I have had this blog post about SDRs (Software Defined Radio) bookmarked for a couple of years now:

https://blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr/

Apparently the basic models only cost around 30-50 dollars. I’ve been thinking about getting one, but I haven’t had the time to dive into it yet.

Yeah, but I would never let an AI agent run commands on my machine without verifying each command. And at that point I would just rather copy and paste commands by hand, takes about the same time.

If the installation for example required creating some complicated host specific config files, then sure, I could see how that kind of a “runbook” could maybe be useful. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

It’s real

https://github.com/0xeb/ghidrasql#install-with-an-ai-agent-recommended

Haha, reading some of the responses in this thread actually reminded me of that xkcd but I couldn’t immediately find it. Thanks!

Oh wow, things really have gotten bad over there. For me personally, the much greater risk is that I forget my phone somewhere or someone steals it and in that scenario a weak password is the larger issue.

It seems there isn’t a single correct answer here. The threat model is different for everyone.

Yes, but that’s besides the point. If the convenient options for a normie user are

• Having a weak password
• Having a strong password and a fingerprint

Out of those the fingerprint with a strong password is way better option, imo.

In the USA, they can legally force you to unlock a device using biometrics.

Also, how does that work? Can’t they legally force you to enter your password too? Or can you claim you don’t remember it? If that works, can’t you just have a band-aid on your finger or something? Surely they cannot force you to take it off and risk getting an infection on the large wound you just happened to get yesterday…?

Where I live they recently implemented a minimum age of 15 years for riding e-scooters that can exceed 15 km/h and I think it’s a very sensible change.

I think it depends. Some people might be inclined to use too short or simple password because they don’t wanna constantly be typing a long password. It’s much better to have a strong password and fingerprint/face rec for convince than just a insecure password.

I was going to agree to disagree, but I couldn’t resist biting one more time because the link you posted turned out to be really interesting, but probably not for the reasons you were expecting… It’s past midnight where I live and I have work tomorrow so I’ll keep this one short.

Two things. First, just a reminder that like I wrote in my last message, I’m not arguing for any instance to re-federate Hexbear or Lemmygrad. It’s clear even just from reading this thread that most users don’t want to see them, and that’s actually a perfectly valid reason to maintain the status quo. But at this point it’s also pretty clear that ideological reasons and personal opinions are part of why those instances are so widely defederated and we are lying to ourselves if we insist otherwise.

Second, let me prove it by using your alt’s post you linked. I’ll be really frank here as you seem like someone who won’t take it personally. It’s obvious you feel very strongly about this matter, you’re good with words, and you’re not scared to influence others to adapt your ideals. Your post on discuss.online is honestly very well written if that was your goal. It’s manipulative, but not in instantly obvious way. It’s a textbook case actually: (All quotes below are directly from the post)

• Starts with an appeal to fear (“…we don’t even know how many users this is turning away from us…”)
• Overgeneralization from anecdote (“…Though I am by no means the only one that this has happened to - it seems to continually occur for each new user that joins here…”)
• Poisoning the well (“…at which point any further communication to them is already known to be in bad faith…”)
• Appeal to social proof (“…Many of the largest instances across the Fediverse have eventually already defederated…”)
• Loaded language (“…troll instance…”, “…flooding over here…”)
• False consensus (“…most of us…”)
• Shifting the burden of proof (“…the case for defederation from hexbear.net seems much more clear and straightforward - and really, why not?..”)
• Flattery (“…Discuss.Online’s much better admin practices…”, “…you are doing a fantastic job of being admins…”)
• Strategic concessions (“…That one I understand may be more problematic…”)

I could go on, but it’s late and I’m tired…

Then add what looks like a mountain of evidence, but is mostly a handful of trolls and douchebags, something you can find from almost any larger instance. Most people aren’t going to dig through the “evidence”, and just like that, discuss.online defederated Hexbear. It’s not my place to comment on the decision itself, especially since it doesn’t affect me. I’m just pointing what happened there.

blahaj is in the black box (has defederated fedinsfw.app), in the blue box (has defederated Lemmygrad) and in the red box (has defederated Hexbear). No one on this graph has defederated pawb. The graph is a bit confusing on the first look.

Thank you for taking the time to explain your point of view in such detail. It’s not every day that a Lemmy comment makes me really think or maybe even change my opinion a bit :)

I actually agree with almost everything you wrote. If I were unlucky enough to be friends with both Russia and Ukraine, then sure, that game night would be very unlikely to happen. For science tho, I decided to check what the hell people on Hexbear and Lemmygrad are actually discussing to make everyone and their dog want to block them. Judging by the first two pages of recent threads on both, they seem like generally nice people who I disagree with politically very much, but could still imagine spending a fun evening with without anyone getting murdered. And at most game nights I’ve attended, politics is one of the banned discussion topics anyway xD

Lemme be absolutely clear, I’m not arguing for suddenly reversing the defederation of those two instances. That’s not an argument I’m qualified to make, first of all because I don’t know the full history we have with them. What I’m trying to ask is whether we’re absolutely sure all these defederation decisions are solely based on provable facts and past behavior, rather than some instance admins simply disliking how certain people think and deciding they know better than their users what they should or shouldn’t see. Just like the Tesseract dev recently were exposed trying to do. Because if it’s the latter, then it’s a very dangerous road we are on.

My own experience is that in 3+ years on Lemmy, I don’t remember having a single bad interaction with someone from Hexbear, for example. That’s why I’m so surprised to find so many instances defederating them. I’m not trying to invalidate anyone’s bad experiences, but I think everyone should ask themselves whether they actually had those experiences themselves or have only heard about them from others?

Also worth adding, I fully understand I’m using a free service (although I do make a small monthly donation to my instance) and no instance is obligated to provide a platform for any content they don’t want to. As you said, anyone can host an instance and freely choose who to federate with. But if we cannot trust the admins of these large, well-known, and promoted (e.g. join-lemmy.org) instances to make decisions based on the common good of their users rather than their own personal opinions, then the Threadiverse will slowly but surely turn into a net of isolated echo chambers. And that’s something to be plenty sad about.

Btw, I’ve been thinking about hosting my own instance just for myself. But wouldn’t it be really hard to discover new communities that way? To my understanding, an instance only receives posts and comments from communities that someone on that instance is already subscribed to?

Yeah, I get your argument, and obviously it’s good to have instances with different federation policies. It’s just that when big instances like the ones in this chart start swinging the defederation hammer around, I worry that some (or many) users end up disconnected from users and communities without ever realizing it or agreeing with the decision.

Have you ever tried to organize a fun game night with friends but two of them just can’t get along, ruining the whole thing? That’s kinda the feeling I get from this.

I think the main issue is that this isn’t communicated clearly. Most people joining a random instance listed on join-lemmy.org won’t know what defederation means and they have no way of knowing that by choosing that particular instance they’ll be cut off from a certain number of other users.

Kinda eye-opening, thx for making the chart. I hadn’t realized it had gotten this bad. In my opinion, defederation should only ever be used to combat spam, not because of ideological differences or disputes between individuals.

One of the most common tips for people looking to switch over from Reddit has been that the instance you choose doesn’t really matter. But it clearly does. Choose the “wrong” instance and you may suddenly find yourself cut off from a sizable portion of other users because someone else decided they know better than you what you should and shouldn’t see.

I’m lucky to be on an instance that has “only” defederated one instance in this chart (lemmygrad.ml). I don’t really follow the drama around here, so I have no idea why that instance is banned. All I see is that there are 558 active users I’ll never be able to interact with just because someone I don’t personally know (my instance admin) made that decision at some point.

Wasn’t there just a big drama because some app developer built-in their own opinionated blocklist into their app or something? How is this any different?

My point being, why not leave these kinds of drastic decisions to individual users, who can and should block whoever they want, instead of dividing threadiverse into silos at the instance level?

I’m in favor. I don’t really care whether we do things the same way as in Reddit but sometimes I start typing a reply to a thread without noticing which community it’s in. Having ELI5 in the title makes it immediately clear what kind of responses are wanted.

That said, if the rule is implemented, I don’t think it’s necessary to start enforcing it strictly right away. It’s not that big of a deal if someone forgets the rule. That way it wouldn’t create any extra work for the mods.

I don’t have any experience with game localization but on the software side of things, I feel like the biggest challenge is keeping the UI intact. In the original language you might have three equally sized buttons neatly next to each other, but then in the localized version one of the buttons needs far more characters than the original to convey the same meaning. What do you do in that case? Make one button wider than the others? Looks ugly. Make all of them wider? They might not fit on a single line anymore. Move one to the next line? Now the whole UI grows taller.

Obviously, this is much less of an issue if the software is designed from the ground up with localization in mind and the UI already accounts for the possible differences in text length.

I run Debian on my homelab and manage Ubuntu Servers at work. I haven’t seen any practical differences between the two. Sometimes you might get a bit newer version of something from the Ubuntu repositories than from the Debian ones but not even once has that been an issue and most of stuff I use come from 3rd party repositories anyway.

Old screenshot. They used to have basic security features like 2FA behind a paywall. That’s just stupid. But at least they recently changed it, allowing free users to secure their accounts.

Instance admins can appoint new moderators to any community if/when someone wants to take over one of the currently dead ones. That’s why many instances have a community_requests community, where anyone can request mod rights for a community that no longer has an active moderator.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kuin_Esterin_perseestä

One urban legend has it that Esteri was the goddess of rain in pre-Christian Finland, but in fact the name is of Biblical origin. Another folk etymology suggests the phrase derives from Esteri, a brand of water pumps used by fire brigades.