@pixelscript - eviltoast
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 25th, 2023

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  • A lot of folks blame this on kids simply not wanting to go outside anymore. But I believe a significant dimension to it also lies in the fact that the world is a lot more hyper vigilant about punishing things like trespassing, loitering, hooliganism, and the like.

    The woods? Whose woods? Someone owns that land. Are they gonna call the cops on you if they notice you’re in there? Do they not want you damming up their creek? Is that going to be considered vandalism? Do they not want to be liable if you injure yourself on their property? All questions that probably aren’t in a kid’s head, but I imagine would be on a modern parent’s. The safety risks are high. Always were, that’s not new. But the legal risks are new.

    And yeah, it’s not like getting in trouble for these sorts of things didn’t happen back in, say, my dad’s childhood. But I’d wager my dad would have gotten picked up by cops in his youth and sent off with stern tut-tut by the local sheriff for being just another incident of rowdy boys being boys, while my kid (if I had one) would be far more likely to make it out with a criminal record if they’re old enough, or trigger a lawsuit against me for my negligence if they aren’t.




  • What’s a FOSS pword manager

    There are probably more that these two out there but the two I know of that fit this bill are Bitwarden and KeePass. The latter comes in two flavors, the original KeePass that kinda looks like shit and tries to stay lean and defer niche features to plugins, and the fork KeePassXC that tries to give it a sleeker UX with more features natively baked-in. I will refer to both simply as “KeePass” for the rest of this comment.

    that is easy to use

    “Easy to use” is relative. If you’re savvy enough to know what FOSS software even is, to care about using it, and to find your way onto an experimental platform like Lemmy to ask about it, I’d say youre more than capable of handling either of the above choices with ease.

    reliable, likely to be around and working in 5 years

    I’d wager that on both Bitwarden and KeePass.

    and won’t leave me feeling shit up a creek if my phone dies or I’m using a public terminal with software installation restrictions

    Bitwarden offers free cloud hosting and a web interface. As long as you have access to a browser and an Internet connection, you have access to your Bitwarden key store.

    KeePass is offline-only and requires specialized client software to read its key store file format. Though, since all it is is a file, you can use simple and straightforward methods to make it accessible wherever you need it. Copy it to a flash drive. SCP it between devices. Put it on a cloud service like Dropbox. You have options. It’s just up to you to use them.

    Bitwarden also lets you save locally stored files and manage them like KeePass, if you’re into that.

    Honestly, since each can be made to more or less behave like the other, which one you pick largely comes down to taste. Bitwarden is more turn-key if you want cloud hosting, KeePass makes you work for it. Bitwarden is a company providing a premium service you can buy, while KeePass is a completely free project funded only by good will donations.

    I prefer KeePassXC, personally.


  • pixelscript@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlBut this... does put a smile on my face
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    6 months ago

    I replied to that thread.

    OP was claiming to be working on a static HTML-serving search engine. They suggested that because it’s just HTML and CSS, and that interested parties can use Inspect Element to read the network requests, that it constituted “open source”.

    Commenters then got on his case about not open sourcing the server backend. OP defended that choice saying they didn’t want a competitor taking their code and building a company off of it that would “drive [them] out of business”. Uh-huh. So, proprietary software, then. Bye.




  • Had a lapse of judgement once and sent one of those 2FA passcodes sent to me via SMS to a shady guy on Craigslist. This was back when 2FA was still in the process of becoming ubiquitous, I do not believe I had seen one before that point.

    I believe the only thing it allowed them to do was register a Google Talk number in my account’s name. I immediately dissociated my account from the number after this interaction (strangely, you could not actually cancel the number, only disown it, so I guess the scammer still got what they wanted anyway) and changed my account password for good measure.

    I’ve also bought many bootleg collectors items off of Ebay. Though, each time I’ve done so was fully knowing the listings were lying, and still wanting the bootleg garbage anyway.


  • MLMs can be actually viable jobs for a very select few of people. Not entirely unlike how you can theoretically make money at a casino. There need to be winners to the game once in a while, or else no one would play. The game is just rigged wildly out of your favor.

    The general structure of an MLM as I understand it is sort of a cross between a wholesale job and playing a mobile gacha game. Unlike a normal business where you purchase stock to match your demand, and only stock items that actually sell, an MLM contractually obligates you to buy a certain volume of stock, and each shipment is essentially a lootbox full of who knows what. It then becomes your responsibility to get rid of the stock any way you possibly can.

    When you buy all that stock, you are not buying it from a factory or a warehouse. You are buying it from another person in the same position as you, one layer up. They are also playing the lootbox gacha and trying to get rid of all the crap. Except, hmm, now they have at least one person beneath them who is contractually forced to buy from them, and can’t select which stock they’re buying. Gee, I wonder what you’re gonna be getting…

    Whenever you actually do manage to sell something off, a cut of that kicks back to the person who sold you that stock. And a piece of that kickback goes to the person who sold them that stock, and so on, up and up.

    The real money in MLMs is having so many people beneath you that the kickbacks start adding up into significant income. This is theoretically achievable. But it requires a very specific kind of personality matrix who is not squeamish about being a little cut-throat to get ahead, and generally requires a significant investment where you are going deep into the red just for the opportunity. And even if you do make it there, you have to accept the knowledge that your profitability can only exist necessarily because of the existence of many people beneath you all spinning those slots and losing the rigged game to the house (who by this point is you).



  • we are throwing accuracy out the window by using milli anyway so who the hell cares

    It’s a factor of 8 we’re talking about. That’s not far off from a factor of 10. If a factor of 10 difference is important enough to get its own prefix in SI, I think a factor of 8 difference is plenty enough to care about having clarified notation. This isn’t like the mega/mebi thing where the drift is only on the order of 3%.


  • My thoughts exactly when reading this.

    I believe people when they claim to develop free software. Often because it’s software the dev wants for themselves anyway and they’ve merely elected to share it rather than sell it. The only major cost is time to develop, which is “paid” for by the creation of the product itself.

    You (OP) are proposing a service. Services have ongoing fees to run and maintain, and the value they create goes to your users, not you. These are by definition cost centers. You will need a stable source of funding to run this. That does not in any way mix with “free”. Not unless you’re some gajillionaire who pivoted to philanthropy after a life of robber baroning, or you’re relying on a fickle stream of donations and grants.

    You indicate in other comments you will not open the source of your backend because you don’t want it scooped from you and stealing your future revenue. That’s fine, but what revenue? I thought this was free? What’s your business model?

    It sounds like what you want to do here is have a free tier anyone can use, supported by a paid tier that offers extended features. That’s fine, I guess. But if you want to “compete with DuckDuckGo”, you are going to need to generate enough revenue to support the volume of freeloaders that DDG does. If your paid tier base doesn’t cover the bill, you will need to start finding new and exciting ways to passively monetize those non-revenue-generating users. That usually means one or more of taking features away and putting them behind the paywall to drive more subscriptions, increasingly invasive ads on the platform, or data-harvesting dark patterns.

    Essentially what I’m saying here is, as-proposed, the eventual failure and/or enshittification of your service seems inevitable. Which makes it no better than DDG long term.

    It is, at any rate, a very intriguing project.








  • That sounds like it’d be fantastic for reading but, depending on how it’s implemented, hell for posting.

    Lemmy already aggregates posts from communities you follow into one feed. If it allowed the creation of an arbitrary number of sub-feeds configurable by the user, that would be incredible. But every user would have to build these on their own from scratch. Great for user choice, but no communities will come bundled by default, so small communities won’t get a discovery boost.

    If instead there was some kind of first-class notion of a “supercommunity” offered on the server side, where it acted as a transparent view of other communities, that’d be a great visibility boost for small communities. But if you tried to post to it, which underlying community would it post to? You’d have to either designate a default community to receive posts (which would be unfair to every other community there), randomize where it goes to (which would be a quagmire, what if your post is allowed in half of the communities present but rule-breaking in the others?), burden the user with choosing (which would be hell if there are a lot), or simply make it read-only. I don’t really like any of these. It also raises hairy questions about who will control which communities are and are not part of the group, how the groupings react to defeds, etc.