Lemmy shouldn’t have avatars, banners, or bios
- 7 felt like it was mine
I remember that marketing campaign. Windows Vista had a shaky launch, because the hardware manufacturers hadn’t polished the Vista-compatible drivers yet. 6 months later, they had caught up, but people still had a bad taste from it.
So when service pack 1 came out, Microsoft made a reskinned version of it and started an ad campaign with “customers” claiming “Windows 7 was my idea!” and the public ate it up.
I have such bad things to say about recruiters. They generally don’t have a clue about any of the skills related to the jobs I’m after, and they take a huge cut of the pay the entire time I’m working the job.
On the other hand, the two best jobs (highest pay and best working environment) I’ve had in my career, I got through recruiters, so I acknowledge them as a useful business when it works out. The last one has led to the company buying my contract and hiring me directly for the past 12 years
Think about the experience new users have.
I bring this up a lot, but among the things putting people off from sticking to Lemmy, the new user experience is just not great. I’m not talking about choosing an instance, I’m talking about the general attitude Lemmy has towards content in the feed.
I know it’s a very popular idea that if you don’t like communities or instances or users, you can block them. Unfortunately, most social media users aren’t interested in spending a couple of hours curating their feed to make it useful for them. People are coming in to a feed full of a growing number of niche porn communities, and if they can sort through that, they find heavy-handed political messages, FOSS bros telling everyone how popular software sucks, repost bots with zero discussion, and small community moderators desperately posting dozens of links into the void, hoping for bites.
At the very least, Lemmy needs a sort algorithm that is capable of keeping a page of the feed from being dominated by one community. Going further, I think we could benefit from giving instance admins the tools to curate a default feed that appeals to a wider audience of users.
Maybe then the smaller communities would have a shot at growing.
Yes, if you want to see Hackernews posts, get them from Hackernews yourself. Reposting to Lemmy just adds more posts with zero engagement that new users will see and be put off of the site for
Several months ago we had three different instances with their own Hackernews communities and their own repost bots posting the exact same things, with zero discussion.
Lemmy needs more actual discussion, and fewer bots adding noise to the feed.
A lot of people talk about the decentralization being a barrier of entry, but I don’t think it is.
Generally speaking, your average social media user won’t care about that one way or the other. You tell them an instance to look at, they will check it out.
Where I think it goes wrong is the general Lemmy attitude of curating your own feed. Your average Lemmy user will say the best part is that you just block the communities and instances that you don’t want to see.
Your average social media user on the other hand, doesn’t want to spend an hour or a month blocking people and communities to make the site useable. Most folks will come in, see a feed full of tech bros, repost bots with zero discussion, 30 different fetish porn communities, Star Trek memes, and bottom of the barrel shitposts, and they’ll just leave.
The only way I see Lemmy overcoming this is for instance admins to heavily curate the default experience so the feed is friendlier to new users. This would likely require some more tools in place to allow for this, possibly even a default block list that users can customize after they are already drawn in
Also the sorting could be better.
Yeah anyone wanting to get into the series should begin with asylum. It’s got a more horror vibe which I think holds up incredibly well still.
But the other games are mechanically better, so it’s hard to go backwards and enjoy it quite as much
This is a very good time to pick up one or more Fallout game. The release of the show brings sales on the games on multiple platforms
Not quite this, but I did have a validation team that didn’t know when to quit.
The project was a Windows service, and they would be constantly opening bugs saying “program crashes when we deleted xxxxx.dll”
Like… Yeah. If you delete necessary libraries from the installation directory, the program won’t run correctly.
Atleast one must get physical access to the lock in order to pick it.
It’s a fair point, but if we’re taking about cars, I’d say physical access is a given. Keyless vehicles haven’t quite enabled remote car thefts just yet
It’s free, so when I need to ask about something in the news today, I’ll use Bing. Granted I use a browser extension that lets me use Bing in Firefox.
These are useful tools, but not useful enough that I’m willing to pay for them when there’s free options.
Generally commercial drive encryption solutions, like Bitlocker, usually has a backup recovery key that can be used to access the encryption key if your TPM is reset, or if your device dies.
So I guess the short answer is most of these solutions don’t fully protect it from being moved to another device, they just add another layer of security and hassle that makes it harder to do. And without the TPM as part of these solutions, you would be entering a 48-character passphrase every time you boot your device, which has several security flaws of its own.
Assuming you use bitlocker on your PC, how do you know the entire content of the TPM (your bitlocker encryption key, etc) cannot be fetched from the TPM by the manufacturer or any third parties they shared it tools and private keys with?
The TPM specification is an open standard by the Trusted Computing Group, and there are certification organizations that will audit many of these products, so that’s a good place to begin.
As with any of the hardware in your device, it does require some amount of trust in the manufacturers you have chosen. These same concerns would apply to anything from the onboard USB controllers to the CPU itself. There’s no way to be absolutely certain, but you can do your due diligence to get a reasonable level of confidence.
And because it is hardware based, how do I as a user know that it does what it claims it does as I would with a software based encryption software that is open source (like truecrypt/veracrypt).
This is a reasonable thing to think about, although very few individuals are qualified to understand and audit the source code of encryption software either, so in most cases you are still putting your faith in security organizations or the community to find issues.
When it comes to security, it often comes with a trade-off. Hardware devices can achieve a level of security that software can’t completely reproduce, but they are a lot harder to audit and verify their integrity.
In any case, the TPM is something that software solutions have to explicitly call in the first place, it isn’t something that activates itself and starts digging into your hard drive. Which means if you don’t want to use it in your security solution, then it will sit there and do nothing. You can keep using your encryption keys in clear memory, visible to any privileged software.
I don’t know specifically about the XBox and how it uses it, but the TPM absolutely can be used as part of a DRM scheme. Since the TPM can be used to encrypt data with a key that can’t be exported, it could be part of a means to hinder copying of content. Of course this content still has to be decrypted into memory in order to be used, so people looking to defeat this DRM usually still can. DRM as a whole is often shown to be a pretty weak solution for copy protection, but companies won’t stop chasing it just the same.
Well I have good news for you, the TPM can’t do those things. The TPM is just a hardware module that stores cryptographic keys in a tamper-resistant chip, and can perform basic crypto functions.
In of itself, it can’t be addressed remotely, but it is usually used as a component of a greater security scheme. For example, in full disk encryption, it can be used to ensure that disk can’t be decrypted on a different device.
There’s been a lot of FUD surrounding TPMs, and it doesn’t help that the actual explanation of their function isn’t something easily described in a couple of sentences.
There’s no reason to be afraid of a TPM, and for the privacy-minded and security-conscious, it can even be used as part of a greater security scheme for your device and its data.
Of course at the same time, it’s not a feature most home users would make full use of, and as for not liking Windows, carry on. There’s plenty of reasons to avoid it if those things are important to you
“I Will Always Love You” is further left than I would have expected it to be
You should have seen how mad people were over the time Discord slightly changed the shade of the icon
iRobot […] soon to be facts
Beware the sinister Roomba, what are they doing with all the dirt they steal from our floors?
It’s a lot like my feelings on cryptocurrency. The dencentralized idea was interesting but it led to mostly discovering several reasons why it wasn’t as good as they thought. Some of the problems were solvable with future iterations, but overall it led to private exchanges that could just take all your money if they wanted, high transaction costs, etc.
With social media, federation addresses one thing: If an instance goes away, the content has already been federated elsewhere. For starters, this has never been a concern for me. I don’t treat any social media network as a long term data archive. If there’s something I need to refer back to, I will save the conversation myself or I am prepared for it to be deleted when I look away. Even on Lemmy, I don’t assume anything I post will stay, because moderator actions are federated, which will delete content from other instances anyway (when that federation is working correctly, at least)
On the other hand, we’ve already seen some of the negative sides of this:
First, users spam offensive/illegal content, which gets federated to all the other instances, leading to admins scrambling to a) stem the flow of this content and b) remove what is there. Ultimately they had to solve this with temporary defederation and user-created tools to help purge some of the content.
Second, federation is a (relatively) complex process, and there are multiple situations that can cause federation to an instance to fail. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen cases where if one instance’s keys are lost and certificates need to be regenerated, any instance that has seen that instance will be unable to federate with it anymore.
Now like I said before, these aren’t unsolvable problems, it’s just a case of the software and concept being relatively new, and needs to mature more.
Now when I switched to Lemmy, the complaints I saw about Reddit had absolutely nothing to do with federation and data availability. All I ever saw people complaining about was:
These are significant issues, and are worth leaving a service over. However, federation doesn’t address them at all. Lemmy certainly addresses the first two, but that has nothing to do with federation, that’s just it being open source and community-developed software.
So that’s what I meant. The one thing federation addresses is questionable, and the added complexity has brought about new problems that need to be solved still. I’m not against it, but it was never what drew me to this platform. It’s just a “Huh, that’s neat” kind of feature.
WSL has replaced my use of the command prompt in Windows for anything (and I used it more than most, I think).
In my job, I develop Linux applications to support industrial automation, and WSL is capable of building and running most of what I make. It isn’t a full Linux machine, and can behave unexpectedly when trying to do things like changing certain network configurations.
So it’s great for what it’s for, really. But if you want a full VM, this isn’t really for that.
Hell, I’m technically-minded and I do understand it, and I still don’t consider decentralization a particularly helpful feature of social media (yet).
Federation is technically interesting, but it introduces a lot of new complications that the software is still too new to have solved. The problems it does address, it doesn’t really solve very well yet. And I’ve always been willing to leave a social media network when it doesn’t suit me anymore, so centralization has never really bothered me.
What drew me here was the growing community. I would still be here if it was just one centralized service
I’m shocked at what an unpopular thought this is. Like… If you go out in public, there’s a very real risk that people in public will see you. If that’s a concern you have, then you should take steps to not be seen in public. To me, that would mean not making my presence obvious when visiting a bar.
Camera or not, if people are looking for you, they will find ways to look for you in public places. You should always assume you’re being watched, because you probably already are.