jarfil
@jarfil@beehaw.org
Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.
- Comment on Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game 4 minutes ago:
Fun fact: you can get a machine to do that, for about the price of 3 games. It will even last longer than the games.
- Comment on After Years of Struggle, Blizzard Has Found Itself in Uncharted Territory: Overwatch Players Are Having Fun Again 18 minutes ago:
Let me know when stuff is no longer locked behind a “Battle Pass”.
I got pretty much all the cosmetics in OW1 without paying for a single lootbox, and definitely refuse to pay for the privilege of FOMO.
- Comment on Energy labelling and ecodesign requirements will apply to smartphones and tablets from June 2025 1 week ago:
The ecodesign requirements will include:
* resistance to accidental drops or scratches and protection from dust and water
* sufficiently durable batteries which can withstand at least 800 charge and discharge cycles while retaining at least 80% of their initial capacity
* rules on disassembly and repair, including obligations for producers to make critical spare parts available within 5-10 working days, and for 7 years after the end of sales of the product model on the EU market
* availability of operating system upgrades for longer periods (at least 5 years from the date of the end of placement on the market of the last unit of a product model)
* non-discriminatory access for professional repairers to any software or firmware needed for the replacement
Finally! 🎉
Customer replaceable batteries would be nice too — those 800 cycles are not all that much — but I guess it’s a tradeoff for dust and water resistance increases with wireless charging and possibly no ports.
- Comment on Annoyed ChatGPT users complain about bot’s relentlessly positive tone 1 week ago:
- Comment on Tesla’s Remarkably Bad Quarter Is Even Worse Than It Looks 1 week ago:
The article sounds like it lifted the headline from some comment I’ve seen:
- Comment on Bluesky rolls out blue check verifications 1 week ago:
The comparison to 𝕏 doesn’t seem fair:
You can self-verify by setting your domain as your username. We highly encourage official organizations and individuals to do this
Additionally, through our Trusted Verifiers feature, select independent organizations can verify accounts directly.
- Comment on Bluesky rolls out blue check verifications 1 week ago:
It seems like both the data server (PDS) and the data aggregator (AppView) have been released:
What am I missing?
- Comment on Google won’t ditch third-party cookies in Chrome after all 1 week ago:
From Ladybird’s website:
No code from other browsers. We’re building a new engine, based on web standards.
Except… Chromium is the living standard for the web. They’ll have the same problem as Firefox, playing catch-up to whatever happens in Chromium.
Right now, the viable browsing experience is a combination of browsers:
- Chromium derived - latest compatibility
- Firefox with extensions - daily driver
- Tor Browser - actual chance of privacy
And a VPN and/or Pi-hole.
- Comment on Petition: Bring the Affinity Suite to Linux - #AffinityOnLinux 1 week ago:
one-time payment
Is Canva going to keep that? In the purchase announcement, they stated that their plan was to add the features of Affinity to Canva, which only has a subscription option.
rely on creative software by Adobe or other companies, for which there is no comparable alternative with Linux support
Corel has comparable features with a single purchase option. Too bad they removed the Linux version.
As for alternatives, Krita, Inkscape, or Blender, are not a 1:1 equivalent, but include features that Adobe is missing. When I used to do visual stuff, they were a good set of tools to complement an Adobe subscription.
How does Affinity compare to that?
- Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That 2 weeks ago:
If we’re talking takedown-resistance, we may need to enter the dark web realm:
- Tor hidden sites are inherently hard to pinpoint
- ZeroNet was an interesting project, seems to be abandoned
- I2P is like Tor on steroids, can publish all sorts of services
- IPFS is a decentralized P2P storage system (best/worst known for NFTs)
FreeNetHyphanet is a 25+ years old distributed content system with limited support for services- FreeNet is… honestly, haven’t seen a working example, but it sounds interesting?
- Matrix… if they manage to get things under control
- Nostr is a censorship-resistant distributed messaging system
Hosting distribution and localization varies, but they all have features to make it hard to pinpoint host and/or client locations.
- Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That 2 weeks ago:
There are many community networks out there, but they require more dedication and funding than simply paying an ISP, for a worse service. It’s a hard sell to the average doomscroller.
The EFF scaled down their efforts for OpenWireless.org after it became obvious that they’d have to support hundreds of different hardware models, and ultimately abandoned the project.
A couple decades ago, FON tried to build a mixed community-commercial network with their own standardized hardware, but even the commercial incentive was not enough to keep it afloat in the long run. Some of the hardware got repurposed for community projects, but most of the best placed hotspots ended up in the trash, replaced by municipal and ISP networks.
In many places, fiber is a no-go. Like, in my city there was a large move to get fiber to most houses over a decade ago, but after the first deployment of a handful of ISPs, the city stopped giving permits for additional deployments: lease from one of the existing ISPs, or you’re SOL.
- Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That 2 weeks ago:
The bright side is, that you run it in a container. Beware of privileged mode, don’t give it unnecessary mounts or networks, and there’s very little some malicious code can do.
If you’re using it for a build system, tough luck but you need to manage the keys to avoid TOFU, and ideally pull from your own registry.
- Comment on How I Got Hacked: A Warning about Malicious PoCs 2 weeks ago:
Never, EVER, do anything security related while sleep deprived, drunk, high, having sex, or all of the above.
After that… no, don’t trust. Zero trust.
There are basic hygiene measures to run anything related to any exploit — including “just” PoCs — depending on how risky a total pwn would be:
- container
- VM
- separate machine
- airgapped
- airgapped in a faraday cage (tinfoil works wonders to kill WiFi, a cheap DBV stick turned SDR is great for making sure).
Reading through the code is nice, and should be done anyway from an educational point of view… but even when “sure”, basic hygiene still applies.
Keeping tokens in one VM (or a few), while running the exploit in another, is also a good idea. Stuff like ”Windows → WSL2 → Docker", works wonders (but beware of VSCode’s pass-through containers). Bonus points if passkeys and a fingerprint reader get involved. Extra bonus points for logging out before testing (if it asks to unlock any passkey… well, don’t), then logging out again afterwards.
What I’m not so sure about, is deleting the siphoned data without alerting the potential victims. Everyone kind of failed at security, but still. A heads up to rotate all keys, would be nice.
- Comment on DeepSeek: The Chinese Communist Party’s newest AI advance is making repression smarter, cheaper, and more deadly. Even worse, they aim to export it to the world. 2 weeks ago:
Not sure if they’ve edited it, but right now it reads:
the historian George Dyson envisioned the internet as a sentient being that would one day reach artificial general intelligence (AGI)
Inside China, such a network of large-scale AGI systems could autonomously improve repression
The whole piece looks like written by, or with the use of, some LLM.
Other than that, there are two valid points that could be made:
- Massive application of AI to city-wide surveillance, with zero regards for privacy, could provide an AI agent system with enough compute power to self-train in realtime.
- DeepSeek is plausibly a Trojan horse, trained with a repression based bias, if not directly with hidden malware features.
The near future will see a soft “AI war” in the form of publishing models — to be used as agent cores — with different ideological biases.
- Comment on Why doesn't Steam support Android? 2 weeks ago:
what is gone, exactly?
By adding support for alternate stores, the monopoly argument is gone: everyone can build their own store now. Meaning, everyone with a store can kick out anyone else, and tell them to just build their own.
comply with their own ToS
…which they can change at any moment, but don’t really need to; most ToS include clauses about refusing service without having to explain why. If you ever agree to a ToS, better make sure they’re even supposed to notify you if they ever decide to cut you off.
- Comment on Google created a new AI model for talking to dolphins 2 weeks ago:
LLMs use a tokenizer stage to convert input data into NN inputs, then a de-tokenizer at the output.
Those tokens are not limited to “human language”, they can as well be positions, orientations, directions, movements, etc. “Body language”, or the flight pattern of a bee, are as tokenizable as any other input data.
The concepts a dolphin language may have, no matter what they are, could then be described in a human language, and/or matched to human words for the same description.
- Comment on Chinese people flood TikTok with videos urging Americans to buy direct amid Trump tariffs 2 weeks ago:
How to make cheap products in China:
- Use the same production line (same tooling)
- Use less skilled, cheaper workers, producing lower quality
- Replace materials with lower quality ones
- Skip materials where they aren’t seen
- Reduce requirements for the quality check
Brands, and the fear of losing the investment put into establishing one, is the only thing keeping people in check. When brands stop caring about quality, they lower it. When manufacturers want to differentiate themselves from scammers, they establish a brand 🤷
- Comment on Why doesn't Steam support Android? 2 weeks ago:
Read the case, the whole thing started because Google banned Epic from the Play store, and the only reason for it to become a case, was the monopolistic position. That’s gone now, they’re free to refuse service to whoever they want, whenever they want, for no reason at all… and if you don’t agree, go sue them, they’ll show you the precedent followed by the door.
- Comment on Google created a new AI model for talking to dolphins 2 weeks ago:
This group has been studying dolphins since 1985 using a non-invasive approach to track a specific community of Atlantic spotted dolphins. The WDP creates video and audio recordings of dolphins, along with correlating notes on their behaviors.
Just the 40 years, for that specific group of dolphins.
- Comment on Tesla Stock Price Reaches 'Death Cross' Status 2 weeks ago:
Tesla is going to fall hard for a very simple combination of reason:
- It’s a meme stock, with 0% dividends and the P/E of a startup despite being 20 years old.
- It’s not going to miraculously start making money, when the worldwide sentiment is to let it burn (sometimes literally).
Considering the Elon an oppressor or not, has nothing to do with it. Personally, I’m saddened by the fate of SpaceX engineers once the Elon loses the virtual backing that those fantasy TSLA shares are giving him.
- Comment on Why doesn't Steam support Android? 2 weeks ago:
I do like Balatro and want to play it on my phone, but if I want to do that I have to buy another license, which I can’t even do because I don’t run Google Play Services
Spoiler: you can use the LÖVE loader to run the “PC version” of Balatro on Android, since it’s all written in Lua.
- Comment on Why doesn't Steam support Android? 2 weeks ago:
They don’t ban the entire company from distributing any software.
They can do whatever, it’s their store.
Keep in mind that Epic Games v. Google has made Google add features to allow alternative app stores on Android… which automatically removes the monopoly argument and lets Google ban anyone they want from the Google Play store.
- Comment on The rise of ‘Frankenstein’ laptops in New Delhi’s repair markets 2 weeks ago:
Your words spit in the face of everyone who died in a hunger strike. Truly disgusting.
- Comment on The rise of ‘Frankenstein’ laptops in New Delhi’s repair markets 3 weeks ago:
Alternatively: nobody can actually force anyone to do anything, as in moving their arms and body for them, everyone chooses whether to starve, work at a suicide job, or rebel. Shifting blame for someone’s actions, or inaction, to an abstract “system”, is an easy excuse to justify people’s inaction regarding said system.
- Comment on Adult gamers of Lemmy how do you find time to game without being exhausted of the screen? 3 weeks ago:
game without [being exhausted of the] screen
There is your answer: if screens exhaust you, do something without screens.
Games are supposed to give you a good time, reinvigorate you, and prepare for your “real life”. If you’re sick of screens, then pick up pottery, or squash, or hiking, or skydiving, or cooking, or… thousands of activities out there to have a good time without a screen.
having a huge backlog
That’s work. Just don’t. Do stuff that makes you feel better, not just tick a box in a backlog so you feel slightly less bad.
- Comment on X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research 3 weeks ago:
People want “anonymous for me, not for thee” mixed with “I don’t trust you, trust me bro”.
Starting from a basis that people want a contradiction, people will go to whichever platform “cons” them better.
Facebook had a real name policy, then it didn’t. Twitter had an anonymous policy, then it added verified accounts, now anyone can buy the blue, so they added a gold.
Meanwhile, people don’t want to understand that others can behave in different ways or capacities at different times, but if course want full understanding for themselves.
Goggle’s Circles had the right idea, but it failed explosively by showing their hand to people who want to pretend it doesn’t exist.
- Comment on Why you should be polite to AI 3 weeks ago:
evil play-through in a video game
This reminds me of the case of a parent who let his 6 year old play GTA. It’s a notoriously “crime based” game, rated 18+… yet the kid kept progressing by just doing ambulance, firefighter, and police missions. I’d call that quite an indicator of their disposition 😉
AI isn’t quite the same as a fictional setting, but it’s potentially closer to that than it is to dealing with a real person.
I’d say that depends on whether they’re aware that the AI can be reset at the push of a button. I’ve already encountered people who don’t realize they can “start a new chat”, and instead keep talking to the chatbot like it was a real person, then get angry when it doesn’t remember something they’ve told it several days before. Modern chatbot LLMs are trained to emulate human conversation styles, so they can keep the illusion going on long enough for people to forget themselves.
- Comment on Why you should be polite to AI 3 weeks ago:
Some estimates put the percentage of psychopaths in the single digits, that of sociopaths in the double digits. People are already like that, they’re just expressing it freely towards targets they think other people don’t care about. Let’s not forget the fate of Tay: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
What these people don’t realize, is that modern LLMs are trained on human interactions, get tuned and/or limited to “positive” interactions, and interacting with them like kicking a rock, will give them zero results. And honestly… I’m fine with that. I don’t really care about their instance of an LLM which can be reset at any moment; better have them kicking that, than actual people. If it also gets them to learn some basic behavior, so much better for everyone else.
- Comment on ‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers 3 weeks ago:
It’s just fancy Google that elaborates, but you can’t trust the results it gives you, because it lies
That’s a contradiction: either it’s “fancy Google”, or “it lies”. Can’t have both at the same time.
- Comment on The rise of ‘Frankenstein’ laptops in New Delhi’s repair markets 3 weeks ago:
Farooq Ahmed, an 18-year-old scrap dealer
Without proper safety measures, workers handle toxic materials such as lead, mercury, and cadmium daily. “I cough a lot,” Ahmed admits with a sheepish grin. “But what can I do? This work feeds my family.”
Food for today, death for tomorrow.
On one hand, it’s criminal what companies like Apple do to hinder repairability. On the other, these people are killing themselves pretty quickly; instead of in a landfill, all those heavy metals are going to end up in the air after they get cremated.
