irotsoma

Yeah I think hashes in the same folder are only valuable as a check to make sure you downloaded the file successfully. Which isn’t a big issue for at least the around 80% of internet users who have access to broadband. They are only useful for security if the hash is on the website that you click on and then you download and verify it manually.

Yes. X-ray, MRI, and other complex images are difficult to analyze at a glance and it takes a lot of experience to make a guess on whether something is normal or not. This is exactly what AI is good for. Learning the relationship between some complex set of data points and assigning a probability that it is something based on historical data. AI is just not being used for the correct things most of the time. This is one of those correct things.

AI should not be making decisions, only assisting humans in making decisions. So it depends a lot on how it is interpreted. A doctor can see a 50% probability vs a 75% probability and react appropriately. When someone who doesn’t know the topic decides that an 80% probability is yes and lower is no, this is when things like police using facial recognition to determine guilt rather than just seeing that there’s an 80% probability of a match and immediately arresting and prosecuting them while telling jurors that it’s a match rather than only an 80% probability of a match that AI becomes an issue.

Yeah, IMHO Signal is the right balance of usability and privacy. Problem with not having a user ID is that you can’t easily use the application on multiple devices at the same time and if you lose the device, or don’t properly migrate to a new device, you will have to start over building your connections to others.

But the real issue with no user ID or centralized platform is discoverability. Same reason things like gpg for email never caught on. You can’t just type in a person’s phone number, username, or whatever and start talking to them. It only works if you have another line of communication with each person to set up the connection. This is usually the deal-beaker.

But the problem with user IDs is that anyone can create as many as they want and use them to avoid spam and abuse filtering. So that’s why phone number is used by Signal as a unique identifier. It’s not 100% unique, but it’s good enough to deal with all but the most determined abusers.

Can’t speak to this incident, but i do agree that in general, free VPNs are not safe because usually they are funded by selling your personal information and web traffic data or performing MITM attacks to inject ads and thus compromising security, even if that’s not the intention.

That being said, Rise Up is a donation funded organization and is specifically run by a nonprofit promoting activism, so really it all comes down to your trust that org. The cost of bandwidth required to run a VPN is high, their site mentions it costs them about $60/person/year. So that money has to come from somewhere. If you’re paying, and it’s a reasonably trustworthy company, then it’s unlikely they will be willing to risk selling your data. But if you’re not paying, then the incentive to not sell your data just isn’t there, thus it requires more trust, IMHO.

Also, if they are a legit org and I take their product without paying, I’m taking that money from activists in places that truly need VPNs to stay safe from arrest or murder, so I generally don’t feel it’s moral to use it just to save money, but that’s me.

Not OP, but for me the issue is if you want to override the default and make it opt-out, especially sine the opt-out process isn’t that well documented, then you should realize that support is a necessary part of that process and fix problems as they arise rather than resorting to name calling and hostile behavior when something you published is broken. It’s a responsibility of taking on that kind of project. Either that or make it explicitly opt-in and give users a warning like with beta version opt-in notifications that the packages are not official and issues may not be fixed as quickly as the official releases.

Would prefer something that could be federated and distributed so the cost of hosting is distributed and doesn’t allow for a single entity to set ridiculous prices once they get popular, like Etsy did.

Because with stores, the evidence would be missing products. Very easy to see. With bugs like this, a million people could have abused it, or one. Either way that data is likely available to all who want it.

A better comparison is, store posted list of their customer’s addresses on the back door. No clue how many people walked by there much less if anyone copied it down.

Problem is that knowing the link between a person’s profile and their email now means you know the link between their account and their accounts in many other places. That information could be used to offer the person different prices at stores, attack them for being a minority or activist, to hack their account because their password was leaked from another site that uses that email,or all the other things these cumulative leaks add up to.

And AI will stifle creativity in all areas that it’s used in. That’s the problem with predictive models being called “AI”. They are only as “intelligent” as the information they were trained on and will always be biased towards what that data set was biased on and won’t be able to create anything truly new, only improve existing things.

Unfortunately, the far-right has been pushing this idea of traditional gender roles a lot lately, so people who follow the media in that space are constantly flooded with conspiracy theories and made up horror stories. It’s just one of the current favored ways to keep them distracted and their anger aimed away from the real problem makers.

Yeah, I think of two sides to labels. One is how you perceive yourself and one is how you communicate who you are to others.

For the internal labels, these are only useful to some people, and can change as often as you want, or you can chose to not use them at all and just be you. You decide. What they are useful for in my experience is self-discovery and helping you to decide how you want to present to others. So use them, or not, try them on for a while and see how it goes, switch them up. Treat them like trying on clothes at home. You can wear which ever ones you want, in whatever combination you want or just go naked. It’s your house/brain.

External labels shouldn’t be assigned and if they are you should ignore them. Don’t let them affect who you are or how you behave or you just end up wearing masks. Now I say that with the caveat that masks are necessary in certain situations for safety or to preserve your job or whatever. But when you’re free to be you in public, ignore those assigned by others. Again, using the clothing metaphor, it’s like someone putting a hat on your head. It’s rude for a stranger to come up to you and do that. Now it may be that hat looks great on you and turns out you wear it the rest of your life. But someone shouldn’t put it on you, they should see that you might like it, hand it to you, and you decide to put it on or not. Same with labels. People can suggest a label, but should not try to assign one to you.

Problem with social labels is that it’s not acceptable to go naked in many social situations. So you have to pick the ones you want or risk being forced to wear them. And in some situations, you will be forced to wear one without your consent. You just have to decide if it’s worth being in that situation or if you should leave. And the other issue is that changing labels confuses people, just like significantly changing your clothing style might if you go from wife-beater and jeans to goth cat girl. So it’s best to pick some base ones and then add on or make small adjustments as you go. There are lots of generalized labels like non-binary or gender-fluid that sound like might be a good starting point for you. Then you can add more specific ones later once you have internally tried them on for a bit or tried them on in safe spaces like with good friends who are open to it. Like starting out with a black tshirt and pants, then adding on a skirt or sweater later, you can add on something like demiboy which is a subset of non-binary and eventually get to more specific labels as you find them useful.

And also, something I always emphasize to people is that gender and sexuality are not directly related and sometimes even romantic interests and sexuality are not necessarily directly related. There may be a correlation for the majority, but it’s not a direct relationship. So choose your sexuality, romantic, and gender labels separately at least the internal ones. Just realize that because language is weird, the most common romantic and sexuality labels are only meaningful when combined with a gender label (e.g. straight, gay, hetero/homosexual, etc), so it’s good to find that first, but not necessary. There are more gender neutral sexuality labels, especially in the ace spectrum, or ones that explicitly specify the target gender rather than specifying the relationship the target gender has to your gender, like gynosexual.

And remember, we all change over time. Be flexible with yourself and don’t worry about what you felt like in the distant past, only today. Gender, sexuality, etc., are much more complex psychologically than simply a single chromosome like many bigots pretend. It’s mostly up to hormones and the way different parts of your body react to those hormones which can change over time from age, environment, diet, etc., not just your genes. Genes just set a starting point, and sometimes those get overridden before birth even. That’s why people with an X chromosome can be born with a vagina and all the other combinations.

Hope that is useful. It’s a deep interest of mine because my own journey has been complex. So I enjoy info-dumping about it. Lol

Unstable, in technical terms, is not unreliable or buggy. Unstable means it often changes in a noticeable or significantly way. Instability is not necessarily a bad thing, it just means you have to be more aware and adapt to changes.

An average, nontechnical user will not like significant changes in an OS. They can barely handle changes in applications they use on a regular basis, much less the thing that controls their whole experience on the computer. Many users even prefer working around bugs to having to learn a new process.

This is what instability is about. Instability has a correlation to unreliability/bugged experiences, but is not necessarily a direct relationship. Higher instability is just more likely to result in problems.

That’s what backups are for. No matter what solution I use, I would need backups. I used to use LastPass, but that just relied on LastPass to do the backups. I backup the database, but you can also periodically export the data and back that up somewhere securely on your own if you want it in a different format.

Cool for classified ads kind of stuff. Though personally I’d love to see more of a storefront kind of thing like Etsy. Etsy has become so greedy that it’s often not profitable for small businesses and definitely not for individuals doing stuff in their free time out of passion like it used to be.

I got an ASUS Zenbook about a year ago for about $1,500: model UX3404VC-BB99T. But it looks like it’s no longer available:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-14-120hz-oled-touch-laptop-evo-intel-13-gen-core-i9-with-32gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3050-1tb-ssd-gray/6548463.p?skuId=6548463

It has pretty decent specs. Intel gen 13 Core i9, nice looking touchscreen, 32GB of RAM, etc., and it all works out of the box with Ubuntu and now Fedora. It did have some issues with plain Debian, but that’s fairly common with Debian and newer hardware.

Although that particular laptop is not around anymore, there might be some other Zenbooks as I have found they tend to be Linux-friendly in general. And ASUS gets a lot of hate for whatever reason, but I’ve always found them to be good for the price.

The other recent “suicides” of whistleblowers have gone unpunished, so it’s no surprise that it’s now standard practice. Especially unsurprising given that it’s standard practice of the dictator currently in control of a large percentage of American politicians and billionaires.

I also default to they/them. That has been the default for way longer than this “debate” (i.e. stream of hate) has been popular. I’d love to see the people who use “he or she” instead of “they” in normal speech about people whose gender they don’t know. I don’t know anyone outside of old formal papers from the pre-internet era that use that kind of language.

I’m agender by the way, so not only are pronouns sometimes hard to remember because they don’t connect to the way I perceive a person, but i don’t even perceive my own gender except when forced to, so take my comments with that in mind.

Selfhosted VaultWarden with Bitwarden browser apps and KeyGuard on my phone, which I like better than the Bitwarden app.

It’s not a private messaging platform, it’s an anti-censorship messaging platform among other things. If you’re looking for privacy, this probably isn’t the application for that. Though it is somewhat possible to make it more private, that’s not the primary use case. If you’re looking for a platform for public conversations where corporate interests of the day won’t cause your messages to be censored, then Matrix might be useful. But moderation of spam, hate content, etc., is also not going to be robust in general.

Anytime there is an update, files are often deleted during that process so they can be replaced with new files or because those files are no longer part of the new version being installed. If an error occurs during this process, it is possible that an application will appear not to be installed because it’s broken.

Anyway, most software does at least partially “uninstall” when it is updating, so if the install fails, then it’s always possible that an update will have uninstalled something. That’s just updates regardless of operating systems, package managers, etc.

I mean, bugs are a part of all software. Stability is about reliability. That if you boot up your computer you are less likely to spend the first hour or two troubleshooting unless you just did a major upgrade. I’m not saying Arch is unstable, just less stable.