dannym

@[email protected]

🚀 Seen my posts and want more? Dive deep into the issues with Big Tech at Escape Big Tech!

💡 Need FOSS-focused software solutions? Reach out on Matrix at @dannym:balooga.xyz!

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

dannym,

Quick aside, there won’t be a USB D (unless the USB people change their mind yet again), it will be something different from USB. The idea was to have USB A be what you plug on your source and B on your destination and was designed as a way to avoid power surges in the original 1.0 spec because the A side was physically different from the B side you weren’t ever going to plug in something that sends power to something that receives power (basically it prevented users from breaking their devices on accident). USB C changed that with a chip on each cable that handles negotiation before agreeing on a power spec

dannym,

I love it; it’s been my replacement for LaTeX since I’ve hears about it on hacker news

dannym,

the syntax is more powerful than markdown, the whole idea of with blocks and the ability to have more complex layouts is great

dannym,

The concept of competition among tech companies has done a complete 180 on its original meaning. It’s no longer predominantly about crafting superior products; rather, it’s become a race to secure the largest amount of investor funding.

In this transformed landscape, the product itself and revenue generation often take a backseat, or at best, hold a tertiary importance. The heart of customer-centric ethos, especially crucial elements like data security, are now distressingly overlooked. What matters is getting the next investment to become the next “unicorn” and be acquired for billions of dollars. Silicon Valley Companies want the easy way out, do only a fraction of the work for an exponential amount of the benefits.

Don’t get me wrong, there are reasons to seek investment, getting a good product built is actually complex and you actually need a lot of different people working on it. The alternative is losing years of your life on a sisyphean ordeal of soul-crushing, hundred-hour work weeks (and that’s real work, not “let me check twitter” work), making you question your life choices and whether you should just throw it all away, abandon technology, become a hermit and move to a shed in the mountains.

The problem is that the EXPECTATION today is that you’re gonna build a third of a product, care about 1% of the actual business behind it and then pivoting exclusively to the pursuit of investment, letting everything else rot

dannym,

Oh, i didn’t think about that! Tho I’d feel gross installing a google product on my phone

dannym,

I mean fair enough, i can also drink gasoline and douse myself in it, then set myself on fire and jump inside a shark infested ocean to put out the fire, but I’m not gonna do that either

dannym,

well nix still uses the same structure, the only difference is that files are symlinked to files in subfolders of the /nix/store folder.

For example you may find that /etc/hosts is just a symlink to /nix/store/69420aaabbbcccdddfffggghhhiii420-hosts

dannym,

I mean fair enough, some files are in /run/current-system/sw/

dannym,

If you’re on Android use grayjay, if you’re on Linux use freetube. You can follow channels on both of those.

If using grayjay and you can afford it please do pay for the license; you’re not technically required; it’s based on the honor system, but it helps the developers at FUTO work on it and it helps them donate to other FOSS projects.

If you use freetube please donate to them, even a dollar, the developers will greatly appreciate it.

Let’s support software that doesn’t hate us!

dannym,

To be fair, the allegations haven’t been proven and allegedly he was 13 at the time… not that it makes it any better, but context matters

dannym, (edited )

the results for me are hilarious, who knew people in my general area downloaded so much porn… and… weird porn at that

it’s literally only porn, who the heck torrents porn?

some of the most hilariously sounding things on that list:

very nsfw- FATAL ECSTASY.rar - I was looking for work as a voice actor but I was made to do a motion capture sex.rar - Picking up girl on the way home from a live show and having sex!.rar - Divine Fuck VR Sex Worship - Sailor Girl Stuck In A Wall.rar - ReEro - Ejaculating in Another World ver.2.0 [EnglishMTL].rar - Intercourse Study Week.rar

dannym,

yeah, there was a feature that was supposed to do it, but they never implemented the feature properly, which made it literally useless, and it was discovered just now, 3 years later

dannym,

Maybe you’re right, but to me it’s still worth it to point out those issues

dannym,

that’s wrong. the device exposed the real mac address on port 5353 (udp) which is apple’s “bonjour” service, which acts as a service discovery/zeroconf network tool.

that means that other devices in the same network can know your real mac address, this makes it very easy for say ISPs to track you across networks if you use friends networks, open wifi networks in coffee shops etc.

dannym,

DNS tracking can be mitigated with Oblivious DoH, DNSCrypt or even a VPN.

dannym,

As time marches on, my skepticism about there being ONE smart google employee only grows.

Grayjay is not Open Source (hiphish.github.io)

Today FUTO released an application called Grayjay for Android-based mobile phones. Louis Rossmann introduced the application in a video (YouTube link). Grayjay as an application is very promising, but there is one point I take issue with: Grayjay is not an Open Source application. In the video Louis explains his reason behind...

dannym,

Let’s not make this sound worse than it is. We don’t need to devolve into Stallman everytime we see software that’s not 100% in agreement with the GPL or other extreme licenses. Let’s celebrate some great software, nitpicking like this is not productive. Their license is perfect for their product; at the very least they’re HONEST unlike big tech companies. I’d rather have “source available” code than proprietary bullshit that can only be understood by spending months looking at it with ghidra

dannym,

I can give my two cents on it, as one of those people you’re talking about.

I’m very in touch with the FOSS community. I have used more FOSS software than you can think of (and yes, that is with your definition of FOSS). What I am NOT however is a stallmanist or a purist who dogmatically sticks to one narrow definition of what FOSS should be. While I wholly understand the importance of not diluting the meaning of FOSS, I think it’s critical to step back and see the broader picture here. The dogma around FOSS can sometimes be counterproductive, stifling the very innovation and freedom it aims to foster.

Firstly, if I had to choose, I’d certainly prefer to have a software landscape filled with “source-available” applications over one dominated by entirely proprietary systems. Source-available projects, even if not fully meeting the stringent FOSS criteria, still provide transparency and offer opportunities for auditing and modification, which is what we all want! It’s a step towards wresting control from Big Tech and their walled gardens.

Secondly, I aim to push for a new industry standard where, at the very least, source-available software becomes the norm. However, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Thirdly, we have to be realistic about sustaining FOSS projects. The developers behind these initiatives should absolutely be compensated for their contributions. It’s essential to acknowledge that people have livelihoods to maintain. And if a FOSS project (or a source-available one) truly provides value, its creators deserve not just recognition but overwhelming financial success. This is the only way to incentivize more high-quality projects and thereby fundamentally change the software industry for the better.

Lastly, concerning the GPL, while the GPL has played a monumental role in the growth and popularity of FOSS, it’s not without its flaws. For one, it can sometimes discourage commercial adoption, which, whether you like it or not, is a powerful driver for widespread change.

While I’m way more invested in FOSS than most people, I don’t consider myself a purist; I don’t consider myself a Stallmanist and as much as I respect his contributions to software I would rather the world not have his dogmatic and “religious” beliefs in Software.

I believe in a pragmatic approach that not only seeks to amplify the tenets of FOSS but also recognizes the realities of the world we inhabit. Being inflexible in our definitions and approach can only improve our situation.

dannym,

it was a pun, this lemmy instance is called beehaw, bee nice

dannym,

now they just need to make a keyboard, and make it integrate a jp ime… there are so few good keyboards that meet all the boxes on android…

as far as i know the only two keyboards that have decent english prediction and a jp ime are the gboard and anthy, both options suck fof different reasons

dannym,

openboard lacks a japanese IME, so it’s useless to me

dannym,

I’m always astonished by the amount of information that people give away freely without securing it properly.

As for yet another billion dollar company’s data being stolen… well… that’s just a normal Friday. I’m not one for government intervention, especially considering how our governments act nowadays, but I seriously think that our privacy laws should be a lot more useful and a lot more severe.

I don’t even know what this company was thinking, what goes through someone’s brain to not stop for 20 seconds and think that storing this information unencrypted and just behind a simple login screen is a bad idea? Isn’t it just blatantly obvious that they should’ve used e2e encryption? Require people to generate a key before they send their sample? Or if you want to make it moron proof, was it really impossible to write a unique seed phrase on each box and require users to type that to see their PRIVATE GENETIC INFORMATION?

I’m not anti capitalism, but the audacity of certain companies especially in the us is a sight to behold

dannym,

GDPR is honestly not that good, it’s a step in the right direction but it’s not even close to being a decent solution.

We should consider implementing penalties harsh enough to actually incentivize behavioral change. Ideally, we’d see a system where a failure to reform would result in fines doubling each subsequent month, ensuring that even a giant like Google feels the sting, otherwise nothing is gonna change.

dannym,

sigh 'member when computers were there to serve you and not the other way around? pepperidge farm 'members

https://lemmy.escapebigtech.info/pictrs/image/150a4e3e-7f5e-4948-b7aa-c3b53a2f8692.png

dannym,

I keep telling people that, but for some, what amount to essentially a simulacra really can pass off as human and no matter how much you try to convince them they won’t listen

dannym,

it’s not about feeling intellectually superior; words matter. I’ll grant you one thing, it’s definitely “artificial”, but it’s not intelligence!

LLMs are an evolution of Markov Chains. We have known how to create something similar to LLMs for decades, getting close to a century, we just lacked the raw horse power and the literal hundreds of terabytes of data needed to get there. Anyone who knows how markov chains work can figure out how an LLM works.

I’m not downplaying the development needed to get an LLM up and running, yes, it’s harder than just taking the algorithm for a markov chain, but the real evolution is how much computer power we can shove into a small amount of space now.

Calling LLMs AI would be the same as calling a web crawler AI, or a moderation bot, or many similar things.

I recommend you to read about the chinese room experiment

dannym,

yes, as I said it’s an EVOLUTION of markov chains, but the idea is the same. As you pointed out one major difference is that instead of accounting for only the last 1-5 words, it accounts for a larger context window. The LSTM is just a parler trick. Read the paper on the original transformer model browse.arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf

dannym,

you’re posing an unfalsifiable statement as a question

“prove to me that you don’t have an invisible purple unicorn friend that’s only visible to you”

dannym,

I can disprove what you’re saying with four words: “The Chinese Room Experiment”.

Imagine a room where someone who doesn’t understand Chinese receives questions in Chinese and consults a rule book to send back answers in Chinese. To an outside observer, it looks like the room understands Chinese, but it doesn’t; it’s just following rules.

Similarly, advanced language models can answer complex questions or write code, but that doesn’t mean they truly understand or possess rationality. They’re essentially high-level “rule-followers,” lacking the conscious awareness that humans have. So, even if these models perform tasks and can fool humans to make them believe they’re intelligent, it’s not a valid indicator of genuine intelligence.

dannym,

I think we’re splitting hairs here. Look, you’re technically correct, but none of what you said disproves my point does it? Perhaps I should edit my comment to make it even more clear that it’s not EXACTLY the same technology, but I don’t think you’d argue with me that it’s an evolution of it, right?

dannym,

While John McCarthy and other sources offer valuable definitions, none of them fully encompass the qualities that make an entity not just “clever” but genuinely intelligent in the way humans are: the ability for abstract thinking, problem-solving, emotional understanding, and self-awareness.

If we accept the idea that any computer performing a task indistinguishable from a human is “intelligent,” then we’d also have to concede that simple calculators are intelligent because they perform arithmetic as accurately as a human mathematician. This reduces the concept of intelligence to mere task performance, diluting its complexity and richness.

By the same logic, a wind-up toy that mimics animal movement would be “intelligent” because it performs a task—walking—that in another context, i.e., a living creature, is considered a sign of basic intelligence. Clearly, this broad classification would lead to absurd results

dannym,

they can’t translate chinese, they receive a bunch of symbols and have a book with a bunch of instructions on how to answer based on the input (I can’t speak chinese, so I will just go with japanese for my example)

imagine the following rule set:

  • If the sentence starts with the characters “元気”, the algorithm should commence its response with “はい”, “うん” or “多分” and then repeat the two characters, “元気”.
  • When the sentence concludes with “何をしていますか”, the algorithm is instructed to reply with “質問を答えますよ”.
  • If the sentence is precisely “日本語わかりますか？”, the algorithm has the option to respond with either “え？もちろん！” or “いや、実は大和語だけで話す”.

input: 元気ですか？今何をしていますか？

output: うん, 元気. 質問を答えますよ :P

input: 日本語わかりますか？

output: え？もちろん！

With an exhaustive set of, say, 7 billion rules, the algorithm can mechanically map an input to an output, but this does not mean that it can speak Japanese.

Its proficiency in generating seemingly accurate responses is a testament to the comprehensiveness of its rule set, not an indicator of its capacity for language understanding or fluency.

dannym,

at this point is there even a reason to use windows? I genuinely want to know from windows users, why are you still on this operating system?

for many years (since windows 8.1) I switched to using only linux (and at times macos), and I have never regretted my decision; what keeps you using this hellish platform?

dannym,

does solidworks not work under wine?

dannym,

Anyone who uses excel in a business capacity can’t switch

interesting, what features of excel are you missing in libreoffice, onlyoffice or cryppad?

dannym,

adobe creative I get, I know plenty of people that are forced to use their products because of the stubbornness of other people they work with.

sharepoint I kinda get, I assume that your company is a windows-only shop?

but one drive? why would anyone use one drive?

dannym,

deauth attacks are still a thing, however this is changing with wpa3.

If your router has a setting called “Protected Management Frames” you should enable it ASAP, it’s basically encrypted and signed communication for every packet of data, so that your computer basically refuses to trust any deauth signal that doesn’t actually originate from the router (massively simplifying here).

dannym,

it’s not about the frequency, it’s about the protocol. both 2.4 GHz and 5GHz are vulnerable with WPA2 (or worse WEP). WPA3 is not vulnerable

dannym,

Framework is doing amazing work. Sure, their stuff isn’t cheap, but you’re basically voting with your wallet against the throwaway tech culture. It’s like saying, “Hey, we’d rather pay a bit more for gear that’s actually built to last, than for some flimsy junk that falls apart and costs a fortune to fix.”

dannym,

Love what you’re doing!

Where can I donate to help the project forward?

Also, would you be open to having an article written in a pro-privacy & pro-FOSS blog about the applications you’re building?

dannym,

I completely respect your decision to hold off on donations until there’s a transparent system in place. It’s an admirable approach that really aligns with the spirit of FOSS.

As one of my side projects I manage a blog called escapebigtech.info, and we’ve been fortunate enough to gather around 4000 unique monthly readers. We focus on FOSS and privacy, and I’m launching a weekly feature starting next Friday (2023-10-13) to showcase valuable FOSS projects. I think Purplix would be an excellent candidate for this feature, and I’d be interested in covering it in about three weeks if you’re open to it.

voxel, to privacy
@voxel@infosec.exchange avatar

Say (an encrypted) hello to a more private internet.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/encrypted-hello/

Nothing big, but kinda interesting. I'm excited to see how this will go 👀

@privacy

dannym,

somebody wiresharking your traffic can see the domain name you’re contacting even if you use https; this solves that.

reverse DNS lookup does exist, but it’s not always accurate, especially when multiple websites are hosted on the same server (which is more common than you think)

dannym,

I keep thinking about this, big tech companies and their recommendation algorithms that keep getting worse and recommending you content you don’t actually care about but is designed to keep you on their platform is probably one of the biggest bullshit they come up with.

maybe I should write about this in longform next week

dannym,

some of us ARE doing something about it

dannym,

dude, don’t just assume my political beliefs based on nothing more than a comment…

dannym,

if caring about privacy and not wanting companies and governments to watch everything you do is “the ideology of a suburb liberal”, then fine, I’m a “suburb liberal” lol

EDIT: reading your profile you’re (in your words) a “Firm believers in Marxism Leninism, cartoons, and the need for Gulags” so I don’t think I will continue this discussion. have a nice day ^^

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • uselessserver093
  • Food
  • aaaaaaacccccccce
  • test
  • CafeMeta
  • testmag
  • MUD
  • RhythmGameZone
  • RSS
  • dabs
  • KamenRider
  • TheResearchGuardian
  • KbinCafe
  • Socialism
  • oklahoma
  • SuperSentai
  • feritale
  • All magazines
    •