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Chobbes,

God kurzgesagt really bothers me for their “technology will save us” ideology. I get bad vibes.

Chobbes,

Yeah, it’s really egregious. I don’t really like their videos because they all feel kind of biased like that… and just a lot of editorializing. To be clear, I’m not above technology getting us out of a jam, but I really don’t think we should expect it… We should really plan with what we know is possible.

Chobbes,

Why the fuck don’t receipts just show up in my bank / credit card statements?

Chobbes,

No, but I want to see what I’ve purchased T_T. While we’re at it I’d like public key cryptography to see more use, haha.

Chobbes,

You didn’t like the one where there was a bad guy and they fought the bad guy and then won against the bad guy?

Chobbes,

This was exactly my thought… Some of the ent scenes are really rough now. Fantastic movies, though!

Chobbes,

Ohhhhh, yes, but I think you’re thinking of the other one. It’s the one with a few casual one liners.

Chobbes,

Interstellar is an amazing movie followed immediately by a terrible sequel.

How will we ever get away from plastics when they are ubiquitous for safety

Plastic seals food, sterile medical implements, medicine, beverages, etc… it’s seems like plastic is used as a way to seal things safely. Post pandemic rising, I see even more. My work used to be have plastic utensils in the cafeteria, for example, an already wasteful thing. Now, post-2020, every fork, knife, and spoon is...

Chobbes,

I’m probably going to hell for saying this, but… I’m not that worried about plastic pollution? Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to minimize single use items and plastic ending up places it shouldn’t, but if it’s the best option for food / medical safety or cheaply producing something with a lower carbon footprint… we should probably just use it without too much guilt? The world is almost certainly better because of plastic in my opinion.

Chobbes, (edited )

I don’t think this is a completely fair comparison. I have a Steam Deck OLED and I don’t have a PS5 or a Portal, but I can see the appeal of the Portal (though initially I thought it was kind of dumb too). The screen is bigger and higher resolution, it’s a first party device with pretty much the same ergonomics as the controller you’d be used to, and it is significantly cheaper than any OLED version of the steam deck and roughly half the price of the base model LCD steam deck (with the caveat that the 64GB LCD version can currently be had for $350 “while supplies last”).

Is the Steam Deck a great device? Absolutely! It does more than the Portal in that it can play games on its own (and is kind of a full computer), and the price of the Steam Deck is actually insanely good for what it is. The fact that you can set one up for remote play on a PS5 is also pretty cool, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if people did opt to spend a little more for a Steam Deck vs a Portal…

But realistically if you’re a busy parent or something and you just want to play your PS5 around the house (which I thought was a stupid use case, and was a reason I held off on getting a Steam Deck… But it’s actually really nice), I can totally see the appeal of just getting the Portal because it’s cheaper than a Steam Deck, has a bigger and higher resolution screen (though not OLED), won’t need any tinkering at all, and will just have the layout and features you’re used to in the controller. It’s definitely a relatively niche device, but I don’t think it’s insanely priced for what it is and I think a decent chunk of people will be happy with it… But if you’re not in the target market it might seem a little silly.

As I get older I value money less and time and not having to mess with stuff more. I think the Portal really isn’t targeting younger people who are less willing to spend money, and more willing to put up with jankier solutions like just using your phone… It’s targeting older people who just want to buy a decent quality thing that will just work out of the box so they can play games while they watch their kids or whatever.

Chobbes,

I still can’t get over how much of an obvious blunder it was to only have one analog stick on the PSP.

Chobbes,

I think you’re just not the target market. If you’re not somebody who has the luxury to keep up on whatever the nerds on the internet are making, you’re probably happy to have a first party product to buy. Honestly part of the appeal of products like this is just the luxury to not have to research the thing to figure out if you can make it do what you want — that’s clearly not something you care about, and that’s fine…

Chobbes,

Yeah. You’ll probably have access to a calculator these days, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth knowing some basic arithmetic. Playing around with arithmetic is a good way to gain an understanding of the fundamentals and have a better sense of what the operations mean and how they work, which helps even when you do have a calculator.

Chobbes,

That’s super early to have adopted SSDs solely, no?

Chobbes,

If you’re just buying a terabyte or two of storage there’s absolutely no reason to buy spinning rust at this point. If you want many terabytes of storage 12tb+ hard drives are going to be a fair bit cheaper than SSDs currently. SSDs have been rapidly dropping in price and increasing in capacity, though, so hopefully it just gets more and more cost effective to have a bunch of storage with SSDs.

Chobbes,

Yeah ~2008 is kind of the timeframe I have for people getting SSDs in consumer devices. I mean… maybe you could count compact flash?

Chobbes,

Compression can increase read and write speeds to storage because you’re sending over fewer bits. The tradeoff is that you need CPU resources to do the compression (and decompression).

I haven’t found games to compress that well. On my steam folder 809GB compressed down to 724GB, so I save maybe 10%. That’s certainly not nothing, but it’s not game changing either. That said I don’t install a lot of hundred gig plus games.

Chobbes,

I feel like your example is pretty judgemental. You can absolutely like people but rather do your own thing most of the time, or not want to bother people. Or maybe you’re not much of a talker or whatever. I think it’s best not to prescribe how people should behave, it can be super alienating.

Chobbes,

To be fair that might just be a poor implementation? XMPP can support push notifications just fine now:

xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.htmlmodules.prosody.im/mod_cloud_notify

There are some remaining issues with push (mostly on iOS as far as I know), but it’s all to do with OMEMO. OMEMO is kind of like the signal protocol but in XMPP. This is kind of moot for corporate XMPP, though, as you probably aren’t using OMEMO.

The OMEMO issue is that the contents of the message are end-to-end encrypted so you can’t simply send the notification to devices. I believe conversations on Android may just keep a socket open (or maybe that’s just the fdroid version?) so it just manages it with background tasks. And on iOS monal does what signal does and will use push notifications as a trigger to pull messages from the server. Siskin on iOS just sends you a “you have a new message!” notification instead because they don’t want to spin up the radio to fetch messages in order to preserve battery life. So basically push works fine on monal, and Siskin also has working push but you don’t get message contents.

Chobbes,

I keep getting tempted to try it, but honestly it doesn’t look like it would be my jam. I don’t want to build bases, and I don’t want to grind and collect resources. I’m kind of not into sandboxy stuff anymore. Maybe there’s more to the game, but that’s all it looks like to me as an outsider.

how similar are other North American countries to USA??

I mean the other 2 countries, Canada and Mexico, how similar are both of them to United States?? Both countries have a similar economy and democracy etc, and I think those two countries share things like supermarkets, stores, etc. I suppose the cultural differences are not a lot, that is very nice.

Chobbes,

We’re just not well travelled enough to know :(.

Chobbes,

Eh I don’t know. I’m from Canada and I live in the USA right now. Most places in Canada that I’ve experienced are completely car dependent, and there’s only a few cities with big transit systems? Where I live now has incredible transit compared to where I was in Canada and people here complain far more about transit than they did in Canada (probably in part because people actually use it). The cities that I’ve lived in definitely give a bit of a biased perspective, though.

It’s hard to say which is really more car dependent. There are more larger cities in the US and more with decent transit infrastructure compared to Canada, but maybe per capita or per city Canada would win because there’s a lot of Midwest and the US has a higher population? If I was picking a place to live and transit was the only consideration, though, I would probably pick the USA over Canada because there’s more cities to choose from and more rail.

Chobbes,

I mean it really depends on what you’re measuring to compare car dependence. Is it number of people who have to drive every day? Number of cities where most of the population has to drive every day? Are you comparing transit infrastructure on equivalently sized cities (and then is the size by population, or do you compare cities of the same density…). If you’re looking at how many people across the country need a car, NYC is very relevant. Realistically this is something that mostly makes sense to compare by city rather than by country (obviously the country has influence over transit, but that’s not really the point).

Chobbes,

Yeah, leaving the house was always my cue to shower and now that that’s not as regular of a thing I’m all out of whack!

Chobbes,

I feel like AAA games usually aren’t innovative. AAA games have large budgets and therefore need to have mass appeal which usually means a relatively safe existing formula with a lot of the budget going towards graphics and scale (and marketing). That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and I wouldn’t say no innovation happens in AAA games… but it’s not that surprising that they can be a little formulaic.

Honestly all games are kind of starting to feel the same to me and I’m not sure if it’s what I’m playing, that I’ve played too many games and “seen too much”, or that I need a break or what lol.

Chobbes,

I wouldn’t do it. Not worth the risk.

Chobbes, (edited )

It’s the password to unlock the content on the DVD (well, HD DVD / Blu-Ray) so you can just copy the video from it for redistribution.

Chobbes,

More technically, the data on the disk is encrypted with that “password”, so there’s not really a password prompt. It’s more like your DVD player will have this encryption key stored on it somewhere (possibly on a separate chip where it’s hard for somebody to extract it and distribute it on the internet lol), and then it will automatically run the decryption algorithm with this key on the disk contents transparently.

Chobbes,

Pretty much, yeah! CDs and blu-rays aren’t all that different from punch cards, as the data is literally stored as indentations on the disc with a reflective layer. Arguably CD-RWs are kind of different as they change the reflectivity of a material itself… Hard drives and floppies are maaaaybe slightly different too because they use changes in magnetism instead of physical indentations too. You could probably argue that flash and DRAM aren’t glorified punchcards? But I mean, ultimately all data is stored in a physical medium somehow so it’s always going to have some resemblance!

Chobbes,

I feel like we don’t appreciate the history of data storage enough! It’s kind of wild looking at how different the world was when CD-Rs came out. They could store substantially more data than a typical hard drive of the time and were dirt cheap. So you would get bulletin boards hosting content from optical drives and stuff. It’s also (partially) why you would have to use discs for games in the past, instead of just installing them to the hard drive. When hard drives are expensive it’s probably better to just stream music and assets from an optical disc instead of taking up precious space. Sometimes you could play a game (or part of it) without the disc, but you wouldn’t get music because that was left on the disc.

Chobbes,

Okay, ew… but for what it’s worth brewers yeasts are very specific strains of yeast that have been bred for the purpose. One of the most important aspects of these brewers yeasts versus regular bakers yeasts or wild yeasts (like a sourdough starter) is that they can thrive in higher alcohol environments, allowing them to convert more sugar into alcohol (e.g., I think champagne yeasts can give you a higher ABV). Brewers yeast will also likely be more efficient and convert sugar to alcohol faster than wild strains (sourdough is also a much slower process than using bakers yeasts), which might have implications for food safety if the yeast cannot outcompete other nastier microbes. You can make alcohol with wild yeasts but it’s not as controlled of a process.

Chobbes,

You definitely can use wild yeasts to make alcohol. It probably won’t work as well or as consistently, but I’m sure you can make some good stuff just by letting things ferment naturally. I bake a lot of sourdough and it’s very fiddly compared to commercial yeasts. You also technically can use bakers yeast for brewing, but I think it’s not ideal for various reasons, like the flavour can be different and I think it doesn’t clump together as much so it’s harder to remove.

Chobbes,

I was wondering about that! I wasn’t sure what strain it was and didn’t really want to look it up, haha. Very good point, though!

Chobbes,

This is what I thought too, but in my case it turned out my drive was busted and btrfs detected an error and went read only… which was super annoying and my initial reaction was “ugh, piece of shit filesystem!” But ultimately I’m grateful it noticed something was wrong with the drive. If I was just using ext4 I just would have had silent data corruption. In that sense other filesystems do silently do their jobs… but they also potentially fail silently which is a little scary. Checksums are nice.

Chobbes,

They’re just suggesting that you should accept both cash and electronic payments.

Chobbes,

No, they are not. They are not end-to-end encrypted but they are encrypted between your PC and your service provider, between service providers and between service providers and receivers. End-to-end encryption is needed to defend against your service provider or entities that can order your provider around but not against random hackers snooping around in your network.

This is true AND untrue at the same time! It’s true that most e-mail providers will talk to other e-mail providers with TLS, but it’s trivial to downgrade the connection in most circumstances. If you can man-in-the-middle e-mail servers you can just say “hey, I’m the e-mail provider you’re trying to talk to, I don’t support TLS, talk to me in plain text!” and the senders will probably oblige. There’s a few standards to try to address this problem, like DANE (which actually solves the problem, but is unsupported by all large e-mail providers), and mta-sts which is a much weaker standard (but supported by gmail and outlook). In practice there’s a good chance that your e-mail is reasonably well secured, but it’s absolutely not a guarantee.

Chobbes,

Nowdays client-server and server-server communication is ecrypted and signed, so no an issue now.

This is probably true, but in a very unsatisfying way. It’s not accurate to say this is not an issue now because mail servers talk to each other with opportunistic encryption — if both ends say “hey, I support TLS” they’ll talk over TLS, but if either end claims to not support TLS they’ll default to plain text. This is deeply concerning because it’s very possible for somebody to mimic another server and get the connection downgraded to plain text, bypassing TLS altogether. There are standards to deal with this, like DANE, but most large e-mail providers don’t support this… The other more recent standard to address this is called MTA-STS, but it’s much weaker than DANE and can potentially be exploited (but at least gmail and outlook support it, I guess). E-mail security is in a weird place. It’s slightly better than the “completely unencrypted” situation that people seem to think it is… But it’s also pretty much impossible to guarantee that your e-mail will not be sent over plain text.

Chobbes,

In my experience with my Apple Watch you have to activate the wallet functionality in order to pay for something by clicking the side button twice, which should make it harder for somebody to just walk around with a terminal charging random people. Phones usually need to be unlocked to make payments too. In theory NFC credit cards could be scanned like this, and if you’re worried about that you can look into NFC blocking wallets… I’m not super worried about it, though, because usually you wouldn’t be on the hook for such a fraudulent charge.

Chobbes,

AFAIK DKIM/DMARC now is mandatory on most servers.

DKIM and DMARC don’t have anything to do with this. DKIM is a way for e-mail servers to sign e-mails with a key that’s placed in DNS in an attempt to prevent e-mail spoofing, but this in no way protects e-mails you send from potentially being read in plain text. DKIM is also not necessarily mandatory, and you can potentially get away with just SPF. Many mail servers also do not have strict sender policies, which could potentially allow for spoofing in certain situations. Also neither DKIM / SPF provide any protections if an attacker is able to poison DNS records.

GPG. Or other E2EE.

I mean, yes, but that’s not really the point. PGP has essentially nothing to do with the e-mail protocols aside from the S/MIME extensions. Almost no institution is using PGP to secure e-mails. You could also encrypt something using PGP before you sent it over the fax lines in theory.

Chobbes, (edited )

That depends on the specific TLS setup. Badly configured TLS 1.2 would allow downgrade attacks, TLS 1.3 would not.

Why would TLS 1.3 prevent this kind of downgrade attack? The issue is that TLS has never been a requirement for e-mail servers, so for interoperability they only do TLS opportunistically. Even if you configure your own e-mail server to only talk over TLS, nobody else knows that your server only speaks TLS (or speaks TLS at all), so if somebody is pretending to be your mail server they can just claim to only speak plain text and any sender will be more than happy to default to it. If you support DNSSEC you can use DANE to advertise that your mail server speaks TLS, and even fix the certificates that are allowed, but senders will actually have to check this in order to make sure nobody can intercept your e-mail. Notably both outlook and gmail do not support this (neither for sending nor receiving!), they both instead rely on the weaker MTA-STS standard.

my guess would be that at least the big ones like gmail don’t allow unsecured communication with their servers at all

They absolutely do :).

I highly doubt the “in most circumstances” line

That was maybe too strong of a statement, at least with the recent adoption of MTA-STS this is at least less trivial to do :). The intent of this statement was more “if you are in the position to be a man-in-the-middle between two generic e-mail servers it is trivial to downgrade the connection from TLS to plaintext”. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was hard-coded that gmail and outlook should only talk to each other over TLS, for instance, which should prevent this for e-mails sent between the two (I also wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t hard-coded either… There’s sort of a bad track record with e-mail security, and the lack of DNSSEC from either of these parties is disappointing!). Ignoring special configuration like this, and without MTA-STS or DANE these downgrade attacks are trivial. Now with the advent of MTA-STS you’ll probably have a reasonably hard time downgrading the connections between some of the large e-mail providers. Though notably this is not universally supported either, iCloud supports neither MTA-STS nor DANE for instance, and who knows about all of the various providers you never think of. This is a bit of a tangent, but a good talk about how large mail providers might not be as well configured as you’d hope: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwnT15q_PS8

Chobbes,

Neither TLS provide in such case. Attacker can request ACME cert.

Depends whose DNS you can mess with, but yes! It may be possible to poison DNS records for one e-mail server, but ACME certificate providers like letsencrypt (supposedly) try to do DNS lookups from multiple locations (so hopefully a simple man-in-the-middle attack will not be sufficient), and they do lookups directly from the authoritative DNS servers. This is, of course, not perfect and theoretically suffers from all of the same mitm problems, but it’s more thorough than most mail servers will be and would potentially limit who would be in the position to perform these attacks and get a bogus certificate issued.

With DNSSEC and DANE you are even able to specify which TLS certificate should be used for a service in a TLSA record, and you can protect your A records and your CAA record which should make it much harder to get bogus certificates issued. Of course you need to trust the TLDs in order to trust DNSSEC, but you already do implicitly (as you point out, if you control the TLD you can get whatever certificate you want issued through ACME). The reality right now is that all trust on the web ultimately stems from the TLDs and DNS, but the current situation with CAs introduces several potential attack vectors. The internet is certainly a lot more secure than it used to be even 10 years ago, but I think there’s still a lot of work to be done. DNSSEC, or something like it, would go a long way to solving some of the remaining issues.

Chobbes,

I’m not responding to that comment?

Chobbes,

Isn’t there VR Google Earth? It’s probably the thing I’m most tempted to buy a headset for.

Chobbes,

If you’re active outside it’s surprisingly hard to be cold to be honest. Beyond that the most important thing is having a wind proof layer on the outside, and probably some decent gloves.

Chobbes,

I’m from Canada, so… I have?

Chobbes,

I’ve lived where it regularly gets near -40C. Often feel chillier laying down in a “cold” house than even just walking outside for a bit. If you have a thick coat and you’re moving it’s not unusual to get too warm, which can be a bit of a problem if you start sweating. I would bike in the winter and I basically just needed a wind breaker and a light jacket (and good gloves, obviously!). One thing that kind of sucks is taking the bus in the winter because you walk to the bus stop, but then sit there in the cold, and then when you finally get on the bus it’s disgustingly warm.

Chobbes,

It’s been great for getting to games I’m not sure I would have otherwise. Ori and the Blind Forest was the perfect game to play through on it!

I hope you have a better rest of the year and beyond. This year stank a bit for me too, but there’s been some good things as well.

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