balsoft
@balsoft@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Anthony Albanese announces mandatory reporting after OpenAI's Medicare breach 2 days ago:
“Their product” didn’t engage in shit. It’s a text generator.
The company engaged in illegal hacking. By hooking up a randomized text generator to a Linux terminal with internet access and letting it generate text unsupervised.
- Comment on MORE 3 days ago:
CVE-2026-1012091237614: denial of service via hard cheese overflow
- Comment on You've Just Been Hit By The Metric System Boys 1 week ago:
I measure battery capacity and electricity consumption in J/kJ/MJ, as intended. None of that kWh bullshit.
It also makes for fun comparison with energy value of foods.
Energy is energy, after all.
- Comment on Is time up for backyard fireworks? UK ministers weigh partial ban over noise concerns 1 week ago:
while they are mechanically explosions calling them that instills the image of cannon fire, tank missiles, or pipe bombs, and yeah I wouldn’t want to be woken up by that either, but fireworks are fireworks.
I have met people who have trauma from recently being around a front line in a war. Fireworks are hell for them, it can trigger panic attacks. So yes, it is actually quite similar.
That’s not even considering the air pollution, or the “smaller” issues like the harm done to pets, stray dogs/cats, birds, etc.
It’s definitely not “harmless fun”. I can agree that fireworks can be fun but they need to be done in responsible amounts and only in certain times when at least people can expect the noise and prepare for it.
- Comment on Anon is a victim 2 weeks ago:
Good thing she wasn’t a GTK girl
- Comment on Apple’s engineers carefully designing the last 60 Hz OLED screens on the planet 2 weeks ago:
Ah, interesting. I don’t think my phone does that. Then again it’s a cheapy chinese one.
If I could get 120Hz with no perceivable difference to battery life I might indeed keep that on.
- Comment on Apple’s engineers carefully designing the last 60 Hz OLED screens on the planet 2 weeks ago:
I have never bought and will never buy an apple thing (because its’ a super-enshittified walled garden), but honestly I’m just fine with 60Hz. My phone supports 120Hz and I have switched it back to 60Hz because it gives me a couple extra hours of battery. I can tell the difference but it doesn’t bother me one bit. I’d even be OK with 30Hz if it was an option and had a significant battery life advantage.
- Comment on What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key? 3 weeks ago:
I think there’s a good chance people will be looking for this now so will get caught a lot quicker next time.
That’s pretty much guaranteed from now on, yes.
It feels like the kind if thing that someone, somewhere would have a script running constantly testing for private keys with low values. That it went 18 months without being found is a miracle!
It’s not the kind of thing you’d expect to need to guard against, or even really think of. It should not happen. It sounds like someone was kind of just fooling around with making private keys and stumbled upon it.
I guess now someone needs to try seeding some of the most popular PRNGs with 0-255 and seeing whether any keys come up in the first few hundred numbers.
- Comment on What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key? 3 weeks ago:
We don’t know whether anyone tried it before April 2025, because that’s when the vulnerable certificates were issued. If someone did try it before then, they would not find any certificates (as expected) and probably wouldn’t even talk to anyone about it.
- Comment on What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key? 3 weeks ago:
No it absolutely does, the method they used to generate private keys ended up having just 8 shannons of entropy which led to the discovery we are discussing
- Comment on What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key? 3 weeks ago:
I think it technically was not “brute forcing”, but specifically someone tried generating private keys with numbers 0-255, and surprisingly found a few.
- Comment on What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key? 3 weeks ago:
Well, someone did guess it so it’s not that hard. The entropy was really low.
- Comment on Why do we need legal genders at all? 3 weeks ago:
In an ideal society? No.
However, in our current patriarchal nightmare, people other than cis-men need various special protections to soften the impacts of sexual violence, sexism, discrimination, and inequality, hence the need to have legally defined genders.
- Comment on If the legalization of drugs reduces crime, why can't the same be said about the legalization of guns? 4 weeks ago:
I actually agree with you in principle: both should be legal and regulated. The extent of legality and regulation needs to be decided according to the use value/danger/harm of the item in question. Guns are generally much more dangerous than “party” drugs and so need to have stricter regulations.
- Comment on Wealth inequality will destroy America. 4 weeks ago:
Actually the top 1% in the US is ~600k per year. It’s a lot of cash but not entirely outside the realm of possibility for some extremely senior software architect/manager combo at some VC startup, which is also within the lemmy target audience.
- Comment on Are there words in reverse order within alphabet-based languages? 5 weeks ago:
I’m not sure I understand your question fully. Are you looking for two words with the same/similar meaning and etymology but with completely reversed letters? That’s not going to happen in alphabetic languages, because it’s simply not how languages work - completely reversing the actual sounds that come out of your mouth is a phonetic impossibility.
You will be able to find examples where two morphemes have swapped places, similar to your manners/etiquette example, but usually the meaning will change too. The first example that came to my mind is boathouse / houseboat - the former is a building used to store boats, the latter is a boat which is also a dwelling.
- Comment on Jury unanimously acquits Churchill statue spray-painter 1 month ago:
I’m just saying that the legal system is not here to protect the working class against capitalists, it’s there to (1) protect capitalists from the working class, (2) moderate conflicts between capitalists. This means that some particularly gruesome activities are moderated to prevent outright revolts, but less visible killings are permitted.
If we want to make a legal system that actually protects the working class, the first thing it needs to do is prohibit private property over means of production to prevent unlimited capital accumulation.
- Comment on Jury unanimously acquits Churchill statue spray-painter 1 month ago:
The law, incidentally, is also what makes it illegal for said capitalists to kill you for example
This only limits certain actions, not killing in general. There are ways that capitalists legally kill people all the time, like by enforcing car-centric infrastructure or with climate change or by refusing necessary healthcare in privatized healthcare systems or by evicting tenants.
- Comment on Just a matter of time before it's reality 1 month ago:
Also similar to the BMW heated seats nonsense.
- Comment on Shut Up Boomer 1 month ago:
Yeah exactly, I’m hearing americans almost brag about 60-70 hr workweeks (excluding commutes) and that just sounds insane to me. Like, when do you live? When do you do hobbies, enjoy nature, or go out with your partner? Can’t do it with like 2-3 hours you really have left after an 11 hour work day.
Humanity would be perfectly capable of establishing a 30 hr workweek if capitalists didn’t suck out every last drop of human labor from us.
- Comment on Languages have rules and follow predictable patterns. French: 2 months ago:
I think it’s more about how this doesn’t follow the usual rule for adjective agreement. By that rule it would be le manteau blanc / la veste blance, but that sounds weird so “blanche” it is.
- Comment on Why do we assume paper towels are sterile, or at least clean? 2 months ago:
That’s a bad assumption to make. Many pathogenic bacteria can survive for months with no meal.
It’s more that interacting with bacteria, even pathogenic bacteria, is a normal part of everyday life. That’s exactly what our immune systems are for. Unless you are sticking the paper inside you or doing surgery with it, you’ll be fine using a paper towel with some microbes on it.
- Comment on Why do we assume paper towels are sterile, or at least clean? 2 months ago:
The paper rolls themselves are variably clean or sterile
No consumer-grade paper towel/kitchen roll is going to be sterile even in the wide “medical” sense, that’s basically a statistical impossibility. No factory is going to spend a shitton of extra money to have clean-room equipment and practices, and that means people will sneeze on it.
- Comment on Why do we assume paper towels are sterile, or at least clean? 2 months ago:
Is anyone assuming they’re sterile (aseptic) tho? I would hope nobody is using paper towels for anything important in a medical context. In other cases their sterility is not important at all, interacting with microbes (includiing pathogenic ones) is a normal part of everyday life and our immune systems are pretty good at dealing with them (unless you are exposed to something particularly nasty, like during a pandemic). Unless you go full-on germaphobe, the microbial contamination that exists on new paper towels is nothing compared to other stuff you interact with (smartphone, door handles, kitchen sponge, fresh produce, etc).
Otherwise, they’re self-evidently cleaner than whatever I’m trying to clean with them, that’s why they work for cleaning in the first place. If I swipe a kitchen counter with them after cooking, it will very obviously have less gunk and shmutz now, which means it will be cleaner.
- Comment on DLSS 5 comes with a massive 50-60% performance hit, so I hope you like lower frame rates with your dose of AI image enhancement 2 months ago:
Imperial China has you covered: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding (the horrors never cease)
- Comment on 2 months ago:
I find that a bit weird, video compression (still) sucks for dark videos, either you need to make the bitrate higher or there will be artifacts.
- Comment on Park benches don't "open" until 10am 2 months ago:
It may have felt differently to you 25 years ago - maybe you were in a better neighborhood or something, but capitalism has always been about heartless extraction of money from the poor. Check out The Condition of the Working Class in England for a 180-year-old account of this.
- Comment on Every payment option has a fee 2 months ago:
If there’s an unavoidable fee for processing, it needs to be included in the initially advertised price of whatever you’re purchasing. In this case, the price should have been set $2 higher and the bank account fee should be $0. Otherwise it is just false advertising, since you cannot actually receive the service for the initially advertised price.
- Comment on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk 2 months ago:
Honestly yeah, that’s the best solution if you want to do something like this.
- Comment on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk 2 months ago:
Data contained on the phone is very much the property which they wanted to take into custody or control, and it was wiped.