@self - eviltoast
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • it was previously quite easy, but it seems to be getting much harder as Google locks the ecosystem down alongside their push towards manifest v3 (cause nobody can have nice things) and potentially moving their Chromebooks to Android

    a used Chromebook might still be a good option for a cheap linux laptop though — your mileage may vary. if you go that route, look for one that lets you replace its bootloader. the Google one is extremely annoying if you’re running a third-party OS, because it’ll wipe your SSD and reinstall ChromeOS if you hit spacebar during boot (probably Google’s way to punish the user for straying too far from the ecosystem)
















  • I think you’re absolutely correct, and this feels to me like the only reason why we’re seeing some of the bizarre shit we’ve been keeping an eye on:

    • several old forums, all of which are unique high-quality data sources, are being polluted by their own admins with backdated LLM-generated answers. this destroys that forum as a trustworthy data source and removes it as competition for the LLM that already scraped the forum — and, as a bonus, it also makes training a future LLM on that data source utterly impractical without risking model collapse.
    • Wikipedia refuses to compromise on quality in general, so it’s under increasing political pressure to change. the game here is to shut down or pollute the original data source by any means necessary, so that the only way to access that data becomes an LLM. the people behind the AI startups are experts at creating monopolies, and shutting down a world-class data source like Wikipedia or making it otherwise unusable would guarantee a monopoly position for them.

  • I keep stopping myself from doing this exact project, with the fediverse as the curation source, several times. I’ve talked about this before, but interestingly Postgres’ full-text search is effectively the complete core of a search engine, minus what you’d need for crawling and ranking (which is where curation and a bit of scripting would come in)

    other than resources and time, one big open question is how to do this kind of thing as a positive part of the fediverse — to not make the same mistake that a bunch of techbros already have and index the fediverse without consent. how does one make the curation process simultaneously consensual and also automated enough that it can be reasonably ruggedized against abuse?


  • also, I forgot to point this out earlier, but it’s worth saying: the only reason why I’m considering GrapheneOS as a viable path forward is because as an AOSP fork, it isn’t all-or-nothing. I can create a private space or profile for Google Play Services and all my spyware shit and keep it isolated, and ending the session kills all the processes those apps might have been running.

    that’s fantastic! I finally don’t have to switch fully to open source apps and do without working non-janky notifications to have a modicum of privacy on Android! the graphene devs assume I’m not gonna be perfect and they ruggedized their fork against that and put a ton of effort into making even stuff that’s deeply reliant on Google safer! why in fuck aren’t they like that for everything?


  • To be clear, this is not a rant against security… I treat security of my devices seriously.

    exactly! and taking this shit seriously is why this overbearing shit sucks, especially when it’s theater or enforced for threats that aren’t realistic for your threat model. unlike some of these fuckers, we both actually intend to daily the devices we’re locking down.

    because apparently having non-smooth scrolling can be fingerprinted (that being possible is IMO reason alone to burn down the modern web altogether)

    oh I fucking hate this. it’s the same shit as forcing dark mode off/on as part of fingerprinting protection. not only is this the absolute wrong way to fix that shit, it’s pretty monstrous for anyone who needs dark mode or light mode to use their device in anything resembling comfort — your user may have a visual impairment or severe light sensitivity, and now they’re fucked cause the developers couldn’t accept a minor fingerprinting risk (and light/dark mode and smooth scrolling are both utterly minor, to be real)

    Possibly controversial, but I’ll say it: web browsers being so annoying about self-signed certificates.

    motherfucker yes! the CA infrastructure is nowhere near usable for all cases and we all know it, but locking down the web and making development and self-hosting fucking annoying is the game for the browser vendors and Google in particular. to add to this: why the fuck is my browser acting like me not having a cert for localhost is a tragedy? why does the browser sandbox not allow certain shit unless I’m using https of all things to access localhost? where precisely is the fucking threat here? (I’m sure some well-paid security asshole at one of the browser vendors could snark a list of unlikely shit as reasons why local host needs to be treated as insecure with no toggle or dev tools option to treat it otherwise… and I just don’t give a fuck)

    The entire reality of secure boot on most platforms

    I’d love good secure boot! the one on PCs ain’t it at all, and unfortunately the secure ones tend to be used to lock out device owners from modifying what they own and implement shit like attestation that’s just there to violate your rights and make sure you’re not blocking ads, so unfortunately good secure boot might be incompatible with capitalism. for now though at least graphene seems to benefit from a secure secure boot chain that hasn’t been locked down yet?