• 6 Posts
  • 205 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Curated by experts, specifically. Seeing a lot of people use this stuff and flop, even if they’re not doing it with any intention to spam.

    I think the curl project gets a lot of spam because 1) it has a bug bounty with a payout and 2) kinda fits with CVE bloat phenomenon where people want the prestige of “discovering” bugs so that they can put it on their resumes to get jobs, or whatever. As usual, the monetary incentive is the root of the evil.




  • If in the future you think you might bring family/relations onboard to the password manager, it may be worthwhile to pay for a BitWarden family plan. BitWarden is really low-cost and they publish their stuff as FOSS (and therefore are worth supporting), but crucially you don’t want to be the point of technical support for when something doesn’t work for someone else. Self-hosting a password manager is an easier thing to do if you’re only doing it for yourself.

    That said, I use a self-hosted Vaultwarden server as backup (i.e. I manually bring the server online and sync to my phone now and again), and my primary password manager is through Keepassxc, which is a completely separate and offline password manager program.

    Edit: Forgot to mention, you can always start with free BitWarden and then export your data and delete your account if you decide to self-host.


  • You might notice that your Windows installation is like 30 gigabytes and there is a huge folder somewhere in the system path called WinSXS. Microsoft bends over backwards to provide you with basically all the versions of all the shared libs ever, resulting in a system that can run programs compiled from decades ago just fine.

    In Linux-land usually we just recompile all of the software from source. Sometimes it breaks because Glibc changed something. Or sometimes it breaks because (extremely rare) the kernel broke something. Linus considers breaking the userspace API one of the biggest no-nos in kernel development.

    Even so, depending on what you’re doing you can have a really old binary run on your Linux computer if the conditions are right. Windows just makes that surface area of “conditions being right” much larger.

    As for your phone, all the apps that get built and run for it must target some kind of specific API version (the amount of stuff you’re allowed to do is much more constrained). Android and iOS both basically provide compatibility for that stuff in a similar way that Windows does, but the story is much less chaotic than on Linux and Windows (and even macOS) where your phone app is not allowed to do that much, by comparison.








  • As for what ByteDance plans to do with a new LLM, a person familiar with the company’s ambitions said one goal has to do with the search function for TikTok.

    Last week, TikTok released an update to its current search function focused on [keywords for ads], basically allowing advertisers to search in real time for words that are trending on TikTok. It allows marketers to build an ad with relevant keywords that would ostensibly help the ad show up on the screens of more users.

    “Given the audience and the amount of use, TikTok with a search environment that is a completely biddable space with keywords and topics, that would be very interesting to a lot of people spending a ton of money with Google right now,” the person said.

    A dark vision just flashed in my mind. And I am certain this is what will happen. AI-generated ads done in real time based on the latest “trending” thing. Presented to users basically as soon as the topic has the slightest amount of “trend”.

    Just emitting untold amounts of CO2 to show you generated ads in near real time.





  • I know that it’s not their fault, it’s the small size of the team

    This part is directly Telegram’s fault. If they cannot keep up with their moderation queue then they need a bigger moderation team. Preferably properly remunerated. There are news reports about how Facebook’s sub-contracted moderators work for these extremely shitty companies who track them based on how many reviews a minute they do, and which causes extreme psychological damage to the workers both because of the extreme content they have to see as part of their jobs and the bad working conditions they must put up with.