• 0 Posts
  • 320 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 21st, 2025

help-circle
  • It appears there are replies to this thread that call into question many of the things stated

    it reeks of punditry - surface level knowledge and worst case scenarios presented with lots of confidence. fwiw the persons quoted qualifications have absolutely nothing to do with law. They are a “blockchain” and data science person who also does venture capital and angel investing, aka a classic “I don’t know when to stay in my fucking lane and think that because I made a shitload of money I must be a genius at everything ever” type


  • Ending asylums began long before Regan

    Regan ramped up funneling them into prisons, which is basically why the Kirk quote is disingenuous bullshit. Can supportive rehabilitative programs be the answer, even if they’re involuntary and potentially lifelong? Maybe. But that’s not what happens a lot of the time. American politicians, especially republicans, continually push to either limit funding as much as possible, end, or privatize (which only works for the more lucrative things like drug and alcohol and disability services and even those are widely considered to suffer under private equity). Of course, their solution for “end” is throw them to the wolves, which in practice means homelessness, crime, increasing drug use, etc and eventually prison when those things disrupt communities. Kirk wasn’t an idiot. He’s like Newsom, he knew the most likely place these people end up is prison and he didn’t care bc he saw them as subhuman scum

    The fact of the matter is treating serious and persistent mental illness is not lucrative. In fact it is a financial sink if you choose a rehabilitative model, and even an asylum model, which is generally more cost efficient (but can be done with some dignity) is still quite expensive.

    The fucked up part is that prisons are quite expensive too but less so and as a result are quite lucrative to their owners. They also are culturally built into this sense of redemptive justice, as if punishment of the offender actually does something to bring peace to the offended besides deluding them that the chaotic and violent world won’t wrong them again because one unjust act has been forcibly atoned without creating any sense of remorse before returning the person back to society (just exposing them to one of the most traumatizing and violent environments for years or decades with no support, what could go wrong?).

    So we ignore mountains of evidence that rehabilitation oriented programming is overall more successful because it’s not perfect, someone will still get murdered and assaulted! And they won’t get horribly punished! And we stick with our terrible system that objectively results in much more people getting murdered and assaulted





  • The 3ds free shop debacle with titlekeys being easily reused was pretty bad too. Like I suppose it could happen to anyone but if that happened to MS or Sony you know it would be patched in a matter of days (or hours, even) whereas the free shop worked for almost 2 full years. It is absolutely unimaginable in the modern context to think that a modern gaming company would allow an exploit that allowed you to simply download any game or update you wanted from their cdn and have your console immediately see it as legit. To think that such a thing would go on for years is mind blowing nowadays (and partially explains why the switch 2 is draconian, though it doesn’t excuse it. Just do better at security)


  • What kind of phone, laptop, game console, car, iot devices, etc do you have? I guarantee you support this stuff somewhere in your life. It’s inescapable.

    But to answer you more directly apathy and consumerism. Why do people buy the switch 2 despite extremely anti consumer practices? Because they want to play slightly better Mario kart. Why do people buy a macbook? Because they want a computer that largely “just works”.

    With phones it’s a bit different though. The choices are slowly being taken from you. It’s still possible right this second to buy something with an open bootloader but in 2030? Maybe not so much unless you’re cool with going back to a flip phone


  • Different ways:

    Sometimes it’s a cryptographic key thing, if the bootloader doesn’t see an image signed with a trusted key it won’t boot.

    Sometimes it’s a flag set in storage that is secure and not writable. Bootloader checks the flag, if it’s set then it enforces signature verification.

    Sometimes it’s a hardware thing. Newer chips can come with programmable fuses that can be set to pop. This literally severs an electrical connection within the soc or cpu or whatever and then that is the flag. The nintendo switch’s tegra used this to prevent downgrading; if you upgraded legitimately you’d “burn fuses” and then would be locked on that firmware permanently. downgrading could potentially brick the system. (Maybe someone’s figured out a way around this now, I haven’t fucked with switch stuff since tears of the kingdom came out).

    There’s other ways too.

    Defeating these methods is generally quite difficult. Sometimes you get lucky and a glaring bootloader exploit is found early on (fusee gelee for the switch) or one that applies to many generations of hardware (checkm8, unpatchable bootrom exploit for iphone 4s-iphone x) but at the same time companies have learned to harden their shit as much as possible and throw money at people who do find these exploits. Even nintendo, who has been notoriously laughably bad at this kind of thing seems to have come much harder at the switch 2. The only thing released to date is a minor userland exploit and even if something more substantial is released they’ll just brick your console for finding/running it



  • Stoicism is frequently misunderstood and generally the concept of equanimity is a positive one, which is why it transcends stoicism. upekkha as one of the four divine attitudes in Buddhism, the abrahamic religions generally push the whole “god did it so trust in the plan” angle (Christian forbearance and I forget the Jewish word but Islam comes from aslama, peace from surrender), etc. Even Epicureanism had ataraxia

    Absurdism makes sense in a post religious world (depending on audience, obviously) and is more hopeful than nihilism. Existentialism is interesting in comparison: can we create meaning? Is meaning that we create transient? I don’t know.

    Both absurdism and stoicism make the important acknowledgement that reality is indifferent to your plight


  • That’s frankly been the case for a while now unless you’re a AAA gamer or 3d rendering or doing LLMs or something. I used a laptop from 2012 until 2022 then replaced it with a 2019 laptop (i9, Radeon 5600) which I’m using now and plan to use until at least 2030. For the vast majority of us that just browse, watch videos, use office software, teleconference, compile small projects, and the occasional indie game/emulator old hardware is fine. Consumerism makes you think it’s not.





  • I am fairly militant about privacy and data security so I go POE and self hosted. My cameras are all wired and sync to a server in my basement. I trust no corporations.

    That said the cameras I have are reolink. They do have options for WiFi cameras that use apps and such but I don’t use this. You can also use the app with the POE camera but I don’t do this.

    I have the cameras on an isolated lan with no internet access. All of my smart home stuff is like this. If it doesn’t work on an isolated vlan then it is useless to me and I won’t buy it. I then forward the rtsp stream from the cameras to homeassistant which has tailscale so I can view the cameras remotely.

    At one point I used homebridge in homeassistant so I could view everything in homekit but I finally convinced my partner to just use the homeassistant app and leave apple nonsense behind. That said if you’re less paranoid than me this works too and gives you remote access without the bother of tailscale (but the downside of funneling it all through apple).

    Of course, if you research and trust reolinks app then using that is the easiest thing. I haven’t done that tho. I believe amcrest cameras are also good but these are also primarily POE


  • So I personally will forever be on the side of “fuck eufy and I hope they fail miserably” for several reasons:

    they initial sold their cameras with the guarantee of no cloud integration. When users found that even if you had it set to be local only it still uploaded thumbnails of every persons face with a “name” attached to an aws server and that portions of camera streams could be viewed remotely without encryption, suggesting that all of this data was being transmitted without encryption. When called out on this eufy doubled down and said it was incorrect. When proven wrong they offered 0 recourse for pissed off customers who purchased it specifically because of their promises that it was “no cloud integration”, their only response was to silently remove references to “no cloud integration” and “military grade encryption” from their website and marketing materials.

    This led to a 450,000 dollar settlement earlier this year based on an investigation from the NYAG that found “eufy’s Internet-connected security cameras, video doorbells and smart locks did not fully encrypt video data in transit, despite company assurances that consumer footage would remain private and secure.”

    Scumbag company. Fuck eufy.


  • Don’t bother buying stuff you “think” you’ll need except for a drill. Buy stuff beyond that as needed.

    Depending on where you live get to know the deal spots around you: pawn shops, Craigslist, fb marketplace, ebay, etc. tools are frequently resold for fairly cheap especially if you ever desire stuff that’s a pain in the ass to ship/move like ladders/table saws/miter box/etc.

    Brand doesn’t matter regardless of what internet dorks say for the most part but picking an ecosystem means you won’t have 90 different batteries hanging around. Keep in mind with some manufacturers there a sub lines with different batteries (eg ryobi has a battery whereas Makita has 3 different battery types).

    Don’t buy Milwaukee. Dogshit tools that work okay until they don’t. Makita, ryobi, dewalt, Bosch, metabo, etc are generally repairable. Makita is my go to because you can generally buy parts (though sometimes cost prohibitive tbf), dewalt too but dewalt is pricier. Milwaukee though tends to have these proprietary pcbs with microcontrollers in everything for some reason that inevitably fail and cannot be purchased so once they fail the $350 tool you just got is junk. Whereas https://www.ereplacementparts.com/makita-parts-c-97.html? And https://www.toolservicenet.com/b2b/dewalt/en//Dewalt/OUTDOOR//p/DCCS623B sells actual oem parts

    Harbor freight stuff is fine too especially if you’re not going to use it much (or even if you are, my palm sander is from there and I’ve used that for hundreds of hours. Had to change the brushes but otherwise fine).

    Hope you know how to patch drywall.

    If you want something like cameras that’s like a whole thing. IMO that’s where you should head over to selfhosted. Easy mode is get some WiFi cameras from whoever like eufy and slap them on your house but then you trade away privacy (uploads to their cloud servers and literally every company has had at least one “security whoopsie”) and connection stability (WiFi connection will inherently drop out several times a week/day/hour depending on your setup/congestion in your area. You go to check the camera and it’s always unavailable when you need it). You also have to either add solar panels to them or recharge them every few months. But this is generally what people do because it’s cheaper and easier

    Alternatively you can get power over Ethernet cameras that have much more reliable connectivity and are more likely to run locally (eg record to hardware in your home, either an NVR or a server you make). Downsides here are more expensive (not subsidized by being able to sell your data + the cost of the nvr/server), needing to run Ethernet drops to wherever you want cameras, having to figure out something like tailscale if you want to view cameras remotely and truly don’t want any cloud involved



  • There are many good things about this, American consumerism is out of control

    We discuss climate change and how “companies are the worst offenders” but what drives those companies? American consumerism

    Importing fast fashion, cheap plastic bullshit, other nonsense in plastic packaging, etc (much of it produced in countries that still utilize very dirty fossil fuel chains) ultimately funds and drives significant demand to keep it going and expand.

    Also puts huge demand on fuel for international shipping of dumb bullshit.

    Next thing to do would be to further reduce fuel demands by limiting air travel and consumer fuel usage but Trump isn’t going to invest in public transport, obviously. This is only a byproduct of his idiocy. After that would be to address concrete and other building material demand/suburban sprawl. Although the time to do this was 20 years ago