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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Some examples from mine if anyone is curious. I never use the fb sso or any of that shit, nor did I ever explicitly consent to any of these services sharing anything with fb.

    • Spotify
    • bookings .com
    • ebay (haven’t touched my account there in over a decade but they still had data to send this year)
    • windy .com
    • duolingo
    • tinder
    • my bank
    • opera
    • sonos (I can’t think of any time I’ve ever even interacted with this one)
    • samsung wallet (another one I never even set up)
    • Uber eats
    • calorie counter
    • mediacom usa and euro (?)

    Also, if you remove access via messenger app, it will show a confirm message without closing the screen. Clicking x goes back and it’s not on the list anymore. Whether they are actually leaving it disconnected or just hiding it, who knows.

    Some of these services I didn’t use the same email that I used for fb, too, or any email at all.


  • My perspective has been that if things really do go to shit to the level of what peppers believe, financial stuff won’t really matter unless you’ve invested in setting up a self-sufficient compound. And even then, owning such a compound would likely be as much of a liability than an asset because unless there’s many such compounds, you’re going to get swarmed by anyone who hears about it, so you’ll also need security forces and equipment to defend it.

    And if you have a small army on the compound, good luck not getting couped by them.

    A business venture like a magazine would be completely irrelevant if society ends. But it might make a decent income in the time between now and the end. And it’ll be kinda like religion: once anyone is in a position to find out how good any of your advice really was, they won’t likely be in a position to get upset with you if it was all just made up.




  • How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie should be required reading for everyone. It’s full of things that are so obvious in hindsight but go against our natural instincts so we blunder through attempts to persuade not realizing that we might be increasing resistance rather than decreasing it.

    Like the whole, “you might be right but you’re still an asshole” thing. Being correct just isn’t enough. In some cases you get crucified and then after some time has passed, the point you were trying to convince others of becomes the popular accepted fact. And they might even still hate you after coming around on the point you were trying to make.

    That book won’t turn you into a persuasive guru, but it will help avoid many of the pitfalls that make debates turn ugly or individuals stubborn.

    Or, on the flip side, you can use the inverse of the lessons to become a more effective troll and learn how to act like you’re arguing one thing while really trying to rile people up or convince them of the opposite. I say this not so much to suggest it but because knowing about this can make you less susceptible to it (and it’s already a part of the Russian troll farm MO).


  • Yeah, I was going to mention race conditions as soon as I saw the parent comment. Though I’d guess most cases where the debugger “fixes” the issue while print statements don’t are also race conditions, just the race isn’t tight enough that that extra IO time changes the result.

    Best way to be thorough with concurrency testing IMO involves using synchronization to deliberately check the results of each potential race going either way. Of course, this is an exponential problem if you really want to be thorough (like some races could be based on thread 1 getting one specific instruction in between two specific instructions in thread 2, or maybe a race involves more than 2 threads, which would make it exponentially grow the exponential problem).

    But a trick for print statement debugging race conditions is to keep your message short. Even better if you can just send a dword to some fast logger asynchronously (though be careful to not introduce more race conditions with this!).

    This is one of the reasons why concurrency is hard even for those who understand it well.


  • I once lived in an apartment where the bathtub drain was pretty plugged. It would drain but every shower was done in a slowly rising puddle. I tried draino but it didn’t make a difference.

    I eventually had a roommate move in and noticed right away that the tub drained better, asked him how he fixed it. He used the plunger. It blew my mind because up until that moment, I had thought a plunger was specifically for use with toilets.

    Now I have a toilet plunger plus a smaller sink plunger since the size of the standard one can be awkward to use on a sink, plus the whole not wanting to use something that’s been in the toilet on things outside of the toilet.

    Not that I’ve even had a plugged toilet in years, and, having a bidet, it’s even less likely going forward.


  • Wouldn’t it come down to wattage rather than straight voltage?

    My guess is even if the voltage is ramped back up (which does sound accurate), that voltage would droop quickly if anything tried to draw power from it. Probably still not a fun time for anyone on the lines, but Tesla coils go up to something like 20kV and I got shocked by those back in high school. It fucking hurts (actually, more like extreme discomfort) but isn’t fatal.

    Not that I’m saying a generator or battery at 20kV is the same thing as a 20kV static discharge, just saying that even extreme voltages can be ok. It’s about the amperage, not the voltage. Would a home generator or car battery have the amperage if ramped up to thousands of volts, especially considering the whole point of the ramp up is to reduce the amperage to increase efficiency.

    I’d also figure, unless the outage was just one house disconnected from the grid, wouldn’t any generator or battery end up powering the whole neighborhood and quickly overloading if it tried to send power back out to the grid?





  • I like grid for that because it’s by default per-site permissions and also by default allows the sites own cookies while blocking any cookies for other domains.

    It can involve some trial and error to get things working if the site uses a CDN or third party services for functionality, but I’ve found that it hasn’t yet been necessary to enable any 3rd party cookies to get any functionality working (at least none that I wanted to get working, maybe other sites that use Google or fb accounts would automatically log me in if I had those ones enabled, but those are things I specifically want to block).

    Usually I’ll just need to enable some scripts and media from CDNs.


  • Same thing that’s preventing them from ignoring your choices or not offering them in the first place: nothing technical; it’s all up to the legal system.

    I’m not sure how sites generally do it, but from my web dev experience in the past, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is actually implemented as one giant cookie. Iirc cookies are attached to domains and one domain can’t access another’s cookies. So if they are sharing the data on their end, I’d guess it is one big cookie. If they have their site set up to make the clients share the data themselves, I’d guess there’s a cookie for each partner’s domain.

    It’s even possible that the information is shared without using actual cookies at all, since data can be sent to servers using the http get request. If you see ? in the url, everything after that is a list of arguments and values… Though the entire URL (after the domain, which maps it to that server) is data and doesn’t have to map to a directory structure and file on a server. Maybe this falls under the umbrella of “cookie” despite technically not being a cookie.

    Or maybe it’s a loophole where the legislation focused on just cookies and falls back to these methods. Probably not, because if it’s done on the client side, it would be easy to detect by anyone who knows how to look. But who knows what’s going on on the server side of things?

    Edit: my knowledge here is dated and outside of my specializations, so consider this more technically informed speculation than necessarily applicable to how things generally work. I say this because I see another comment came in while I was writing this that contradicts mine about a giant cookie being technically possible. My own use of cookies was to store a session id so that php could find the data that was being stored server side that was necessary for site functionality (like storing logged in state, user id, and other internal stuff we don’t want users being able to change by editing a cookie). They worked like maps iirc where you just give them key:value pairs, thus could store an arbitrary amount of data.


  • This topic always reminds me of one of my co-op jobs where I was working with a piece of software to develop an importer for its file format. Getting the software running properly with its licensing system took a couple of weeks. We had the license all along, but it used a license server that needed to be set up on my machine, plus a dongle that it used.

    Once it was up and running, I did like the software and one day decided to also use it to produce files for a personal project I was doing for fun at home. Downloaded a pirated version and had it running by that evening no issue.

    The DRM just made for a crappy experience for the paying customer and wasn’t even noticed by those it was meant to prevent using their software.

    Though I now wonder if that was deliberate because they’d still catch that in corporate audits (I think? Not really sure how those work tbh), so allowing individual users to easily bypass the DRM could help them build market share that they get paid for by businesses buying licenses when users say it’s their preferred platform.


  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlAmd fan
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    1 month ago

    It’s not easy to make shit that doesn’t work if you care about what you’re doing. I bet there’s angry debates between engineers and business majors behind many of these enshitifications.

    Though, for these Intel ones, they might have been less angry and more “are you sure these risks are worth taking?” because they probably felt like they had to push them to the extreme to compete. The angry conversations probably happened 5-10 years ago before AMD brought the pressure when Intel was happy to assume they had no competition and didn’t have to improve things that much to keep making a killing. At this point, it’s just a scramble to make up for those decisions and catch up. Which their recent massive layoffs won’t help with.




  • In order to simulate the future of the universe, one would need a computer that could store every bit of data required to express the state of the universe, plus anything required to handle any temporary calculations and then extra if you want to store anything about that simulation.

    There is only one such device known to exist: the universe itself. And it doesn’t store any simulation history, though you can figure out some things by examining the current state.

    We could simulate a smaller portion of the universe, but you still need to store every bit of information about the current state and things would diverge anyways because you won’t be perfectly simulating the edges and those differences would cascade throughout the whole thing eventually.

    That state for Earth would still take an earth amount of matter to store. But ok, let’s say we repurpose Jupiter to be a perfect Earth simulator at least until the edge differences mess it all up, plus it has a ton of extra matter to store useful information about the simulation. First thing you’ll need to do once it’s ready is initialize it with the current state of Earth.

    But, there’s a problem: how do you measure every single thing about something without the earlier measurements changing the later ones? You can’t measure something without interacting with it in some way. Even if you just look at it, it changes (though it’s not your eyes that change it, it’s the light that bounced off of it to get to your eyes). That change is miniscule for direct affects on us, but it’s very relevant at a perfect simulation level of detail.

    The universe might be deterministic (I don’t think there’s any real way to determine this for sure either way, like what would be different if it was or wasn’t?), but it’s not prederministic, at least not from within.

    Maybe there’s some kind of mechanism to see a reflection from the future or something like that, but even then, what would happen if someone saw themselves walk through the left door in the future but when the moment came walked through the right door instead?