but if they do it’s a scandal waiting to happen

That was my line of thought. If you pay for failed captchas, there are a few websites using it that’d deserve a bot failing them constantly.

Do you pay for successful verification only, or even for failed ones?

I’ve heard that this kind of s(h)itting is (or was?) common in some Asian countries. Learned that when someone left shit all over the toilet at our company, in places where it would be basically impossible to get to unless you were sitting like this.

It works simillarly to an IRC. You have a server, that server can have channels, I think it can even do voice. But, unlike IRC, you can also use your server to talk to people on other servers, similar to how Fediverse works - if I have a server hosted on myserver.com, and someone else has a public room on server otherserver.com, I can either join the room@otherserver.com or message person@otherserver.com, all from my account on myserver.com.

And bridges are basically just bots that run on your own server, and by scraping websites/using API of the service your bridging they create a private room i.e Messenger@myserver.com, with subrooms per chat, and the bot then sends every message it recieves signed into your messenger account to the room, and vice versa - anything you send there will it forward to the real messenger, basically allowing you to chat with people on messenger through your matrix server. Which solves the problem of “Each of my friend is using different messaging service, can I have them all in one app? (The app being Matrix client)”.

I’m a fan of self-hosted Matrix server. You can get a dozen of bridges for those stubborn people that refuse to leave messenger/whatsapp/telegram (at a loss of encryption, and they still get your convos, but at least you don’t have their spyware on your mobile and you can have everything in one app), while also being decentralized.

Self-hosting a server is actually really, really easy. It took me like half an hour, because there is an amazing Matrix Ansible Deploy script, that has a pretty easy to follow documentation, and is also one of those super-rare projects that just works. Even if I forgot to update my server for several months, I could literally “just update”, and the script is clever enough to figure out what changed, tell me what I need to update in the config files (which are still only like four rows of stuff I needed to setup), and it is a really smooth experience. Even when you want to set up some bridges, for most it’s literally just adding “<service>_bridge_enabled: true” to the ansible yml config file. I’ve already set up Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord and Messenger this way, and it was effortless.

If you look at it from this perspective, it sounds way more obvious. I like this PoV.

If I ever wanted to fight against my local regime, it would definitely not be through US and CIA, lol.

I don’t think so. If people leave and the only reputation you’d hear about the platform is that it’s full of shit like that, you won’t have any reason to start an account in the first place, since there’s no “normal” content with which they’d first hook you in, before they can slowly start changing your views.

If the serious content remains, you’ll get people signing up for that content, only to be slowly manipulated into whatever The Algorithm feels will drive the engagement (which is probably fascism). If there’s nothing in the first place, you don’t have that hook.

Let it die.

Sounds almost like they should’ve focused on being properly decentralized sooner.

VRAM would be 810Gb/403Gb/203Gb for FP16/FP8/INT4 for interferrence, according to their website.

I’m not sure what “FP16/FP8/INT4” means, and where would GTX 4090 fall in those categories, but the VRAM required is respectively 810Gb/403Gb/203Gb. I guess 4090 would fall under the INT4?

Yes and no. For ads to make any kind of revenue, you first need an user-base. And if the first thing you do is riddle them with ads, it will probably really hurt the sales.

So, the first generation of smart glasses should be pretty OK as far as ads go. Of course, they will gradually introduce them, but that will hopefully take several years before we get to that point.

And inevitably some FOSS/privacy focused alternative will show up, just like you have with GrapheneOS, PinePhone and similar. Or, assuming they will let developers side-load their apps without going through proprietary store (which may be unlikely, given the current trend of locking everything down - on the other hand, there is a pretty large market of developers who wouldn’t touch anything Apple-level of closed and someone will definitely want to cash in on it), you will eventually get OCR ad-blocks for billboards outside. I bet that would be one of the first apps developed once possible.

But then you are risking an actual reprecussion for your actions, and would have to deal with consequences of several really pissed of corporations with a recipe about how much money did your actions costed them in damages, that would be pretty hard to wriggle yourself out of.

Which is exactly why (proper) protesting isn’t easy to do in the slightest, and you have to really believe in the cause to resort to such things. And that is how it should be. It’s also why you only end up with with random people blocking inconsequantial roads or ruining glass-protected paintings. Because they want attention, they want to feel good that they’re doing something, and protesting is the edgy thing to do that nobody understands. But at the end of the day, they want to go back to their instagram so they can post about it, instead of dealing with the consequences.

If you resort to such a drastic action, and protesting definitely is a drastic action, at least the kind the post is talking about, you should sacrifice something other than your free time and a pocket change in fees, otherwise it has no value. That’s why demonstrations held at a weekend or holidays feel so cheap, if you aren’t even willing to take your time off for it, whats the point?

I wouldn’t for most of them. So I don’t attend. But all these “feel-good” demonstrations and protests are only succeeding in undermining the grave nature of protests and demonstrations, to the point where no-one really needs to take them seriously.

I’m actually glad for it. It made me switch to Linux, discover Mullvad Browser and their VPN combo, get a GrapheneOS phone, find an amazing Freetube YT desktop client, and dabble with Home Assistant and PIHole. Plus I migrated to Protonmail and Kagi as my search, and Lemmy instead of reddit is also an amazing change, the discussions I’ve seen so far feel better and more in depth, and I’m enjoying my time here so far. The lack of endless content is also great, to help with implementing Digital Minimalism.

So, while I hate any large corporation and their greed with more and more passion, it has lead me to a nice privacy journey, for which I’m glad.

Shit, it placed my own question into Cybersecurity right under this one. Now i dont know how to feel about it.

I’ve just blocked YT in my browser, and use https://freetubeapp.io/ instead. It’s a desktop app, so I don’t have to deal with cookies and storage being deleted after every session, just as i can do subscriptions to channels without requiring an account.

So far, it has been an amazing experience, I totally recommend it. And I second the point about Nano AdBlcoker, since I’ve also been one of the victims, since at the time Nano Defender was one of the alternatives pretty well recommended on Reddit, that was better at avoiding anti-adblock scripts. Plus, any extension you have only makes you easier to fingerprint, thus defeating the point of VPN or privacy focused browser. Especially with Mullvad browser + VPN, which is especially build on the idea of sharing the exact same fingerprint with every other Mullvad VPN user.

Isn’t that SCP-953? Good luck.

You are right I shouldn’t have equaled bitcoin with the rest of the crypto ecosystem. While most crypto is utter scam, it’s true that there have been some slight advances here and there, and there are coins that may be actually useful for some cases, mostly Monero and I suppose Ethereum. I’d still say that crypto has done more harm than good in the world, and I say that as someone who’s really focused at privacy, care about it a lot and have invested significant amount of time and effort into staying as private as possible.

But it’s great that Ethereum managed to solve most of the issues with Bitcoin - unless I’m mistaken, it’s not really used for investment speculation, and if it managed to keep the energy requirements low, that’s good. But last time I remember researching about blockchain (it was few months, so feel free to correct me), isn’t it running into serious issues with ledger size, that makes it infeasible for long-term (decades) of use, without sacrificing some of it’s guarantees? Which is one of the main issues with blockchain tech in general, that I don’t think has been solved so far.

Thanks for this. It never occurred to me to look into St. Nicolas, even though it’s my name, and he’s way more awesome than I though.

A patron of prostitues, hell yeah. I guess that explains my Mark of Slaneesh scarification.

I just hope bitcoin will finally die. It’s literally just wasting absurd amount of energy, only to allow scammers to scam billions of dollars from victims, and regular people to steal from eachother by investing into it. I mean, if the only use of bitcoin by now is for speculation and investment, then it means that any dollar you made, you literally stole from someone else who will be left with useless bitcoin once it’s all over. There’s no value, and with the ledger getting bigger and bigger, and bitcoin more expensive to mine, it will eventually be worthless. And we all know it, so anyone who makes thousands of dollars, there’s someone who probably financially ruined himself by making a wrong and stupid investment at the wrong time.

I hate crypto so much :D.