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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2023

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  • The only way you can do this, is if the only service you use the provider for is storage. Encrypt the data before you send it to the provider and then they don’t know what they’re storing.

    If they have to do any processing on it at all, then conceptually they need a plain text copy of it to feed into the CPU. And if they have that, there is nothing you can do to stop them from stealing it or using it.

    There has been some research in this field, the concept is called homomorphic encryption. That is where you encrypt something in a way that allows a third party to manipulate the data without possessing a key. It is still very limited, and likely always will be due to the extreme difficulty of the question.


  • with an outside control interface that’s quite literally about as optimal as it can be.

    Which is probably true, as long as you make one assumption- that the operator dedicates a significant amount of time to learning it. With that assumption being true- I’ll assume you’re correct and it becomes much more efficient than a Nano/Notepad style editor.

    I’m happy to concede without any personal knowledge that if you’re hardcore editing code, it may well be worth the time to learn Vim, on the principle that it may well be the very most efficient terminal-based text editor.

    But what if you’re NOT hardcore editing code? What if you just need to edit a config file here and there? You don’t need the ‘absolute most efficient’ system because it’s NOT efficient for you to take the time to learn it. You just want to comment out a line and type a replacement below it. And you’ve been using Notepad-style text editors for years.

    Thus my point-- there is ABSOLUTELY a place for Vim. But wanting to just edit a file without having to learn a whole new editor doesn’t make one lazy. It means you’re being efficient, focusing your time on getting what you need done, done.


  • It will be interesting to see that tested in court. I don’t think anyone would complain about for example a pencil sketch of a naked celebrity, that would be considered free speech and fair use even if it is a sketch of a scene from a movie.

    So where does the line go? If the pencil sketch is legal, what if you do a digital sketch with Adobe illustrator and a graphics tablet? What if you use the Adobe AI function to help clean up the image? What if you take screen grabs of a publicity shot of the actor’s face and a nude image of someone else, and use them together to trace the image you end up painting? What if you then use AI to help you select colors and help shading? What if you do each of those processes individually but you have AI do each of them? That is not very functionally different from giving an AI a publicity shot and telling it to generate a nude image.

    As I see it, The only difference between the AI deepfake and the fake produced by a skilled artist is the amount of time and effort required. And while that definitely makes it easy to turn out an awful lot of fakes, it’s bad policy to ban one and not the other simply based on the process by which the image was created.


  • A stupid (as in, not intelligent) analogy.

    Bomb laws don’t stop bombers. You CAN buy hardware store ingredients and make a bomb. Most people don’t do such things.

    The point of the bomb law is so when they get a tip and raid someone’s house and find a few bricks of C4 wrapped in nails with a clock attached, they have something to arrest him for rather than saying ‘we have to wait until you use this to hurt people’.

    But that’s also because that bomb has very few legitimate uses. There aren’t neighborhood bomb ranges where people go to compete and practice. You can’t use a bomb to hunt or protect yourself from 4-legged predators when in the woods. There aren’t bombing tournaments. You can’t use a bomb in self-defense or to protect your home or family. There ARE legitimate uses for bombs in mining, agriculture, industry, etc but those are uncommon and thus highly regulated.

    A gun has many legitimate uses, and tens or hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans use guns legally every day. Neighborhood gun ranges host classes, practice sessions, and competitions / tournaments. Guns are used for hunting and defense from predators in the woods. A gun can defend your home and family from intruders. And a small concealed pistol can be used to defend against street crime.



  • Other countries have less gun crime sure. They also have a functional health care system, including mental health care. They have culture that doesn’t glorify violence and better emphasizes connections with fellow humans and collaboration rather than confrontation.
    Behavior like bullying that in the US often elicits a ‘boys will be boys, let them work it out’ reaction would get kids severely disciplined or kicked out of school in most other civilized countries.
    Other countries didn’t defund their mental health systems in the 1980s, turning a great many violent and mentally ill people out on the streets. I’m not a big Reagan fan generally but that policy did irreparable harm to the US.
    And other countries don’t treat addicts like criminals, locking them up for years with violent criminals where they themselves become violent. Other countries treat addicts like medical patients.

    So yeah other countries do a lot of things better than the US, in terms of cultivating a less violent more inclusive society. You can’t just point to gun policy and say THERE THATS THE ANSWER THATS ALL WE NEED.


  • you say the lions share of murders are committed by drug gangs, but that’s ignoring the majority of gun injuries are self inflicted.

    Quite correct. Somewhere between 2/3 and 4/5 depending on the year of gun deaths are suicides. It’s why I hate most ‘gun violence’ numbers because they include suicides to get to a ~30k/year number (homicides are 10-12k/year most years) while the term ‘gun violence’ strongly suggests crime done to others.

    I don’t believe we should blame a gun for suicide anymore than we should blame a knife, body of water, tall bridge/building, bottle of pills, etc. Suicide is a (shitty) personal choice someone makes for themselves. And I reject the idea that all of society should be prohibited from owning a tool simply because a suicidal person might use it to end their own life.
    Suicide is a tragedy and I’m all for preventing it. But depriving hundreds of millions of law-abiding citizens from having a tool they use safely, daily, for protection and recreation is not the answer. It’s not how a ‘free’ society works or should work.


    And while it was written into the constitution it was amended into the constitution, and like the 21st which repealed the 18th, could be amended out again.

    Yes it could be. Any part of the Constitution can be changed. Even the 1st Amendment. Should we rewrite the 1st Amendment to ban pornography or politically unpopular speech? Should we rewrite the 4th Amendment to exclude computers and only apply to printed papers?
    Just because we CAN muck with the Bill of Rights doesn’t mean we SHOULD.


    you also say there are 5x defensive Gun owners. This is a made up statistic - there is no formal definition of a defensive gun owner, there is no way to shoot a gun defensively.

    I said ‘defensive gun USES’. That has a definition- it’s when a law-abiding citizen uses a lawfully-owned firearm to stop or prevent a crime. The vast majority of defensive gun uses (90-95%) end with no shots fired- the criminal sees the gun and runs away.
    Sorry for a reddit link but click here - that’s from /r/CCW (concealed carry weapon) and it’s a filter for ‘member DGU’, IE posts where a redditor is involved in a DGU situation. I’d encourage you to read some of them.

    The problem with DGUs is they aren’t tracked. Most aren’t reported to the police and those that are aren’t centrally tracked in any database like the FBI’s homicide database. That means coming up with a number is done with statistical analysis of victimization surveys. This of course produces wildly different numbers, which range from 55k-80k/year (anti-gun researcher Hemenway) to ~2 million (pro-gun researcher Lott). Personally I think the number is somewhere around 300-500k (at least that’s what NCVS data suggests) but you can draw your own conclusions. Wikipedia has a great article on DGUs.

    For the sake of this argument though I go with a low number of 60k-- 12k homicides, 60k DGUs, that’s about 5x.

    While it may take time - a few generations - maybe even a dozen generations - to disarm the majority of households, it’s possible.

    Let’s say you do that. Let’s say you repeal the 2nd Amendment, and do ‘buybacks’ (or as gun owners call it, ‘confiscation with compensation’), and you keep this up for 20+ years. What have you actually accomplished?

    Most likely DGUs would drop to near zero. FIREARM suicides would drop to near-zero, and suicides overall might drop a little (a gun is faster and works at home, a lot of people who take pills or decide to jump off a building change their mind before they’re dead and survive). This would have little/no effect on drug gangs who are usually using illegal guns anyway. And without DGUs, criminals would KNOW their victims are ALWAYS unarmed.
    Spree shootings would probably become less frequent. But under 100 people per year die in such incidents anyway, despite the big headlines (you’re literally more likely to get struck by lightning than die in a spree shooting in the USA).

    I therefore look at that and say even if you stop a few spree shootings, you don’t do much for gang violence, you empower criminals, and you get rid of the DGUs. I don’t see that as being an effective policy.


    the majority of gun owners own guns for fun/sport. So while, yes, it is sad to ruin fun, it’s also sad to have children killed.

    And if there was a direct zero-sum tradeoff between sport shooting and dead kids you’d have a really good argument. There isn’t.

    Finally, you don’t have to ban all guns, you could keep say, bolt action rifles and single barrel shotguns - where sports and hunting could still continue. This wouldn’t solve all the problems but it might have saved lives multiplicatively in mass shootings.

    Well that also removes pistols for personal defense.
    But even if you did, what happens when some enterprising machinist with a basement workshop downloads plans for a gun or to turn a bolt action rifle into a semi-auto?

    THIS is why gun bans don’t work. They’re too easy to make. The only reason criminals don’t manufacture or import them in great number is because while they’re easy to make, they’re easier to steal or straw purchase. Just because a lot of crime guns were once legal guns doesn’t mean cutting off the legal guns will make gun crime go away.


    Curious for your thoughts/reactions to this?







  • Simplistic logic that sounds nice but doesn’t actually work. There are more guns than people in this country. We have significantly bigger problems with illegal drug cartels than most. Drug gangs, who have access to illicit import capability, commit the lion’s share of gun violence. The right to keep in their arms is literally written into our Constitution.
    Put those things together and you have a few very big problems.

    The first is that any sort of gun ban will basically fail unless you amend the Constitution, which there is not political will to do by any means. And those who want to keep their gun rights will point out that there are at 4-5x as many defensive gun uses by law abiding gun owners as there are gun homicides. So it is unlikely that you will be able to get any sort of gun ban to happen.

    Second, even if you did, you could never get rid of any significant number of them. There is no national registration scheme. A couple of states have their own registration schemes but those are generally not the states with the majority of firearms. Look at other countries that had similar situations like Australia, they have had numerous amnesty periods for people to turn in firearms and they still don’t think they have a significant majority of them collected.

    Finally the question is who you are disarming? Remember, the lions share of gun murders are committed by drug gangs. A gang that can import illegal drugs can just as easily import illegal guns. Or, guns are actually not that hard to make, significantly easier than drugs. Any decently equipped machine shop can crank out guns, and unlike a drug lab which has to be out of the country the machine shop has a legitimate day shift use so it can operate in the open and pay taxes.
    Point is, you will end up disarming the law abiding citizens while the criminals will still be armed, and willing to sell those guns to other criminals.

    I also very much want to end school shootings. I hate that we are turning schools into fortresses or prisons. I hate the teachers, who are already paid shit, have to think things like ‘time to attack a gunman with scissors’.

    But I want to spend effort and money on the policy that will most likely bring that goal about. Maximum bang for buck if you will. And I’m sorry but gun control isn’t it.



  • To expand on this- In general you must comply with the laws of any jurisdiction where you have a business presence. This for example Meta is a USA company, but they have offices in the EU and they sell advertising in the EU from EU offices so they have to comply with EU laws for EU users. They can’t just wave off and say ‘we are a USA company, EU regs don’t apply to us’.

    Lemmy is not a corporation. There is no business presence in Texas, unless an instance admin lives there or hosts the server there. So Lemmy, both as a whole and as individual instances, can simply give Texas the middle finger and say ‘we aren’t subject to your laws as we have no presence or business in your state. We are in the state of California (or whatever) and are subject to the laws of our home state. It is not our job to enforce Texas laws in California on servers hosted in Virginia.’

    Thus Texas trying to enforce their laws on a Cali company is like Hollywood studios sending DMCA notices to Finland.



  • The new app sucks, but that’s been true for quite some time. I have a bunch of older Sonos stuff that’s still runs their old ‘S1’ app. It works perfectly. When I need to add a zone I buy old hardware on eBay that is still S1 compatible. What this article doesn’t mention but should, is the newer versions of the new app have a much less robust privacy policy and even more stuff is being done through their cloud. It’s not necessary, it doesn’t help user experience, it just gives more data to harvest, and it’s not what consumers want.

    It’s good that they are trying to right the ship. But this article nails it on the head, whatever they are doing now is way too late. Management that’s not asleep at the switch would have seen these problems before the app even launched and slammed on the brakes lest they destroy their company to get a pair of headphones out the door. And that’s exactly what they did. The trust of users is broken, that’s not easily repaired. They shipped their headphones but nobody gave a shit because the app made people want to get rid of Sonos entirely.

    It’s too bad Logitech discontinued the Squeezebox line. At the time that was the biggest competitor to Sonos, they could be cleaning up right now.


  • Yes exactly. Hosts got greedy, Airbnb let them, and this is the result.

    They could fix it pretty easily but the host would hate it.

    • Make the price that is displayed by default inclusive of all fees and charges, except taxes. So that stupid cleaning fee makes your property go down in the list.

    -Make the listing page clearly indicate whether or not the guest is required to perform chores. Make the filter aware of certain chores and allow a guest to screen out listings that require those. IE, ‘strip bed’, ‘do laundry’, ‘take out garbage’, ‘cleaning tasks’, ‘other’, etc. and have a really easy button at the top ‘filter out listings with chores’.

    If I’m paying half the price of a hotel then I don’t mind having to throw the sheets in the laundry. If I’m paying more than a hotel plus a cleaning fee, I want to be on vacation and act like it.


  • They won’t. I think that’s why this is happening on a Saturday- stock markets are closed so it won’t instantly tank Boeing’s stock price.

    Look back at the last few space disasters that killed people- Challenger and Columbia. In both cases it was the same- someone in NASA tried to sound the alarm but they didn’t listen because of organizational culture or whatever. Thus the people at the top of NASA could say with a straight face ‘we didn’t know, we will change culture to listen to the little guy who thinks there’s a problem’. And so, we all forgave them for making us watch heroes die on live TV.

    This is different. The alarm has been sounded and it’s been sounding for months. Everyone at all levels of NASA, Boeing, and for that matter the general public know that Starliner has a very serious thruster problem. There’s no excuses here, no ‘promise to fix culture’ or new procedure that could forgive an accident. If Butch and Suni blow up on live TV there’ll be no excuses anyone for anyone to make because the decision is being made with everyone fully informed. The public at large will know it happened because NASA trusted ‘don’t bolt the doors on Boeing’ with the lives of American heroes. The American people will demand that heads roll at both NASA and Boeing and it may well happen too. We don’t like watching real heroes die on live TV.

    So look at Starliner right now. The thrusters have problems that make them overheat and shut off when commanded to fire and, as of when I last checked, Boeing isn’t even sure what’s wrong.

    Point is- if Starliner crashes with Americans on board, NASA won’t just be burning credibility. They’ll be burning themselves, Boeing, and the entire manned space program.

    So I predict the flight readiness review before the press conference is just a formality, that the decision has already been made to bring our people back on Crew Dragon. And I’m sure someone from Boeing will be all thumbs up over an ‘overabundance of caution’.