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bionicjoey

@bionicjoey@lemmy.ca

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bionicjoey ,

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/topgear/images/a/a6/P452.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130625113110

Safest way of using WeChat on Android?

I live in Canada. My girlfriend is Chinese (also living in Canada), and while we are able to communicate via SMS, her mobile carrier isn't the best, and so there have often been issues for us with regular texting. She expressed a strong preference to use WeChat, at least as a backup option for when texting fails us. While I...

bionicjoey OP ,

To answer the question: GrapheneOS and a separate profile would be the safest

I appreciate the suggestion, but maybe I should add that I'd like to not have to change up my phone too much. It's a Fairphone 4 running the OEM Android and my preference would be to keep it that way. Are separate profiles like that a thing on stock Android?

If you are both outside of china there really is zero reason (other than preference) to use that piece of spyware.

She travels back to China sometimes, uses it to contact friends and family back home, and uses it to chat with lots of mainlanders here in Canada. For her it's not weird at all.

In fact, she expressed to me that she's perfectly comfortable with the fact that they use WeChat combined facial recognition technology in China for payment processing. When you get on public transit, you can have them scan your face and it will automatically charge you the bus fare. It really skeeves me out, but it's simply not the hill I want to die on in this relationship. I'm crazy about her in so many ways, it's okay with me if we don't see eye-to-eye on digital privacy.

bionicjoey OP ,

That's a great point, thanks! I will definitely be using the international one. I expect since I'm getting it through Google Play it'll be constrained based on the OS permissions I give it. And I don't intend to give it any permissions

bionicjoey OP ,

She's not very tech savvy at all. It would be asking a lot. I'd rather stick to something she is comfortable with.

bionicjoey OP ,

I'm not in the US, but what is this Shelter you speak of?

bionicjoey OP ,

Yeah she's an iPhone user. And she wants to use WeChat because it's like second nature to Chinese people. It's as normal to them as email is to us in the west. They are totally desensitized to the digital privacy concerns.

She has WhatsApp as well, but it's not set up properly on her phone so she doesn't get notifications for it. Plus I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work if she traveled back to China.

bionicjoey OP ,

I've heard of matrix bridges before but I'm unfamiliar with how to actually set them up and use them. I understand the basic idea is that they relay messages out of matrix and into some other messaging service, but I don't understand how to actually enact that onto the element client on my phone. Matrix is so complicated 😅

bionicjoey OP ,

Thank you! This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for!

bionicjoey OP , (edited )

Maybe get a girlfriend that isn't a brain washed spy? \s

Listen here, I like my qt tankie sleeper cell gf. As long as she doesn't hear anyone say the activation phrase, she's very sweet.

For real though, this app is pretty culturally ingrained over there and so I don't really have the option of pushing something else (we all know how real messaging app fatigue has gotten these days). Especially when other apps will be restricted whenever she travels home, and we want something that can serve as a backup when other communication methods aren't an option. I'm pretty sure WeChat will work through The Great Firewall, so it's ideal for our purposes. I have no idea if the same can be said for WhatsApp or Signal.

bionicjoey OP ,

Relationships (of all kinds) are about compromise. You have to recognize that outside of the echo chambers in communities like this one, literally nobody cares about digital privacy to the extent that us nerds do. So you can choose to be dogmatic in your approach and alienate yourself from the >99% of people in the world who don't care, or you can recognize that your own desires for digital privacy need to be weighed against your desires to form meaningful connections with other people.

Personally I prefer to be pragmatic in my approach. I do what I can to look after my privacy within the constraints of actually doing what I need to do to connect with other people. That's why I made this post. My mind is made up that I'm going to at least try to use WeChat, but within that constraint, I want to do everything in my control to limit the app's visibility into the rest of my system.

Safest way of using WeChat

I live in Canada. My girlfriend is Chinese (also living in Canada), and while we are able to communicate via SMS, her mobile carrier isn't the best, and so there have often been issues for us with regular texting. She expressed a strong preference to use WeChat, at least as a backup option for when texting fails us. While I...

bionicjoey ,

These sorts of bike lanes that have car lanes on both sides are tragically common in Ontario. Especially near intersections. If the intersection has a dedicated right turn lane, the lane will often split off around the bike gutter. This means cars who are just planning on turning right often change lanes and cut off the bike lane without even looking back (because let's be real, who does a full visual check when changing into a lane that just began?)

bionicjoey ,

They advertise aggressively through YouTubers/streamers. A lot of mushy brained people probably download it once just to see what their favourite e-girl is on about. Then once they realize it's not providing them any tangible value they don't use it, but probably leave it installed since nobody ever uninstalls apps from their phone.

bionicjoey ,

Well IDK because I use ad block and sponsor block for everything, but all the big VPNs do

bionicjoey ,

That was just a bit of humour. I just mean in general whatever streamer or YouTuber someone might be watching, they are probably getting paid the VPN bucks.

bionicjoey ,

I wasn't hating on e-girls, I was goofing on the simps that idolize them, to the point of downloading a VPN app because their gamer girl parasocial gf was paid to tell them to.

Maybe don't go around assuming everyone is an Incel unless they announce otherwise.

Should I also announce all of my political positions to you, just so you can be sure you don't need to downvote me?

bionicjoey ,

Reminds me of a line in Futurama:

Fry: Over there a crazy guy used to hand out a socialist newsletter

Bender: Was it poorly Xeroxed?

Fry: Oh, you better believe it!

bionicjoey ,

2fa can be handled by a cycling number like authenticator apps

bionicjoey ,

Unfortunately the building codes for office and residential buildings are very different and it's damn near impossible to convert many offices into residences.

bionicjoey ,

It doesn't matter what you'll "take". It's illegal to live in a building that doesn't meet code for residential units. Stuff like natural light as well as adequate plumbing and ventilation are important.

And they wouldn't just be converting entire floors into single units. Those would be beyond luxury sizes. You think a 50 storey building can afford to become a 50-unit apartment? How is that going to solve our housing crisis? Don't be dense.

For a conversion to work, they would need to be able to convert every floor of an office building into sufficiently dense housing. But office buildings are typically laid out with very deep footprints, where much of the internal layout of the building is far from any sources of natural light. Humans need access to natural light, which is why it's not legal to sell a unit where the main rooms don't all have windows. That can't be fixed without tearing down the building and building something new.

Adobe’s ‘Ethical’ Firefly AI Was Trained on Midjourney Images (www.bloomberg.com)

When Adobe Inc. released its Firefly image-generating software last year, the company said the artificial intelligence model was trained mainly on Adobe Stock, its database of hundreds of millions of licensed images. Firefly, Adobe said, was a “commercially safe” alternative to competitors like Midjourney, which learned by...

bionicjoey ,

When you process an image through the same pipeline multiple times, artifacts will appear and become amplified.

bionicjoey ,

The process of training is itself a pipeline

bionicjoey ,

Above all else, the training data needs to be open. It's not really free software if the model is trained using a proprietary blend of training data. And it also opens the door for training data to be obtained unethically (which we know the AI companies are already doing)

bionicjoey ,

The only people who say shit like that as a defence are people that 90% of people would agree are behaving unethically. Just because ethics overall are subjective doesn't mean there aren't some obvious right and wrong answers.

bionicjoey ,

There's a search bar at the top

bionicjoey ,

Most of the Lemmy stuff is hentai, AI generated, or amateur self-promotion. Not as much variety of content as could be found on Reddit

bionicjoey ,

Porn streaming sites are "infinite" too...

OP said this is just a frontend for pornhub's gif section

bionicjoey ,

OP hasn't invented anything here. There are lots of infinite scrolling porn sites out there.

bionicjoey ,

https://media.tenor.com/58Icp_Pzl7QAAAAM/steve-brule-for-your-health.gif

bionicjoey ,

I'm in a similar boat. The challenges I run into at work are often resultant of the weird infrastructure we use in our datacenters and our weird legacy software stacks, so there's no reason to believe AI will have anything in its training set that will help me. People don't realize that AI is only as good as their problem is ubiquitous. If you spend your time working on weird legacy systems, it can't possibly predict all the weird needles you need to thread when developing solutions.

bionicjoey ,

Usually this happens when the only resolutions available are the ones shown (typically because it's an older video)

bionicjoey ,

Yeah it's called bullshitting. It's the way lots of people are encouraged to write in high school when the goal is to see if the student can write a large amount of prose with minimal grammatical errors.

But once you get to post-secondary you are expected for your writing to actually have content and be fairly concise in expressing that content. And AI falls on its face trying to do that.

bionicjoey ,

Honestly a good change. Defaults should be handled by the OS. If a software wants to be your default, it should ask the OS to present the selection screen and allow the user to choose the option.

bionicjoey ,

Yeah

bionicjoey ,

Your feet run arch (btw)?

bionicjoey , (edited )

I'm pretty sure the joke is just that "[Something] Hooters" is a meme right now among Zoomers. Like the joke is that there would even be Hooters for specific categories, and then within that that the joke of this comic is that one of those categories might be for something supernatural.

bionicjoey ,

humans can be shifted to more creative roles

It's a fallacy to assume that there will always be enough jobs for everyone who wants a job.

bionicjoey , (edited )

Thus why it's a fallacy

Edit: also it literally hasn't. There have been many times in human history where there simply weren't enough low-skill jobs for everyone who needed a job to support their family. See the Great Depression.

bionicjoey ,

But Steve Ballmer told me "Developers Developers Developers Developers"

Are you saying that was a lie?

bionicjoey ,

Relevant XKCD:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ballmer_peak.png

bionicjoey ,

What text editor are you using? In theory most should detect a yaml file and adjust their indentation behaviour appropriately. I edit yaml in VSCode and Kate and it's never been a problem.

bionicjoey ,

Well in that case, I have good news. All valid JSON is also valid yaml. It's a superset by definition. So if you really hate yaml so much you can just write your yaml files as JSON and the parser should handle it fine. Just be aware that yaml does some more agressive typecasting when quotes are omitted, so you may need to figure out which value is actually being used when converting.

bionicjoey ,

You should try looking up the language spec rather than hoping a text generator will generate truthful results. What's even the point of asking for answers if you don't trust that the thing you're asking won't just bullshit you?

bionicjoey ,

I have an idea to write an editor plugin that will, when opening a yaml file, convert it to json (or some other less painful configuration language), then convert back on save. I don't know enough about yaml syntax to know if that's possible or if there's some quirk that makes them not completely cross compatible

You could probably do this pretty easily with a simple python script. Use the yaml parser to convert into a dictionary, use the JSON renderer to save that dictionary into a pipe file. Launch the visual editor of your choice on that file. When the editor exits, read the file as JSON, parse it back into a dictionary, and use the yaml renderer to save that dictionary back into the original file.

bionicjoey ,

It sounds like the real result is that reducing car trips has a positive effect on GHG emissions, and building bike infrastructure is the cheapest way of doing that. But there will be diminishing returns building bike infrastructure after a certain point if cities are continuing to be built as suburban sprawl. We should be building denser more walkable communities as well as expanding alternative modes of transport.

bionicjoey ,

I'm pretty sure the number of people that have lost their jobs over this shitty text generator has surpassed a million.

bionicjoey ,

Decent explanation of what QC actually is and what it is not

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