Max_P

Max_P, 22 days ago

That’s a good feature, politics on social media is just a cesspool these days. There’s nothing worth seeing because there’s no political discussion, just name calling, climate change denialism, racism and transphobia.

Meta’s well aware that everyone’s tired of that uncle that just won’t shut up.

Max_P, 23 days ago

Some of those keys are public knowledge and only serves to tie what client it is (Chromium, Firefox, Safari probably) or otherwise stolen from one of those. This is a safe browsing API key, it’s used to check if sites have been marked as phishing/scam/etc and is used to warn users that the site is known to be malicious. Others are used to tie analytics or ads to the app, so it goes into the right developer’s account metrics.

I wouldn’t call those leaked, they’re meant to be embedded into apps and aren’t considered as secret keys.

It’s common practice to use API keys like that even if they’re not so secret, just for the sake of tracking which app is making what requests and so people can’t just openly use the API. You can easily shut down unapproved clients by just rolling out a new key, and it causes an annoying whack-a-mole game to constantly have to extract them from an APK.

Max_P, 23 days ago

github.com/googleads/…/622

It looks like it used to be bundled as part of binaries shipped by Google with the Google Ads SDK so that’d be why it’s not exactly documented. Developers just bundle it in their app and presto, ads are displayed.

I’d be skeptical of scanners just spewing “security vulnerabilities”. That malware report is of very poor quality, and they incorrectly identified this key as an API key leak with no idea what it is nor what it does because it’s not relevant. It’s also claiming it’s downloading files… using private IP addresses in the 10.0.0.0/8 range? Nonsense. That report is a lame report to pad their portfolio of “security researchers”.

Max_P, 23 days ago

That’s been a long time issue on Boost for Reddit as well. Boost doesn’t save its state properly when the activity gets closed, so you get a cold start. Some phones are bad and just kill it outright, but the good ones gives the app an opportunity to save its state.

I usually see it after using multiple heavy apps after Boost, immediately after is a bit weird unless it’s a really low end device that just doesn’t have the RAM to keep any activities open in the background.

Max_P, 23 days ago

That varies wildly between manufacturers and ROMs. AOSP and consequently LineageOS have consistently been pretty clean. I have apps running in the background for literal weeks at a time. KDE Connect never fails, Linphone is solid on one of my devices and also stays connected for weeks at a time.

Then there’s Xiaomi and Samsung which seems to be competing for who’s got the worst software imaginable. People keep saying it’s better and the TouchWiz days are over but I’ve yet to pick up a Samsung and not go “ewww” at it.

Pixels are okay but there’s nothing like a bloatware free custom ROM. No AI garbage, just plain basic Android.

The problem is essentially, most people don’t buy phones for the specs, they buy them for the fancy stupid features the manufacturers keep pushing to distinguish themselves. For 99% of the people, that’s effectively all bloat. Samsung in particular seems to do everything possible to pretend it’s not really Google’s Android but Samsung’s Android. Everything is different for the sake of looking different. Developers despise Samsung because their apps works well on every phone except Samsung because it’s “special”.

Max_P, 24 days ago

I’ll never understand the people that fake these kinds of things. Fake watches, fake followers, fake views, fake likes, fake jobs. Why?

What’s attractive about likes and views anyway? Why would I care that my date has 0 followers or a million followers? If anything it means they’ll constantly be busy streaming.

Max_P, 25 days ago

Can confirm they block rooted Android users intentionally, completely silently, at least when using Google’s RCS servers. The message just doesn’t send and is automatically deemed spam if you don’t pass PlayIntegrity. And the only RCS capable app is Google’s Messages, third party apps can only access SMS and MMS functionnality.

So yeah, fuck RCS really. I was completely on board with RCS until that. Apple was right on that one. It won’t fix messaging, it just puts it in Google’s hands unless carriers finally decide to roll out real RCS instead of relying on Google to provide it.

Third party apps had that resolved a decade ago, and Signal is just plain better.

Max_P, 25 days ago

There should be a report button to report it. Last time this happened the ad got taken down before the dev could report it on his end.

The ads come from ad networks, so there ain’t much visibility into what gets displayed: it’s regional and stuff.

Max_P, 24 days ago

You can buy it once (I think it’s like $5) to remove ads. I’ve been using the Reddit version since about when it came out. I’ve gotten a lot of use from it over the years, and I’m happy to have the same experience on Lemmy.

The guy deserves his $5 and the donations. Sure it’s not for everyone, some people would rather not run proprietary apps, but sometimes it’s worth paying for software. The key for me is, it’s not forced on me: I chose that app. It competes on its own merits.

Maybe one day Jerboa will beat it, but in the meantime I appreciate the quick API backend swap and having a high quality Lemmy app in like about a month into the Reddit API apocalypse.

Max_P, 26 days ago

There’s always the command escape hatch. Ultimately the roles you’ll use will probably do the same. Even a plugin would do the same, all the ZFS tooling eventually shells to the zfs/zpool, probably same with btrfs. Those are just very complex filesystems, it would be unreliable to reimplement them in Python.

We use tools to solve problems, not make it harder for no reason. That’s why command/shell actions exist: sometimes it’s just better to go that way.

You can always make your own plugin for it, but you’re still just writing extra code to eventually still shell out into the commands and parse their output.

Max_P, 26 days ago

It could be a disk slowly failing but not throwing errors yet. Some drives really do their best to hide that they’re failing. So even a passing SMART test I would take with some salt.

I would start by making sure you have good recent backups ASAP.

You can test the drive performance by shutting down all VMs and using tools like fio to do some disk benchmarking. It could be a VM causing it. If it’s an HDD in particular, the random reads and writes from VMs can really cause seek latency to shoot way up. Could be as simple as a service logging some warnings due to junk incoming traffic, or an update that added some more info logs, etc.

Max_P, 26 days ago

There’s not much to improve on PNG. It’s essentially a zipped up BMP with optional filters to rearrange pixels in a way that will hopefully lead to better compression at the zip stage.

Last time I tested this, if you used xz or zstd to compress a BMP with max settings, it made smaller files than PNG.

WebP and JXL is where it’s at.

Max_P, 26 days ago

WebP solves use cases for both PNG and JPEG as the same format can be lossless or lossy, while getting the benefits of a much more powerful codec.

PNG is good for certain types of graphics. Take a full size 48MP picture and encode it in PNG and it’s going to be massive compared to JPEG.

PNG is a pretty simple and effective format but it’s not especially good nowadays, there’s a reason WebP is popular. Much smaller files for the same quality. Same for JPEG XL.

Max_P, 27 days ago

Even then, those requirements are easily satisfied by a Raspberry Pi and most other SBCs out there. Seems rather reasonable to dedicate one to HA. It’s not too crazy when you take into consideration how powerful cheapo hardware can be these days.

Max_P, 27 days ago

Seems like one of the few good use cases for AppImages.

Max_P, 27 days ago

The federation aspect adds complexity. A lot of complexity.

The only thing the fediverse might enable is nobodies like me can theoretically write social media software and actually get them successful without becoming a VC funded social media startup and have to resort to ads and premium tiers.

But things that couldn’t be done without the fediverse as a base? Nah not really.

Note that the concept of federation is really old. Emails are a form of federation. XMPP was federated too. Heck, Diaspora* is pretty old and tried to make open Facebook for almost as long as Facebook’s been mainstream.

Max_P, 27 days ago

I’m still getting activities from Beehaw on my instance, and seemingly I can still interact with them too.

Did they stop accepting new instances or something? Because it definitely still works fine for me.

Max_P, 27 days ago

What emulator did you try to download that was 2GB? They’re definitely not that big, but your choice of emulator might be pulling in a lot of dependencies especially if it’s a Flatpak.

If you install it from apt you should get the smallest size as it can share the most libraries with the rest of the OS.

But that won’t change that if you run KDE but end up with a GTK-based emulator you’ll pull in a good chunk of Gnome to run it. Or if it’s a 32bit application and your first one, it needs to pull in a good chunk of the OS in 32bit variant.

Total installed size really isn’t an indicator of a bloated emulator or any indication it’ll struggle on your old Celeron. I’m kinda curious how you end up with a 2GB though that seems rather extreme.

Max_P, 27 days ago

That’s precisely the problem, motherboard manufacturers hoping your CPU won the lottery and can do the +30%. The solution is to tune for the CPUs that’s maxed out of the box.

Reviewers have been complaining about this for years.

Intel publishes recommendations but lets the manufacturers do what they want because it makes their CPUs look more competitive with AMDs, while getting to blame the motherboards when it inevitably becomes a problem. AMD actually specifies maximums and minimums because they don’t want people to see their CPUs as unstable, especially when they are ahead of Intel with stock settings.

A motherboard should never overclock by default. Never. If the user wants overclock, they should enable it themselves. It’s an issue dating back two decades, there’s an Old New Thing blog post from Raymond Chen about it where he goes into how they were getting a lot of nonsense bug reports. Turns out some PC shops were shipping prebuilts running right at the edge of stability so once the chips degraded it started crashing random apps. Blog post

Max_P, 27 days ago

They’re not for you. If you want to pump 500W into your CPU, AMD will gladly let you do so. But you did so with your own understanding of the risks.

Those specifications are for motherboard manufacturer defaults. Defaults should always be sane and safe. 14th gen Intel motherboards are shipping with no power limit and increased turbo boost durations out of the box. Those can work, but requires really good cooling that the motherboard have no way of knowing if their users will 100% of the time have watercooled PCs.

People have been “fixing” those Intel CPUs by underclocking them where they should always have been in the first place. That shouldn’t be underclocking, that should be the stock reference setting.

Max_P, 27 days ago

That’s fine, the stock is up this quarter with all the hype, they’ll deal with the next quarter when it comes.

This reeks of “make a chip better than Apple’s or y’all are fired” and the ensuing lies throughout the company about the actual performance of the chip to appease management.

Max_P, 27 days ago

The whole chanting the “axe the tax” to Québec where we don’t even have the carbon tax was all I needed. Even if we had it, with all our hydro we wouldn’t pay much carbon tax anyway.

He’s still managed to convince a ton of the rural population that’s true and that he’ll make gas so much cheaper and their profits skyrocket.

Max_P, 28 days ago

At this point every new Android feature people get excited about is stuff we had even in the CyanogenMod days. But gotta generate hype so people get FOMO and buy new devices, maximizing ewaste.

Max_P, 27 days ago

A bigger desk so I can just roll the chair a few inches to switch to the work laptop.

My original plan was a keyboard/mouse only KVM, probably a Teensy or a RPi or something of the sorts. But I got lazy as the extra desk space has just made it a non-issue for me. I also have a Logitech mouse that can switch between devices, so if I was going to really need that setup I’d probably just get the matching keyboard.