a1studmuffin

Janitor.

Sometimes the real value of a project isn’t its proposed worth, but the schadenfreude it offers instead. I’ve backed a few failed Kickstarters that I absolutely got my money’s worth on.

If you’re concerned about privacy I don’t know why you’d use Tailscale over Wireguard directly. The latter is slightly more fiddly to configure, but you only do it once and there’s no cloud middleman involved, just your devices talking directly to each other.

WhatsApp has been exploited before with a zero-day, check the Complaints section in this link:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)

The reality is WhatsApp and Signal will continue to be high-value targets for exploits given the number of users, cloud infrastructure reliance and promise of secure communications, so it’s a wise idea to avoid them for defence matters.

Horizon Zero Mean Girls

I’d rather drink a verification can every 30 minutes.

This article seems misleading. It uses the loaded Western term “selfie” to generate these images of different cultures smiling. If you use the term “group photo” instead, you get much more natural looking results, where certain cultures are smiling and others aren’t.

This has been the weirdest console generation. I’m still surprised they railroaded ahead with the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches right at the beginning of the pandemic.

To kill any competition and ensure they retain control over future standards. Money. It’s pretty straightforward.

The basic idea is that a huge company with infinite money creates software that supports an open standard, such as Threads. Next they spend significant amounts of money driving users to their software, rather than an open software equivalent. Once they’ve captured a huge percent of all users of the open standard, they abandon the open standard, going with a proprietary one instead. They’ll make up some new feature to justify this and sell it as a positive. Because they control almost all of the users at this point, many of the users they don’t control will decide to switch over to their software, otherwise the value of the open standard drops significantly overnight for them. What’s left is a “dead” open standard that still technically exists but is no longer used. You can find plenty of past examples of this pattern, such as Google and XMPP.

I can’t speak for Craigslist, but in my area Gumtree is big, and I know from first-hand experience that they “handle it” by waiting for the crime to occur and be reported to police, then they give police the list of all IP addresses that viewed a listing. Having stared down the pointy end of a knife right outside my own home, I feel there’s an opportunity to build a better system that keeps people honest and discourages thieves.

One of the biggest challenges with online marketplaces is personal safety for physical meetups and scam prevention for online sales. It’ll be interesting if there are any efforts to solve this, such as an escrow system or other process to keep buyers and sellers honest.

Another vote for Mikrotik, but only if you’re technical-minded and want to learn how routers work. One of the things I like the most about it is the ability to import/export the router config as plain text. That makes it very easy to do things like bulk-editing (I have a lot of IOT devices I need to configure), storing your config in version control for safe-keeping etc.

It really shouldn’t be possible in a EULA/agreement of any kind to essentially say “you agree you can’t sue us in future for anything ever”.

What I love most about 8-bit era games are how small they were storage-wise. Most of the ROMs are tens of kilobytes for the entire game. Developers were severely constrained by the hardware limits which led to some creative decisions, eg. the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros are the same sprite just drawn in different colors. All code was written in pure assembly for efficiency and size.

To put it into perspective, AAA games today are one million times bigger.

A new deal is being forged with 4chan instead.

One of the great things about Home Assistant is they give you full control over everything, so it’s entirely up to you how much you rely on local vs cloud infrastructure. It all just comes down to how you configure individual settings and plugins.

Their subscription plan is great because it allows them to continue open source development without relying on commercial sponsorship, so there’s no ecosystem bias or advertising or anything crazy like that. A great open source project.

Slight tangent, but I recently cleaned out the house of a parent after they passed away. There were boxes and boxes of family photo albums. We kept them for a while out of guilt, but we really didn’t know anyone in the photos aside from one or two people. Eventually we got rid of them. Point being the value of your stuff is probably far less to others then it is to you, especially photos to future generations.

“You’re not into me, baby?”
“It’s not you, it’s galactic cosmic rays”

Large data sets are valuable. And many people who hack are primarily motivated by the challenge, so targeting a site isn’t always a vendetta. Unfortunately sometimes hackers stumble across these things and are motivated by money too, because they’re human like the rest of us.