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efstajas

@efstajas@lemmy.world

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efstajas ,

This is a bit unnecessarily tough on independent content creators... what exactly do you expect them to do? Make no money from their content? How would they be able to make a living?

efstajas ,

Would you put blame on doctors for contributing to the opioid?

I'm gonna assume by "contributing to the opioid" you mean over-prescribing pain medication for the commission? If so, that comparison is so far-fetched that it's completely meaningless. You're really going to compare that with independent creators having skippable ad reads that have to be clearly marked as such on content you get for free?

efstajas ,

Sure, Patreon is great, but Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living, considering how hard it is to get people to commit to monthly subscriptions.

Q: “Are we doomed?” A: “We would be, if not for the amazing developments in renewable energy.” (powering-the-planet.ghost.io)

I wasn't aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.

efstajas ,

Doomerism like this is fucking stupid and definitely leads to the wrong thing, which is to do nothing. If we're already fucked, why even try? The truth is that IF we try, we very well might be able to avoid the worst. Which is worth fighting for.

efstajas ,

So what does it say about us diverting from purely server-side scripted message boards with pure HTML and tables, and not a line of JS? Yes, let's get back there please.

Ironically, proper SSR that has the server render the page as pure HTML & CSS is becoming more and more popular lately thanks to full-stack meta frameworks that make it super easy. Of course, wanting to go back to having no JS is crazy — websites would lose almost all ability to make pages interactive, and that would be a huge step backwards, no matter how much nostalgia you feel for a time before widespread JS. Also tables for layout fucking sucked in every possible way; for the dev, for the user, and for accessibility.

people want nice, dynamic, usable websites with lots of cool new features, people are social

That's right, they do and they are.

By the way, we already had that with Flash and Java applets, some things of what I remember were still cooler than modern websites of the "web application" paradigm are now.

Flash and Java Applets were a disaster and a horrible attempt at interactivity, and everything we have today is miles ahead of them. I don't even want to get into making arguments as to why because it's so widely documented.

And we had personal webpages with real names and contacts and photos. And there were tools allowing to make them easily.

There are vastly more usable and simple tools for making your own personal websites today!

efstajas , (edited )

I know. Just the "full-stack meta frameworks" part alone makes any ADHD person feel nausea.

But why? What's bad about this?

I disagree. Geminispace is very usable without scripts

That's great, I'm not saying that it's impossible to make usable apps without JS. I'm saying that the capabilities of websites would be greatly reduced without JS being a thing. Sure, a forum can be served as fully static pages. But the web can support many more advanced use-cases than that.

If only one paradigm must remain, then naturally I pick mine. If not, then there's no problem and I still shouldn't care.

So you can see that other people have different needs to yours, but you think those shouldn't be considered? We're arguing about the internet. It's a pretty diverse space.

For me it's obvious that embeddable cross-platform applications as content inside hypertext are much better than turning a hypertext system into some overengineered crappy mess of a cross-platform application system.

Look, I'm not saying that the web is the most coherent platform to develop for or use, but it's just where we're at after decades of evolving needs needing to be met.

That said, embedded interactive content is absolutely not better than what we have now. For one, both Flash and Java Applets were mostly proprietary technologies, placing far too much trust in the corpos developing them. There were massive cross-platform compatibility problems, and neither were in any way designed for or even ready for a responsive web that displays well on different screen sizes. Accessibility was a big problem as well, given an entirely different accessibility paradigm was necessary within vs. the HTML+CSS shell around the embedded content.

Today, the web can do everything Flash + Java Applets could do and more, except in a way that's not proprietary but based on shared standards, one that's backwards-compatible, builds on top of foundational technologies like HTML rather than around, and can actually keep up with the plethora of different client devices we have today. And speaking of security — sure, maybe web browsers were pretty insecure back then generally, but I don't see how you can argue that a system requiring third-party browser plug-ins that have to be updated separately from the browser can ever be a better basis for security than just relying entirely on the (open-source!) JS engine of the browser for all interactivity.

I ask you for links and how many clicks and fucks it would take to make one with these, as opposed to back then. These are measurable, scientific things. Ergonomics is not a religion.

The idea that any old website builder back in the day was more "ergonomic" while even approaching the result quality and capabilities of any no-code homepage builder solution you can use today is just laughable. Sorry, but I don't really feel the burden of proof here. And I'm not even a fan of site builders, I would almost prefer building my own site, but I recognize that they're the only (viable) solution for the majority of people just looking for a casual website.

Besides — there's nothing really preventing those old-school solutions from working today. If they're so much better than modern offerings, why didn't they survive?

efstajas ,

Holy shit go touch some grass. Jesus Christ

Debian used to be so good. What happened!? (lemmy.world)

Firefox on Debian stable is so old that websites yell at you to upgrade to a newer browser. And last time I tried installing Debian testing (or was it debian unstable?), the installer shat itself trying to make the bootloader. After I got it to boot, apt refused to work because of a missing symlink to busybox. Why on earth do...

efstajas ,

simply reading the browser agent isnt really security

It's not for their security, but for that of genuinely clueless people that are just running an actually outdated browser that might have known and exploitable security flaws.

efstajas , (edited )

How do you know this? Of course there are lots of reasons for why they'd want to enforce minimum browser versions. But security might very well be one of them. Especially if you're a bank you probably feel bad about sending session tokens to a browser that potentially has known security vulnerabilities.

And sure, the user agent isn't a sure way to tell whether a browser is outdated, but in 95% of cases it's good enough, and people that know enough to understand the block shouldn't apply to them can bypass it easily anyway.

efstajas , (edited )

Doing that would tell you nothing about whether the browser might have un-patched, known vulnerabilities elsewhere.

efstajas ,

They sell AirTag location data? I honestly find that hard to believe. What's your source on this other than big tech bad?

efstajas ,

They won't go to jail, period. No company owners never go to jail, kinda ever.

That's absolutely not true. Sure, there are lots of cases where individuals have limited personal liability under their company, but this doesn't mean no-one goes to jail for illegal business activity. In fact it happens all the time.

efstajas ,

They definitely do not send video though. That would be super obvious.

efstajas ,

Sorry but "they could slip in a chip that enabled a wavelength their satellites can access" is ridiculous. Sending a real-time video stream to a satellite would require a large and very power hungry transmitter on the drone. It'd be super obvious.

People won't do that at scale.

It'd take only one person to recognize a sudden large traffic spike caused by the app and post about it online to ruin such a setup. As soon as it's confirmed by a few more people, it'd immediately be a major news story. And it's not like it's particularly hard to spot unusual traffic; especially on a phone where the OS monitors per-app data usage both on mobile and WiFi.

efstajas , (edited )

Tbh it seems to me like the only thing they're targeting with this are media company lawyers that could try to argue that they're "enabling piracy" by resolving domains to known piracy resources.

efstajas ,

SteamOS has HDR support indeed, and it works really well with pretty much all HDR-enabled Windows games in Proton I've tried.

efstajas ,

It's not the same and I wish people would stop pretending that it is. Does it do what most people need it to do though? Yeah, probably.

efstajas ,

No, "most valuable" is accurate here, since we're talking about its market cap (value of all shares combined essentially). "Wealthiest" would refer to the company's total assets.

efstajas ,

Well yes and no. Market cap is the total value of all shares for the particular stock combined (not including those held by the company itself). The value of each individual share is determined on the market. No-one directly "owns" this value, since the whole point of stocks is to distribute ownership, so no-one including Apple as an entity "owns" their market cap entirely. If that were the case, there would be no trading, and ergo no value to the shares, and the entire idea of a market cap no longer applies.

Individually though, the value of shares is of course very real. If you own shares and the stock is liquid (as in: there are people willing to buy), you can sell those shares for real money whenever you wish, at the current market price. Unless you want to sell a substantial amount, in which case you may run into trouble finding buyers and / or create significant downward pressure on the price.

HP bricks ProBook laptops with bad BIOS delivered via automatic updates — many users face black screen after Windows pushes new firmware (www.tomshardware.com)

On May 26, a user on HP's support forums reported that a forced, automatic BIOS update had bricked their HP ProBook 455 G7 into an unusable state. Subsequently, other users have joined the thread to sound off about experiencing the same issue....

efstajas ,

It was most likely HP, through Windows Update (which handles device-specific driver etc. updates that OEMs are in control of). Microsoft doesn't concern itself with pushing BIOS updates to some random 4-year old HP model

efstajas ,

Does it though? Having it pull down your shirt, having to rely on projecting a GUI on your hand, and being unable to hear it in loud environments all seem like pretty strong limitations of the form factor

efstajas ,

If they wanted to companies could put a camera in a smart watch easily. Samsung was doing it ages ago.

efstajas ,

For sure, my point is just that they could if it made sense — so clearly they don't think it does, at least for now.

efstajas , (edited )

Totally agree, this honestly sounds a bit like putting principles before reason. Personally, I don't at all see why paying people for their work would make projects adhere any less to the "open source ethos", even though I hear this idea a lot. I think that in an ideal world, it should be possible to contribute to OSS projects full-time and make a living, financed by donations from dependants (including corporations) that profit off of the free software and have a vested interest in continued and rapid development of the project.

If you really don't want the money to reward contributors, why not pass it on to open-source dependencies of your project that are looking for funding? FOSS projects not scrambling for funding is pretty rare today unfortunately.

efstajas ,

You totally are getting closeups of faces though in all of these games. In cutscenes, but still.

efstajas ,

Where do you download them from?

efstajas ,

Physically? So the dev has to come ask you in person?

efstajas ,

If you read the original report, it says that it basically just displays a fake banking login page. It also says that it requested accessibility service permissions, which makes me think maybe it brought up the fake login pages "in the right moment" (as in as users opened their banking apps) to make it more convincing, even though the article doesn't specify that.

Either way, IMO the problem here is clearly with the Play Store allowing this app in, and not with Android's security itself. These apps are misusing the accessibility service system, which is obviously necessary for a ton of important use cases (and of course also requires the user to grant very explicit permission). The fact that the accessibility services are a thing doesn't delegitimize Android's security improvements over the years.

efstajas ,

How is this a meme?

efstajas ,

Some fake Telekom workers showed up at my grandma's place in person recently, wearing uniforms and all, saying they need to "perform maintenance on the TV connection". Luckily, grandma's still super sharp, recognized that something was off, and just shouted "Peter, the TV people are here" into her flat, even though she was alone and Peter had died decades ago. They made some excuses and left immediately when they thought they were no longer just prying on a single brittle old lady.

Super proud of her, but also so scary to think that a bunch of asshole scammers were so close to just walking around in her flat.

efstajas ,

What a nightmare

efstajas ,

ITT: Cat people getting upset at a dumb joke.

... Classic cat people I guess

efstajas , (edited )

You can't just "update" models to not say a certain thing with pinpoint accuracy like that. Which one of the reasons why it's so challenging to make AI not misbehave.

efstajas ,

If you limit the resolution of the gayness measurement, sure. You could define least gay as 0 and most gay as 5, then you have millions of people on 5. But there are infinitely many real numbers, and if there were some theoretical 100% accurate way to measure "gayness" (whatever that means) at "infinite resolution", the chance of two people being equally most gay is theoretically 0. On the other hand of the spectrum, it'd be impossible to be ENTIRELY not gay at all, so even if millions of people are very close to 0, one would be the closest.

I'm way overthinking this lol

ChatGPT Answers Programming Questions Incorrectly 52% of the Time: Study (gizmodo.com)

The research from Purdue University, first spotted by news outlet Futurism, was presented earlier this month at the Computer-Human Interaction Conference in Hawaii and looked at 517 programming questions on Stack Overflow that were then fed to ChatGPT....

efstajas ,

Yeah it's wrong a lot but as a developer, damn it's useful. I use Gemini for asking questions and Copilot in my IDE personally, and it's really good at doing mundane text editing bullshit quickly and writing boilerplate, which is a massive time saver. Gemini has at least pointed me in the right direction with quite obscure issues or helped pinpoint the cause of hidden bugs many times. I treat it like an intelligent rubber duck rather than expecting it to just solve everything for me outright.

efstajas ,

Hey, at least we can rest easy knowing that human devs will be needed to write regex for quite a while longer.

... Wait, I'm horrible at Regex. Oh well.

efstajas ,

Pretty funny how it says "Unauthorized access" right below screenshots of features clearly being enabled.

efstajas ,

you could add a random number to the encrypted data on the card and require it to always be the same or larger than the last time that card was seen, and then increment it every time the card is used.

efstajas ,

You could store a counter for every machine used on the card, realistically, given few Laundromats would have over 50 or so machines. That'd mean that as you say, restoring the cards initial state would break it for every machine you previously used.

Going way too far now for what would make sense for a Laundromat, but just to entertain the idea...

You could also use an OTP encryption scheme on the card, where the exchange encryption key is based on the laundry machine ID, card ID, and a current timestamp, and thus changes every time the card is used. It would then be quite hard to "restore" the initial state of the card without having the laundry machine's hidden ID. Everything you read off the card would be useless a second later.

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    efstajas , (edited )

    It's been a pretty common practice for online companies for years. There are SaaS providers that offer APIs just for this purpose. At my previous job we implemented something like this too; making a rough guess at the gender of users based on just their name and some additional information. The only reason we did that is because we didn't want to ask people for their gender when they registered because that seemed arbitrary and frankly we didn't care, but at the same time we still needed a rough overall split for investor reporting and high level marketing strategy decisions.

    I assume Discord would do this for similar reasons.

    efstajas ,

    It's monetized through server boosts (upgrading a community to have premium features) and premium accounts that give users additional perks and features.

    efstajas ,

    Pretty funny that it took that long. Expertly executed rebrand.

    efstajas ,

    I don't see anyone claiming they have "working full self driving"

    ... They're literally calling it "Full self driving".

    efstajas ,

    Wait, so in your mind products need to have "working" in their name in order to be held to the standard of ... working? I don't understand what you're trying to argue at all. They're calling and selling this product as "full self driving". It's not full self driving. It doesn't need to be called "working full self driving" in order for it to be misleading.

    efstajas ,

    No, the other user is claiming that they don't have a "working" full self driving but is being vague about what they mean by "working".

    I don't think the other commenter is being is vague at all. "Full self driving" quite literally means Level 5, maybe level 4. That's just what those words mean. There's no argument here.

    Full Self Driving is just the name of the software

    Yes, which is the problem.

    The end goal of it is to eventually be capable of level 5 self driving so that's why it's named like that even though it has been a work in progress all of it's existence.

    Which is exactly why calling it "full self driving" now doesn't make any sense. It's false advertising at best, and a super dangerous overpromise at worst.

    Wouldn't make much sense to call it "partial self driving under supervision" because Full Self Driving is a better marketing term.

    Of course it's a "better marketing term", because "full self driving" is the pinnacle of self driving tech, what Tesla and everyone else in the race is trying to achieve. The problem is that what they have is not full self driving, and in fact whether it can ever be achieved with current Tesla hardware is far from proven. I'm not confused as to why they call it that, I'm arguing the point that they shouldn't call it that.

    Misleading? Well yeah perhaps but that's what marketing teams do. Nothing new there.

    Not at all. This is not typically what marketing teams do at all. It's pretty damn unusual for a major corporation to sell a product under the technical term for what it may be at some point. Or do you have any other examples of this?

    Not a single Tesla owner is under the illusion that you can just enable the system and take a nap.

    Maybe not, but do you really think no-one bought a Tesla based on Elon's promise that it'd be fully self driving by 2019? Or that you could monetize it by having it run as a robotaxi at night by 2020?

    Doesn't mean people don't do that but they know that they shouldn't.

    Tesla and Musk not constantly overpromising and misrepresenting their product with false confidence might help with preventing people from placing undue trust in the system.

    Personally I don't see a huge issue with that name. It's level 2

    As you say, it's level 2. "Full self driving" is level 5. You still don't see the problem with the name?

    it does what the name implies: drives itself

    It quite literally does not drive itself given that a driver needs to be around and alert to take over at any moment.

    efstajas ,

    Wait, what does this have to do with outsourcing abroad?

    efstajas , (edited )

    macOS out of the box fucking sucks for monitor scaling with third party monitors. It's honestly laughable for a modern OS. You can install some third party software that fixes it completely, but it really shouldn't be necessary. I use an (admittedly pretty strange) LG DualUp monitor as a secondary, and out of the box macOS can only make everything either extremely tiny, extremely large, or blurry.

    Other than that, I've had no problems at all, and the window scaling between different DPI monitors is a lot smoother than it was with Windows previously.

    efstajas ,

    Source...?

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