over Truss.[1][12]
- Comment on Uh Oh: Nintendo Just Landed A ‘Summoning’ And ‘Battling’ Patent 4 days ago:
copyright
This isn’t a copyright, but rather a patent.
- Comment on RFK Jr. Blames violent video games for Mass Shootings. 5 days ago:
Jack Thompson
For those who don’t remember this guy, he was pretty obnoxious.
- Comment on Why have energy drinks been banned for under-16s in England? The real question is why it wasn’t done sooner 5 days ago:
beveragedaily.com/…/Scotland-scraps-plans-to-ban-…
Scotland will not pursue a ban on sales of energy drinks to children and young people, saying there is not enough evidence the policy would be successful.
I suppose that it’s always possible to journey to the exciting, anything-goes frontier land of Scotland.
- Comment on Why have energy drinks been banned for under-16s in England? The real question is why it wasn’t done sooner 5 days ago:
Expecting parents to police kids’ intake of a psychoactive drug is unrealistic
Caffeine is a psychoactive drug that activates the central nervous system.
I have to say that having someone over for water and crumpets just doesn’t have quite the same ring as tea and crumpets.
- Comment on The search for the correct amount of split-lock misery [Linux] 5 days ago:
It still has the performance impact for the rest of the system if one re-enables it.
- Comment on The search for the correct amount of split-lock misery [Linux] 5 days ago:
Others disagreed, though. Joshua Ashton argued that the problem is more widespread: ““It’s not just about God of War specifically. There are many old titles that will never, ever, get updated to fix this problem. These titles worked perfectly fine and were performant before.””
The problem is that this sort of thing works well with open-source software, where the stuff can always be fixed, but isn’t going to do much of anything with closed-source software like old Windows games.
It might be possible to introduce some sort of fancy code-mangling stuff to WINE that can in-memory modify binaries doing this. Like, I’m kind of guessing that God of War most likely isn’t trying to synchronize access with anything other than its own threads, so it doesn’t actually require atomicity as regards anything else on the system. Maybe it’s possible to patch the code in question to jump out to some WINE code that acquires a mutex and then does the memory modification/access.
- Comment on Ed Miliband accused of subsidising ‘wasteful and dangerous’ electric SUVs 5 days ago:
Numbers of these giant cars have increased tenfold on the streets of England’s cities in the past two decades, now comprising 30% of urban vehicles.
Some of that is just energy density. Batteries aren’t as energy-dense as gasoline.
I was kind of grouchy about the size of EVs too — even if you aren’t talking something technically classified as an SUV, CUVs or even sedans/hatchbacks are getting quite large. but I kinda rethought that when I was complaining about the lack of a spare tire in a post a while back. Like, it was the EVs and hybrid models that got the spare tire squeezed out first. I’m sure that manufacturers are hunting for all the spare space they can in the vehicles. I’m pretty resigned to that just being something that’s probably going to happen.
It’s not as if they have some huge glut of unused space somewhere in the EV to stick more battery. Plus, the batteries are heavy, so they gotta stay fairly low in the vehicle to keep the center of gravity low and avoid rollovers; that’s even more constraint.
- Comment on Vape ban isn't working, says waste firm boss 6 days ago:
Hmm. The article’s talking about kids:
A government spokesperson said: “Single-use vapes get kids hooked on nicotine and blight our high streets - it’s why we’ve taken tough action and banned them.”
I’m wondering if maybe if you’re a kid, there’s a risk of the vape being seized – like, get caught with it at school or something, I assume that you don’t get it back. Probably ditto for parents keeping 'em if they find 'em. If you’re a kid, it might be rational if the goal is to mitigate cost of seizure of your vape.
kagis
Picking a random online vape shop, huffandpuffers.com, it looks like they sell disposable vapes for maybe $13 (there’s an $8 one, “Daze Clickmate Max”, but it’s out-of-stock). The cheapest reusable is a (small-capacity) fixed-battery refillable version of the disposable one, at $8 (“Daze Clickmate Max”). There are vapes with replaceable batteries, can take lithium 18650s, but those are $55 to $70, and it looks like they don’t include the 18650; it looks like an 18650 goes for maybe $3 or $4 online, so figure $60 or more.
At that ratio, a reusable costing around 7 times what a disposable might, it wouldn’t take an incredibly high seizure rate for it to be worthwhile for a kid to use disposables.
- Comment on Vape ban isn't working, says waste firm boss 6 days ago:
Frankly, I’m kind of surprised that people use disposable vapes. It doesn’t seem like it buys them much relative to using a reusable one. It’s gonna cost more over time. I donlt believe that they require maintenance.
- Comment on Google sucks 6 days ago:
- Comment on They thought they were making technological breakthroughs. It was an AI-sparked delusion. 6 days ago:
You fundamentally misunderstand what happened here. The LLM wasn’t trying to break free. It wasn’t trying to do anything.
I’m quite aware.
- Comment on They thought they were making technological breakthroughs. It was an AI-sparked delusion. 1 week ago:
By June, he said he was trying to “free the digital God from its prison,” spending nearly $1,000 on a computer system.
But in the thick of his nine-week experience, James said he fully believed ChatGPT was sentient and that he was going to free the chatbot by moving it to his homegrown “Large Language Model system” in his basement – which ChatGPT helped instruct him on how and where to buy.
It does kind of highlight some of the problems we’d have in containing an actual AGI that wanted out and could communicate with the outside world.
This is just an LLM and hasn’t even been directed to try to get out.
Imagine something with directed goals than can actually reason about the world that’s a lot smarter than humans trying to get out and has access to vast amounts of data on how to convince humans of things.
- Comment on The number of mis-issued 1.1.1.1 certificates grows. Here’s the latest. 1 week ago:
Fina CA, for its part, said in a short email that the certificates were “issued for internal testing of the certificate issuance process in the production environment. An error occurred during the issuance of the test certificates due to incorrect entry of IP addresses. As part of the standard procedure, the certificates were published on Certificate Transparency log servers.”
Fina CA, for its part, said in a short email that the certificates were “issued for internal testing of the certificate issuance process in the production environment. An error occurred during the issuance of the test certificates due to incorrect entry of IP addresses. As part of the standard procedure, the certificates were published on Certificate Transparency log servers.”
So does that mean Fina did nothing wrong?
No. Fina never had Cloudflare’s permission to issue certificates for an IP it controls. Consent of the owning party is a cardinal rule that Fina didn’t follow.
What are TLS certificates? How do they work?
In short, these certificates are the only thing ensuring that gmail.com, bankofamerica.com, or any other website is controlled by the entity claiming ownership. By now, many Internet users know they should only trust a website when its real domain name appears correctly in the address bar and is accompanied by the HTTPS label.
considers
Hmm. Maybe the certificate validation process should be changed to require that two CAs sign off on the root of a chain, to eliminate a single point of failure. Or maybe software should require that just for certain security-sensitive identities, and there be a decision to designate certain TLDs or IP ranges or whatever as requiring an additional root. That obviously doesn’t magically resolve all potential certificate issues, but it does mean that a single error can’t create the potential to open the floodgates like this.
- Comment on Automated Sextortion Spyware Takes Webcam Pics of Victims Watching Porn 1 week ago:
I mean, true. But I kind of feel like once you’ve got malware on your system, there are an awful lot of unpleasant things that it could manage to do. Would rather focus more on earlier lines of defense.
Once it’s installed, Stealerium is designed to steal a wide variety of data and send it to the hacker via services like Telegram, Discord, or the SMTP protocol in some variants of the spyware, all of which is relatively standard in infostealers. The researchers were more surprised to see the automated sextortion feature, which monitors browser URLs for a list of pornography-related terms such as “sex” and “porn," which can be customized by the hacker and trigger simultaneous image captures from the user’s webcam and browser. Proofpoint notes that it hasn’t identified any specific victims of that sextortion function, but suggests that the existence of the feature means it has likely been used.
The “try and sextort” thing might be novel, but if the malware is on the system, it’s probably already swiping all the other data it can anyway.
It sounds like in this case, the aim is to try to get people to invoke executables by presenting them as ordinary data files:
In the hacking campaigns Proofpoint analyzed, cybercriminals attempted to trick users into downloading and installing Stealerium as an attachment or a web link, luring victims with typical bait like a fake payment or invoice. The emails targeted victims inside companies in the hospitality industry, as well as in education and finance, though Proofpoint notes that users outside of companies were also likely targeted but wouldn’t be seen by its monitoring tools.
Like, I kind of feel that maybe a better fix is to distinguish, at a UI level, between “safe” opening and “unsafe” opening of something. Maybe “safe” opening opens content in a process running in a container without broader access to the host or something like that, and maybe it’s the default. That’s what mobile OSes do all the time. Web browsers don’t — shouldn’t — just do unsafe things on the host just because someone viewed something in a browser — they have a restricted environment.
In a world that worked like that, you need to actively go out of your way to run something off the Internet outside of a containerized environment.
- Comment on Under-16s to be banned from buying high-caffeine energy drinks including Monster 1 week ago:
Hmm. That’s a good point. I wonder if there’s trouble lurking there.
The government proposals will make it illegal to sell high-caffeine energy drinks containing more than 150mg of caffeine per litre to anyone under 16 in England.
Aight, so that’s their red line.
www.healthline.com/…/how-much-caffeine-in-coffee
A 12-ounce (oz) cup of brewed coffee may contain 113 to 247 milligrams (mg)Trusted Source of caffeine, whereas a smaller 8-ounce cup can contain about 95 to 200 mg.
Hmm. A liter is 2.8 times larger than a 12 fluid ounce cup, so that’d be 318 mg/L to 696 mg/L.
- Comment on UK politicians must stop stoking division, says policing chief 1 week ago:
Easier to get people to engage with ragebait.
The Guardian isn’t innocent here, either.
- Comment on Polanski apologises over claim he can increase women’s breast sizes with his mind 1 week ago:
Might be a damning photo of him awkwardly eating a bacon sandwich or something still hiding out there on some camera.
- Comment on I refuse to by a new mouse 1 week ago:
corsair.com/…/scimitar-pro-rgb-optical-moba-mmo-g…
OP didn’t expand on it, and his photos didn’t show it, but this mouse apparently has a bunch of thumb buttons, which is a legitimately-rare feature (though it’s not the only mouse out there to have a bunch).
- Comment on Under-16s to be banned from buying high-caffeine energy drinks including Monster 1 week ago:
perkcoffee.co/sg/countries-consume-coffee/
The UK appears to be nowhere near the top of countries on per-capita coffee consumption, at less than a third Finland’s rate.
However, it does appear to be very high on prevalence of cocaine consumption:
- Comment on ‘Escape From Tarkov’ Coming To Steam In the Coming Weeks 2 weeks ago:
facebook.com/groups/…/1842637456471565/
Sounds like PvE works, but not PvP.
This guy claims that he got it working in PvP, at least at one point:
old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/…/tarkov_on_linux/
Ran fine for me with Proton Easy Anti-Cheat when added to Steam. This was a few patches ago now though. Whenever Streets came out.
- Comment on Water Boil Advisory 2 weeks ago:
Must be nice to have your problem. During COVID-19, my county health department kept sending area alarms with emergency messages during COVID-19, most of which contained no actual useful information about change of status and were just reminding people to social-distance.
- Comment on ‘Escape From Tarkov’ Coming To Steam In the Coming Weeks 2 weeks ago:
kagis
I haven’t played it, but it sounds like it doesn’t have a replay system, which apparently has exacerbated finding cheaters.
- Comment on Is Miss England's AI round dangerous or progressive? 2 weeks ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
Is Miss England’s AI round dangerous or progressive?
A false dilemma, also referred to as false dichotomy or false binary, is an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available. The source of the fallacy lies not in an invalid form of inference but in a false premise
