effingjoe

It’s mostly true, but not entirely. The data “on the internet” has to live somewhere. For instance, when you DM someone on a social media network-- would you consider that private? I assure you the content of those messages can be read by the website’s admin-users.

If you’re hosting your own non-social web service (like, personal cloud storage or something), then that is arguably private for you, but if you let someone else also use it, then it is not private for them, because you can almost certainly see their file content, having access to the server directly.

Encryption can throw all of this off; a service like Signal is private-- the admin-users of Signal can’t see your messages. Generally speaking any service that warns you that all your data will be lost if you forget your password is probably private. If they can recover your data, they have access to your data.

Edit: Better word choices.

I think many of us are using reverse proxies, and opening port 443 (https) and maybe port 80 (http).

VanillaOS is pretty neat. It has an immutable (kind of) OS, lets you choose which package formats you want to use (flatpak, snap, appimage, etc) and leverages containers (a la Distrobox) and their package manager Apx to give you seamless access to packages on other distros. It’s Ubuntu-based right now but the next release is switching to debian.

To be fair, I don’t have much time on it. My daily drivers are a chromebook and a steamdeck, but I did dust off an old laptop just to check it out for a little bit.

I was very young, 4 or 5, and I was taking a nap in the afternoon. In my dream my mom told me she would only ever make spaghetti and meatballs for dinner for the rest of my life. I liked spaghetti and meatballs, but I didn’t want to eat only that forever. My grandmother woke me up because I was crying in my sleep.

This is my earliest memory.

I think it’s overall good. A vote is no longer an anonymous action-- it’s personal, just like leaving a comment supporting or disagreeing would be. While I don’t think it would ever be appropriate to harass a person because they up/down voted something, I do think people should have to make the mental calculation about whether they’re willing to have any specific up or down vote available for anyone to see.

Upvotes mean “people should see this”. Downvotes mean “there is no reason for anyone to see this”.

Those of us on kbin can see who up/downvotes. I’ve noticed, anecdotally, that once this became more wildly known, there have been fewer downvotes that mean “I disagree”, with them mostly being used on troll posts or obviously bigoted posts.

Google’s built-in chatbot search “experiment” seems to do the same thing. It’s kind of neat.

It was mostly rhetorical. There’s no way to know that you want the application to have extra access to some folder needed for your theme. That’s the exact kind of thing that would be better handled on a user-input level. You applied your theme, you notice that it is broken with the app, you apply the new expanded permissions to get it to work with your theme.

How do you propose that they trigger that popup? How would flatpak or the application know to ask if you wanted to add those extra permissions?

I can’t say with any specifics but flatpaks are sandboxed on purpose, when you override something you’re giving it more (or less) permissions than the developer thought they’d need. “Automatically giving permissions the developer didn’t think they’d need” seems like a crazy thing to try to automate, no?

Check out Flatseal if you haven’t already. It’s a GUI for flatpak permissions. Might make your life easier in the future.

It’s funny because lately I have been applying that quote to people being terrified of “AI”. (I hate that we use that word to describe stuff like LLMs, but that’s another topic.)

There are countless points in history where a technological advance has rendered some human labor less or no longer needed. There’s nothing to be done about it; that’s how progress works-- it’s why we’re not mostly farmers anymore.

The solution to technology rendering human labor less or no longer needed is for society to divorce the need to work from living a comfortable life. It’s certainly not to try and hold back or eliminate the technology solely to protect human labor.

Don’t be terrified of “AI”.

If feels like there is a system in place that will deal with this if it can be resolved by a simple command. Am I missing something?

Right about what? Using whataboutism to spread russian propaganda?

I kind of get what you’re saying, but what you might be missing is that we are long past the point where politics is just a disagreement on how to achieve the same general goal. The mainstream GOP is full on pro-bigotry, anti-freedom, and if not openly fascist, they sure do seem to do a lot of fascist-like things. This is not hyperbole.

Additionally, money is (and always has been) the lever to obtain power, so knowingly giving money (directly or indirectly) to a person who will use that money to promote or assist these kind of beliefs becomes a moral question, not a financial one. You may not want to believe it is so, but it is so.

How did that turn out? haha

I have two that have stuck with me most my adult life-- and I find that they apply frequently.

I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

-- Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty Speech, 1944

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

-- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt, 2002

Yes, there needs to be a glossary somewhere to get people up to speed, or some kind of on-boarding process. It’s also plausible that some of the naming conventions are from translation weirdness, and, as you say, backend Activitypub naming conventions that frontend users don’t normally see.

I made a magazine (aka a community, aka a subreddit) specifically so I could play around with kbin to figure things out. Right now, trial and error is all we have, as I imagine all the devs are more busy with more technical issues than naming conventions.

We might have figured out why you get called a tankie, friend.

What could go wrong with giving a democratic government the power to strip voting rights from those people they deem unsuitable to vote on how they are governed? /s