𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

Sourcehut also supports Mercurial, so you also have an option to the herd mentality.

Sourcehut also has zero, or almost zero, JavaScript in the interface, so it doesn’t suck

Sourcehut is also componentized, so you can mix and match the pieces you want or need:

• VCS hosting
• masking list management
• issue management
• build server
• man server

Sourcehut is by far the best hosted VCS option at the moment. The Mercurial support alone puts it miles ahead of the others, which are all hobbled by tight coupling to git.

So, you’re basically running the KDE infrastructure, just not using the KDE WM? Have you done a ps and counted the number of KDE services that are running, just to run KDE Connect?

Here are the (KDE) dependencies on the Arch KDE Connect package:

kcmutils 
kconfig
kcoreaddons 
kcrash
kdbusaddons
kdeclarative
kguiaddons
ki18n
kiconthemes
kio
kirigami
kirigami-addons                               kitemmodels
kjobwidgets
knotifications
kpeople
kservice
kstatusnotifieritem                           kwidgetsaddons
kwindowsystem
pulseaudio-qt
qqc2-desktop-style
qt6-base
qt6-connectivity
qt6-declarative
qt6-multimedia
qt6-wayland

When you run KDE Connect, you’re running most of the KDE Desktop and Qt; you’re just not using it.

Have you ever tried running it headless? I have; it doesn’t work.

Yeah, tarpits. Or, even just intentionally fractionally lagging the connection, or putting a delay on the response to some mime types. Delays don’t consume nearly as much processing as PoW. Personally, I like tar pits that trickle out content like a really slow server. Hidden URLs that users are not likely to click on. These are about the least energy-demanding solutions that have a chance of fooling bots; a true, no-response tarpit would use less energy, but is easily detected by bots and terminated.

Proof of work is just a terrible idea, once you’ve accepted that PoW is bad for the environment, which it demonstrably is.

Everything computer does use power. The issue is the same very valid criticism of (most) crypto currencies: the design objectives are only to use power. That’s the very definition of “proof of work.” You usually don’t care what the work is, only that it was done. An appropriate metaphor is: for “reasons”, I want to know that you moved a pile of rocks from one place to another, and back again. I have some way of proving this - a video camera watching you, a proof of a factorization that I can easily verify, something - and in return, I give you something: monopoly money, or access to a web site. But moving the rocks is literally just a way I can be certain that you’ve burned a number of calories.

I don’t even care if you go get a GPU tractor and move the rocks with that. You’ve still burned the calories, by burning oil. The rocks being moved has no value, except that I’ve rewarded you for burning the calories.

That’s proof of work. Whether the reward is fake internet points, some invented digital currency, or access to web content, you’re still being rewarded for making your CPU burn calories to calculate a result that has no intrinsic informational value in itself.

The cost is at scale. For a single person, say it’s a fraction of a watt. Negligible. But for scrapers, all of those fractions add up to real electricity bill impacts. However - and this is the crux - it’s always at scale, even without scrapers, because every visitor is contributing to the PoW total, global cost of that one website’s use of this software. The cost isn’t being noticeable by individuals, but it is being incurred; it’s unavoidable, by design.

If there’s no cost in the aggregate of 10,000 individual browsers performing this PoW, then it’s not going to cost scrapers, either. The cost has to be significant enough to deter bots; and if it’s enough to be too expensive for bots, it’s equally significant for the global aggregate; it’s just spread out across a lot of people.

But the electricity is still being used, and heat is still being generated, and it’s yet another straw on the environmental camel’s back.

It’s intentionally wasteful, and a such, it’s a terrible design.

Are China Parties like Tupperware Parties, where friends get together and one shills a pyramid scheme? That’s what CP is, right?

Yup. Same in the States.

People are fundamentally selfish; sometimes, that selfishness extends to their family, and rarely, to their immediate community. But rarely will people vote for something that has a direct negative impact on their own interests but which benefits the majority. Smart, educated, dumb, ignorant; the tendency is toward selfishness.

Education and intelligence influences empathy, and can impart greater long-term thinking, but it doesn’t guarantee it. As stupid as we may believe Bezos and Musk to be, they’re clearly educated, and act selfishly, like the majority of the 1%.

You also don’t get runtime errors with TOML when an invisible tab turns out to be invisible spaces.

On Linux, you have to be running Gnome or KDE. There is a headless option called mconnect, but (a) it’s essentially unmaintained, (b) it’s written in Vala, a niche¹ language, © either KDE Connect or mconnect can’t maintain an association - leaving the LAN and returning always forces a re-authentication.

It’s promising, and nice when it works, but the supported linux daemons are - sadly - tightly coupled to two DEs, making it useless for headless and the large number of people running neither KDE or Gnome.

Device Connect, OTOH, works flawlessly, remembers device authorization, and the Linux server is completely headless. It uses standard tooling for desktop integration tasks, like opening links. It lacks many of KDE connect’s features, such as using the phone as a touchpad and media control (the latter would be easy to support through MPRIS2, but media control could also be a separate app; it’s kitchen-sinking, so I understand leaving it out).

Look again at the first cell. They’re even more fucked up.

I gave my dad one of my spare laptops four years ago; it had never had Windows on it (being from the halcyon days when Dell sold laptops with linux pre-installed), so I put Mint on it for him.

Early this year he called and said one of the keys stopped working so he’d bought a newer, used laptop and could I help him put Linux on it, because that’s what he was used to. Over the phone, I helped him download and burn a new Mint image from his ancient desktop, and verbally walked him through switching the bios to boot from the USB, and through the Mint install menus.

Since then, he’s called me once for technical support for getting his printer connected.

Dad’s in his 80’s and was a cop with an associate’s degree; he’s never claimed to be a brainiac. That is what convinced me Linux is ready for anyone, but that the choice of distribution is important. I think dad never upgrades or installs new software, but that’s OK. I have to update and reboot every week because I’m stupidly loyal to Arch.

I’m sorry that your mom had a bad experience; that’s super frustrating.

set his account up without any superuser access

Oh, revenge for when he had parental restrictions on the router and you couldn’t get to teh pron, huh?

I like it.

It’s also an extremely efficient alg.

Not if it’s an effective proof-of-work anti-scraping mechanism. The point of these are to make it prohibitively expensive for scrapers to harvest data.

A mire energy efficient way to do this is with lags and tar pits, which do not cause CPU cycles to be wasted.

Any mechanism - any - that uses proof-of-work is by definition wasting CPU cycles. If there’s a useful waste product, like boinc, where the work that’s proved to be done is science, then the POW isn’t pure waste energy. There are certainly more efficient ways of generating fingerprints than PoW; Google and Facebook are peerless at fingerprinting without any PoW at all. The value of these fingerprint coins tokens is entirely incidental to the real purpose: to cost the scraper CPU cycles, cost them energy, and make scraping less profitable.

Anubis is all of the execution cost of cryptocurrency, without the financial flavoring.

Do you understand how Proof-of-Work works? Perhaps you can give me an ELI5 that shows that it does not use the client’s CPU to perform calculations for only the purpose of proving that the client’s CPU performed the calculations?

It still uses Proof-of-Work, in which the coal being burned is only to prove that you burned the coal.

Ah, yes, well. Many people see the root of all evil not in money, but in organized religion, and that’s sometimes hard to emotionally separate from the (perceived) irrationality of capital-R religion. So, yeah: in friend groups, I can see debates about religion that veer into proselytizing, although – again – people generally don’t preach to the already-converted except in sectarian wars, which in the US have subsided as religious communities have solidified against the greater threat of atheism.

I grant, in any case, that even atheism can have strong advocates who try to convert people. I do think that it depends on who you are: being an athiest, I’ve never had an athiest pressure me about my religious beliefs, and have only been prosthelytized to by Christians… but that’s to be expected, right?

You just need to wait for the proof of work to complete

I will never find the irony in this anything other than pathetic.

The one legitimate grievance against Bitcoin and other POW cryptocurrencies - the wasteful burning of energy to do throw-away calculations simply to prove the work has been done… the environmental cost of distributed scale meaningless CPU cycle waste purely for the purpose of wasting CPU cycles, has been so eagerly grasped by people who are largely doing it to foil another energy wasteful infotech invention.

It really is astonishing.

I’m sure he’s very clever, but jesus fucking christ why can’t he get his shit together?

I’m mad, because I was really looking forward to bachefs, but now I’m going to hold off. btrfs is great, and they’ve got their process under control. Call me when bcachefs switches maintainers and can follow the Kernel merge process. These last minute pushes are sketchy.

The Remarkable 2 is fantastic. You can ssh into it, and scp from it. There are some filesystem layout quirks, but it’s good. Peerless writing experience. Great battery. Plenty storage. Large screen. No backlight, sadly. Good for

• taking notes
• reading & annotating PDFs
• reading technical books, with illustrations and diagrams
• reading graphic novels

Not so good for reading for pleasure, like fiction. It’s too big. It’s best for active reading and writing.

I have a Kobo Aura H2O for recreational reading and travel. Massive memory and an SD expansion slot. Backlight. Pretty indestructible, I read it in the jacuzzi.

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UTF-8 codepoint 8674

E2E usually suffers from the same thing HTTP does: the MITM might not be able to read what you’re saying, but they know who you’re saying it to, and they may know in what context. This is a lot of information that can be used in profiling.

So you end up with systems like SimpleX, where everyone has a different UID for every contact, but that has its own problems, as anyone who’s used systems like that are aware. We haven’t really solved making that a good user experience for messaging; I don’t see it translating to broader social media any time soon.

Nostr has some really good specs and tooling that neatly addresses these topics, including great cryptography support, signing, ad-hoc IDs, and an entirely voluntary simple naming lookup; it doesn’t exactly solve zooko’s triangle, but it provides a toolset sufficient to mix and match characteristics for whatever your threat model is. Sadly, Nostr is utterly dominated by the crypto crowd (and is associated with some controversial personalities), and even if you’re not cryptocurrency-hostile, it’s a really dull echo chamber with little other content that has prevented people who might otherwise build interesting platforms in it from doing so.

Mastodon was around for ages before (the in practice centralized) Bluesky; why did it take Bluesky to open a mass exodus from X?

This is a hard problem to solve. Throwing E2E at it doesn’t make it easier; it’s just tossing a buzzword in.