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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • It’s the “stringing it all together” that could be problematic.

    If you have multiple clients (desktop/cellphone) modifying the same entry (or even different entries in the same “database” ). You need something smart enough to gracefully handle this or atleast tell you about it.

    I did the whole “syncing” KeePass and it was functional, but it also meant I needed to handle conflicts - which was annoying. I switched and really appreciate the whole “it just works” with self-hosted bitwarden.




  • In addition, you can force your cellphone to GSM/2G (ie: super slow internet).

    Depending on what your TV does when it “activates”, if it just needs to “activate/register” - it should be fine. If it needs to “update/upgrade/add a bunch of crapware” - Your internet will be so slow, you can turn it off before it’s finished (note: there is a slim chance that, this could also put your TV in a broken state - if it does, simply do a factory reset and try again)




  • I don’t want PCs to be like smartphones. I don’t want locked bootloaders.

    I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but since Microsoft made TPM mandatory for Windows 11+, locked down bootloader are on their way.

    Basically, TPM allows (Windows) software to validate/verify the integrity of the OS and hardware. This also (could) include the bootloader/bios if Microsoft chooses to do so.

    TPM is the equivalent of attestation on Android, which is the exact reason why your Banking App won’t work on your rooted/custom Android Phone.

    That being said, we should embrace ARM. X86/AMD has 30+ years worth of “history” baked into each ( CISC) chip. This complexity is why your PC draws soooo much power and generates soooo much heat.



  • I think OP is referring to the fact that bad actors, who are exploiting facets of SEO (rather then providing “meaningful” content), use to need to programically generate content (pre-AI/LLM).

    For a real reader, it was obvious (at a quick glance) this was meaningless garbage. As they would often be large walls of text that didn’t make sense, or just lists of random key words.

    With LLM/AI, they’re still walls of text and random key words, but now they grammatically/structurally correct and require no real effort to generate. Unfortunately, it means that the reader actually need to invest time in reading it. You’ll also notice a growing trend in articles (especially in “compare X vs Y” type articles), the same content is recycled and rephrased to “pad” the article and give it a higher SEO ranking.




  • Innevitably whatever public transportation you use the route will end up in the ghetteo.

    This is a mindset that many people in the U.S. will need to get over before the “quality” of public transport improves: that busses, trains, subways are for “the poor”.

    I’ve been on the subways in New York and busses and trains elsewhere in the States. They’re gross. Especially, compared to most of Europe (Italy, Denmark, Germany, etc). In Asia, they’re also a clean. The mindset in Asia and Europe is “this is what people (not just the poor) take to get from point A to point B”. There aren’t school busses, the kids just take the same city bus/train/subway that all the other people take to get to work.

    I’ve spent 45 minutes in the States on my daily commute staring at (and riding on) the bumper of the car in front of me. I’ve also spent 45 minutes, in Europe, peacefully riding the subway to work. I’m able to surf the web, watch a video, relax. I definitely enjoy/recommend the later experience.


  • Microsoft creates thousands of tons of ewaste for no reason…

    Of course there’s a reason, you said it yourself: TPM.

    With TPM, Software will be able to cryptographically verify that the OS and Hardware are all unmodified. This’ll be an end to piracy and end to unauthorized modifications to your PC (“We’ve detected that you’ve installed an Ad Blocker, please remove it before accessing your banking website”)

    This won’t happen overnight, but the forced hardware upgrade is all about control (Microsoft over you) and creating a walled garden to drive profits (like Apple).

    You can take a look at Android’s attestation and how it prevents running your banking apps on a rooted cellphone as an example of things to come.




  • I’m curious, how would you do this in such a way that it wouldn’t come at the expense of effecting your high availability?

    If the server were on-prem or in the cloud… and the system crashed/rebooted, how would you decrypt (or add the passphrase) to the encrypted drive?.. cause the likehood of the kernel crashing or a reboot after and update is higher than an FBI raid… and it would get tiresome to have the site being down, while we wait for Bob to wake up, log in, and type the passphrase to mount the encrypted hdd.

    You could use something like HashiCorp Vault, but it isn’t perfect either. If the server were rebooted, it could talk to Vault and request the passphrase (automatically) , but this also means that the FBI could also “plug in” the server (at their leisure) and have it re-request the passphrase. … and if Vault were restarted there’s quite a process to unseal (unlock) a vault - so, it would be as cumbersome as needing to type in the passphrase on reboot.

    My point / question is: yes, encryption (conceptually) is easy, but if you look at “the whole life cycle / workflow” - it’s much more complicated and you (as an administrator) might ask yourself “does this complexity improve anything or actually protect my users?”