• 3 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • I honestly fully believe that proprietary software is bullshit and all software ought to be Free Software. I’m not saying I don’t use proprietary software, but I don’t trust it. If I run proprietary software, I go out of my way to try to run it in prison. I don’t let my Nintendo Switch connect to the internet except when I have a very specific reason and then I disconnect it immediately after I’m done. When I bought a robot vacuum cleaner, I bought specifically the model that I knew I could hack to not phone home. I bought a phone on which I could run LineageOS without the Google apps. (And, yes, I’m running a proprietary EFI BIOS on my main desktop machine and such. But I do take a lot of steps to limit how much influence proprietary software has on me and my devices.)








  • Thank you for bringing more awareness of this. I’m what you might call an “AI skeptic” and don’t really care what happens in the AI space as long as it doesn’t screw up things I care about.

    But I care deeply about FOSS and AI is screwing it up. I don’t want to have to explain why XYZ thing absolutely is not Open Source and that “Open Source” has a specific meaning beyond “you can look at (at least some of) the source code.”

    (Compare it to the term “hacker” that has among at least a lot of muggles taken on the exclusive meaning of committing some kind of fraud with computers. Originally it meant something very different. And it’s unfortunate the world has forgotten the old meaning.)

    Another project that is diluting the term “Open Source” is Grayjay, a video streaming app that is a FUTO project (and FUTO is a Louis Rossman thing.) Rossman has called it Open Source in YouTube videos, but it’s not Open Source. (The license is here and forbids things like “commercial use” (selling the software or derivative works) and removing facilites for paying the FUTO project from derivative works. Which is a lot less restrictive than the license was last time I checked it. Previously it didn’t allow redistribution or derivative works at all. But it’s not Open Source even now.)



  • If it’s already in memory, that’s one few step to reach it.

    I search my live memory with Tab Manager Plud

    Oh, so you’re doing something like Googling just to find the page title and then rather than clicking the link in Google, (closing the Google results page, I hope and) searching through your tab titles with Tab Manager Plus to find and switch to the open tab where you already have the page in question open?

    Though, I still don’t understand why you keep the tab open in the first place rather than juat closing the tab when you’re (at least for the moment) done with it and then Googling to find the content again and clicking the appropriate link to get that same content in a new tab when you do need it again. I asked whether the reason was so that if the content is removed from the server, you didn’t lose it, but I don’t think anything you said in your last post answered that question. You did say:

    My software should not discard data without my permission. When it runs out of RAM it should dump to disk cache, not delete.

    Which wasn’t quite a direct answer to my question. And you then directly admit that the browser doesn’t even keep content that’s open in a tab:

    But browser have the builtin assumption that the web remembers everything, which is false.

    So that must not be why you keep content open in tabs, right?

    Is it maybe something like if you keep something open in a tab, the presence of that page title in your tab manager gives you confirmation when you later Google to find the page title that such-and-such particular result in the Google results is indeed the thing you’re looking for and not a different page than the one you were looking for?

    Just as an aside, my web browser use is probably atypical as well. I have my browser forget all cookies, history, cache, etc (basically everything but my bookmarks) every time I fully close it. And I close it every time I switch activities to keep my online personas isolated from each other. (So I’m never logged into my Google account and my Amazon account at the same time, for instance. To reduce targeted ads and such.)

    Also, I’m wondering if something more like a caching proxy with maybe page searching capabilities and finegrained control of what is cached and what isn’t might fill part of your use case, but I still don’t have a firm grasp on your use case.


  • I’ve read this entire thread like three times and watched all the videos you’ve posted, and I still don’t understand your workflow at all.

    If searching bookmarks/history is harder than using Google to just find the thing you want to get back to, why do you need to keep the things you want to get back to open rather than just using Google to find the page again later? Or when you want to get back to something you (think you?) have left open, do you find it just by scrolling through all your tabs until a title/favicon looks like what you’re looking for?

    Your last paragraph makes it seem like maybe you want to keep the tabs open so if the page/content gets deleted off of the server, you don’t lose it. Is that correct? I’d imagine that doesn’t always accomplish that, though, right? (Particularly for something like YouTube.) If that’s a significant part of why you keep the tabs open, though, maybe that bit at least is a good question for a data hoarder community.

    I haven’t been able to find any “discard all tabs” addon for Firefox by Googling. And I can’t guess what exactly it does. (Does it save tab states to disk and suspend - but also leave open - all tabs or something?) Are you sure that’s the name of the addon you’re using?



  • Great question! Not really my area of expertise, but probably there are at least a couple of possible avenues. One is decompilation and/or disassembly and static analysis. (Basically use automated tools to reconstruct the original source code as best it can and then read that imperfect reconstruction of the source code to figure out what it does.) Another is isolating it (“air gap” – no network or connectivity to anything you care about) so you’re sure it can’t do any damage and running it with tools that record/report everything it does. (On Linux, one could use strace and/or GDB. On Mac, dtrace. Not sure what the equivalent is for Windows programs running on Windows.)

    Actually, I guess another option could be to set up an isolated system, record a whole bunch of information about it before running the .exe then after running the .exe, examine it to see what you can find on the filesystem or in the registry or in RAM or whatever that might have changed. It wouldn’t catch everything, though. Like if it made a network connection or something but didn’t actually change anything on the filesystem, it might not leave any traces.

    Whatever the case, it’d probably require some specialized tools and expertise. But it’d be an interesting project.





  • Doesn’t that require a much higher temperature than most beds would be able to safely achieve.

    I had to take the screen off of a Pixel not terribly long ago to replace the battery. I used a heat gun and I remember it requiring a temperature of like… 240C° or some such? And when I’m printing PLA, my printer bed only gets to 60C°. (Not saying it couldn’t go higher, but 240C° seems way higher than 60C°.)


  • I’ve run across AI content in non-AI subs before and responded with similar things fully expecting to be downvoted to Earth’s core and was pleasantly surprised at how few downvotes and how many upvotes I got. So I’ve made a habit of calling out AI stuff in non-AI communities when I run across it. (Unless it’s actually strongly related to the purpose of the community it’s posted in.)

    This is at least the third time I’ve made such a comment, and the first time I’ve seen a negative net score for more than a few minutes after I posted. Still, it’s pretty evenly split even on this one. Maybe most of the down-voters just don’t want anything negative said about “AI”. (Like cryptobros will deem anything “bearish” to be “FUD”.) Who knows.

    And there are places for engaging in mouth-foaming AI bubble hype indulgence on Lemmy. I just don’t want the communities I like inundated with tons of AI PR posts.


  • I don’t really have any investment in TF2.

    But if I were involved with the #FixTF2 movement, I’d want it to be careful not to make the big wigs at Valve want to just slap Valorent-like anti-cheat on TF2.

    It does seem like the page for #FixTF2 talks about zero tolerance policies and basically manually banning people based on reports. But not explicitly saying in the petition to Valve that kernel-level anticheat is not the solution seems risky.

    Edit: Ok, looked a little closer. It doesn’t seem like #FixTF2 is really against invasive client-side anticheat measures. They talk about “updated anti-cheat measures” as something they want, but don’t put any qualifiers on that. That’s unfortunate.