TimLovesTech

TimLovesTech , 4 days ago

Just took a look at them, and Rumble is for sure a hard pass. The 2 rows under "news" is all far-right extremist videos, which is great if you are aiming for the Parlor/Truth Social/Nazi and Nazi sympathizers of the internet, but I think you'll miss most of the world going that toxic on the frontage.

TimLovesTech , 4 days ago

To your point, the amount of money/effort to even try and rival YouTube (and/or Google) would be a hell of a task for sure. Since you would want it to be open, well moderated (but not so much that the majority of people scream "censorship!"), and be able to store/encode/serve a wild amount of video daily. And the later 2 things get exponentially more difficult as you scale.

It would need to be like the Fediverse on steroids, doing a distributed filesystem allowing every federated member to host/encode/serve part of the burden (like Kazaa/Limewire/DC++) but in some manner that people could be assured node hosts couldn't tamper with videos. And then you would also need some sort of reward for creators that wouldn't somehow lead to greedy power struggles causing an implosion of your open platform.

Ah, to dream.

TimLovesTech , 4 days ago

In their current state, I would argue none of them are actually alternatives in the sense of being a real replacement. None of them is setup to scale, making the moderation/filtering point kinda moot.

TimLovesTech , 8 days ago

You ever heard of a man Hannibal Lecter he was a "nice guy".

• Donald J Trump

TimLovesTech , 8 days ago

What platform are you on that you need to use VLC?

TimLovesTech , 14 days ago

Could always do what looks like the Arch AUR package is doing and build it yourself from source. Or if you are running a Fedora/OpenSuse distro you could find a package on COPR or something that converts a package from a .deb to .rpm and just change source and stuff to match signal.

TimLovesTech , 12 days ago

Sometimes it comes down to support. For every distro specific format you build and package for, the more you need to do with every release (and need the proper config and to be comfortable packaging for each).

TimLovesTech , 12 days ago

Or, if you are running one of those distros you could just take the .deb and repackage it for whatever distro you're running. Expecting a project to package for every distro, and then be required to support them for every release is a lot of work. And unfortunately some people have no issues expecting from others, but baulk at the idea of doing it themselves.

TimLovesTech , 12 days ago

OP, what distro are you running? You mention a whole bunch of package formats they don't provide, but never mention what format you require. Depending on the distro, making a build script (or converting the .deb) really isn't Rocket Surgery ™.

TimLovesTech , 8 days ago

What percentage of Signal users is "grandma" that uses Linux and would be messaging from her PC? I would have to imagine the overwhelming vast majority of Signal users are on mobile only, so packaging for specific distros is probably far down the priority list.

TimLovesTech , 21 days ago

I know I'm feeding a troll, but US democracy is on the ballot this year. Previous years have been big years, but this could be the last election in the US. Trump getting to the White House will allow him to save himself, and he will be bringing Fascism to a whole new level in the US with Project 2025 and all the truly evil folks in his cult leadership circle.

TimLovesTech , 21 days ago

He's shown you who he is, I think we need to start believing him. He has also surrounded himself with even more unhinged and dangerous people this time around. They have a plan this time to keep power and end elections. Putting your head in the sand doesn't make him and his cult any less of a threat, and plays right into their playbook. They want you to become disengaged, to burn out, to think he is "just joking", or just "telling it how he sees it", or worst of all "the new normal". These all leave his cult emboldened and with less resistance to grabbing power.

TimLovesTech , 21 days ago

This rant is about using Cloudflare as a proxy, nothing to do with who you buy your domain name from.

TimLovesTech , 21 days ago

So does everyone here that fears Cloudflare as secretly out to get them not believe that the NSA doesn't have their hooks in all the major datacenters? The same datacenters used by all the major web hosts people are using to "self host" for privacy.

Personally I think you have to have faith at some point that everything from your node to the destination is on the up-and-up unless you have a concrete reason to assume otherwise. Otherwise you should be suspicious of your ISP's network and every switch/router/firewall/node your data traverses on the internet. And being that paranoid basically means anything you didn't review the code of and compile yourself should be out of bounds.

TimLovesTech , 21 days ago

Agreed, it can work for those wanting to be an admin (and know enough to be "dangerous"). I think the bigger issue comes when you want to open services to the internet, because unless you are an admin you probably don't want to do that without a proxy (and possibly firewall) of some kind in front of your home network. Which is kinda what I was thinking with this anti-Cloudflare post. If you are interacting with the Internet you have to trust a network and hardware outside of your own. And I think it's naive to fear the 3-letter orgs being inside Cloudflare, and then thinking that putting your data in a datacenter you don't control is any "safer".

I think ultimately if the 3 letter groups want your data that bad because you're on some list, I think the internet as a whole is something you should probably be avoiding anyways. And for randoms, if they are sweeping up data like that you can be sure they would do it at more than just Cloudflare.

TimLovesTech , 25 days ago

This unlocks the secret 30 license copy.

TimLovesTech , 29 days ago

For those not upset and see the band "just playing a gig", what would be a line that you personally would consider too far? Would you be ok with them doing a private show for Netanyahu and his cabinet? Would a private show for Trump and his Republican lackeys be ok? How about Nestle CEO and its board, but none of its workers? Would a private show for the Proud Boys be ok if they had a "dump truck full of cash"?

TimLovesTech , 3 months ago

I think in this case "self host" would be on a VPS, not at home. But you definitely would want to lock it down so it was open to the public.

TimLovesTech , 3 months ago

Using that site and doing my instance to Lemmyworld , your site is listed under the working ones. I know spam has been on the rise again on big instances, so that could be playing a part in this also.

TimLovesTech , 3 months ago

The first thing that came to mind when I saw Reddit was The_Donald.

TimLovesTech , 3 months ago

This is all to say: we’ve been given many different channels and suggestions by the developers during our time on this platform for how to influence priorities. However, those priorities still have not materialized even after we used those channels and followed those suggestions–in fact, we’ve often observed our priorities seemingly being derided, played down at times, or to languish.

To me, this sounds like they were repeatedly trying to get the devs to work on what Beehaw wanted, and they are upset that those demands have not been met.

TimLovesTech , 4 months ago

Agreed. Cloudflare level of transparency should really be the minimum in cases of security breaches for all companies with any user/customer information. And when found to be purposefully hiding that information you should have your right to do business at least suspended in the US.

A policy as such would -

1. Incentives disclosure (or your essentially DOA in US)
2. Increase the IT budget and force more security over profit (because again the alternative is no profit otherwise - or at least many detailed explanations on how the company still isn't doing anything)

EDIT - spelling/autocorrect battle

TimLovesTech , 4 months ago

Well also remember that to win the "buy box" is also a competition amongst people who are just drop shipping similar items, sometimes by the pallet load, directly to Amazon warehouses and then based on margin basically doing a constant reverse auction to win the box the customer sees. Amazon also knows all this and will adjust its own competing stock/listings according to these changes as well. I have also heard that their prices are similar to Walmart and will vary based on estimated income of the customer. Have an iPhone or Mac and you are probably paying more than someone that shops on a cheap Android phone or no name PC.

TimLovesTech , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

This isn't based on income, but here is the automatic price adjusting.

EDIT So, not 100% as granular, but not that far off.

Dynamic Pricing

Another interesting aspect of dynamic pricing is that it can lead to price discrimination, where different customers are charged different prices for the same product. This is because retailers can use customer data, such as location, browsing history, and purchase behavior, to tailor prices to individual customers.

TimLovesTech , 5 months ago

Wild that you can base a whole case on what a photo AI thinks it is seeing. These programs at the very least should work like DNA or fingerprint matching and provide a percentage of its accuracy, not just that it finds some kinda close image in its database and everyone rolls with it. And it should need some other piece of evidence as well to back it up, it should never be the "best" part of a prosecutors case.

TimLovesTech , 5 months ago

Yeah lots of "drop shipping" folks on Amazon, they buy a pallet of whatever it is from the same source as the top seller and then do some magic to get the "buy box" (the company that shows as default seller). Once they run that person out of business they are free to raise pricing until they no longer are winning the buy box again.

Amazon has also gotten bad with who it allows to sell on the site, and has been known to lump similar SKUs together, even ones from different sellers. This becomes especially troublesome when someone in the stack is selling counterfeit items.

All that is to say, pay attention to who you are buying from, and be on the lookout for counterfeit items.

EDIT - I don't think this is the case here, but Amazon is also known to look at the users location and device and change prices accordingly. A great example of this is that sometimes a user buying from an Apple device (desktop or iPhone) will pay more than a user from a cheaper Android or Windows PC for the same item.