freakazoid

freakazoid, 7 months ago to random

When Trump got elected, I discovered a bunch of the people I thought were OK were actually fascists.

The same is true of the Hamas attacks. I discovered that people I thought were OK were the equivalent of white supremacist Trump supporters. I just didn't recognize it because it wasn't about white people or the United States.

freakazoid, 1 month ago to random

What if computing weren't divided into siloed "applications"? What would that look like? How could we do it while still keeping software development decentralized?

freakazoid, 10 months ago to random

I'm really not sure how to feel about WEI. On the one hand, it's DRM, and all DRM is bad. On the other, maybe it will finally present an opportunity to stop pretending YouTube is a viable way to share videos.

But there is another way it could go: if anyone can come up with "good enough" and "lightweight enough" DRM that most people will just allow it and get on with their lives, it could become REALLY INCONVENIENT to avoid it. Computing freedom could be about to take a huge step backward, like it did with the jump to mobile, which was pretty much a death blow.

It doesn't matter if you have a general purpose computer on your lap if a huge fraction of what you do runs in a tamper-proof, surveillance-ridden VM controlled by someone else.

Sure, we can continue to do things outside of it, just like we don't have to use Android or iOS to do anything. But how many people reading this don't carry an Android or iOS device everywhere with them, or even use an open source Android distro? The web landscape is horrible enough already, with even Microsoft not able to maintain a viable browser (and after watching Liz's tribulations with Safari I'd say Apple can't either). And now Google wants to make fully open source browser implementations completely impossible. And I suspect they will be successful, because people just don't care.

freakazoid, 8 months ago to firefox

Every time I reinstall #Firefox I'm reminded that #Mozilla deliberately fails to sync my default search engine from my other browsers. I will probably continue to use Firefox until Mozilla dies, but honestly their death can't come soon enough.

freakazoid, 5 months ago to random

Don't wanna hear about any good things Biden is doing while he's enabling a genocide.

freakazoid, 5 months ago to random

How brainwashed do you have to be to have a president and party actively supporting genocide and then say no it's just the OTHER party who are fascist?

freakazoid, 11 months ago to random

Ok I guess it's time to try to get some LLaMa variant working on my AI box.

freakazoid, 11 months ago to random

Have you considered WHY Meta is having Fediverse admins sign an NDA?

How much do you want to bet it's because they're going to pay them to federate, and in the case of Eugen and Dansup to add features to the software that benefit them? Life-changing money for Eugen and Dansup is pocket change for Meta. The only way we can counter that is through solidarity.

freakazoid, 10 months ago to random

The real reason they're working on quantum computing is that they want a computer that's so hard to build that we can't have one at home. In other words they want to permanently de-democratize computing.

freakazoid, 10 months ago to random

What if I told you that the actual goal of monetary policy is to hold down the standard of living of the working class?

Hear me out.

1. Rising rents are considered bad; they're included in CPI. But rising purchase prices, which represent how accessible the financial security of homeownership is, are considered good, and they are only indirectly included in CPI through "owners' equivalent rent".

2. When things get so expensive that we have to buy something else, they just change the CPI basket so that the thing we can't afford anymore stops having any effect

3. When things get crappier, CPI often includes that as a deflator through "hedonic adjustment". Your donut spare, for example, is considered to add something like $500 to the value of your car over a full size spare

4. When inflation gets too high, the central bank responds by inducing unemployment, i.e. by pushing down working class incomes

5. Because the working class by definition has to work to survive, "full employment" says nothing about the standard of living

6. Rising stock prices are considered good even though most working class people can't afford to own stocks, which makes the stock market a proxy for wealth inequality.

Why would they do this? Surely they're not simply evil. The reason is that their actual goal is to maximize wealth inequality, which is just another term for the power of the most powerful. The whole system has been engineered to transfer ever increasing amounts of power to the people who already have power, and central banks are the most powerful and opaque instrument of wealth transfer that has ever been created.

It's actually really hard to find a good visualization of wealth inequality. Most histograms look at the total wealth controlled by the different percentiles, but the buckets used are vastly different in size. The top 0.1% of households in the US, 132,000 households, control $18 trillion. That's $136 million per houshold if it were evenly distributed which it's not. The bottom 50%, 66 million households, control $3.44 trillion, or $52,000 per household. That's a difference of 2616x.

How can votes matter at all when 1/1000 of the population controls over 5x the resources of a majority of the population? It doesn't matter that the 50-99.9th percentile controls more wealth, because concentrated interests always win out over dispersed interests, and of course most of those people have been bamboozled into thinking they're on the same side as Bezos and Musk even if they don't actually like Bezos or Musk. They're just happy to be in the top half and not the bottom half.

freakazoid, 4 months ago to random

How did we ever get bamboozled into thinking that choosing between the lesser of two evils both appointed by the aristocracy was "democracy"?

freakazoid, 10 months ago to random

Why are governments even allowed to have the option to fail to maintain infrastructure after building it? If it's not needed any more, mothball it or tear it down. If it is, you need to keep maintaining it. If you can't, you're not a government and should pack your things and go home.

freakazoid, 2 months ago to random

How does #V8's Orinoco garbage collector do compaction concurrently?

At first I thought that would require a read barrier, but then I realized that with a dynamic language like Javascript one can just replace each evacuated object with a proxy object that transparently forwards all accesses to the new object. The write barrier will catch any attempts to write new pointers to the block being evacuated. Such an approach couldn't work with full heap compaction, since objects need to be compacted into the space vacated by previously compacted objects, but it works perfectly fine with Orinoco's approach of evacuating blocks based on a fragmentation heuristic. It does mean the block can't be reused until the entire sweep phase finishes, though.

The same technique could theoretically be used to find and forward pointers from the old generation into the nursery, but that would mean the "from" space also couldn't be reused until the sweep phase completed. It's OK to delay reuse of evacuated blocks, because the system doesn't rely on those for new allocations, but it's not OK to delay swapping the spaces in the nursery. So Orinoco does need to use its write barrier to keep track of pointers from the old generation to the nursery.

The space overhead is far lower than for the train algorithm, but the tradeoff is the need to use free lists while moving objects out of the intermediate generation and evacuating old generation blocks, and a longer delay in freeing evacuated blocks. The train algorithm is always able to evacuate a block right away, and it never has fragmentation within blocks.

https://v8.dev/blog/trash-talk

freakazoid, 5 months ago to random

"Anti-cheat" is an especially invasive form of DRM. And call it what it actually is: a rootkit.

freakazoid, 3 months ago to homeassistant

Anyone using Mitsubishi ductless mini-split heat pumps with #HomeAssistant? Any issues/gotchas?

freakazoid, 11 months ago to random

Just because so many people don't fit in "traditional" gender roles doesn't make the modern version of those roles "better," particularly the nuclear family with both parents working and having to hire child care during the day and spending all their time just taking care of basic survival and household needs during their time off from their day job. That's complete garbage, too.

freakazoid, 1 year ago to random

The reactions of people on #Hachyderm make me feel quite comfortable that the decisions other instances made to silence them or defederate were good ones. "You have to interact with us poor rich tech workers no matter what we do or you can't claim to support diversity!!1!"

freakazoid, 1 month ago to random

@alcinnz I seem to recall you were talking about text rendering at some point. If I want to do the actual rasterization myself, it seems like the best approach is to use at least Harfbuzz and FreeType (and maybe FreeBidi?). I've figured out how to set the drawing callbacks for Harfbuzz, but I can't figure out how to get it to actually make those calls; I just see how to get glyph indexes back. Do you know what I'm missing?

freakazoid, 7 months ago to random

I don't know anything about Palestine Action, and I haven't been paying much attention to the BBC's coverage of the situation, so I don't have much comment on the vandalism itself, but I do have a question about this quote:

“Regardless of your view on what’s going on this is not the way. Props to the security team on duty tonight.”

When the flow of information is controlled by the powerful in order to maintain, in an alleged democracy, a status quo that is resulting in genocide, what IS the way? Frankly, one should be happy this action only involves property damage. Historically it has involved guillotines and worse. And I suspect that's what it's going to come to. Not necessarily over the current crisis, but eventually.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/oct/14/bbc-building-red-paint-protest-israel-hamas-coverage

freakazoid, 9 months ago to random

What domain registrar should I use? Need to register a new domain and don't want to add another to transfer off of gandi.net.

freakazoid, 6 months ago to random

Maybe you can block Trump when he wins in 2024 because the Democrats refused to take a stand against genocide.

freakazoid, 5 months ago to random

Mozilla needs to die. They're just perpetuating the lie that the GoogleNet is a world we can live in.

They're basically the Democrats.

freakazoid, 2 months ago to random

If "right anarchists" are really authoritarians, doesn't that make the left-right political axis a lie? The only axis that matters seems to be authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian.

freakazoid, 11 months ago to random

We let search engines crawl the web because they provided something useful in return. But now both the search engines and the AI companies have realized they can just follow the trail blazed by the early search companies while just keeping everything for themselves.

I'm not sure what the right response is. Probably a web that's extremely hostile to automated crawling of any kind.

freakazoid, 11 months ago to random

The question on every politician's mind when it comes to the environment: "What additional costs can we impose on consumers that the market won't transfer to corporate shareholders?"