Technology

"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Probably a lot of us are tired of Musks ramblings but I just thought this is clearly showing why he is so dangerous.

I think Musk may be more of a psychopath than Donald Trump, who is more of a narcissist but hopefully not a full blown maniac.

This is one amazing blog post. I don't think I've ever identified so much with what they are saying here.

Some quotes from the beginning of the article:

Instead, the tech industry has evolved into an absolute mess. And it’s getting worse instead of better! Our tower of complexity is now so tall that we seriously consider slathering LLMs on top to write the incomprehensible code in the incomprehensible frameworks so we don’t have to.

Programmers today are impatient for success. They start planning for a billion users before they write their first line of code. In fact, nowadays, we train them to do this without even knowing they’re doing it. Everything they’ve ever been taught revolves around scaling.

In modern computing, we tolerate long builds, and then docker builds, and uploading to container stores, and multi-minute deploy times before the program runs, and even longer times before the log output gets uploaded to somewhere you can see it, all because we’ve been tricked into this idea that everything has to scale.

This could be promising!

In case you still visit reddit from time to time, here's how the get rid of their ads (i.e. "Promoted" posts):

If you use Brave, right click anywhere in the page and select "Brave -> Manage custom filters". If you use uBlock, click on the toolbar icon, then settings (gear icon), then go to the "My filters" tab.

Enter the following code:

www.reddit.com##[id^="t3_za\="]

Save and reload the page. Promoted posts should be gone now.

First of all, sorry if there is a better place for this post, but it seemed fitting.

I can't tell you how recent this update is, but it's certainly not a welcome change. I would never, ever, under any circumstance voluntarily hand over all of my computer's data to a remote server in who-knows-where. I'd literally rather burn the hard drive myself than just give it away for free. I'm honestly insulted they think that is something we all want by default. Can't be uninstalled via Programs and Features, nor can it be viewed or rated on the windows app store in case you have that turned on.

There is probably a way to locate it and make a firewall rule to block it, might be in the SystemApps folder.

EDIT: It was in the \Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_cw5n1h2txyewy folder, you can go to Windows Defender Firewall > Advanced Settings > Outbound Rules, create a new rule, select program, block and then do the same for Inbound. Hopefully this permanently disables any chance of MS' cloud getting their greasy grubby stripy shirt button cuffed hands anywhere near any file that you've even glanced at.

This is pretty cool and one of the top comments on Hacker News describes it the best:

It's easier to understand this if you look at the onion protocol. Broadly, it introduces noise between all users on the network by constantly sending and receiving random bytes to and from each node. This prevents external listeners from figuring out where the main server is. Originally designed to protect naval command ships, it was later used for the "dark web". If you don't know which node is the server, you can't shut it down, or read data off of it. Simplex does something similar. A connects to B. B connects to C. And A and C connect. They all chat. but there is no way to know A, B, or C, because from the outside, it all looks like: X connects to Y, X connects to Y, X connects to Y. So who spoke to whom? This is great. Even if "the authorities" demand access to chat logs, first, they won't know what to ask for. Chats between whom? Second, they still won't know who spoke to whom even if they have all the data. It's anonymized chats. They would have to sift through all of it. It still won't prevent someone invading privacy if they have physical access to your device, since the identities are stored locally for your usage convenience.

Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37105477

As usual, very quick fixes for these vulnerabilities on Linux.

This flaw is now patched in the 5.10.179-5 kernel package of Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” and 6.1.38-4 kernel package of Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm”. However, to fully mitigate the vulnerability, users will also have to install the intel-microcode 3.20230808.1~deb11u1 package.

Infosec super-band the Cult of the Dead Cow has released Veilid (pronounced vay-lid), an open source project applications can use to connect up clients and transfer information in a peer-to-peer decentralized manner.

The idea being here that apps – mobile, desktop, web, and headless – can find and talk to each other across the internet privately and securely without having to go through centralized and often corporate-owned systems. Veilid provides code for app developers to drop into their software so that their clients can join and communicate in a peer-to-peer community.

I think this sounds absolutely awesome. So when can we integrate this into Lemmy for private messaging?

Who is surprised by this? Its a bone headed move to force people back into the office. There are literally only advantages to working at least hybrid, up to 4 days per week. At least in the technology field, if you are someone who needs to focus to get shit done.

I dont know who is a neovim user here, but its one of my favorite code editors for a long time.

I didnt use vim much but neovim is built on its core principles.

Editors come and go. Right now its VS Code that is popular. But it will eventually fade away and be replaced by something else. As a person who also really dislike big tech, I want to use an editor that doesnt come from a big tech company. And neovim is just amazing.

If anyone wants tips on resources etc, just ping me.