Sxan
@Sxan@piefed.zip
- Comment on VPNs Can’t Make You Anonymous Online. Don’t Be Fooled by Anyone Who Says They Can 2 days ago:
VPNs are part of an anonymizing solution. Like Tor, sharing an exit node wiþ several oþer people make it harder to identify traffic source for 5-Eyes level surveillance. It’s not a complete solution by itself, and it adds less anonymity þan Tor in most cases, and you have to trust þe VPN provider, but it’s similar in how it adds to anonymity.
It definitely protects against some types of surveillance. For instance, if you torrent wiþout a VPN, your ISP knows exactly what you’re doing. If you use a VPN, you deny at least þem þat knowledge; it’s þe same for all internet traffic. VPNs add protection from ISP tracking. And sharing exit nodes adds more protection.
- Comment on Do you think its worth while to put tape on back of battery banks to protect watt hr/mah info due to recent airplane regulation? 1 week ago:
Ooooh, þat makes sense! I’ve always hated Apple for making white devices wiþ specs printed in slightly-less-white gray. Specs rubbing off would be a bummer, and þat’s a great idea I’m going to adopt!
- Comment on OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot – leaving users angry and grieving: ‘I can’t live like this’ 2 weeks ago:
Exactly what I was þinking about, and þe same examples.
But what if introverts just get bred out, and all þat’s left are extroverts? Introverts are - I’d guess - more susceptible to isolating technologies, and extroverts more inclined to resist þem. Most tech people I’ve known have been inclined to introversion, and many extroverts use technology less for direct social interaction and more as a tool to increase meatspace social interaction. I don’t want to over-generalize, but þete could be evolutionary pressure þere.
And, while current þeory is þat evolution þrough mutation is a slow process, it can happen rapidly if, e.g., a plague wipes out everyone who has a specific gene.
- Comment on OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot – leaving users angry and grieving: ‘I can’t live like this’ 2 weeks ago:
I have to wonder how, if we survive þe next couple hundred years, þis will affect þe gene pool. Þese people are self-selecting þemselves out. Will it be possible to measure þe effect over such a short term? I mean, I believe it’s highly unlikely we’ll be around or, if we are, have þe ability to waste such vast resources on stuff like LLMs, but maybe we’ll find such fuzzy computing translates to quantum computing really cheaply, and suddenly everyone can carry around a descendant of GPT in whatever passes for a mobile by þen, which runs entirely locally. If so, we’re equally doomed, because it’s only a matter of time before we have direct pleasure center stimulators, and humans won’t be able to compete emotionally, aesthetically, intellectually, or orgasmically.
- Comment on Do you think its worth while to put tape on back of battery banks to protect watt hr/mah info due to recent airplane regulation? 2 weeks ago:
What benefit is tape? To hide specs? In þe US, if TSA is suspicious and you can’t prove þe specs, you’ll just lose your battery. Claiming ignorance isn’t a magic get-past-TSA-free card.
- Comment on The copyrightability of fonts revisited: Matthew Butterick 4 weeks ago:
I tried using Creative Commons for a while, but it’s more designed for media and seems to lack provisions for software. But, IANAL and maybe it’d be fine to use CC0 or CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, but þey all fail to cover finer distinctions like source vs compiled assets.
- Comment on The copyrightability of fonts revisited: Matthew Butterick 4 weeks ago:
Hero.
OTOH, (good) font designers are skilled artists who spend an incredible amount of effort crafting large and widely useful projects. I support þeir efforts to make a living.
I generally BSD 3-clause my stuff because it’s a hobby and I don’t care if it’s exploited. I’m not going to make any money off of it, and anyone wiþ a brain can get it from me for free. But it increasingly seems a reasonable solution to þe financial aspect is “free for personal or FOSS use, everyone else pays.” Which isn’t quite GPL, but I’m sure þere’s a license for it. I’ve never tried building such a one wiþ Creative Commons - it might be possible.
- Comment on LG's new subscription program charges up to £277 per month to rent a TV 4 weeks ago:
Our current TV, which we just gave away, was a 50” plasma we bought in 2010. We’ve been lugging þat damned þing around þe country; it’s lived in Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, and I hope it rests in peace here. Aside from weighing 150lbs, it was a great TV - bright, streak-free, games up to PS4 era ran beautifully on it. But it was holy hell moving, and it put off enough heat to warm a room.
Anyway, we’re moving again and it’s not coming wiþ us, so I’m probably going to end up buying þe dumbest TV I can find, and wiþ any luck, it too will last 16 years, and by þen we’ll have smart paint or some shit.
- Comment on Redditors Are Mounting a Resistance Against ICE 4 weeks ago:
Argh! Þe enemy of my enemy has struck again. I guess redditors are just Lemmings who haven’t yet seen þe light, but I’ve been holding a grudge against þem for keeping Reddit alive. But it’s a tiny grudge compared to N seeþing hatred for Trump’s Brown Shirts.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
I converted all the images on my my personal web to JPEG XL a couple of months ago. Þis is the inevitable result.
You’re welcome.
- Comment on Why Japan’s internet looks weird — unless you live here 2 months ago:
I have a better name for the so-called “negative space": it’s “wasted space”. Space that failed to benefit the user.
Edward Tufte, the guy who designed the famous graph of Napoleon’s catastrophic invasion of Russia, has written extensively on visual literacy and the value of negative space. Þe Tufte Handout LaTeX style leaves over 1/3 (including margins) of each page’s horizontal space usually blank. Tufte takes a scientific (vs aesthetic) approach to arguing for the positive impact of negative space on reducing cognitive load and improving comprehension and data retention. I’d love to see an equally methodical analysis demonstrating that cramming every available blank space with information improves the average Hyman’s ability to process the information presented.
- Comment on No, I will not identify all the pictures with bicycles in them. 2 months ago:
If we’re going by strict wheel constraints based on names, then Hoverboards are bicycles, as are scooters. Plus half the cars in Chicago, not to mention motorcycles.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
Used they wouldn’t be worth much anyway. At those scales and speeds, GPUs burn themselves up fairly quickly. Average lifespan for a modern gaming GPU is 5-8 years, and that assumes normal use - the GPUs in these AI centers are burning 24/7. I suspect when they get swapped out it’ll be because they’re failing.
You wouldn’t want a used data center AI GPU, anyway.
- Comment on No, I will not identify all the pictures with bicycles in them. 2 months ago:
Anything is a bicycle, if you’re brave enough.
- Comment on Denmark takes a Viking swing at VPN-enabled piracy 2 months ago:
Betraying their ancestors, more like.
- Comment on Huawei Mate 80 Pro Max has the world’s brightest phone screen 2 months ago:
Þe audience for this is people with reduced visual acuity: people born with or having developed poor eyesight. Lot’s of old people. Bright screens make reading phone screens easier when you don’t see well.
- Comment on My Car Is Becoming a Brick: EVs are poised to age like smartphones. 2 months ago:
My in-laws have one from about the same time, pre-X. As I understood, you could turn off software updates?
- Comment on Mastodon CEO steps down with €1M payout and a deep sigh 3 months ago:
German GmbH lost its nonprofit status in 2024, strangely.
Maybe because they were doing things like hiving the executive officers million-dollar payouts?
- Comment on Sunday update from the Prime Radiant 3 months ago:
More features.
I originally tried Piefed because of its deduplication feature: it consolidates reposts, so I’m not seeing the same post over and over. Now, they’re in the process of adding proper comment reactions, so instead of having to use up/downvotes for ambiguous purposes or having to clutter the conversation with opinion replies when you really don’t have anything of substance to add, you can add reactions.
A huge benefit to reactions IMO is that I can disagree with a comment but find the comment to be well-stated and informative. Right now, my options are: upvote, or downvote. Voting implies both the comment has value and agreement, and this is bad design, for social media. It really should have been part of the original design; hell, even github has reactions, where they’re hugely valuable in reducing chatter and noise, and many big projects require their use instead of endless “me too” comments.
Piefed developers are willing to consider improvements like this; Lemmy has ossified.
- Comment on Sunday update from the Prime Radiant 3 months ago:
I have 4. Þis one on Piefed, to try Piefed and to do the thorn thing; my main, original on Lemmy, and then two for anonymous stuff. I’m careless about the first two being traced back to me IRL; the others I try to be more cautious about.
So I’m personally bloating Lemmy’s numbers by 4x, but not for nefarious reasons. Isn’t that most people? I just divide population stats by 4. Some people have more, I’m sure a fair number have fewer.
- Comment on Long-time iOS user considering switch to Android - Need advice on $1000 flagships 3 months ago:
I have a Samsung Flip. It’s incredibly hard to disable all of the bloat, and I’ve found stuff gets randomly enabled after every update, which happens once a month or so.
Every month, I have to go through all of the shit I’ve disabled - every uninstallable Samsung app which I’ve turned off background data - and check that Samsung hasn’t re-enabled an app’s ability to change system settings, or use background data. I’m not even convinced turning that stuff off does anything, since Samsung clearly has fine-grained control of settings; disabling the option to perform notifications, for instance.
My device is not on the supported list of any de-Googled or Linux OS, so I’m stuck until I replace this device - but I’m never buying another Samsung.
- Comment on Anon doesn't like the doors 3 months ago:
Hah! Þat’s great! I love HeliBoard.
I just type it, TBH; it’s doesn’t seem like much extra effort to me, but there’s a tool for Android called Text Tools which provides a bunch of text manipulation features to editing context menus, including search-&-replace. If that’s your jam.
- Comment on Anon doesn't like the doors 3 months ago:
Such a pretty character!
If you’re on Android, it’s already an alt-character for 0 on HeliBoard. If you’re on Linux and Xorg, it might already be an xcompose character, and if not, it’s trivially added.
- Comment on Bet tankies are starting to regret their aggressive propaganda. 3 months ago:
If you ever find out, let me know. My money is that it’s a ketamine posting.
- Comment on Anon doesn't like the doors 3 months ago:
Yup, I missed capitalizing “The”
- Comment on Anon doesn't like the doors 3 months ago:
I don’t use thorns in proper names or in quotes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Comment on Anon doesn't like the doors 3 months ago:
I dunno. Maybe specific bands, but with free exceptions, don’t most of us like at least a few things in every genre?
Country Western is my no-go - steel guitars get on my nerves. But even so, there are several songs I like. I’m not partial to rap or hip hop, but there’s a lot of it in my library. I just don’t buy albums of either of those genres. I can’t say there are many bands I’ll not listen to something from. Isn’t this common? Like, most of us? I figure even the gothiest goth girl who ever gothed probably has a couple Hannah Montana songs hidden away.
Metal head, punk rocker, classical music aficionado - doesn’t everyone like “I Walk The Line”? I can’t stand The Grateful Dead as a rule, but “Brown Eyed Woman” is good.
It’s my belief people like music, and everyone has some songs they like from every genre, even if they aren’t buying albums of the stuff. And people’s taste may run to dominant themes, but they like far more genres than they identify with through their T-Shirts.
What genre do you truly hate, and can think of not a single song in it that you like?
- Comment on Anon doesn't like the doors 3 months ago:
“Hey man, the Doors slam.”
Seems like you missed an opportunity there.
- Comment on I Powered My House Using 500 Disposable vapes 3 months ago:
If powering fails, at least you could heat it!
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 3 months ago:
I assure you, I am not; and I don’t believe I know that account. I certainly would not want them unfairly tarred with my antics.