makeasnek

makeasnek , 9 months ago

Digikam is powerful and can do this no problem. Digikam can store in its own database and (if you choose) at the same time in the image itself in case your digikam database ever gets corrupted.

makeasnek , 9 months ago

It’s wild to me how many people with seemingly liberal values are cheering on the US government telling them what apps they can and can’t use to get and share information. Banning it on government devices is fine, banning it outright seems like a huge 1st amendment violation and assault on democratic values. The government has no business telling you what you can listen to or say, many people have died for us to have that right and we shouldn’t give it away just because we’re scared of election interference or spying or whatever it is.

makeasnek , 9 months ago

I couldn’t find the full list of state attorney generals who did this, but here’s a partial one. Write your reps if you think the government has no business telling you how and with what apps you are free to speak. Georgia, Alaska, Utah, Indiana, Nebraska, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and South Dakota

makeasnek , 9 months ago

They do actually care about getting re-elected. The more they hear from constituents about issue A, the more likely they are to vote some way on issue A. Do they ignore many of their constituents concerns? Of course. But if we never make them heard, they will certainly be ignored. It’s an imperfect system but apathy is an even worse one.

makeasnek , 9 months ago

The ruling class can ask for whatever they want. Votes, and the money to buy enough advertising to get them votes, are what actually get them into office. Those are levers of power everyday people can control if they don’t let apathy or defeatism win.

makeasnek , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

To add to this, SiDock is an awesome project working on an open-source, patent-free, self-stable antiviral for covid using the computers of volunteers. Anybody can volunteer their spare computational power with a few clicks. I have been crunching it since 2020 and find it very fun.

makeasnek , 9 months ago

Get this though: many children still do end up hospitalized. The majority of them have no underlying comorbidities or conditions. Their only reason for ending up in hospital is luck of the draw. That was presented at the CDC meeting where the recent booster was approved. It’s not just the elderly or infirm who end up in the hospital and die from it. It’s still killing, hospitalizing, and making seriously ill way more people than flu.

makeasnek , 9 months ago

How to contact your MP www.parliament.uk/…/contact-your-mp/

makeasnek , 9 months ago

Every time I try another DE I always come back to XFCE. Lightweight, stays out of the way, gets the job done. NEVER crashes. Ever.

makeasnek , 9 months ago

Nope

makeasnek , 9 months ago

DietPi is always a good option. It’s designed for raspberry pi, but you can absolutely run it on a laptop and install your desktop environment (XFCE etc)

makeasnek OP , 9 months ago

Absolutely!

makeasnek , 9 months ago

Not world news? But people in the US: These things can be fought back. Vote in every election local to national. Put pressure on your representatives. Donate to reps who do right by your values. Apathy is how they win. Sign up for EFF’s e-mail alerts act.eff.org

makeasnek , 9 months ago

If you want to help find an open-source drug (cure) for COVID, contribute your computer’s spare computational power to SiDock. It’s a simple download and you will help an international team of scientists working to find a molecule that can block the Sars-cov-2 molecule in the body. And it will be available to everybody at low cost.

makeasnek , 10 months ago

FUD. FUD. FUD.

“You may not always have interner and power but need goods”

^^ Credit/debit cards have this same problem. Besides, when was the last time you didn’t have your cell phone with you and had to pay in actual cash?

“You may send money to the wrong wallet -> gone forever (doesn’t even have to be yout fault, great target for man in the middle attacks)”

^^ Ok fair. But most exchanges in the future will probably support some degree of transaction reversibility. Most people will not self-custody but will instead use a bank, exchange, etc to help “soften” the experience of using crypto.

“You may forget your passphrase or your grandpa dies and you inherit nothing as nobody can access the money”

^^ There are many solutions to this problem including social recovery, keeping backups, or trusting a third-party custodian like an exchange or in the future banks will probably help manage your crypto assets.

“You want to pay in you supermarket. Great you have to wait till you transaction gets processed as this is super slow. And wait until many more people use this currency.”

^^ You know how long a credit card transaction takes to fully settle? 30 days. Any vendor is just going to accept a one-confirmation transaction which occurs in seconds if not picoseconds. This is really not an issue unless you are buying a house. If you are buying a house, you can wait 30 minutes for a full multi-block confirmation.

“It’s pseudonymous not anonymous. Everyone you send money and know in real life knows about your financials in detail 👌🏻”

^^ Monero and other privacy-respecting cryptos solved this, and there is talk of adding more privacy to Bitcoin.

“It’s great to freeze assets of people who are shit”

^^ You can still have court orders to seize all their money and assets, their house, their car, etc the only thing you arguably lose access to is their bank account. People with enough assets to justify seizing their bank account usually have somebody else manage their assets, that somebody else can be compelled with a court order.

“It’s great to be able to control the amount of money in the system to counter crisis or just keep the economy healthy”

^^ If you believe this is true you should know that blockchains can make their own economic policy. They can set the inflation rate and redistribute wealth however they like, some of them even have their own on-chain voting mechanisms to automate this. The difference is who gets to make those decisions: the participants of the network or some oligarch hack who finds it politically expedient?

“It’s great when people pay taxes”

^^ Crypto is not immune to taxes, you have to pay taxes on it like all other assets and foreign currency. Taxation works exactly the same.

“Fixed amount of coins means deflation in the long run and deflating economies die faster than you can blink”

^^ Only a few coins have a fixed amount, many have a built-in inflation rate. Land is a fixed asset. Diamonds are a fixed supply asset. Are they destroying the economy?

^^ Proof of Work burns our world and Proof of Stake is oligarchy. Today the distribution of most coins is worse then normal currencies.

Proof-of-stake has many varieties, not all of which inherently end in oligarchy. Even those are infinitely more democratic than our current financial system. PoW typically uses green energy sources as they are the cheapest and can be used to balance energy demand curves. The root problem is not that PoW uses energy, but where that energy comes from. Some PoW coins require “proof of useful work”.

makeasnek , 10 months ago

Unfortunately this is just ONE of MANY bad internet bills currently up for consideration and with bipartisan support. Help fight all of them at badinternetbills.com

makeasnek , 10 months ago

Generic inkjet and laser printing technology is so old at this point, it seems like an open source model for each would be possible to make and sell quite profitably. One that respects your privacy and doesn’t jerk you around like all the major printer manufacturers do.

makeasnek , 10 months ago

Garbage headline. This isn’t “AI” doing this, it’s hiring managers and companies. It’s policy. If I put all my applicants into a Microsoft excel spreadsheet and use the sorting function to sort by race, then only hire ones of of a particular skin tone, is Excel keeping millions of qualified candidates out of the workforce? No, of course not. Neither is AI. Replace “AI” with “company policy” in every one of these articles and you get at what’s actually occurring.

Same reason we don’t need to “regulate AI”. We need to regulate it’s deployment, just like we regulate whatever technology we used for it previously. In other words, we don’t need new rules, we just need enforcement of existing ones. You can’t have a hiring process that discriminatory. What tool you use to arrive at that end doesn’t matter.

makeasnek , 10 months ago

“This touches on one of the huge ethical questions with regulating AI. If you are discriminated against in a job hunt by an AI, who’s fault is that?” It is the fault of the company hiring practices, which are to blindly trust an AI without testing whether or not it is discriminatory. It is also the fault of the producer of that AI software (or service) sold to the company for screening candidates. No new laws are needed to hold either of them accountable, existing laws cover the ground well. That company selling the AI screening services could have just been called “crystal ball hiring” before AI and would be equally liable if they just discriminated in their hiring suggestions. The tool isn’t the thing that needs regulating, the actions people and companies take based on the tool is. And that is already well regulated.

Make an AI in the privacy of your own home that does ____ literally anything? Fine. Collaborate making an OSS AI to do whatever with some of your friends? Also fine. Sell that AI as a employment screener app? Better make sure you’ve tested it to not have discriminatory outcomes. Use that AI to screen employees? Same deal.

makeasnek , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

If you’re interested in finding stuff in space, there are several volunteer computing projects: Universe@home (mapping black holes and other objects), Einstein@home (finding pulsars), and Asteroids@home (you’re never gonna guess what this one is about). You just install a free program and it uses your computer’s spare processing power in the background, and you can set it to run only when your machine is idle so it doesn’t slow anything down. It’s pretty fun when you get to see your username right next to the discovery in their database! For more volunteer computing projects check out !boinc

makeasnek , 10 months ago

Not sure why nobody in the comments is distinguishing between blocking a community on an instance (removing /c/piracy) and defederating instances (saying your users can’t subscribe to otherinstance.com/c/piracy). They are very different things. We should be very skeptical of defederation.

Removing a community because it violates the rules of your instance is A-OK and every instance should do this. Anybody can run an instance, and anybody can set their own rules, that’s the whole idea of federation.

De-federating other instances because you find their content objectionable is less ok. Lemmy is like e-mail. Everybody registers at gmail or office365 or myfavoriteemail.com. Every email host runs their own servers, but they all talk to each other through an open protocol. You would be pissed to find out that gmail just suddenly decided to stop accepting mail from someothermailprovider.com because a bunch of their users are pirates or tankies. Or blocked your favourite email newsletter from reaching your inbox because it had inflammatory political content.

Allowing your users to receive e-mail, or content from subcommunities on other lemmy instances is not a legal risk like hosting the content yourself is (IANAL etc). Same way Gmail is not liable if somebody on some other e-mail server does something illegal by emailing a gmail user. That’s why you can register at torrentwebsite.com and get a user confirmation email successfully delivered to your inbox. Gmail is federated with all other e-mail services without needing to endorse them or accept legal liability for them.

Lemmy’s strength, value, and future comes from being the largest federated space for link-sharing and other forms of communication.

De-federation is bad.

makeasnek , 10 months ago

You would be free to do that, just as you can make filters in gmail. But the difference is who gets to make that decision.

makeasnek , 10 months ago

Not sure why nobody in the comments is distinguishing between blocking a community on an instance (removing /c/piracy) and defederating instances (saying your users can’t subscribe to otherinstance.com/c/piracy). They are very different things. We should be very skeptical of defederation.

Removing a community because it violates the rules of your instance is A-OK and every instance should do this. Anybody can run an instance, and anybody can set their own rules, that’s the whole idea of federation.

De-federating other instances because you find their content objectionable is less ok. Lemmy is like e-mail. Everybody registers at gmail or office365 or myfavoriteemail.com. Every email host runs their own servers, but they all talk to each other through an open protocol. You would be pissed to find out that gmail just suddenly decided to stop accepting mail from someothermailprovider.com because a bunch of their users are pirates or tankies. Or blocked your favourite email newsletter from reaching your inbox because it had inflammatory political content.

Allowing your users to receive e-mail, or content from subcommunities on other lemmy instances is not a legal risk like hosting the content yourself is (IANAL etc). Same way Gmail is not liable if somebody on some other e-mail server does something illegal by emailing a gmail user. That’s why you can register at torrentwebsite.com and get a user confirmation email successfully delivered to your inbox. Gmail is federated with all other e-mail services without needing to endorse them or accept legal liability for them.

Lemmy’s strength, value, and future comes from being the largest federated space for link-sharing and other forms of communication.

Defederation is bad.

makeasnek , 11 months ago

• Due to insultingly low wages nobody is willing to work for. There. Fixed it for you.

makeasnek , 11 months ago

Funding. Nobody has figured out how to fund development for large open source OSes outside of the enterprise realm. You crack that, you can have linux be installed by default on Desktop/Laptop computers, and patches that come as a result of that funding benefit the rest of the ecosystem as well. People will use the default, they will complain about it, just like they complain about Windows Update randomly restarting their computer, but they’ll use it.

But also the share of people who own laptops or desktops continues to dwindle. Many people don’t have and see no need for a computer. So they run Android, which is Linux, so I guess we’re winning there?

makeasnek , 11 months ago

Or you could just start using Bitcoin for international trade. No having to trust a specific country to responsibly manage your currency. Send money anywhere instantly with 99.9% uptime, much lower fees than banks/swift/etc, 365 days a year, etc.

makeasnek OP , 11 months ago

Worth noting that BOINC (the distributed computing platform behind SETI@Home) is alive and well with over a dozen projects. You can help scientists cure diseases, map the galaxy, and more. The Large Hadron Collider even has a BOINC project you can crunch for. See the Lemmy for BOINC sopuli.xyz/c/boinc

makeasnek OP , 11 months ago

It’s going to be bought anyways by speculative investors. The only difference is who buys it. The market has an as-of-yet-unknown price it will buy those shares at. Even in the scenario you describe where demand from redditors drives up the price, if the end goal is achieved of having a user-owned platform, I’d still consider it a win.