pinusc

I think subtitles and captions are the same foe YouTube-DL. However, some videos only have auto-generated captions, and YouTube-DL doesn't download these... by default. There is an option to force the download of both generated and even translated captions.

AFAIK Guix stays very true to the GNU values of ONLY shipping free software, including drivers. A couple years back I had a similar issue where I couldn't get my WiFi card to work because I'd have to recompile the kernel while including nonfree libraries... which is pretty hard to do if you know nothing about Guix!

Maybe I'll try it again in a while. Not sure if it's available for raspberry pi, but it would be great to try it there and eventually switch to it on my laptop (once JJ change WiFi card!)

It can range from trivial to impossible. Full disk encryption does not play well with hybernation on laptops, for example. There is also very limited support for hardware encrypted ssd... And even though it can potentially be a few arch commands away, you need to do a lot of reading to understand what you're doing and make informed choices about your setup. Which is hard.

Bounty programs are in place so that bad actors are not the only ones on the lookout for bugs. If experts get paid pennies for finding enormous security vulnerabilities, what's stopping them from selling them to actually bad actors for a potentially much greater cut? I can imagine that someone would be willing to pay far more than $5M to gain access to Apple wharehouses.

That VPN provider would likely be out of business extremely fast. If you offer a service that's supposed to increase privacy, and it doesn't... who's gonna pay for that service? Of course exceptions apply with law enforcement, but then again your threat model is very different there (and the VPN provider in question will not be able to say no).

That being said, there are VPN providers who guarantee that no logs are kept (I believe ProtonVPN does this) and are extremely privacy-oriented. I am inclined to believe these companies, if all I'm doing is pirating a few movies.

Paying more for something that you think is higher quality hile beeing just as bad as the cheapest product is a bad thing. Assuming parent comment is right that this is the case.

Savannah might be awful, but there are more sensible options. There actually is a good discussion on the GNU website [1]. Savannah gets an A for ethical concerns (which to be fair is what's important to GNU, rather than usability); GitHub gets an F (fully closed source and now controlled by Microsoft...);

However, in the middle there is GitLab, with a respectable C. In my experience, it's usable and has all the important features that Github also has. And it's much better from ethical standpoints! I can't imagine any point of view from where Github is more acceptable than Gitlab.

1: https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html

The comment above lists many solutions that require compromises to work.

We can make compromises on a covid-tracking app. Worst case scenario: fewer people install it and it's less effective—still better than not having it in the first place.

We can't make compromises on a voting system—worst case scenario: democracy is overthrown forever.

There is a BIG difference in the threat models here. The prople objecting to electronic voting recognize that a major breakthrough in computing security is needed before we get there. OTOH we van probably design a _reasonable_ covid app with acceptable compromises.

If you think that having your position tracker is unacceptable: great for you, stand up for your rights. Most people do have google maps and its tracking installed, and don't give a crap _because it lets them see traffic_. I think the tradeoff here is definitely better.

Because once you learn it, notation gets out of the way rather than in the way. I can't imagine doing physics and having to write out words rather than symbols to express rates of change.

It makes sense that specific knowledge uses specific language to be more easily used and manipulated. Imagine writing (or even proving) Euler's equation without using i or pi or e. Imagine what mess math would be if we never used Greek symbols.

Sure, it would be easier for middle schoolers. But if you're arguing that we should make it easier for them since they're not gonna need ease of manipulation for math that they're not gonna use... Then just do the teach it to them. Maybe middle schoolers don't need < as a concept any more than they need it as a symbol.

But if you're going to solve equations and inequalities, then yeah, you need = and <. Everything else would be needlessly verbose and get in the way of actually manipulating concepts you know.

Although those physical approaches are fascinating, I think there must be an easier software solution. How hard can it be to live edit the webcam recording so that half of the frame is a static picture? Then you just have notes flat on your desk... And the webcam will show it empty.

Alternatively, one could run a VM with the monitoring software, and have a separate window with notes. As long as the mirror is angled so to hide a small portion of the screen that should be good enough.

To build on your physical solution using polarization: that's easier. You can apply a polarized filter to the webcam (you can get one from an old pair of 3d glasses) and then have the notes on a secondary screen that will then look completely dark on webcam. Maybe lay the device on a black background so it's not obvious that there's a "turned off" device and you're done.

This is all a fun thought experiment. I don't have invasive professors, thankfully. They simply made all tests open book and raised the difficulty of the questions accordingly. That being said, I enjoy trying to work arounf hypothetical limitations...

You can always hard delete all the data _and_ keep track of deleted users so that their usernames can't be reused.

Once you have hard delete, this solution is almost trivial and by far the most user-valuable.

1. Is not necessarily true. If you use an open source browser like firefox, your browser vendor would absolutely not be able to access your passwords (...without creating a huge scandal where users would catch up immediately)

3. Can actually be mitigated, or other options can be used. For example, in my browser I disabled JavaScript clipboard access, so that random websites can't access my passwords. You mention pass, aan excellent non cloud option, which I personally use with a script that types in the password as if it was a keyboard - but Firefox and chrome plugins with autofill are available, and those are offline.

Eh, if an attacker has filesystem access you're already pwned.

That's not how decriminalization works. Drugs are not legal in Portugal. What decriminalization means is that you don't go to jail if you use or abuse them; AFAIK the government has rehab programs and actively helps you to get rid of these drugs.

It's not like in Portugal you go and buy cocaine and the government expects you to self-regulate; that just doesn't work. Libertarianism works well for perfectly rational individuals, but rationality can't coexist with addictive drugs. Individuals need help breaking from destructive forces that are greater than themselves.

The idea here is not to punish people for using social media, but to punish social media companies for making their apps addictive. Just like in Portugal you can't get jail time if you're addicted, but you certainly do go to jail for dealing.

This. Choose the right distro (ubuntu or derivatives, or elementaryOS) and it's as easy as windows for everyday tasks.

And for not-everyday tasks, you can just ssh in and fix it for them.

I wrote a `pass` plugin [1] that works similarly to xkcdpass — but integrates it into a password manager. Makes usage far easier!

1: https://github.com/pinusc/pass-diceware

There is! Check out invidio.us

I'm currently self-hosting a Matrix homeserver! I got a few friends to join me and we use it to chat daily.

I can't really speak for its security. Afaik the protocol is almost considered stable, and I trust it for everyday communications — but I wouldn't trust it if dealing with a nation-state level adversary.

The only privacy pain point is that if you run a synapse home server (the reference implementation), by default your voice and video chats are routed through Google's servers. You have to run your own TURN server alongside synapse to prevent this. This is fine, but imho it's not well explained on the install guide.

Riot is... Okay. It's great ffor power users, but imho is quite obscure for the average chat app user; the ux isn't great yet. Perhaps with the redesign...

Lastly, bridges are the biggest reason why I want matrix to succeed... But as of now, none of them are really useful or even usable. They're all in very early stages of development and need contributions.

I believe the phenomenon you're talking about is called "Peter principle" [1], which states that "people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence. In other words, an employee is promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

edit: punctuation and wording

While magic and its limits are indeed defined by the author, the problem with fantasy worlds with widely available magic is that it usually ends up permeating the universe and being at the center of the story. Think of Harry Potter or LOTR or even going back in history to the tales of King Arthur. Game of Thrones is not a fantasy tale as much as a human one.

George Martin chose to make the story about people and the struggle for power and ideals and everything else that is human. And even with magic being barely a presence, it still is a force able to radically influence the game - but not much more than money, or armies, or human ability, which are still powerful enough to be relevant.

I think if magic was more widely available, it would either have needed to be trivial, not powerful magic, or these other resources would have suffered.

I can read the article just fine on Firefox for Android with uBlock origin. It also loads with no problems through my pi-hole, which blocks Google Analytics.

Link to the full study: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/08/08/384412

I have not read it completely yet, but it seems it lacks any sort of blind trial and control group; hence, it fails to account for placebo effect. Given the nature of the experiment, I believe placebo effect could have significantly altered the results.

I. I live in China, so pollution can be a problem at times. Usually I don't bother to check the Air Quality Index, but it's useful to know when it's really bad, so I wrote a small script to connect to aqicn API and display the index in my desktop panel (along with weather and temperature :)

II. This year my school's schedule is really hard to interpret, with 4-days rotations out of 6 every week, plus fridays also rotating themselves... I wrote a script that checked the schedule, the holidays, fetched the list of classes for each student and created a .csv file ready to be imported in their calendar. Sadly I didn't bother to build a GUI for it, so I'm the only one using it.

III. Wrote a script to automatically swith color profile in my terminal and panel. Still have to figure out how to switch gtk colors though.

IV. I wanted to use mpd to listen to music, but be able to stream some music from youtube if I wanted to. I used youtube-dl to fetch stream URLs and titles for songs, and add them to MPD playlist.