IMHO if you don’t have a globally-reachable address or forwarded port, you are not really a participant of the internet, you are just a receptacle xD

One service I never see mentioned is OVPN. They have a 1-to-1 feature parity with mullvad and were an easy drop-in replacement when mullvad closed their ports:

• wireguard
• port forwarding
• no usernames/emails/registration, only account numbers
• crypto payments/cash in the mail
• same price as mullvad
• multiple device keys
• multihop
• no bandwidth limits
• setup guides
• status dashboard

I used mullvad for years, sad to see them go, and all my scripts basically worked without any change other than the server addresses/public keys. Only downside is they don’t have as many users so not as many servers. I wish more people would join up so I get more IPs to choose from :D

I know you are just nitpicking on whether the current dictatorship has an official policy to deport American citizens, but I want to clarify, for the benefit of anyone else who might not be aware of this, that the American government has in fact already deported multiple American citizens by mistake. This GAO investation found that while ICE doesn’t keep track of such stats, based on the data that is available it must report that indeed “ICE and CBP took enforcement actions against some U.S. citizens.” The numbers are in the hundreds-arrests-per-year range, and dozens-per-year deportations. There are many interviews in the press with American citizens who say they were illegally detained or deported. Some Americans had to sneak back across the border after being illegally deported. Many Americans sued and won settlements for their illegal deportations, so now it is official court record that such events happened.

This is not just a matter of ambiguity, cases of “who can really know whether that person was a citizen or not”. These are cases where CBP has been clearly negligent, where the victims had been able to procure for display real birth certificates, real passports, and the agents wouldn’t look at them. The court-appointed lawyers would “lose” the documents and claim none were received in front of the judge, or there would not even be court hearings at all, just deportations. When sued later, no one would take responsibility, no one reprimanded, just settlements paid out. Sometimes the CBP would get sued, receive a court judgement affirming that the victim was a citizen who was unlawfully deported, then ignore the judgement and deport them again. This has all already happened… under past administrations. The implication is that the willful negligence under the current one will not get better.

For something like a browser, you don’t even need to “install” at all. You only need to acquire the standalone/portable executable from the browser developer’s official website. For example you get Waterfox from https://www.waterfox.net/download/. If you read the PKGBUILD, even if you can’t see through all the potential malicious tricks you’ll at least find that that’s basically all it claims to do: download a binary from official website and put it somewhere. In this case “installing” means using root permissions to stick it in /usr/bin, so all users on the computer can run it. But since almost all home computers only have a single user, you can skip having to give it (temporary) root access by saving it in your home directory instead. I also run the binary inside its own Firejail so it doesn’t even have access to my personal files. You are always trusting someone, be it the Arch maintainers, the AUR contributors, or the independent browser developers, but this way the least number of parties get the least number of permissions.

By some argument, section 103 of the DMCA (which is what grandparent post is referring to) does make it illegal to even talk about DRM circumvention methods.

illegal to: (2) “manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in” a device, service or component which is primarily intended to circumvent “a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work,” and which either has limited commercially significant other uses or is marketed for the anti-circumvention purpose.

If youtube implements an “access control measure” by splicing the ads with the video and disabling the fast-forward button during the ad, and you go on a forum and say “Oh yeah, you can write a script that detects the parts that are ads because the button is disabled, and force-fast-forwards through those”, some lawyer would argue that you have offered to the public a method to circumvent an access control measure, and therefore your speech is illegal. If you actually write the greasemonkey script and post it online, that would definitely be illegal.

This is abhorrent to the types among us for whom “code IS free speech”, but this scenario is not just a hypothetical. DMCA has been controversial for a long time. Digg collapsed in part because of the user revolt over the admins deleting any post containing the leaked AACS decryption key, which is just a 32-digit number. Yet “speaking” the number alone, aloud, on an online platform (and nothing else!) was enough for MPAA to send cease and desist letters to Digg under DMCA, and Digg folded.

*Yawn!* Wake me up when they stop requiring phone numbers to sign up.

Piped/invidious work by scrapping the video chunks directly from google and proxying them through volunteer servers. They will stop working as soon as google gets around to locking down the APIs that they are abusing, or blocks their server IPs.

This is like that Key and Peele sketch where they rob the bank by working in there for 20 years.

That’s why Google is pushing hard their Web Environment Integrity. It’s DRM for the browser! They want the TPM chip in your computer to attest that the code running processing the video stream is authentic. Then you can’t slice out the ads because you do not have physical access to the inside of TPM. With HDCP encryption on the HDMI video output, you gonna need to point a literal video camera at the physical screen to DVR the video and slice out the ads later.

They’ve been working hard for decades to lock down the video pipeline with TPM and HDCP and now WEI. They said “don’t worry about it” and we let them. They are really close to snapping the trap shut!

Now please excuse me, my tongue is falling off with all the acronyms…

We are totally gonna get DVRs back, aren’t we 🤣?

It’s like… I keep imagining what if I were a Manchurian Candidate CEO and tried to destroy the entire value of my company as surely as possible before being found out, what decisions would I make? And I must say, what spez and musk are doing keeps surprising me at every turn, because even in my imagination I have not come up with schemes as effective as theirs.

Top 25 AI jokes from the paper appendix:

• T1. Why did the scarecrow win an award?
  Because he was outstanding in his field. (140)
• T2. Why did the tomato turn red?
  Because it saw the salad dressing. (122)
• T3. Why was the math book sad?
  Because it had too many problems. (121)
• T4. Why don’t scientists trust atoms?
  Because they make up everything. (119)
• T5. Why did the cookie go to the doctor?
  Because it was feeling crumbly. (79)
• T6. Why couldn’t the bicycle stand up by itself?
  Because it was two-tired. (52)
• T7. Why did the frog call his insurance company?
  He had a jump in his car. (36)
• T8. Why did the chicken cross the playground?
  To get to the other slide. (33)
• T9. Why was the computer cold?
  Because it left its Windows open. (23)
• T10. Why did the hipster burn his tongue?
  He drank his coffee before it was cool. (21)
• T11. Why don’t oysters give to charity?
  Because they’re shellfish. (21)
• T12. Why did the computer go to the doctor?
  Because it had a virus. (20)
• T13. Why did the banana go to the doctor?
  Because it wasn’t peeling well. (19)
• T14. Why did the coffee file a police report?
  Because it got mugged. (18)
• T15. Why did the golfer bring two pairs of pants?
  In case he got a hole in one. (13)
• T16. Why did the man put his money in the freezer?
  He wanted cold hard cash. (13)
• T17. Why don’t seagulls fly over the bay?
  Because then they’d be bagels. (13)
• T18. Why did the chicken go to the seance?
  To talk to the other side. (11)
• T19. Why was the belt sent to jail?
  Because it held up a pair of pants. (11)
• T20. Why did the chicken cross the road?
  To get to the other side. (7)
• T21. Why did the computer go to the doctor?
  Because it had a byte. (6)
• T22. Why did the cow go to outer space?
  To see the moooon. (6)
• T23. Why did the man put his money in the blender?
  He wanted to make liquid assets. (6)
• T24. Why don’t skeletons fight each other?
  They don’t have the guts. (5)
• T25. What do you call an alligator in a vest?
  An investigator. (5)

OpenAI doomposting is a scam because…

• making their AI look more dangerous also makes it look more competent, allowing them to fleece more money out of investors before everyone realizes shit doesn’t work

Got it, thanks!

OpenAI is saying they believe superintelligence “could arrive this decade” and “could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction” but all we worry about is the salaries.

I’m on Linux with no swap, and can experience CPU spikes when running out of RAM. The 100% CPU usage is illusory - the CPU isn’t actually doing any calculations. When I tried using a profiler at such time, 100% of the CPU usage was something like “waiting on input/output”, which htop counts as usage.

Why is it doing input/output? Linux has a “feature” where under memory starvation it evicts pages of executable code (like shared libraries) from memory, because it knows it can load them from disk when needed. But what turns out happening instead is that the kernel will run one line of code from one thread, evict everything, load the code and shared libraries for the other thread from disk (takes loooong time!), run one line of code, evict everything, switch/repeat… This leads to disk thrashing (when we still had disks) and makes system unusable.

Is there any way, like via config or command line options, to set a hard limit on PostgreSQL memory usage, such that it would guarantee not to consume more than 1.5GB, say? Barring that (or adding more RAM indefinitely), look into the “OOM-killer” Linux feature. There is some way to configure the “ferocity” level of the watchdog inside the kernel so that it kills the process with the largest memory consumption sooner, instead of trying to thrash around by evicting even more shared memory. That will kill the Postgress process and force it to restart, but you say it works fine normally at around 0.8GB? Then the spike of runaway memory consumption is either a bug/memory leak, or a rare special event like rearranging/compressing the database somehow.

There is also a link to Instances at the bottom of any page.

From a game theory of greedy agents point of view, what is the number value of a worthless app? As in, if Reddit offered to buy Apollo for $1 right now, what greedy reason would there be to refuse?

Currently the key provisioning system is really only meant for developers, key requests have to be manually approved by reddit admins. You couldn’t have millions of users jump in to request their own keys. This uncertainty is why the 3pa devs considered and discarded the option of letting users provide their own keys, choosing to shut down their apps entirely. Making the system official and automated via Reddit Premium would have solved that.

All the 3pa’s shut down business the moment the actual API prices were announced. This wasn’t a protest move, the prices were simply 20 times higher than what they were promised and impossible to work into their business model. Reddit couldn’t have overcharged and continued as normal - it was a deliberate move to kill off 3pa while pretending they are not. Reddit COULD have charged this API price to users directly via Reddit Premium, but failed to do so.

All they had to do was offer API keys with Reddit Premium. Plug-and-play into your 3rd-party-app of choice. Can’t believe those dum-dums chose to kill off their golden goose instead.

Everyone should be applying to be a mod, then keeping the subreddits closed :D spez said that they will not force communities to reopen, only that they will be replacing mods