• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: May 11th, 2024

help-circle
  • This just proves you are not the average user of YouTube…

    The average user of YouTube user either their TV app or their official mobile app, not the website.

    Me too, I also use adblockers when accessing it via the website in my computer, however when I’m watching things on living room I have to use the official apps.

    So yeah, most users suffer with their ads because it’s easier to use the official apps.

    YouTube app already comes installed in most Smart TVs, already comes installed in almost all Android phones (which is majority of the marketshare worldwide)…


  • Well, I’m not sure how using bitwarden changes anything here related to losing your keys?

    Hosting vaultwarden you are just restricting third parties from having access to your cryptographed data. (personaly, to me, that’s always better, since restricts possibilities of brute force - currently unfeasible for non-state actors, but who knows what will be achievable in 2, 4 years from now…)

    If you lose the key* that unlocks your vault, be it vaultwarden or bitwarden, you will have effectively lost access to your vault either case.

    *: losing the key is what seem to have happened in this election


  • It’s almost impossible for any of those to suceed beyond being niche because its not viable to run against the economics of scale and the practicality of the corporate solutions provided by the Big Techs companies in capitalist countries.

    Believe me, I’ve tried to talk to real people about the dangers of sending data to a single company like Google (Alphabet) or Facebook (Meta) and depending on that for media comsumption, how it can and how it’s really used to manipulate public opinion on countries… The fact is that for non-tech and non-privacy minded people (which I’d sure Must be 99.9% of the population) they really don’t seem to care, they just wanna a “free” service that they turn on the TV and there are the videos of their “influencers” or YouTube channels to watch, on YouTube I really hate how it shoves ads like there’s no tomorrow nowadays every 5 minutes, but I also understand there’s a cost to run their business, I, myself, if were to pay for similar service provided without ads I’d pretty sure the YouTube Premium offering would still being a bargain since Google’s infractucture and running costs are really optimized.

    So yeah, I really don’t believe any capitalist country can compete with the Big Techs companies, they are probably deeply rooted into common user behavior in all capitalist country, in the capitalist “democracies” it’s impossible to lobby against them in privacy concerns since they can easily sway public opinion in their favor with invisible chances to their content delivery, so anyone trying would have to have a lot of resources to do so (a popular movement without money funding in a capitalist society is basically doomed, theres a very pow chance to suceed imo) and any national alternative, or any actual alternative to their services is almost impossible to suceed since they already have their economy of scale set up with minimal costs and they can also run years on and on with a loss untill any competition does due to being unable to compete with their lower artificial prices.


  • It’s guess that even for Trump there’s probably a fine balance between:

    • wanting to be seen as a ‘winner’ by associating yourself to ‘winners’; and
    • disdain for critics that tarnish your personal image, since that would make you be seen as a ‘loser’.

    And I’d pretty sure Obama making a joke about Trump hijacked the later in Trump’s mind.

    Being more realistic through, is that this winners/losers is really an observable tendency in Trumps’ decision making process, however the fact is that it’s obviously not a binary decision and there’s nuance to It, since the human mind is usually not ‘rational’, not immutable, and also not necessarily consistent, in its decision making process, over time.


  • You are disregarding that the bullet text inscriptions are common alt-right memes? That the suspected killer is from a conservative family upbringing?

    Or you don’t believe those inscriptions have nothing to do with the alt-right movements? That the conservative family is also to be disregarded?

    Now about more evidence of participation of the killer in alt-right movements, or other links, you can be damn sure the current US administration is not really intereesting in making any of that public anymore, since it goes against the current administration propaganda. If it was some “leftist” you can be damn sure there would be a deep investigation into the killers electronics, internet activity, and etc, to find other “leftists” and politicians to associate with him and ALL that would be publicized by Donald Trump himself.


  • Being honest, there’s still a long way to go here. Next year’s elections will be very important for Brazil. But, 4 years of Trump, then 4 years of Bolsonaro, then Trump again now, that’s a lot of damage, and some people that I don’t see leaving the cult. Access to bias confirming “news” channels (mostly through social networks, there are plenty propaganda groups in WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and lately TikTok, and also YouTube Channels) makes some people seem to be living in a different universe.

    With tech companies profiting lots of political “controversy”, US big tech companies having a big predominance in Brazil, and also tech companies being used as a state political discourse dominance weapon we are pretty much at their mercy. META can definetly skew elections to a candidate of their own, or to the “least damaging” candidate to their interests, and there’s no way for the Brazilian governement, be it executive body, justice system, or congress to do anything about it. So the tendency is to everytime more and more legislators to be sided with the tech companies objectives, which ARE ALL FOREIGN companies, and that IS definetly very detrimental for any kind of actual democracy.

    And, of course, the current tech companies aligned legislators, and most proeminent “right wing” prospects for presidential run next year, are all sided with Bolsonaro (that, for me, makes all of them extreme right wing candidates) because that guarantees them only chance to having an actual significant amount of votes, since hardcore Bolsonaro supporters makes at least 20-30% of the population. All those candidates basically have pledged to give Bolsonaro an amnesty, and current Bolsonaro supporters in the congress are trying eveyday to passando new laws to favor him too (and remembering that most supreme court judges have already declared that an amnesty for the coup attempt would be unconstitutional), however the next president will also be able to appoint 3 other judges for the supreme court, and Bolsonaro has currently appointed two of the 11 judges, that could give Bolsonaro a chance of having an amnesty either by the president or the congress.

    TL;DR: There’s still a lot of shit to be done here, and the right wing extremist wave is definetly not going away easily.





  • Your source is not credible.

    It’s not clear wheter Mao os ar all serious

    Yeah, the original transcript is really not clear whether Mao joking or not with that sentence…

    Dr. Kissinger: We think they will give it to us. It will be a difficult battle, but we are quite certain we will win. We are proposing it also in such general language that we can remove discrimination that still exists towards the People’s Republic.

    Chairman Mao: The trade between our two countries at present is very pitiful. It is gradually increasing. You know China is a very poor country. We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women. (Laughter)

    Dr. Kissinger: There are no quotas for those or tariffs.

    Chairman Mao: So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands. (Laughter)

    Prime Minister Chou: Of course, on a voluntary basis.

    Chairmain Mao: Let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burdens. (Laughter)

    [Page 131]

    Dr. Kissinger: Our interest in trade with China is not commercial. It is to establish a relationship that is necessary for the political relations we both have.

    Chairman Mao: Yes.

    Dr. Kissinger: That is the spirit with which we are conducting our discussions.

    Chairman Mao: (Laughing) Those are honest words.

    Dr. Kissinger: This is our position.

    Chairman Mao: Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you ten million. (Laughter, particularly among the women.)

    Dr. Kissinger: The Chairman is improving his offer.

    Chairman Mao: By doing so we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interests. In our country we have too many women, and they have a way of doing things. They give birth to children and our children are too many. (Laughter) [Page 132]

    Dr. Kissinger: It is such a novel proposition, we will have to study it.

    Chairman Mao: You can set up a committee to study the issue. That is how your visit to China is settling the population question. (Laughter)

    Complete source: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v18/d12

    Ahh, actually the transcript said there was laugther all along that exchange about China being poor and having an excess of woman population, how could this Foreign Policy writer have guessed if Mao was being serious ir not?!

    Edit: And I just read a little bit more of the transcript of this conversation, futher down:

    Chairman Mao: (Looking toward Miss Shen.) The Chinese have a good command of English. (To Prime Minister Chou.) Who is she?

    Prime Minister Chou: Miss Shen Jo-yun.

    Chairman Mao: Girls. (Prime Minister Chou laughs.) Today I have been uttering some nonsense for which I will have to beg the pardon of the women of China.

    Dr. Kissinger: It sounded very attractive to the Americans present.(Chairman Mao and the girls laugh.)

    Mao apologises for his jokes about women in China that were made Just a few moments before… Damn, but who would expect a Foreign Policy article writer to just have read the full transcript of this conversation he was quoting before wondering If Mao was really offering 10 million chinese women as a serious deal… We will really never know If that was a real offer by this Crazy Mao guy to the Saint Dr. Kissing gentleman… 🙄


  • There are many tiers of private information.

    You can definetly collect a lot of useful telemetry data without collecting any of the, lets say, “most sensitive” private information.

    Just to exemplify:

    • you can collect telemetry on the most acessed features of a software and associate it with their location: whilst collecting their location you can definetly choose between having the person’s specific location (GPS coordinates with a few meters of accuracy) or their broad location (i.e.: their city, state, or country).

      • with the broad location you can have insights on how users of your software behave per region and plan accordinly actions or those regions.

    Collecting someones specific location is definetly way more sensitive than their broad location…

    And the full content of all textual documents a person generates has a very high chance of containing of their most sensitive private information…



  • It was definitely making use of the content, and not just my prompt.

    Ok, being simplistic about the actual workings: anything a LLM outputs is based only in the training data or the prompt, a LLM does not “create” anything.

    I really doubt your blog is statistically significant enough represented in the training data, therefore I can only assume that yes, your blog post URL referenced was web scrapped by ChatGPT and, and any other URLs linked by this main URL that the scrapped deemed significant to the prompt, and all that text was in fact added to the full internal prompt that was processed by the actual LLM.





  • You don’t. KeePass databases can be easily shared totally offline.

    However, it all depends on “how easy” you want the sync to happen…

    There are many ways to “sync” KeePass databases, basically you just have to copy password database among the devices, which can be done totally offline.

    • HARD - Manually copy the KeePass database to the devices
      • Can be accomplished via any Network connection or USB cable connection
    • EASIER - Put the database on any file sharing service that’s available on your devices, and sync that
      • The file sharing service can be available on the internet (Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud…), but it also works with any file sharing service that’s not connected to the internet (e.g.: local only Nextcloud server, or not even that, using Syncthing if that’s your thing…, which would not even require a local server)

    So, I’ll just give one example.

    If you have 2 devices:

    • Linux PC
    • Android Phone

    You can use KeePassXC on the Linux PC, and KeePassDX on the Android Phone, and have a copy of your kdbx file (the encrypted database) on each device, manually copying the newer version whenever there are changes on them.

    Issues that might happen: consistency between the files in case you make changes to both databases and forgot to sync manually previously. There’s no easy way to handle this currently afaik if you are doing manual syncs… I’d suggest maintaining one of the databases as “kinda read only”, not performing edits on it unless you can immediately copy it to the other one.

    You can do the same thing above, but instead of manually copying the files among the devices you can use Syncthing… Or if you have a local Nextcloud server, you can use that to share the files, which is pretty easy to use to ensure consistency if you are using KeePassXC and KeePassDX, since if you open the database on Android using KeePassXC directly to the “file system” that links to the Nextcloud folder, it will always automatically retrieve the newest version to your device if there has been any change and if your local Nextcloud server is reachable, otherwise it just uses the local cache, and you will know it’s using the local cache and was not able to sync.