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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 14th, 2024

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  • Is it more for situations that need to be compatible with most *nix systems and you might not necessarily have access to a higher level scripting language?

    Yes, and also because integrating Python one-liners into shell pipelines is awkward in general. I’m more likely to write my entire script in Python than to use it just for text processing, and a lot of the time that’s just a pain. Python isn’t really designed for one-liners or for use as a shell. You can twist it into working in those use cases, but then I’d ask the reverse question: why would you do that when you could “just” use awk?

    On macOS, Python is not installed by default. So if you are writing scripts that you want to be portable across platforms, or for general Mac administration, using Python is a burden.

    This is also true when working with some embedded devices. IIRC I can ssh into my router and use awk (thanks to it being included in Busybox), but I’m definitely not going to install an entire Python environment there. I’m not sure there’d even be enough storage space for that.


  • I’m not (currently) in a position where others would find it desirable to do so. Potentially in the future?

    It’s hard to imagine a scenario where this would happen and your voice would not otherwise be available. For example, if you went into politics, then you’d be a target, but you’d already be speaking in public all the time. It only takes a few seconds of a voice sample to do this nowadays and it’ll only get easier from here.

    Maybe just make a point to educate your family and friends on the risk of voice cloning so they don’t fall for phone scams.






  • My guess is that this is a teenager, and this is probably their first experience with git and version control in general. Just a hunch.

    Anyway, it is reasonable to expect a mainstream GUI app from one of the largest companies in the world to be approachable for people who do not know all the inner workings of the command line tools that are used behind the scenes. And it is reasonable to expect any destructive action to have clear and bold warnings. “Changes will be discarded” is not clear. What changes? From the user’s perspective, the only changes were regarding version control, so “discarding” that should leave them where they started — with their files intact but not in version control.

    Have mercy on the poor noobs. We were all there once.



  • This is good advice, because email is very difficult to make reliably private. However, it’s not the best you can get. Tutanota, for example, stores headers with E2EE, and still has a search function.

    The goal should be to make it as private as it can realistically be. Ideally, any cloud service you use should only store end-to-end encrypted data.

    I’m not trying to shit on Proton — it’s a huge step up from the popular mainstream email services, and the inclusion of cloud storage makes it a much easier transition than going piecemeal with 2-5 different services.


  • Not the encrypted mail, mind you, because they can’t do that

    Just want to point out for anyone new that ProtonMail does not use E2EE for email headers. That means they CAN access your subject lines, to/from fields, and other email headers. That means they CAN be forced to hand it over to the government.

    Source: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained

    Subject lines and recipient/sender email addresses are encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted.

    Personally I am disappointed in a lot of Proton’s wording about this. They frequently promise they can’t access “your data” and “your messages” when they do, in fact, store potentially sensitive data in a format they CAN access.







  • Switching to another Chromium-based browser is a half-measure. Other Chromium-based browsers are on borrowed time.

    As time goes on, it will become more difficult for them to maintain v2 support. Nobody has the resources to properly maintain a browser fork with more than minor modifications. And you can bet Google will go out of their way to make this difficult for everybody else.

    I mean, sure, use what you’re comfortable with if you really can’t use a non-Chromium-based browser for some reason. But it means you’re likely going to have to jump ship again sooner or later. Why not just jump once, to something with better long-term prospects?

    Then again, the folks behind Arc Browser have expressed interest in becoming engine-agnostic, so perhaps there will be a Chromium-free Arc version in the future. That would be very cool.




  • This doesn’t seem to be a problem with disaster recovery plans. It is perfectly reasonable for disaster recovery to take several hours, or even days. As far as DR goes, this was easy. It did not generally require rebuilding systems from backups.

    In a sane world, no single party would even have the technical capability of causing a global disaster like this. But executives have been tripping over themselves for the past decade to outsource all their shit to centralized third parties so they can lay off expensive IT staff. They have no control over their infrastructure, their data, or, by extension, their business.


  • Honestly, I don’t find this very creepy. This is information you are already putting out there for everyone to see. If I post a video of myself speaking, I am not concerned about people seeing how my skin vibrates in that video.

    As video generation tools become more advanced, we will need better algorithms to validate videos. The bar for “fooling the vast majority of humans” is much, much lower than the bar for “being literally indistinguishable from a real video”. The main problem I see is that it’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game, and I don’t think any method you publish will remain valid for very long in practice. The same method will be used to improve the next version of video generators.

    Also, lots of real videos use post-processing that might wash out some of the details they are looking for. Video producers might re-record lines so they don’t perfectly match the video to begin with. It’s been a while since I long time since a Samsung phone, but on my old S6, I remember that it always had a beauty filter applied to the selfie camera that made me me look like a creepy porcelain doll. I could probably make a deepfake of myself that looks more “real” than those real videos and photos.