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kava

@ kava @lemmy.world

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419
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • As shady as Mozilla is, they’re competing against a functional monopoly

    yeah this is a part we need to recognize. right now there are essentially three browsers. Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Every other browser is some derivative of one of these- mostly Chromium.

    Google can change some small detail about how they render HTML or a small part of their JS engine and that has global effects all over the internet. Without a Firefox to compete, they will implement policies to hurt the consumer. People think just because Chromium is open source that this mitigates the risk.

    Google's V8 javascript engine does not only power all Chrome and chrome-derivatives, it also powers nodeJS and therefore vast swathes of server-side javascript as well.

    it's actually difficult to understate how much raw power Google has in determining what you see on the internet and how you see it

    we desperately need Firefox. I really hope that an open source alternative could be viable but it's been decades and we haven't had a real browser pop into existence. will the death of Firefox mean something else comes out? Or will the death of Firefox be the last nail in the coffin for a free internet?

  • Ukraine’s Top Military Leadership: We Are Starting to Win, Russia Is Starting to Lose

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  • Saying “kidnapping” and “brutal measures” is a little saucy when this is

    Well, it is extreme. Let's not pretend like it isn't. Legal technicalities aside, it's not a good look. People walking with their families down the street suddenly get ambushed and then thrown into a van? Old woman or wife trying to fight off the military recruiters?

    The Russians don't do this. The Americans didn't do this back during Vietnam. Etc. It's understandable because of the existential nature of this war, like you pointed out, but it is abnormal when you look at other drafts in other countries.

    Part of the reason they're having such a hard time is again, the recklessness with which they have, at certain points of this war, treated human life. Russia's running into this same issue. Although Russia has a bigger population and is able to offer higher incentives in the form of payouts, along with a more centralized and mature propaganda system. Because of this, they haven't had to rely on a draft and mobilization. They are still mostly a volunteer force.

    They had lower tolerance for casualties, but that’s just because it was an optional war rather than an existential one.

    Lower tolerance for casualties is a bit of an understatement. Over the course of 5 years or so there were less than 5,000 American deaths. Since 2022, we're looking at a very conservative at least 100k dead from just the Russian side. The more generous estimates have 200k+ dead on both sides.

    We're talking at least an order of magnitude difference

    That’s pretty much the job description of a soldier

    When military strategy is controlled by the generals, they will prioritize manpower over political goals. When military strategy is controlled by the political regime, political goals become more important.

    Retreating from a piece of land that has little strategic significance is the correct move so that you conserve resources and manpower. A soldier is a human being, a life. Not only does this have some sort of moral worth and should not be thrown away recklessly, it has real strategic value.

    Both Russia and Ukraine in this war have made awe-inspiringly bad decisions at specific points. If I were a man who was being compelled to serve in either army, I would run away as far as possible.

    It was less that OP pointed out this stuff, and more that their “friend in Kiev” apparently phones them up about this and doesn’t mention anything about the Russians who are perpetuating all this and could leave at any time.

    I agree.

  • Ukraine’s Top Military Leadership: We Are Starting to Win, Russia Is Starting to Lose

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  • if you go on reddit to certain pro-russian combat footage subs dedicated to the war, you'll see one or two new videos a week of Ukrainian men being kidnapped off of the streets and stuffed into a van

    they really are taking people off the streets there. they're low on manpower and the men remaining are all those that don't want to die so they've been ignoring any draft summons. so the Ukrainian gov has been resorting to increasingly brutal measures.

    i'm honestly just so glad i wasn't born in post-soviet slavic country , lol. i swear the value of life there is not nearly what it is here. on the Russian side they'll force thousands of men forwards into a meat grinder trying to win with pure brute force. if a soldier tries to go backwards, the Russians themselves will shoot you as a motivation for the others to go forwards. hundreds of thousands of men dead or maimed for what? a couple miles of land a day?

    then on the Ukrainian side they'll keep you defending some worthless piece of land forever as all the supply lines slowly close around you. once you're cut off, you know you and the wounded with you are all gonna die. command promised reinforcements when they had no intention of sending reinforcements. to them , the political benefit of holding onto that land for just a little longer is worth more than the lives of real human beings. you are a soldier and you are expendable. (this also coincidentally makes it harder to get fresh recruitment because ukrainian men aren't stupid and propaganda can only hide so many deaths)

    i've seen confirmed cases of both sides killing POWs. men walking out of a trench with their hands up surrendering just to get mowed down anyways. men trying to surrender to drones only to get blown up anyways.

    war is hell. it's barbaric and highlights the absolute worst nature of humanity.

    having said all that, yeah the commenter does seem like an astroturfer or at least a biased pro-russian poster if organic. but the statement with ukrainians being kidnapped, at least from what I've seen, is true. it has been happening at increasing frequencies

  • Life isn't easy if your last name is 'Null' as it still breaks database entries the world over

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  • really it's a cautionary tale about the intersections of different technologies. for example, csv going into a sql database and then querying that database from another language (whether it's JS or C# or whatever)

    when i was 16 and in driver's ed, I remember the day where the instructor told us that we were going to go drive on the highway. I told him I was worried because the highway sounds scary- everybody is going so fast. he told me something that for some weird reason stuck with me: the highway is one of the safest places to be because everybody is going straight in the same direction.

    the most dangerous places to be, and the data backs this up, are actually intersections. the points where different roads converge. why? well, it's pretty intuitive. it's where you have a lot of cars in close proximity. the more cars in a specific square footage the higher probability of a car hitting another car.

    that logic follows with software too. in a lot of ways devs are traffic engineers controlling the flow of data. that's why, like you said, it's up to the devs to catch these things early. intersections are the points where different technologies meet and all data flows through these technologies. it's important to be extra careful at these points. like in the example i gave above..

    the difference between 

     
        
WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true);

    and

     
        
WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true, NULL '');

    could be the difference between one guy living a normal life and another guy receiving thousands of speeding tickets https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/

  • 'Should be terrifying to everyone': Prosecutor fired by Trump delivers blunt warning

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  • believe me, i'm not under any illusion. but i do genuinely encourage you to do whatever you think will make things better. can't get much worse

  • Life isn't easy if your last name is 'Null' as it still breaks database entries the world over

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  • How do devs make this mistake

    it can happen many different ways if you're not explicitly watching out for these types of things

    example let's say you have a csv file with a bunch of names 

     
        
id, last_name
1, schaffer
2, thornton
3, NULL
4, smith
5, "NULL"

    if you use the following to import into postgres

     
        
COPY user_data (id, last_name)
FROM '/path/to/data.csv'
WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true);

    number 5 will be imported as a string "NULL" but number 3 will be imported as a NULL value. of course, this is why you sanitize the data (GIGO) but I can imagine this happening countless times at companies all over the country

    there are easy fixes if you're paying attention

     
        
COPY user_data (id, last_name)
FROM '/path/to/data.csv'
WITH (FORMAT csv, HEADER true, NULL '');

    sets the empty string to NULL value.

    example with js

     
        
fetch('/api/user/1')
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(data => {
    if (data.lastName == "null") {
      console.log("No last name found");
    } else {
      console.log("Last name is:", data.lastName);
    }
  });

    if data is 

     
        
data = {
  id: 5,
  lastName: "null"
};

    then the if statement will trigger- as if there was no last name. that's why you gotta know the language you're using and the potential pitfalls

    now you may ask -- why not just do 

     
        
if (data.lastName === null)

    instead? But what if the system you're working on uses JSON.parse(data) and that auto-converts everything to a string? it's a very natural move to check for the string "null"

    obviously if you're paying attention and understand the pitfalls of certain languages (like javascript's type coercion and the particularities of JSON.parse()) it becomes easy but it's something that is honestly very easy to overlook

  • 'Should be terrifying to everyone': Prosecutor fired by Trump delivers blunt warning

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  • So, your solution is to quote Marx and hope the revolution will materialize.

    it's actually not quoting Marx. Marx believed that a capitalist society will over time always result in a worker's revolution. I'm more pessimistic about human nature. I think a capitalist society will always result in fascist authoritarianism

    I wish I had the privilege of letting things get worse

    do it then. make things better, I'm rooting for you.

  • 'Should be terrifying to everyone': Prosecutor fired by Trump delivers blunt warning

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  • a capitalist society will always inevitably devolve into fascism, as short-term profit-driven thinking dominates decision making

    the DNC is right up there with the GOP in terms of causing this clusterfuck. decades of neoliberal policies have left Americans financially insecure which has caused a total loss of faith in institutions over the last few decades.

    in a good decade, a little crisis here and there is maintainable. but when you have dramatic knock-off effects of new technologies combined with global economic shockwaves like COVID and the Ukraine war, all of a sudden the establishment hold on power starts to slip. the corporate world doesn't care about democracy. they're more than happy to switch over to a fascist government- there's a very high potential ROI in bending the knee.

    Trump took advantage of this and beat them. We saw the corporate world switch sides during the inauguration. He is now purging the federal government of any elements that may oppose his further renovations.

    This problem did not start last year in November. This problem started decades ago and spans generations.

    It's unfortunate but it's the reality. We as a society are sick. We are fundamentally sick and getting worse. We ignored it and persevered, but it can only be ignored for so long. We are now starting to see serious symptoms, like a person who gets a fever and starts shivering.

    Trust me, it's going to get a hell of a lot worse before it ever gets better. We're in for a rough decade.

  • After 40 years of being free Microsoft has added a paywall to Notepad

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  • The devs have the same kind of “we know better than you do” mentality towards design

    It's not "we know better than you do"

    It's "we have a vision for the desktop environment"

    If you granted the user every little thing they wanted, you don't become a better piece of software. You end up middle of the road. There are limited resources and by keeping a limited scope and having a clear idea of what you want to accomplish- you can do what you aim to do really well. Instead of being mediocre at a lot of things.

    My experience with Gnome- it does 95% of what I need a Desktop Environment to do (and certain things others don't do very well). Some features like

    • Being able to push a button, start typing an application's name, and push enter to start that application
    • Being able to push a button, and immediately see at a glance all of the windows I have open and quickly navigate to them
    • Being able to easily set keyboard hotkeys so that I launch applications and can run my own custom scripts with the push of a button

    Example- I have a script that I set to "Control+Num Pad 5" that opens up a Gnome folder search dialog. I navigate to a folder and click "Ok" and then 4 terminals open on my left monitor. Three small ones stacked on top of each other on the left, one big one on the right. Basically like a tiling window manager. This script has custom commands that run depending on the directory. If I open a react-native folder, it runs an Android emulator and neovim on the big terminal.

    Setting that script to a hotkey is as simple as going to "settings -> keyboard -> shortcuts" and just typing in the path to the script and the hotkey combination

    • Being able to easily run scripts on files and directories directly from Nautilus (Gnome's file manager)

    Example- When I right click on a pdf file in Nautilus, I have custom scripts that I can run. One is "splitPdf" which creates a new folder called "split" and then creates n.pdf files where n is the number of pages in that pdf. I also have "compressPdf" which will compress the pdf as much as possible and pops up a notification showing you how much. I have one for .xlsx and .doc files called "printPdf" that converts those to pdf files.

    Those scripts can be whatever language you want, they just have to be executable, and you just drag and drop them into a specific folder ( ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts if I remember correct)

    Those 4 things I think Gnome does better than any other default desktop environment I've ever used and I've used a lot over the course of my life. The remainder of the items (the 5% of stuff Gnome can't do) I have found custom plugins and in one scenario it only took me a couple hours to write my own custom plugin.

    MacOS does #2 and #4 well by default (although it's harder to write scripts with their clunky apple script language whereas with Gnome because you can just use regular old fish or bash scripts). With certain applications (like better-touch-tools or karabiner) you can get similar functionality as Gnome.

    Windows with Autohotkey does #3 although you have to again use a clunky language (even clunkier than Apple script)

    KDE can do #1 (search/launch apps), but feels slower and less streamlined than Gnome's immediate overview. It does #2 (window overview) and #3 (keyboard shortcuts), but buries these features under layers of settings and inconsistent menus. For #4 (file manager scripts), Dolphin technically supports actions, but configuring them requires wrestling with clunky .desktop files whereas on Gnome you just use fish or bash or python or javascript or whatever the hell you want and stick it in a directory.

    In my opinion, Gnome is miles ahead of KDE and while it's obviously not as polished as MacOS, it has accomplished so much more with its limited resources than a megacorp like Apple does.

    What I love is it gets rid of stuff that's useless. For example desktop icons. What's the point of having some directory on your computer that's somehow different than all the other directories? So that you can clutter up your background?

    I 100% agree that desktop icons are an outdated concept and I love that Gnome got rid of them in order to focus on the fundamentals. It's often not about what you add, but what you take away.

  • After 40 years of being free Microsoft has added a paywall to Notepad

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  • NP++ was good 20 years ago during a time with much weaker competition and it's been coasting on that good will ever since

    It's OK for a text editor (compared to something totally basic like notepad) but other text editors have caught up in every single category

    like you said, VS Code is now the default go to code editor for a lot of people. if you don't use VS Code, you use vim.

    for non-coding uses, I don't see the functional difference between NP++ or something basic like Gnome's text editor

  • After 40 years of being free Microsoft has added a paywall to Notepad

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  • Gnome is an opinionated desktop environment and that turns some people off. But it's bold enough to make some design decisions and have a limited scope. KDE tries to be another Windows alternative.

    Of course, you could go with a tiling window manager but my vote goes to Gnome. I've had a very smooth experience on Gnome for the last couple years.

  • Israel drops leaflets threatening Gazans to 'leave or die'

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  • We would still be supporting Israel with Biden in place. The only difference is there would be a few "we are very concerned" statements from the White House press secretary instead of Trump's reality TV show statements. But in the background, the same number of MK84 2,000lb bombs are being transported by the same military vehicles and they blow up on top of the same people.

  • Steve Bannon Gives Apparent Nazi Salute During CPAC Speech, Mirroring Elon Musk | Video

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  • i think the only way we can survive and create a successful egalitarian society is by having some sort of overlord ruling over us

    so for example let's say we write a constitution and then have a super-powered generalized artificial intelligence machine force us to follow the rules

    or aliens. we could become pets for alients https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgPeP_pfjp4

  • Steve Bannon Gives Apparent Nazi Salute During CPAC Speech, Mirroring Elon Musk | Video

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  • I mean, Bannon started this whole thing. He was pushed out of the inner circle but he was the one with the vision back in 2016.

    Bannon is a visionary and he had the right idea. He just didn't have the ability to execute. Trump took the ideas from Bannon and found new allies who have the ability to execute. Musk (and Thiel) were more than happy to jump on board

    Edit: just in case it's not clear I'm not endorsing his views. I am firmly anti-Nazi

  • Steve Bannon Gives Apparent Nazi Salute During CPAC Speech, Mirroring Elon Musk | Video

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  • look there was no plausible deniability when Elon did it. He pretended like he was a weirdo autist the night of with his weird head bobbing and his exaggerated gestures to try and give plausible deniability. but the Nazi salute was putting the toe in the water. feeling the room

    it seems that the wannabe Nazis felt like the water was warm enough and they're gonna start descending the staircase into the pool

  • Amazon is changing what is written in books

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  • And also if you want books that can’t be altered buy a paper book

    The books on my 1st generation kindle have been there 15 years unchanged. Just don't connect devices to the internet that don't need to be connected to the internet.

    The "internet of things" that was sold to us is just a way for corporations to exert more control. I am pro-technology. I think an ebook reader is infinitely more useful and valuable than a paper book - I can fit tens of thousands of books on my Kindle, more than I could read in a lifetime, and a full charge lasts more than a month at a time.

    I can use whatever font I want, I can scale the size to what I want. I can change the margins, place bookmarks, gives a % of how far I am in a book, skip to chapters, etc.

    Like, it's objectively better than a book.

    But it doesn't need to be connected to the internet.

  • 11-year-old Texas girl bullied over family’s immigration status takes her own life

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  • you're correct it's not a unique experience to feel isolated from the rest of your peers. i feel like it's an experience that might actually be increasing. i think social media ironically adds to this in the youth. many biracial people also experience something like this (ie, too white for the blacks, too black for the whites)

    when i got here initially i moved to a place where nobody spoke my native language. so when i went to school, i would get put in a class all by myself with a nice lady who would hold flash cards with pictures on them. she would show me a card, it would say something like "cat" or "ball" and then she would repeat them over and over.

    so the first year or so of primary school I was alone in a room because I didn't speak english yet. really what eventually taught me english was cable TV

    another element in the experience is being afraid of authority. the police were dangerous because at any moment if they caught us the family could get separated and we could get deported. one time my parents were cleaning an office late at night (they worked in cleaning when they first arrived in US) and they brought me with.

    i didn't understand what a fire alarm was so i pulled it. my parents, scared that the authorities would arrive and see a young child, took me and put me in the backseat of the car where people's feet usually go and they put a blanket on me. they told me to be very quiet and not make a sound otherwise we could all be deported. so i hid in that car for an hour or so until the emergency services left

    i share these things not to say i had a hard life or anything like that. I think I had a good upbringing. and I understand many Americans have had much worse experiences and also feel alienated as well.

    But I share these things just because the story in the OP touched me because I was that 11 year old child once. It's a life and a set of experiences a lot of Americans don't really think about very much. Or at least historically has been more or less ignored.

    Nowadays illegals have attention but unfortunately an overwhelmingly peaceful people become "rapists and murderers". if you look up statistics, illegals are 2-4x less likely to commit crime than native born americans (if you get any charge at all, you can get deported.. even if you get acquitted or the charges dropped!). so naturally they tend to be more careful breaking laws

  • Next week, Amazon is stripping away your ability to download your ebooks.

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  • I'm not sure where exactly they made the switch. Basically, I got my girlfriend one a year and a half ago and it did not need the software. I explained to her to turn off the wifi and just download books and drag and drop.

    But then around Christmastime last year my girlfriend's cousin wanted an ebook ready so we bought her a Kindle and I gave the same advice. But she couldn't figure out how to drag and drop, so she brought it over. I was fussing around thinking something was wrong with my USB cable but then I realized it required that special software.

    So the switch happened at some point in the last ~18 months or so my memory's a bit hazy

    Amazon just couldn't let it be. There's a certain set of people that just aren't going to opt into all the bullshit. These people just want a plain and simple ebook ready to host their ebooks. They think if they force the special software they'll be able to do things like sign into your Kindle and change your settings by force.

    But what happens? Instead of gaining those people like me or you into their ecosystem, they're just gonna lose future hardware customers. I would have been perfectly fine buying Kindles for the rest of my life if they had just kept that feature.

    I'm sure it's going to be reversed engineered at some point but it's absurd. I don't understand the short-sighted greed.

  • Next week, Amazon is stripping away your ability to download your ebooks.

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  • Up until fairly recently, you could just drag and drop files onto the Kindle with a usb. I've had my first generation Kindle for almost 15 years now and it still works. Just download an .epub file, convert it to .mobi with Calibre, and drag and drop it over to the Kindle.

    I have a newer one too, that I got a couple of years ago as a gift.

    The trick is just disable the wifi and never let it communicate with Amazon servers. They will mess with your settings and push secret updates that remove features. For example, it could "sync" your books with your Amazon account if you naively log into your Amazon account and that literally results in you not being able to remove items from your Kindle without logging into your Amazon account on your computer and going through a million menus. It won't let you do it from the Kindle, even if you're offline.

    But if you just never let it connect it to the internet at all, you're fine.

    Although the new Kindles now require a special Amazon software to copy files over (because of "convenience") and it won't communicate with the usual protocol so you can't drag and drop like you could for the last 15 years.

    So yeah, don't buy a Kindle. at least not a new one.

  • 11-year-old Texas girl bullied over family’s immigration status takes her own life

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  • Thank you. I feel like one these days. Especially after the naturalization ceremony. This is a country of immigrants and I'm part of it. I'm not ashamed of it anymore. I was when I was younger.