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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • While you may be correct I think you’re still missing the point. CLI is for super nerds. While you and I may know how to use it, the average person doesn’t, and is unlikely to put in the effort to learn. That is the innovation that Apple made in bringing computing to the mainstream. It was precisely because people didn’t have to learn how to navigate the CLI environment and instead got an easy point-and-click interface that computers caught on with the public at large, and that gained Apple an absolute ton of cash money and noteriety.


  • Your phone has to be informed somehow, from the internet, that it has data to present as a notification. The fact that you got a notification at 3:32 and then again at 3:35 is trackable data, pretty much no matter what anyone does with it, encrypted or not. Doubly so if someone has MITM attacked your data stream. They may not know what the notification contains or even what app it was sent to, but the act of transmitting and then receiving this data packet over cell network or internet is a trackable event. And I don’t really know what Apple could even do about that beyond attempting to build Internet 2 solely for the purposes of keeping the cops out of it, which is unlikely at best.



  • Now every skiddie can do it.

    And this is the real, serious problem. Most people are pretty unlikely to stop a state sponsored spy operation no matter how careful they are. It’s barely worth worrying about unless you know for a fact you’re being tapped and that you will be killed about it, and even if you do know this the state can pull some space age bullshit out of their asses that doesn’t yet have a counter. Top secret military industrial research goes into maintaining that exact advantage every year, if they really want to get you, you will get got. But if Joey Dickbeater and his school friends can just point a mic at your window and then upload it to the Pass-o-Gram to decode it, you have a real problem. It’s like when TikTok kids figured out they can steal Kias with usb keys - if every teenager in America knows how to steal your car, its lifetime is going to be measured in minutes. Same with passwords.

    Sounds like it’s time to buy a bunch of random cherry switches and randomize them across my keyboard…




  • Unfortunately the actions of the man who owns a rocket ship company, an electric car company, and a social media company are, by definition, technology news.

    Everyone wants to bitch about how much Muskrat is in the news, well then, maybe don’t let him buy every company you want to get news on.

    “This isn’t tech news” it literally is. I hate the fucker as much as the next guy but keeping an eye on his actions is necessary. Letting him run wild with the public turning a blind eye is a recipe for much, much, MUCH more disaster than has already been caused.

    This particular article? Yeah I can’t give a shit about Stephen King wishing Twitter had it’s old name back. This article is worthless. But news about, for example, Musk buying Twitter, or Musk changing the name of Twitter, or Musk undermining all ability to determine fact from fiction by changing Twitter verification, is extremely important information for your average user.






  • It is an encyclopedia. It is not a place for subjective content. Just because you keep getting your opinion edits rolled back does not mean that that’s a bad thing. A Wikipedia page SHOULD be filled only with objective facts. Again, it is an encyclopedia.

    Also, you can trust that a given page is not poisoned by checking the sources yourself. They’re all right there at the bottom. Anything without a citation can be ignored but most things of substance are going to have a citation, because an encyclopedia is a place in which to collect objective facts with sources to back them up.


  • The same could really be said about human teachers as well, though. An AI is frequently confidently wrong but so was my history teacher.

    Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a terrible idea. But we were already vulnerable to misinformation with classical schooling. To use your example, we WERE taught that Colombus discovered the Americas peacefully. It wasn’t until I reached college that I learned the truth behind the discovery and colonization of the Americas, and I only even learned it then by doing my own history reading. Up until that point I had been taught that Thanksgiving was celebrated in memory of the happy-fun-get-along-times that were had between the settlers and the natives.

    Kids are already taught ridiculous inaccuracies on purpose and while I hardly think an idea like this would improve that situation, I have to point out that at least accidental misinformation would be less objectively evil than what we already misinform kids about.







  • Right, and the first Starlink launch was in 2019. So, at absolute maximum, these satellites have a total lifespan of 4 years, if the ones coming down now are the very first ones ever launched into orbit.

    That’s, if you’ll excuse my language, fucking abysmal. This is what’s supposed to bring reliable internet access to the distant corners of the globe? A constellation of million dollar satellites that crumble into dust on re-entry every four years? Maintaining this, and God forbid scaling it up to actually serve a majority of the world population, would be a stupendous and recurring waste of money, materials, and labor. Elon has a stable full of actual rocket scientists over at SpaceX, fucking use them. Max lifespan of four years for a “permanent” satellite constellation is actually laughable. The ISS has been in stable orbit since 1998. DIRECTV had better satellite longevity than Starlink.

    By all means, design them to deorbit so that when humanity cooks itself off the face of the planet next century we aren’t left with 300,000 starlink satellites trashing up our cosmic lawn for eternity. But maybe design them to deorbit later. At this rate we’ll be turning a percent of the world’s GDP into literal smoke each year as a fifth of the Starlink constellation rains down over the plains of Africa.