4oo4

I just wanted to say thanks to Martijn Braam for all the work he's put into PostmarketOS along with the other pmOS devs. I was lucky enough to snag a pinetab when the first batch was released, and I was blown away by the quality of pmOS.

This was my first taste of mobile Linux, and pmOS was easily the best distro I used on it in terms of documentation, install tools, performance, and package selection. pmOS has the advantage of being more mature than other mobile Linux distros, but all the work they've put in over the years has really paid off and helped make the ecosystem more viable, so thank you!

I'm really sad to learn about this with Pine64, I had a hint of this when I saw there has never been a second batch of pinetabs and no communication about it (at least that I saw). I had no idea it was this bad though and this makes zero sense why they would kill the ecosystem they spent so long building. It sounds like the decision was made purely based on reducing user support requests? Even though someone that buys one of these is likely to be a tinkerer/hacker with prior experience with *nix and distros already have their own community support channels and would already be doing most of that work for free?

It's complete willful ignorance to mock or dismiss this. It may not be a 'dangerous at any speed' scenario, but that's only a difference of scale because there aren't a lot of Teslas on the road and because FSD is an add-on. If Tesla were allowed to keep releasing such an untested product with such a poor safety track record without repercussions, it could set the tone for other auto manufacturers to do the same. Luckily other auto manufacturers aren't being as reckless.

FSD is dangerously immature software that is not anywhere close to road ready, and yet we are supposed to trust it not to kill or injure people.

Some examples:

- Teslas can't distinguish yellow stoplights from the moon.

https://twitter.com/JordanTeslaTech/status/14184133078625853...

- Numerous examples of near-misses where it decides to veer into pedestrians

- They are demonstrably much more dangerous than other cars:

https://www.tesladeaths.com/resources.html

Aside from the software, they also aren't safe on a mechanical level either, since for instance, they don't have good mechanical safety mechanisms as a fallback for when the electronics fail, and people are trapped in burning cars.

https://www.autoblog.com/2019/02/25/fatal-tesla-model-s-cras...

In my state FSD/Autopilot luckily isn't street legal, but if it was and I saw another Tesla on the road, rather than take my chances I'd pull over if I wasn't able to keep sufficient distance from them. And I certainly wouldn't want to take my chances near them as a pedestrian.

I will give Tesla credit for popularizing EVs and innovating auto design, but that doesn't make up for such poor execution in manufacturing, safety design, and alpha-quality software being trusted to make decisions that can kill people when.

That's fair, everyone's mental health journey is unique, and you deserve a lot of credit for working on yourself and figuring out what's contributing to your depression.

When I say capitalism, I'm mainly referring to it in the sense of "internalized capitalism", as an ideology. It's the idea that your self-worth is only as valuable as your income or economic output and that if you aren't capable of that, you aren't worthy of basic things like shelter, food, and healthcare and therefore don't deserve to live since you are a burden on hardworking people with money. I'd really encourage you to research that since it can help untangle assumptions you might have about yourself, based on what society has been teaching you is the "right" way to live and what expectations you should have of yourself.

I think the things we think of as societal trends contributing to social decay have capitalist ideology and assumptions as the underlying thing that ties them together. Capitalism promotes individuality over communities sharing resources because that increases consumption, since then everyone needs to buy their own instance of something. You're expected to leave home at 18 because that's just what you're supposed to do to be a "normal" young adult, even if you're not financially or emotionally ready, and that also means that you have to consume more to support yourself instead of your parents continuing to share with you. We're taught that "greed is good" and hoarding individual wealth and power is better than making small sacrifices to ensure the well-being of everyone in the community.

Personally, rejection of religion was a positive for me, since at a young age I recognized the hypocrisy of Christianity as it was being practiced versus how it was presented in the gospels. This article written by a priest articulates this feeling that I've had for a really long time, that most of what is called Christianity in the US barely resembles it:

> Inasmuch as the two major political parties in America are both “liberal” in the classical sense—the one devoted a bit more to something like John Stuart Mill’s economic philosophy, the other a bit more to something like his social philosophy, and neither of them to the communal ethics of Christian tradition—it is hard for most Americans to make sense of such views. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism

My self-esteem improved immensely once I became an atheist and stopped guilting myself and tried to stop living up to others' expectations of how I should think and act, and this helped me become a more open-minded and empathetic person. Though, I will admit that although there's a lot to be gained from rejecting organized religion (as a human institution), there's also a void of community and spirituality that's left.

Anyway, thanks for being open about your struggles.

This 100%. Framing mental health as a purely individual or chemical issue distracts from the societal/cultural level problems you're hinting at.

I've come to the conclusion that a lot of what we call the mental health epidemic is really just late capitalism being fundamentally unable to meet human needs of spirituality and emotional belonging.

There's nothing inherently wrong with capitalism as a means to an end in an economic sense, but as an ideology and identity (as is especially pervasive in the US), it's extremely toxic. Capitalism in this sense dehumanizes people, and rewards and encourages lack of empathy and sociopathy. We're taught that it's OK to let people be homeless, starve, and die preventable deaths from lack of healthcare because it's their fault for not being able to succeed in a system that is designed to profit off their failures. We're told we can't fix these because of insufficient means, but in actuality it's a question of prorities and not wanting to midly inconvenience wealthy people to share small portions of their wealth to support the society from which they extract their wealth.

Being in constant fear for your survival because your wages haven't increased in years while the cost of healthcare, food, housing and education keep increasing is disastrous for mental health, that shouldn't be surprising at all. If you're in that position you might be told that your employer can't afford to pay you enough to survive, when in actuality they likely still have healthy profits that are redistributed only to senior management and shareholders.

Learning about the concept of internalized capitalism was a game changer for me. Once you decouple your self-worth from your perceived productivity for the economy/society (aka your value to wealthy elites), it's a lot easier for you to accept yourself and stop blaming yourself for something that's totally outside your control that you perceive to be as a personal failure.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2021/06/...

Interesting take, in a way it resembles direct democracy, but I don't think it qualifies since votes are meaningless in terms of what substantive power you gain from votes. Just because you have the right to speak your mind and have other people hear you does not mean you have any power over the direction of the platform or any additional agency. You can say (almost) whatever you want on the platform, but Facebook is still the arbiter of what speech is allowed on the platform and can ban you at any time, and as a user you are still nothing more than raw materials to them while they seek to monopolize your attention and energy.

The same goes outside of Facebook too for Americans, we can speak our minds but our political rights are being taken away because they inconvenience wealthy and powerful people. Without other freedoms, like freedom over your body, freedom from corporations abusing you by breaking the law and suffering no consequences, the right to vote, the Fourth Amendment, etc, freedom of speech is pretty empty on its own.

Direct democracy can have problems like you're describing, but I don't think it's the issue here. Rather it's exposing the fundamental issues of late capitalism that fails to meet human needs (healthcare, housing, belonging/emotional needs), compounded with unchecked corporate power which is increasingly resembling fascism. In fact, at this point most of the major tech companies (Google, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit) are hiring many people from intelligence services. Corporate power merging with government power, especially by corporations hiring government spies, is a huge red flag for fascism taking hold. Before questioning democracy (which is a trend I've seen lately, as if to normalize democratic backsliding), I think we should start questioning that first.

- https://mronline.org/2021/06/14/jessica-ashooh-the-taming-of...

- https://www.mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number...

- https://www.mintpressnews.com/national-security-search-engin...

- https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tikto...

Actually macroeconomics 101 fails to fully describe the situation we're in. Market concentration (whether it's a single company having a monopoly or oligopoly, a holding company owning different "competing" firms within the same industry, or incestuous relationships created by someone being a board member for multiple companies) throw the usual you're talking about incentives out the window. The near zero interest rates we had until recently weren't so much a balancing act as much as a charity program. And speaking of the Fed, they in effect cause the "free" market to be more like a planned economy, one where those with capital can maintain access to almost limitless free money, and where they use soft power to suppress wages.

Yes, there are other pizza chains, but Domino's has almost twice the market share of its closest competitors, meaning it can waste money in an irrational way with few consequences, contrary to the rational actor and healthy competition that most models assume: https://medium.com/edison-discovers/dominos-takes-50-of-pizz...

This is a good deep dive into these sorts of dynamics: https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Republic-Walmart-Corporations...

For years, lots of companies gorged themselves by burning money by doing stock buybacks just for the sake of pumping share prices for fleeting short term gains for executives and shareholders, while everything that makes the company actually operate is slowly hollowed out. Many of these same companies will then ask for bailouts after wasting all this money and making bad business decisions, like airlines. This example with Domino's is actually pretty mild in comparison to money wasted with things like stock buybacks and executive bonuses. Macroeconomic models also don't take bailouts into account, which are usually needed because companies make bad, irrational decisions that favor extreme short term thinking.

> "Raising prices and pocketing it"

Precisely, that's what many of these companies are doing. Whine about inflation and raise prices for consumers while simultaneously bragging about record earnings on shareholder calls, the only place in practice where they are obligated to tell the truth. If inflation was really the primary cause of price increases, you'd likely see them slashing earnings projections in line with that, but that's not happening. It's certainly a contributor, but to know if a company is telling the truth you have to look at their earnings when they're saying that.

Nitrates are toxic enough that people (sadly) use them as a suicide agent, so this finding isn't surprising. But it is still surprising that something this toxic is so prevalent in food, even in minute quantities, though that's probably mostly due to regulatory capture.

I feel like there aren't nearly enough longitudinal studies on food additives like this, I'd like to think that would prevent more harmful things from being used, but probably not.

No, it will probably make it worse since it gives them cover to waste money like this then raise prices under the pretense of inflation.

I bet you get better performance that way too. That kinda confirms my suspicions that Perl modules are awful to work with, though I'll admit I'm an idiot about the Perl ecosystem so there may be better module tools I don't know about.

What makes you choose Perl over bash/sh then, if it's working as a "glue" between actual binaries? I imagine the text processing things it excels at?

As much as I love Unix I am terrible at Perl. Anyone know any good resources for learning Perl 5?

I seem to stumble quite a bit with CPAN in comparison to pip or npm. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that's because it's not a true package manager like those, and more of just a module downloader that's not as stateful?

CPAN pains I think are a huge reason why I haven't learned it better, also I think Perl can vary quite a bit with readability compared with other languages.

You can write nice looking Perl like those examples but I've also seen things with extremely dense and terse syntax that I can't even begin to walk through. To take an extreme example, RSA in 3 lines of Perl. I have always been curious how that is actual working code.

I've been a TryHackMe user for a while and have been really liking them so far. For those that have used both that and HTB, is one better than the other?

That is a really good use case I didn't think about, since I'm so used to having to leave the terminal to look stuff up in a browser when I can't find something with a manpage or `--help`/`Get-Help`. I'll admit I'm probably being overly skeptical (as I am with a lot of ML things in general), but regardless I think this is really cool, and you guys did a great job on it!

I should probably actually try it instead of trying to second guess it. Is there a way to have it just echo the output instead of having the input ready for you to press enter? Only asking since I'm a clumsy person at the keyboard sometimes :)

> From the videos, I believe you have to press Enter to actually execute the suggested command.

Cool, that's good to hear if that's the case.

> The readme did say that it was inspired by a similar project targetting zsh[0], so I don't see why over time the model couldn't improve to suggest what you want.

Interesting, I know very little about all the cool stuff that zsh can do compared with bash, I suppose if it works well for zsh it could probably work for bash then, since zsh is more complex?

Personally I can't see myself ever using these kinds of tools, even if it fit my usecase. In part because I like to figure things out for myself, and also because I don't like outsourcing decisions to unaccountable ML models. I think these are cool ideas, but I think in the long run they will cause more problems than they solve, just like no-code development platforms. IMO all ML models need to be able to explain themselves before we can trust them with anything important.

I'd really like to see how this does with nontrivial examples. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I bet the bash one isn't that effective for real world sysadmin tasks, since most bash things also require knowledge of the commands in-between the actual bash "glue", and usually requires regexes and pipelines to get the exact answer you want. Pretty much every time I look up a bash command (probably from the same sources this model trains on) I have to tweak it to do what I need.

For example, here are some things I pulled from `.bash_history`, and what I think I was meaning to do.

    # Get the IP address of running lxc container ${CONTAINER_NAME}
    CONTAINER_NAME=some-container; lxc-ls -f | grep ${CONTAINER_NAME} | awk '{print $5}' | sed -z 's|-.*\s||g;'

    # Find the latest git tag version, excluding release candidates and development builds
    git describe --tags `git rev-list --tags --exclude=*-rc* --max-count=100` | grep -vP '(\-rc|dev)' | head -1

    # get the database name from parameters.yml
    grep 'database_name:' parameters.yml | sed 's|.*:||g; s|\s||g;'

I bet #3 would would be feasible, but I'd be extremely surprised if it could get close on the first two.

PowerShell has the advantage of a really consistent standard library, syntax, objects, and has the .NET type system behind it, so any answer is probably already in the format you want or requires minimal manipulation. I can see it working much better there, and that's also probably why the example video only shows PowerShell too. Granted, I am probably the opposite of the target audience.

All that being said, would you really trust running some random commands you don't understand enough to write, because some remote server told you to? It should tell you the commands first rather than just executing them.

You're right that this is not just a MindGeek problem, and that it's hard to filter out good nudity from bad nudity.

But I think it's only fair to hold the company to the standard they set for themself. They said that all the content was reviewed, but that definitely wasn't the case, and would've been physically impossible. That was a lie. Any sane person running or investing in a porn business that accepts user uploaded content should know that's much riskier than other user content sites because it's more inviting for this sort of thing and much harder to detect.

I would really encourage you to read that article if you haven't, I think this is beyond a question of the technical difficulties of user content filtering and crosses a line into criminal negligence. It's a hard problem to solve and every solution is imperfect, but from the information we have, they weren't really trying at all. And I say all of this as a person that thinks that most non-porn sites, especially YouTube, go way overboard with automated, proactive takedowns and am really cognizant of the encroachments on free speech.

    In 2019, the operators of Pornhub content partner Girls Do Porn would be charged with sex trafficking in the US. Following the charges, 50 women filed a class-action lawsuit against MindGeek in 2020, alleging that MindGeek knew Girls Do Porn employees were coercing and lying to performers about how their videos would be used. Still, MindGeek continued to partner with the studio, allowing their videos to be distributed on Pornhub and other tube sites. Pornhub ostensibly removed the Girls Do Porn videos after the operators were arrested, but clips remained available on the site. 

------

    I contacted MindGeek hoping to answer the nagging questions I had about how content moderation was handled when I worked there. Specifically, I asked: were user uploads screened by Manwin employees before being published live?

    “All content was reviewed by human moderators at that time,” a spokesperson named Ian responded, adding that this applied to all tube sites.

    Somehow, that didn’t seem right to me. Hundreds, if not thousands, of videos were uploaded to tubes every day back then, and I wasn’t aware of anyone screening the uploads. Was it feasible that every single video was reviewed and approved by someone before going live? And if that was the case, how could illegal or pirated content still end up on the sites? I followed up with more questions, trying to clarify how the process worked: Had there been a team reviewing videos before they went live working around the clock, including weekends, while I was there? Or were we after-the-fact moderators the only ones accountable for the content?

    The company didn’t respond to my follow-ups, but my questions were answered by Pornhub moderators who spoke out in December 2020. They recounted how they were handed lists of thousands of videos on the site to review and, if warranted, remove. This suggests that only once videos were on-site, ballooning Pornhub’s content offering, were they gradually reviewed, leaving wide-open windows for any type of video to exist on the site, at least for a while.

Wow that's crazy, since I'd imagine SoCs to be the most vulnerable to bitflips.

This wasn't just anti-porn hysteria, they lied about their content filtering process for user uploads, so it was full of underage and revenge porn. Those in particular are against the law and harmful regardless of how one feels about porn in general.

I totally agree that it's messed up that payment processors are now the internet morality police, but hosting those two kinds of harmful and illegal porn are 100% on MindGeek. Dissemination of those kinds of porn is very illegal, and as far as I know no one at MindGeek ever faced legal consequences, even though they were recklessly negligent and did it and on such a large scale for so many years. These guys were running things during this whole time and don't deserve any sympathy. Had MindGeek been following the law, moralist anti-porn crusaders would probably have had far less success than they did.

https://www.theverge.com/c/22925906/pornhub-mindgeek-content...

That never made sense to me until I really learned about bit flips, and how the smaller the process node, the more susceptible it is.

They are at least up to PowerPC with the most recent Mars missions, probably not a terrible tradeoff of computing power vs. radiation vulnerability.

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/03/02/nasa-mars-perseverance-...

Agreed, that sounds more like an ADD management problem on the professor's part?

Unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/GUzin

This is awesome but I'm getting NXDOMAIN when I try to use it. Am I doing something wrong, perhaps something to do with EDNS?

    $ dig 42km-mi.unit @dns.toys 

    ; <<>> DiG 9.16.27-Debian <<>> @dns.toys 42km-mi.unit
    ; (1 server found)
    ;; global options: +cmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 2059
    ;; flags: qr rd ra ad; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1

    ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
    ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
    ; COOKIE: efe3c6f9e0b6e4da56aba44d62a4e63ba7a19bed262b0e1a (good)
    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;42km-mi.unit.   IN A

    ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
    .   6959 IN SOA a.root-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 2022061100 1800 900 604800 86400

    ;; Query time: 44 msec
    ;; SERVER: 138.197.68.199#53(138.197.68.199)
    ;; WHEN: Sat Jun 11 14:00:11 CDT 2022
    ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 144

I think that's also been confirmed by studies?

https://news.softpedia.com/news/Another-Study-Shows-that-Pir...

Most of them I'm seeing were from about 10 years ago, it'd be really interesting if the results are the same today, especially with the huge changes in TV/movie streaming options.

Forgot about that, sometimes I use that but its lack of dark mode hurts my vampire eyes :)

Ahh I totally forgot about this. I'm wondering if you could make this work with any YouTube app where you can't use content filtering (like the app for Roku) across your whole network by creating a CNAME from youtube.com to youtube.com. in DNS? Though maybe that wouldn't work since DNS queries see those two domains as equivalent since '.' is just a delimiter.

I should be a responsible adult and pay for YouTube Premium, but I also try really hard to limit how much time I spend on it. Also, because of how annoying and intrusive the ads are (I'd say they're more frequent than regular TV commercials), I refuse to fall into their dark pattern to give them money. The harder you push me the more I resist out of spite :)

For those reading this on mobile, the following uBlock filter lets you actually read the article, instead of a garbage autoplay video taking up 30-40% of the screen and being impossible to dismiss:

    kokatu.com##div.autoplay

I really hope at some point we have some way of challenging these arbitrary "lost sales" figures. Just because someone can't pirate something does not 100% guarantee that they'd buy a legit copy.

It's not just about sound but also the way it feels in your hands when you play it. I had a ~$400 Squire Stratocaster as my main guitar that sounds great and is nearly indistinguishable from a Fender, but I had a hard time playing it for more than an hour at a time since it was hard on my hands (because of the quality of wood of the neck and fretboard, and I had trouble keeping the neck action where I want it).

Then I saved up and got an American Fender Jazzmaster that's a recreation of one of the 60s models (cost around $2k used), and I can easily play that for 3-4 hours at a time without straining my hands. Everything just feels nicer in your hands because of the wood quality and you play better since it's more ergonomical.

I agree that you probably can't hear the difference between a Squire and a Fender unless you are really familiar with how guitars and the pickup electronics work and have really good musical hearing, however I'd say in general the cutoff for a good sounding guitar (that's almost indistinguishable from something in the $750 to $2k range) is around $400. Anything less than that and the quality of materials and wiring will probably be bad enough to be noticeable, or things will wear out sooner rather than later (and poor ergonomics can keep you from playing at your full potential).

There are exceptions to that though, I have a cheapo Washburn fretless bass that plays and sounds great, and I think I got it used for around $100.

Then above the low 4 figures you're getting diminishing returns and/or just getting a collectible instead of something you intend to actually make music with.

This makes me really happy. I think one of my first internet experiences was in an AOL chatroom, and someone told me to do Alt + F4 to fix something, and I was really mad that they tricked me when I realized what it did, but I think it's hilarious now.

I think you can already do this with LibreOffice Online/CODE?

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/

I think if you have an E5 license there is already thoughtcrime functionality built-in. I remember someone demoing this to me in a Teams user group, and no one seemed to think it was creepy at all. In addition to flagging keywords it also used AI to detect undesirable thoughts and emotions, under the guise of anti-harassment and compliance. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the feature but I think it might be this:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/co...

So I think if Microsoft existed in the world of 1984, they would easily be the preferred tech vendor for IngSoc.

Side note, do you think this would also detect the money laundering and bribery going on within Microsoft itself?

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22995144/microsoft-foreig...

Side-side note, I think the reason why that is allowed to still keep going on given that the SEC knows about it and that there's ample evidence has to do with national security reasons.

It's extremely troubling that given all this corporate authoritarian AI tech they built that Microsoft is still trying to be the voice of reason about the dangers of AI.