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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • I mean… you really can’t. Contracts and even people on the ground more or less reveal this real fast (and is what the OSINT community lives off of). The US and even Ukraine do the same. You can keep it a secret exactly how juicy a target is but you can’t really hide that missiles or tanks or whatever are being built somewhere.


    For example, a buddy of mine lives near a US facility that is near some REALLY nice climbing areas nearby. Every couple of months the army swings by and tells everyone to go the fuck away. And it does not take much brain power to realize that THAT is when they are moving whatever they don’t want people to know is at that base. But any other time? You can literally watch equipment being moved from warehouse/hanger to warehouse/hanger while giving someone a belay.


  • It is the biggest “problem” of modern warfare. We don’t fight wars of conquest anymore because that tends to actually make other countries care (because those brown people have resources!). So we attack and then leave.

    It is similar to why France and England (or China/Japan/Korea) were basically at continuous levels of war for hundreds (?) of years. Because when you roll up and kill a bunch of people and maybe steal a goat? The remaining people want revenge. When you conquer them and either ethnically cleanse them to nonexistence or integrate them into your society? They forget why they were angry after a generation or two.

    I very much do NOT believe the world would be a better place with more ethnic cleansing and stealing of land. But we also are in a mess where retaliation between countries just continues with no real consequences to the people who are calling for the attacks. And the civilians just get rightfully angry when their kid is permanently blinded because she was looking the wrong way at the Lebanese equivalent of a Kroger.

    And then you get the keyboard warriors who hop in decades (or even centuries) into the conflict, pick a side, and immediately say THESE terrorists are good guys and THOSE terrorists are bad guys.



  • Supply chains matter a lot and governments, let alone terrorist organizations, fail to protect them.

    US centric, but far too much of policy is “Don’t buy Made in China” with no thought beyond that.

    For this scenario? My assumption is they ordered from their usual supply sources and nothing was hinky. But Israel (or whoever) compromised a port or fedex center along the way and installed some explosives since the only people buying those pagers were terrorists. And nobody on the hezbollah side even bothered to weigh the packages before handing them out.


  • it is unclear just how much trump is angry at ivanka and jared for allegedly narcing on them.

    But pretty sure even eric and don jr know they are getting dick all. He openly loathes them and it might be his only redeeming quality.

    Nah. It is just the nature of being the party of gun nuts while openly failing almost all of their purity tests. We actually saw similar (just to a much lesser degree) when trump said something like “I love vaccines” and was boo’d like crazy.

    He is a symptom of the rot. Not the source. And by and large he just tries to ride it as best he can.


  • No. There is every reason to “defend yourself”. The key is to actually be aware of what research and efforts are out there and minimizing your risk profile any time you are dealing with a black box.

    I mean, it is known that people can pick locks. Do you plug your ears every time you hear someone talk about how doors can be compromised? Or do you give up on everything and remove every single deadbolt in your home?

    Or… do you do a bit of research and figure out what you can do to make your home harder to break into. Whether it is sturdier screws, a reinforced doorjam, or other methods?


  • I can’t speak to monero specifically

    But:

    • Why aren’t they catching more criminals? They are. They just are finding alternate sources of evidence. Dick Wolf shows love to talk about how cops need to protect themselves from any poison fruit and blah blah blah. The reality is that they immediately go to the poison fruit and use that to make a plausible excuse for why they investigated something else that can confirm information they got from the illegal source. If you’ve ever wondered why they would think to investigate a random unrelated company that ends up being the smoking gun…
    • Why didn’t anyone claim the bounty? Because the CIA and the like don’t want people to know they compromised it?

    Back in my pure research days it was always fun to guess what the latest “big thing” was actually about. It was especially fun when you would be looking for funding opportunities and see really weird stuff that made no sense for the org sponsoring it but would have made perfect sense for a different 3LA.

    It was ALSO real fun to totally never notice when certain funding opportunities dried up and then there was a big push in the news about how we need to outlaw technology those opportunities totally didn’t already compromise.

    Like, for the better part of a decade The Big Thing was graph analysis techniques. And the number of kids who had no idea they were basically writing algorithms to process social media (especially twitter) was downright sad. And the people who DID realize what their work was geared toward? They applied for jobs where they got paid a lot more to do exactly that without needing to pretend it is actually about data storage technologies or optimizing cell tower load.

    And… let’s just say that most of those algorithms ALSO apply toward cryptocurrencies and transaction logs (since they had great applications for bank transactions…) and even doing a number on tumblers and so forth.


  • While I agree this definitely feels like more of a threat than an action, it IS worth understanding the many times that tor nodes have been compromised. Exit nodes are a well documented mess (and have many of the same vulnerabilities normal VPNs do) but eavesdropping and traffic analysis are also probabilities based upon how much of the network any given org has access to.

    If that NGO was doing hinky stuff or just doing a sloppy job? Those cops might actually have a LOT of actionable data that just needs a bit of processing.


    Which is why it is always important to understand what your risks and benefits from a privacy related tool are. People often think “I’ll just put everything through a vpn/tor” which DRASTICALLY increases their risk profiles. But they also don’t understand how tor works well enough to even know what it gives them over a traditional vpn (as opposed to “Dark Web” stuff which is a different mess).


  • If you need an “off the shelf, low effort” IDE then you pick whether you are using VSCode or Vim/Emacs and then go to youtube and google “best plugins for ${LANGUAGE} in ${EDITOR}”. And you get basically a minute of copy pasting to have it set up to about the same level of optimization.

    Aside from that? The reality is that everything takes time to learn. It took you time to learn your preferred emacs config. It took me time to learn default vim and then what my preferred vim config should be and how to take advantage of it. Just like it took time to learn the editor that came with python on windows for years (still might?).

    Which gets back to this being a boomer ass article.


  • CEC is pretty amazing for any relatively modern device (console, blu ray player, etc) in a “normal” setup.

    The main problems are if you are a bit of a “power user” and have a receiver or something (although I have also heard issues with soundbars) with it not always being clear what audio outputs will be used. And as consoles become more and more glorified computers you can run into issues where a simple workflow like:

    1. Start xbox
    2. Start download of big game for later
    3. Go back to “TV” to watch youtube

    Results in the xbox shutting down and not actually downloading the game.


    As a “power user” I just got a sofabaton (Just as mediocre and finicky as a Harmony but you won’t have forgotten that because your config is a decade old). but I keep telling myself that I should futz with my nvidia shield to see if I can use my receiver’s remote for everything instead.


  • Yes. A much less boomer-coded article would be better.

    But as someone who has actually used a lot of the various IDEs over the decades and keeps coming back to vim (and is already expecting to go back to vim within a year because of invasive copilot shit…): Those niche editors? They are either genuinely bad ideas (think TempleOS levels of insanity) or they became plugins for every other IDE. I like vim a lot but emacs is the same (actually emacs is an OS with a text interface but…). And many of those plugins ALSO exist for vscode and atom/sublime and so forth.

    Because good (uncopyrighted…) ideas propagate. That is development and design.


  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.ziptolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldAs it should be
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    6 days ago

    That… is a really shitty meme that misses the point?

    If you actually look at what the overlay exposes, the User still has the ability to pick specific channels, control volume, power, etc. All they really lose are the DVR (good example) and all of the user friendly stuff related to tv guides and the like (bad example).

    I assume this is just AI engagement farming bullshit that someone fell for and posted to lemmy but… I would actually say it would make more sense if the overlay were almost inverted.


  • I REALLY hate articles like this

    Saying we “lost” this software just shows that people don’t understand what software design/engineering is.

    Basically every screenshot of the “lost” TUIs look like a normal emacs/vim session for anyone who has learned about splits and :term (guess which god I believe in?). And people still use those near constantly. Hell, my workflow is generally a mix between vim and vscode depending upon what machine and operation I am working on. And that is a very normal workflow.

    And that is what we want out of software development. The good ideas move forward. The less good ideas become plugins for sickos. Because everyone loves vscode right now but… Microsoft is shitting that up REAL fast with copilot and just wait until every employer on the planet realizes that and ban it.

    And the rest just ignores the point of an IDE. Yes, taking your hand off the keyboard to touch the mouse LOWERS YOUR EFFICIENCY*. But it also means you can switch between languages or even environments trivially. Yes, it is often more annoying to dig through twelve menus to find what you want or talk a co-worker through how to do basic git operations that would be three commands. But holy crap I hate the people who “can’t work without my settings” that mean they are incapable of doing any “live” debugging or doing any peer programming where they aren’t driving.

    Back in the day we had plenty of people who were angry that not everyone was using vi and a bunch of tcsh scripts to develop because it clearly meant they didn’t understand what they were doing and were too dependent on compilers and debuggers. And it was just as stupid then as it is now.


  • In fairness, “gaijin” is any foreigner. And a lot of laws in Japan are very much based on warped Christian values (can’t imagine who they got that from…).

    But yeah. One of my best friends is Japanese American and the way she sums it up is: You know you truly understand the culture of Japan if you realize why you only want to visit for a few weeks at a time.

    With bonus points for anyone who can read quickly realizing why the general stance toward APA is “Only if you get a REALLY good deal”


  • The bag isn’t THAT wet (just enough chemicals to keep it from going purple AND to make getting good hashbrowns nigh impossible without more effort than it took to shred it in the first place) but yeah. Check your refrigerated lunch meats and cheese displays at your local supermarket.

    I personally love them for “breakfast for dinner” or a week night (blasphemous) burrito. They are shit because they take so long to properly crisp up, but you can get them into perfect burrito texture in like 10-15 minutes on the stove.

    And yeah. Unshredded chunks are incredibly common. First time I saw like half a potato though.


  • I’m just going to reiterate this for no apparent reason:

    Propaganda by strongman fascists.

    There is a VERY big difference between “nobles of a warrior caste” and “people who fight and die in a war”. yes, danger exists. Zelenskyy could die from a sudden mortar strike or a sniper any time he is visiting the troops. But every possible precaution is taken to ensure that doesn’t happen.

    Which gets back to the reality of it. This is, and always has been, theater. Sometimes it is a politician trying to show that they care about the troops. Other times it is a strongman trying to show that they are a warrior and might makes right so support them.

    But all fixating on this does is lead to photo ops and stupidity where fascists (like netanyahu) portray themselves as warriors and veterans so that people will support them.

    Because, bare minimum: Being good at ending some lives doesn’t make you a good leader.


  • See: Propaganda by strongman fascists

    But also? Nobility would not be part of the spearwall. Or, to be more precise, they would not be part of the first spearwall and may only be part of a formation that comes in to mop up when the battle is all but won. Or they would be mounted tanks in the form of plate armor (more richard than alexander). They key being that they would be able to get their blade wet but would be in little to no danger.

    I loathe to compare the two as I think Zelenskyy is actually a genuinely good leader who is focusing on his role as a political leader, but he is actually a really good example of this. When things are comparatively safe he’ll walk the front(-ish) lines and get face time with the soldiers to maintain morale and get photo ops. But mostly he is a politician in camo pants who is making sure that the people who actually are fighting for Ukraine’s survival have guns and ammo. A more “strongman” style leader might argue that as being “he is on the frontlines fighting alongside the heroic men and women of our army” but he is never in any meaningful danger.


  • I mean… they are to the extent they would be.

    The idea of the heroic king fighting on the frontlines is a giant load of bullshit that was (and still is) used to manipulate the masses. Even back when we were walls of spears smashing our pointing bits into each other, officers (so nobility and government) would hang back. Because you need someone who can coordinate the battle (to the limited extent they could) and sound a retreat (or flee).

    Even modern day middle manager officers are pretty safe either back in the command tent or off to the side so that they can hear the radio and coordinate support.

    And if even the Colonels are on the front line? Something has gone HORRIBLY wrong.

    This “member when our leaders would actually fight for us” is the kind of bullshit that leads to strongman fascists… like netanyahu.


  • Because the Mastodon community did the same thing we do every time there is a chance to get people away from corporations (e.g. Linux vs Windows).

    People were looking for an alternative. The general consensus was it was hard to really grok federation. So, of course, The Community insisted on explaining federation and why it was good while basically only commenting on the instances that had closed applications. It was the equivalent of insisting someone who wanted to try Linux for gaming NEEDS to use arch and only needs to know twenty command line operations to get up and running.

    So… everyone instead just went to Bluesky and Threads where sign-up links were provided rather than directory links and manifestos.

    And… I am perfectly happy with that. Lemmy has a LOT of issues where so much of the community is talking about their ex-girlfriend (reddit) all the time and we basically get constant content and engagement farming that makes no fucking sense considering the userbase.

    Whereas Mastodon actually IS a really good community that feels very different from twitter/bluesky/threads. It isn’t for everyone but I very regularly have genuinely good conversations with people in the town hall/microblog format. Whereas… I am not sure if I have ever had even a meaningful conversation on lemmy (whereas I’ve probably had maybe ten on reddit over the years?).


  • Generally speaking, all the major instances are federated with all the other major instances.

    The differences are the super tiny instances (which are generally effectively zero traffic) and the controversial instances (mostly tankies). Said controversial instances don’t want to advertise that nobody can stand them and the rest of the instances don’t want to deal with the bullshit from bringing it up again.

    I think it would be a nice novelty to visualize this. But I don’t think there would be much actionable information coming out of it and , because this is The Internet, it will likely lead to harassment and brigading.