blacklight

blacklight, 9 months ago to Netflix

I couldn't pinpoint for a while what I felt was very wrong with #Bridgeton, and all the "forced racial correctness" of several #Netflix productions.

As I read yesterday about the Demerara massacre again (where British official brutally suppressed a non-violent protest in Guyana's sugar plantations exactly 200 years ago), I could finally pinpoint what is wrong.

Productions like Bridgeton are a shameful attempt of whitewashing the sins of colonialism and racism. Nothing less, nothing more.

They depict this ideal late-18th century Britain as a place where folks of African or Caribbean descent held noble titles, intermingle with white nobility, and even the queen herself is a racial mix.

Nothing could be further away from reality.

At that time, Britain was still all in with the lucrative slave trade, it used to indulge in what later was formalized into Kipling's racist doctrine of "the superior white man educating the inferior black man", and it used some among the most violent repression strategies of the time to suppress any form of dissent in its colonies.

Given the popularity of such productions with the young, I'm afraid that we're raising a generation that will underestimate the atrocities committed by their ancestors.

Can you imagine a Netflix production that takes place in the 1940s and it shows Jews and Nazi Germans peacefully coexisting and intermingling with one another? If we would be outraged at such a distortion of German history, why do we allow it when it comes to British history?

blacklight, 9 months ago to ubuntu

So after Red Hat #Ubuntu has also decided to go all the way down the enshittification path.

Nobody likes Snaps, but the folks at Canonical really do, so if you want to use their distro you must really like Snaps.

Actually, everything in the world must be Snaps!

https://www.webpronews.com/ubuntu-23-10s-app-store-will-block-deb-files-when-a-snap-is-available/

blacklight, 9 months ago to random

matrix.platypush.tech is temporarily down for maintenance.

The SQLite db has reached a size of 80 GB, and sync requests from Element clients time out half of the time.

I'm now migrating the db to Postgres (something I should have probably done a while ago) and compacting those noisy tables.

The server should be back as soon as those 80 GB are properly migrated and compacted.

blacklight, 9 months ago to random

Tell me how keen you are to raise a generation that sees the world through the lenses of dogma rather than the scientific method, and I'll tell you how far down the fascist spectrum you are.

https://www.science.org/content/article/science-free-schooling-israel-s-ultra-orthodox-draws-fire

blacklight, 9 months ago to random

An update on #Piped instances being down: it doesn't seem to be another breaking change on the API. It seems that YouTube is simply blocking straight away traffic that comes from known ytproxy IP addresses: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/issues/2820#issuecomment-1679954723

That explains why new instances that are running on new IPs are still working (for now).

Of course there are countless ways to mitigate this (using a VPN on my server and rotating IP addresses every couple of hours could be one), but I really don't want to do this anymore.

I'm really done playing this cat and dog game with motherfucking Google. I've spent years bypassing whichever restrictions they come up with against youtube-dl, Piped and Invidious. I just want to watch my videos in peace now.

Now they've reached the point of straight away banning IP addresses. There's nothing technically challenging to bypass here anymore, no new mechanism to break, nothing that a geek like me would enjoy investigating and breaking. There's just a frustrated company struggling to remain profitable and relevant that has made it a mission to go after that 2% of users that use alternative clients, and they're just banning IP addresses like frustrated IRC admins in the 1990s.

Now I just wish those parasites to die out while I move on with my life. I hope content creators will do so too, as their precious content is held hostage of a corporation that doesn't give a fuck about them, pays them peanuts (if it pays them at all), and those payouts will also decrease as the product becomes less profitable, and it'll not be afraid of limiting the distribution of their content if doing so has a chance of improving their own profit line.

Come on creators, if I've gone through so much trouble to bypass YouTube's barriers was just to view your content. I'd be much happier to support you folks on any other platform.

blacklight, 9 months ago to Youtube

My #Piped instance is currently down, and so does every other Piped instance I know of: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/issues/2809.

We started getting 403 on /videoplayback on the ytproxy starting ~12h ago.

This is most likely #YouTube trying to show that they're serious on cracking down on folks who watch videos without watching ads.

I wish that more content creators were on platforms like #Nebula. I wish there were more of them on #PeerTube too, but I understand the point that many of them make - PeerTube can't be monetized, and not everybody feels like always doing charity.

I'm happy to pay even $10 per month for a platform owned by the content creators themselves (or even a pay-as-you-go model), rather than contributing to Google's spyware while getting interrupted by ads every 10 minutes.

So if this is the last nail in the coffin of my experience as a YouTube consumer, let it be it. Cracking whatever new algorithm the folks at Google have decided to implement in order to ensure that only those who are logged in and watch ads can watch videos is fun for a bit, but it becomes boring after a while. At some point I'd just like to move on with my life and watch videos on my tv without having to debug youtube-dl or Piped on a monthly basis.

And things are only going to get worse from here. A product that is profitable doesn't try to bring in more revenue by shoveling more ads down their users' throat, nor by changing their access control algorithms on such a regular basis just to break the experience for that 2-3% that uses alternative clients. As YouTube becomes more desperate for profits, they'll care less and less of user experience, inter-operability and turning their whole product into shit in the process.

If any of you know of alternative video platforms like Nebula, with high-quality content and owned by content creators themselves, let me know in the comments. I'm happy to support whoever starts to build a serious alternative to the YouTube cage.

blacklight, 9 months ago to random

This is one of the geekest (and most addictive) things I've seen in a while.

It's a videogame where you're the operating system.

You've got a pool of processes that you have to schedule on 4 CPUs, avoiding resource starvation. And you have to remember to deallocate processes when they're stuck on I/O, as well as swap off those that occupy too many pages in RAM.

The goal is to avoid getting the user angry, killing too many frozen processes and eventually rebooting the OS (you).

https://drfreckles42.itch.io/youre-the-os

HalvarFlake, 9 months ago to random

Downloading a YouTube video should be just as covered by "fair use" as recording a song from the radio onto cassette was.

Unfortunately, courts tend to continuously weaken society in the grand bargain between society and copyright holders.

https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-dl-site-goes-offline-as-hosting-provider-enforces-court-ordered-ban-230809/

blacklight, 10 months ago to random

A good article that explains why Southern Europe's with low birth rates starts to be more serious than Northern Europe's.

It flips the stereotypes of "good Christian women stay at home and have children" on its head, now that Denmark has a higher fertility rate (1.78) than Malta (1.13).

And it shows why the natalist policies that the right likes so much (because they provide a more palable alternative to migration to their mostly racist electorate) don't work.

You don't encourage people to have more kids by giving them a one-off payment, nor a piece of land to harvest, nor a tax break.

You encourage them to have more kids by giving them a house and a stable job before their mid 30s, a way out of their parents' house, the guarantee that they won't lose their job or give up on their career plans if they have a kid, and by giving them affordable daycare, affordable nannies, family-friendly workplaces, and by designing child-friendly cities. And by having good migration policies to bridge the remaining gap between your ferility rate and 2.0.

The ideas that the governments of Italy, Poland and Hungary are proposing to encourage local births (and also the Economist's final paragraph in this article, "Fix, don't bribe") remind me a lot of the ius trium liberorum instead.

It was a piece of legislation signed by Augustus about two millennia ago.

The fertility problems afflicting ancient Rome weren't very different from those afflicting Europe today. As women became more educated and the population overall more urbanized, the upper classes started to have less and less kids.

Amid fears of seeing the Roman nobility and ruling class going extinct within a couple of generations, Augustus signed an act that gave families with at least three kids a wide range of priviliges - among those, the fathers weren't expected to serve in the army, and the mothers were allowed to benefit from shares of the inheritance that were otherwise reserved only to male children.

It didn't work.

Not only: it mostly became an act of legitimate bribery, as local governors would often grant the status to friends and clients, regardless of the size of their families.

In order to prevent abuses, the law was amended so that the emperor gave a generous reward (a half of the transgressor's wealth) to anyone who reported someone illicitly benefiting from the program.

That didn't fix it either. It only created a network of professional spies whose only job was to report alleged violations - a good way of getting very rich, very fast.

The problem got so serious that the emperor was eventually forced to slash the reward only to a quarter of the transgressor's wealth. And, guess what? That didn't fix it either. The law remained a sort of dead limb of the Roman legal apparatus, ineffective, used solely for clientelistic purposes, and impossible to revert (all senators loved it, of course), until Justinian finally repelled it in 534 AD.

Let's hope that it won't take our civilization 500 years to learn the same lessons.

https://links.fabiomanganiello.com/share/64d6be8e295207.07192136

blacklight, 10 months ago to firefox

It's coming, it's finally coming! 🎉

I tried to build my Platypush and RSS reader extensions for Firefox for mobile for a while, without much success.

Documentation was scarce, development tools buggy, and eventually only a small handful of extensions was supported.

Now #Firefox is planning to finally make the development of extensions for mobile easier, and this blog article clearly outlines the changes required to get your extension to work on mobile too!

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/08/10/prepare-your-firefox-desktop-extension-for-the-upcoming-android-release/

blacklight, 10 months ago to random

London 2016: "We want to exit the European Union without exiting the European common market"

London 2023: "We want to break encryption without really breaking encryption"

The British ruling class is either incompetent of dishonest. There's really no other explanation behind such a degree of State-sponsored imbecility.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/08/10/1453223/uk-defends-plan-to-demand-access-to-encrypted-messages-to-protect-children

blacklight, 10 months ago to random

Higher primary interest rates mean that some banks have managed to rake amazing returns from loans.

But if you're a bank that has made in 6 months literally twice the profits that you've made in the whole previous year, and you aren't applying to the savings the same high interest rates that you're applying to loans, you deserve to get the shit taxed out of your profits.

Rising interest rates is a painful decision for a central bank: you're basically nudging people to invest and spend less and save more in order to bring inflation down. Cooling down the economy in this way isn't the thing that makes you win elections.

But those interests have to apply both to loans and savings. Otherwise you're telling people to spend less, but you aren't giving them any incentives to save - hence pushing them to invest in more risky products if they want to get higher returns.

We're now in a situation where the average interest rates on loans and mortgages in the Netherlands have gone up from ~1.5-2% to almost 5% in less than two years, but the average interest rate on saving has increased from just -0.5% to just around 0.25%.

The difference between the interests that the banks cash in and those that they pay out is driving up their big profits - in a moment where more and more people are struggling to get access to credit or get their basic necessities covered.

If banks don't play fair, and they don't pass higher interests to their customers' savings accounts too, then they should be forced to redistribute their excess profits via taxation.

What appals me is that Italy, a country run by a government with far-right links, has taken up a leadership role in taxing the shit out of banks raking up excess profits without passing the benefits of higher rates to their customers. Things are still largely silent elsewhere in Europe - even in countries ruled by more left-wing governments that should be all about wealth redistribution.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2023/08/rabobank-first-half-earnings-nearly-double-on-interest-rates/

blacklight, 10 months ago to random

Words matter.

Gaza and the West Bank should go under the name of "Occupied Palestinian Territories".

The name itself tells you what this is about (an illegal occupation) more than any hollow "we unconditionally support Israel" bullshit.

https://theconversation.com/australias-decision-to-again-use-the-term-occupied-palestinian-territories-brings-it-into-line-with-international-law-211260

blacklight, 10 months ago to random

I'm actually not entirely against AIs #scraping the web.

Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in. If there's some content out there that is freely accessible, and it can be used to make large models better, it will certainly be used - we shouldn't be too naive or ideological about that.

I've always supported total freedom of scraping for everyone. I've always supported a world were all the content on the Internet can also be parsed by machines (that was the entire idea behind the semantic web). Once public content is out there, we lose control over who accesses it and for what purposes - that's simply how the web works.

But if Google and Meta are suddenly in this "we ♥ scraping" mood, I'd expect them to stick to their words and allow bidirectional scraping at least.

As an AI geek, I'd love to train my models on large corpora of audio extracted from YouTube videos. Or what people post in public Facebook groups when particular events happen. Or how the price of a product fluctuates on Amazon as the result of several external factors.

But I can't legally do any of these things. Those platforms are sealed, their APIs are very limited by design, only a limited amount of researchers can access some of that data (after signing lengthy NDAs and agreeing that the mother company will decide if the research can be published), and they will have tons of frontend-only checks to ensure that only a human downloads that content - and that they watch a sufficient amount of ads in the process. Not only - the developers scraping software like youtube-dl also get regularly harassed by Google.

So how come should I tolerate a world where if you're big enough you can afford to scrape the shit out of everyone, and use that knowledge to become even bigger and more powerful, but nobody is allowed to do the same with your own content?

We urgently need regulation that creates a level playing field when it comes to automated access to online information. Freedom of scraping means freedom of growing. We cant give this freedom only to those who are big enough.

We need to make web scraping a fundamental human right.

And large companies should be compelled with sharing their data without barriers to scrapers too, if they aren't willing to build proper APIs.

Until that happens, I'll keep scraping the shit out of those bastards without feeling an inch of guilt.

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/it-will-be-the-greatest-theft-in-the-entire-history-of-humanity-indie-hackers-weigh-in-on-big-ai-companies-scraping-the-web-6e78a4a4b7

blacklight, 10 months ago to random

When explaining why AI is a high friction industry with a few gatekeepers, we often focus on the high-level side of things (only a fee companies have both enough data and computing power to train large models etc.).

And we often forget the absolute monopoly that rules anything close to the silicon.

>95% of the ML models today are trained on Nvidia GPUs. And Nvidia GPUs have an absolute monopoly over both the hardware (the GPU itself) and the middleware (CUDA) in the form of proprietary tech without a single competitor.

https://matt-rickard.com/nvidias-cuda-monopoly

blacklight, 10 months ago to SmartHome

Can you imagine buying a fridge, an oven or a washing machine, just for it to suddenly stop working after 2-3 years because the producer decides to turn off their servers?

Even if the device itself is perfectly functional from a hardware point of view, its inability to call home suddenly makes it as useful as a bulky rock sitting in your house.

This is exactly the situation where the "#SmartHome" sits today. I bump into news like these at least once a week. "#IoT maker X decided to stop investing into product Y. Users of Y, who probably invested a few hundreds/thousands bucks in the product very recently, will suddenly discover that their smart device is now dumb. No apology/refund is required/expected from X's side"

1. We need a regulation that guarantees proper support from smart devices. If I buy a fridge or any home appliance, I'd expect it to work for at least 10 years. The same should apply to home appliances that just so happen to run some spyware inside. Going after e-waste means also going after those who suddenly turn thousands of devices into e-waste by switching off a single server.

• The smart home still has plenty of advantages if you build it yourself. Don't rely on people who just want to iterate fast and break things when it comes to the stuff that runs the things in your house.

https://www.t3.com/news/british-gas-starts-to-turn-off-hive-smart-home-devices-forever

blacklight, 10 months ago to Pixelfed

I have (re)-installed my local #Pixelfed instance, and I definitely love the progress done in terms of UX and features.

There are still two quite important features that have been deployed on the main instance but apparently not merged upstream though:

1. Login with Mastodon: I'd like to use my own main account for Pixelfed, or at least have it explicitly linked, rather than having yet another separate account on another service.

2. Instagram JSON import: that would really save me a lot of time. The feature is present on the main Pixelfed instance, but unless I'm missing something obvious I couldn't find a way to enable it on mine.

@dansup any hopes/plans to see these features merged upstream?

blacklight, 10 months ago to random

If you can't be convinced otherwise about something, it's a sign that you might be cargo-cult thinking.
https://movingthelimit.com/a-practical-way-to-detect-cargo-cult-thinking/