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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • StarDreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoFirefox@lemmy.mlFirefox for Android context menu editing
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    10 months ago

    Amazon Smile trades ad views for 1% of their proceeds to a non-profit of your choice (including the FSF, EFF, and more, though I think RMS would have a seizure accepting this money)

    Whole Foods gives you significant discounts on hot foods if you scan a QR code from the app (still expensive though).

    I don’t use these personally but I can totally see someone using them.



  • And I did the same as a kid in the late 2000s in order to play World of Warcraft. Found someone’s info on a random online dump, filled it in and didn’t think more about the id theft. What I then learned is that there is NO “fake” IDs that can pass this test. It’s just plain old ID theft of actual people.

    The ID itself is encoded as 3-digit city/3-digit district/8-digit dob/and 4 random digits. There is no “generated” name that works with a specific ID since the name isn’t encoded anywhere. Most reputable vendors perform the check backed by an actual government DB.

    The problem is that it IS the exact same info used to apply for bank accounts, loans, mobile phone numbers, etc. And nobody bats an eye when a pirated gaming app asks for it. This could be legitimate, but I’m more willing to say this is someone’s ID collection scheme. If that’s the case, it could be doing more than just collecting IDs (cause why not?) or it’s at least facilitating more ID theft.



  • Some people play games to turn their brains off. Other people play them to solve a different type of problem than they do at work. I personally love optimizing, automating, and min-maxing numbers while doing the least amount of work possible. It’s relatively low-complexity (compared to the bs I put up with daily), low-stakes, and much easier to show someone else.

    Also shout-out to CDDA and FFT for having some of the worst learning curves out there along with DF. Paradox games get an honorable mention for their wiki.



  • This is solving a problem we DO have, albeit in a different way. Email is ancient, the protocol allows you to self identify as whoever you want. Let’s say I send an email from the underworld (server ip address) claiming I’m Napoleon@france (user@domain), the only reason my email is rejected is because the recipient knows Napoleon resides on the server France, not underworld. This validation is mostly done via tricky DNS hacks and a huge part of it is built on top of Google’s infrastructure. If for some reason Google decides I’m not trustworthy, then it doesn’t matter if I’m actually sending Napoleon’s mail from France, it’s gonna be recognized as spam on most servers regardless.

    A decentralized chain of trust could potentially replace Google + all these DNS hacks we have in place. No central authority gets to control who is legitimate or not. Of all the bs use cases of block chain I think this one doesn’t seem that bad. It’s building a decentralized chain of trust for an existing decentralized system (email), which is exactly what “block chain” was originally designed for.


  • Is there a specific reason you’re looking at shadowsocks? The original developer has been MIA for years. People who used it in the past largely consider it insecure for its original stated purpose

    trojan-gfw is a better modern replacement. However that requires a certificate in order to work. You can easily get one via lets encrypt.

    At this point, let Shadowsocks, obfs, and kcp die a graceful death like GoAgent before it did.


  • I don’t think either of us is the target audience here. I can see a “cheaper” (questionable) Pro laptop being useful for students going into college with a limited budget. An undergrad CS/graphic design degree shouldn’t tax an 8gb machine too much, assuming students shut down everything else when doing their once-a-semester major rendering/compiling/model training. If people just want Macbook pro software with more ports, a “cheaper” machine is better than none. Personally, I would still get a used/refurbished machine though.

    That being said, my current laptop workload tends to be emacs, qpdfview, Firefox, and tmux on EL9. For the remaining stuff, I usually just spin up a VM then ssh/xrdp into it. As for slack, teams, jabber, etc, I’m happy to report I’ve been out of industry/IT for 1+ years and don’t plan on going back anytime soon. For all I care, Apple can call their models unicorn edition. As long as it sells it’s not stupid.





  • 8gb RAM and 256 gb storage is perfectly fine for a pro-ish machine in 2023. What’s not fine is the price point they are offering it (but if idiots still buy that, that’s on them and not apple). I’ve been using a 8gb ram 256 gb storage Thinkpad for lecturing, small code demos, and light video editing (e.g. zoom recordings) this past year, it works perfectly fine. But as soon as I have to run my own research code, back to the 2022 Xeon I go.

    Is it Apple’s fault people treat browser tabs as a bookmarking mechanism? No. Is it unethical for Apple to say that their 8GB model fits this weirdly common use case? Definitely.