Melmi

I can kind of see where he’s coming from, but only if you’re weighing it against an assumed future where we’re going to die out tomorrow. That’s a low bar for hopeful, and certainly not “100% positive”.

I have a hard time seeing I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream or even worse, All Tomorrows, as “hopeful”. I’d honestly rather just die.

Plus, not all sci-fi involves humans, and not all sci-fi is in the future. There’s scifi with no humans in it, there’s scifi set in the past or in an alternate present, and none of those qualify as “hopeful by default” in the way he defines it any more than any other fiction does.

But how will you get a “universal” view of the fediverse? No single authoritative view exists.

You yourself acknowledge that this is complicated, but I honestly don’t understand what appeal a hacked together fake centralized system would have for people if they don’t care about decentralization in the first place. Any such solution is almost inevitably gonna end up being janky and hacked together just to present a façade of worse Reddit.

Lemmy’s strength is its decentralization and federation. It’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a feature that’s attractive in its own right. It doesn’t need mass appeal, it’s a niche project and probably always will be. I don’t think papering over the fundamental design of the software will make it meaningfully more attractive to the non-technically minded.

Yes, but only if your firewall is set to reject instead of drop. The documentation you linked mentions this; that’s why open ports are listed as open|filtered because any port that’s “open” might actually be being filtered (dropped).

On a modern firewall, an nmap scan will show every port as open|filtered, regardless of whether it’s open or not.

Edit: Here’s the relevant bit from the documentation:

The most curious element of this table may be the open|filtered state. It is a symptom of the biggest challenges with UDP scanning: open ports rarely respond to empty probes. Those ports for which Nmap has a protocol-specific payload are more likely to get a response and be marked open, but for the rest, the target TCP/IP stack simply passes the empty packet up to a listening application, which usually discards it immediately as invalid. If ports in all other states would respond, then open ports could all be deduced by elimination. Unfortunately, firewalls and filtering devices are also known to drop packets without responding. So when Nmap receives no response after several attempts, it cannot determine whether the port is open or filtered. When Nmap was released, filtering devices were rare enough that Nmap could (and did) simply assume that the port was open. The Internet is better guarded now, so Nmap changed in 2004 (version 3.70) to report non-responsive UDP ports as open|filtered instead.

WG uses UDP, so as long as your firewall is configured correctly it should be impossible to scan the open port. Any packet hitting the open port that isn’t valid or doesn’t have a valid key is just dropped, same as any ports that are closed.

Most modern firewalls default to dropping packets, so you won’t be showing up in scans even with an open WG port.

The “make a fork” thing is part of the issue, I think. In general there’s this culture in the open source community that if you want a feature, you should implement it yourself and not expect the maintainers to implement it for you. And that’s good advice to some extent, it’s great to encourage more people to volunteer and it’s great to discourage entitlement.

But on the other hand, this is toxic because not everyone can contribute. Telling non-technical users to “make it yourself” is essentially telling them to fuck off. To use the house metaphor, people don’t usually need to design and renovate their houses on their own, because that’s not their skillset, and it’s unreasonable to expect that anyone who wants a house should become an architect.

Even among technical users, there are reasons they can’t contribute. Not everyone has time to contribute to FOSS, and that’s especially notable for non-programmers who would have to get comfortable with writing code and contributing in the first place.

Google destroys their own search engine by encouraging terrible SEO nonsense and then offers the solution in the form of these AI overviews, cutting results out of the picture entirely.

You search something on the Web nowadays half the results are written by AI anyway.

I don’t really care about the “human element” or whatever, but AI is such a hype train right now. It’s still early days for the tech, it still hallucinates a lot, and I fundamentally can’t trust it—even if I trusted the people making it, which I don’t.

Systemd does a lot of things that could probably be separate projects, but run0 is an example of something that benefits from being a part of systemd. It ties directly into the existing service manager to spawn new processes.

It definitely encrypts the traffic, the problem is that it encrypts the traffic in a recognizable way that DPI can recognize. It’s easy for someone snooping on your traffic to tell that you’re using Wireguard, but because it’s encrypted they can’t tell the content of the message.

This works because block devices like /dev/sdX are just files. If you cp a file onto another file, it overwrites the data of the destination with the source. A block device represents the device itself, not the filesystem; if you wanted to put the ISO inside the filesystem, you’d have to mount it first.

A lot of Linux ISOs are hybrid images which can be booted if flashed directly to a USB stick.

There are already AI-written books flooding the market, not to mention other forms of written misinformation.

If only

Goes to show I don’t know much about SSO I suppose. Time to do some more research

I had issues connecting to Nextcloud from mobile clients when using Authelia, they didn’t like it, but if there’s a workaround for that that’s great

Most things should be behind Authelia. It’s hard to know how to help without knowing what exactly you’re doing with it but generally speaking Authelia means you can have SSO+2FA for every app, even apps that don’t provide it by default.

It also means that if you have users, you don’t need them to store a bunch of passwords.

One big thing to keep in mind is that anything with its own login system may be more involved to get working behind Authelia, like Nextcloud.

Except GNU is a great example of an acronym that is pronounceable. It’s even in the dictionary. The GNU mascot is a gnu, in fact.

LGBTQIA+ is essentially unpronounceable, thus we treat it as an initialism. Not that that’s a requirement, there are examples like VIP where even though we could pronounce it we pronounce each letter individually.

I would rather X didn’t get access to deadly neurotoxin, thanks

Unless they’re running LFS, I don’t see the point. By the time the antivirus database is updated, surely an update will be available in the package repo?

The Linux ecosystem is built around package repos rather than manually installed software, so antivirus makes even less sense on Linux than it does on Windows. If there’s malware it’ll get removed from the repo as soon as it’s detected.

My analogy was off the mark a bit, you’re right. But for example, have you seen some of the stuff people have made on Shadertoy? Incredible art, made from pure shader code.

I can understand the concern with the ethics of AI art and plagiarism, but you’re painting with a broad brush when you say that computer engineering can’t be art.

Without considering AI, you can certainly make art through code. Math can be beautiful. Shaders in particular are a ripe avenue for programmatically generating art.

There are a lot of artists out there creating art through code, and there have been for significantly longer than the AI fad has been around. The act of creating the art is simply in writing the code, rather than in picking up a paintbrush. I doubt you accuse people who paint in Photoshop of “letting the computer paint for them”, even if they use filters or something like the bucket fill tool. That’s code creating art right there. But someone still had to input creativity, and writing code to create art that looks good requires creativity and effort and is absolutely art.

AI art has different problems with it, but “programming isn’t art” isn’t one of those reasons.