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7heo

@ 7heo @lemmy.ml

Posts
12
Comments
178
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • What is the "right" thing to do when a website tells me to download Chrome?

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  • You are only forced by yourself. I regularly find myself ridiculed, ostracised, blocked, etc.; but I never find myself forced: in our western societies at least, nobody (outside of cops during demonstrations, but that is an entirely different topic) forces you to do anything. Instead, you are coerced.

    The thing with coercion is that it is always a tradeoff between a small immediate cost (that will either increase dramatically over time, or be compounded by another factor because of some non immediately obvious synergy) and a big immediate cost (that will however prevent the situation from devolving any further).

    Since most people aren't intelligent enough to spontaneously interpolate the missing information, and understand the entirety of the situation they are enabling, they take the small immediate cost, only to find themselves fucked in the long run, act surprised_pikachu.gif, and argue that they could not have possibly seen it coming.

    The fact is that this lack of intelligence, while partly stemming from an unfair, abusive system, is still mostly on them: intelligence isn't innate. Like strength, it is an ability that one develops and cultivates, and even though there are definitely genetic and environmental factors, they account for a small part of one's overall agency in this regard.

    So, had they bothered to be honest with themselves and just checked that their comfort might very well have an unexpectedly disproportionate cost (especially after people like me would have warned them), they might have realised the importance of not giving in to the easiest "solution".

    Case in point, in this instance, the website is either checking for the blink engine (which could be a technical requirement), the user agent (which would likely be borderline legal at best - at least in the EU, I dunno in other places), or just using JavaScript to probe the browser (beyond its engine). Depending on the situation, the course of action differs.

    In the first case, further investigation is required (as to why the blink engine is technically necessary, and if it is legitimate. Probably isn't, modulo some additional development cost).

    In the second case, spoofing the user agent is a good practice, even if only for privacy purposes. However, pursuing a legal action (on the grounds of antitrust, complying with legally required accessibility, etc) is probably also a good thing to look into, or at the very least trying to find other people who have the problem, to try and organise a more permanent solution (like resisting the coercion as a group rather than as an individual).

    In the third case, the situation is most likely abusive, and while there might be some reasons for them to do this, I would definitely investigate the technical aspect and seek legal advice (same remarks as the previous point here).

    Either way, compliance is an invitation for bullies to continue bullying, so refusing to comply, or being difficult (slow, requiring as much work as possible on their end, etc), and implementing malicious compliance might be your best course of action. Use a virtual machine with chromium if you have to. Try to find a way to exhaust their server resources (and make it plausibility deniable, such as having as many open and hanging connexions as possible, submitting files in a loop, use fuzzing and pentesting tools, etc. Be sure to read the doc, not everything is legal). Make your documents as big as possible. Try to find bugs to make them unreadable, render only on specific systems (windows 98, etc). In office documents, use macros that exhaust resources. Etc.

    And as I said, find others, organise, unionise, and become hard to deal with. At the same time, report the issue as clearly as possible. If they fix it, make sure to stop the malicious compliance as immediately as possible.

  • Users shocked to find Instagram limits political content by default

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  • If they are shocked by this, wait until they understand what meta does with their PII and behavioural information... I'm sure they will understand any day now. Any day...

  • Her accent makes it so much funnier

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  • "I'm being serious. I've never seen something this disgusting in my entire life."

    That's a "you" problem, lady.

  • Her accent makes it so much funnier

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  • You're right, send her a goatse link. Saves time.

  • A handy reference

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  • I apologise if this is already common knowledge, but I just found out you can have multiple layers of LUKS encryption on a drive!

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  • Have fun with the initramfs.

  • Qualcomm's Powerful PC Chip Is Worse for AMD Than for Intel

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  • The ARM architecture does apparently (I'm no expert) have some inherent power-efficiency advantages over x86

    Well, the R from ARM means RISC, and x86 (so, by extension, x86_64) is a CISC architecture, so they are not even in the same "family" of designs.

    Originally, CISC architectures were more popular, because it meant less instructions to write, read, store, etc. Which is beneficial when hardware is limited and developers write in assembly directly.

    Over time, the need for assembly programming faltered, and in the 90s, the debate for CISC vs RISC resurfaced. Most developers then wrote code in C and C++, and the underlaying architecture was losing relevance. It is also worth noting that due to a higher number of instructions, the machine code is more granular, and as a result, RISC code can inherently be further optimised. It also means that the processor design is simpler than for CISC architectures, which in turn leaves more room for innovation.

    So, all else being equal, you'd expect Qualcomm to have an advantage in laptops with this chip, but all else isn't equal because the software isn't there yet, and no one in the PC market is quite in a position to kickstart the software development like Apple is with Macs.

    Now, a key consideration here is that the x86 architecture has been dominating the personal computer market for close to half a century at this point, meaning that a lot of the hardware and software is accommodating (wrt functionality, optimisation, etc) for it specifically.

    Therefore, RISC architectures find themselves at a disadvantage: the choice in Operating Systems is limited, firmware and drivers are missing, etc. Additionally, switching to RISC means breaking legacy support, or going through emulation (like the Apple M3 does).

    However, in our modern ecosystem, the potential gain from switching to a RISC architecture is considerable (storage is cheaper than ever, RAM is cheap and fast, and seldom anyone is writing assembly anymore. Plus, those who do might enjoy the higher degree of control the additional granularity affords them, without having to do everything by hand, given the degree of assistance modern IDEs offer), and it will gradually become a necessity for every vendor.

    For now however, the most popular computer Operating System worldwide has poor performance on ARM, and no support for other RISC architectures (such as RISC-V) that I know of.

    The challenge here is in breaking a decades long dominance that originated from a monopoly: if you have paid attention to what Apple has been doing, they initially used large parts of FreeBSD to build a new Operating System that could run on their custom processors (Motorola 68k), and then built the rest of their Operating System (Darwin and Aqua) on top of it. This afforded them the possibility to switch to Intel CPUs in 2005, and back to ARM in 2020 with their M series CPUs.

    The quality of their software (in large parts derived from the quality of free software and of staggering design work) has allowed them to grow from a virtually negligible share of computer users to the second place behind windows.

    Now, other Operating Systems (such as Linux) have the same portability characteristics as FreeBSD, and can feasibly lead to such a viable commercial OS offering with support for several hardware architectures.

    "All" that is needed is a consistent operating system, based on whichever kernel fits, to supplement MacOS in the alternative offering to windows.

    Most software would be available, and a lot of firmware would too, thanks to ARM being used nearly exclusively in mobile phones, and most mobile phones running a Linux kernel.

    Once we have a (or better, a few) Linux or BSD based operating system(s) with commercial support, consistent design, and acceptable UX for "normies", such CPUs will become a very valid offering.

  • ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

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  • Yeah, well, I would advise you against using google docs, but at least you are using Firefox 😅

  • I am the Rust programmer, I will rewrite everything in Rust.

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  • This is so not Prolog.

  • I am the Rust programmer, I will rewrite everything in Rust.

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  • Implement Prolog in Rust. 🙏

  • The platform era is ending. Rather than build new Twitters and Facebooks, we can create a stuff-posting system that works better for everybody.

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  • Yeah, getting old sucks. I'm still 25 in my head, but my body constantly reminds me that I'm over 30, and that it is slowly falling apart like a decrepit abandoned car.

    I guess what I was trying to say is: we have crossposting between communities, what prevents us from crossposting between years as well? :)

  • The platform era is ending. Rather than build new Twitters and Facebooks, we can create a stuff-posting system that works better for everybody.

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  • This repost is so old that it is the very first tab in my browser. For the record, I have [] tabs open. I have had [] tabs open from some time in 2023. That's how old it is.

  • Great job, champ

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  • Yeah, that one hurts actually. Like, they lowered the bar so we would feel proud for anything, no matter how trivial. And yet, the bar was still too high. 😐

  • POV: Working at Google

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  • That isn't real. It wouldn't pass peer review. Here is the actual code:

     js
        
function GetCookieValue(x) {
  return JSON.stringify(x);
}

user.cookies.agreed = Boolean(GetCookieValue(true));

if(!DarkPatternPopup()) {
  // Make sure we respect the user choice
  user.cookies.agreed = Boolean(GetCookieValue(false));
}

if(user.cookies.agreed) CollectData(user);

  • Someone gets killed by a car, so they restrict e-bikes.

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  • Sometimes you really need that vodka shot when things go wrong in the database

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  • Bartender:

    This is the closest I got.

  • File over App Philosophy

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  • And they must be local rather than remote (cloud).

    Also, always prioritise a common format served through filters (for example having all your data in postgres and minio, and serve that on demand as ICS, XML, etc) so that you don't need to duplicate or lose data due to formats.

  • Deleted

    Predirect, A manifest v3 web extension with minimal permissions that automatically redirects popular sites to privacy friendly frontends.

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  • Now let's get ISPs to run this!!

  • is this the moment spez became Heisenberg? Reddit CEO warns users: "We know your dark secrets'

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  • Spez could learn a thing or two from russia. That is not how one uses kompromat...

  • ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

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  • It would seem that the end user has no idea what "cut" means. I never have to "go back to the original directory to delete the originals". That is what "cut" is for.

    Besides, as other comments pointed out, one can make a multiple selection, and then, in conjunction with "cut", it will work exactly like the feature described at the end. 🤷‍♂️