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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • Not really. The problem with FOSS licensing is that it was too altruistic, with the belief that if enough users and corporations depended on the code, the community would collectively do the work necessary to maintain the project. Instead, capitalism chose to exploit FOSS as free labor most of the time, without any reciprocal investment. They raise an enormous amount of issues, and consume a large amount of FOSS developer time, without paying their own staff to fix the bugs they need resolved — in the software their products depend on. At that point the FOSS developer is no longer a FOSS developer, and instead is the unpaid slave labor of a corporation. Sure, FOSS devs could just ignore external inputs, but that’s not easy to do when you’ve invested years of your life in a project. Exploiting kindness may be legal, but it should never be justified or tolerated.

    Sure, FOSS licenses legally permit that kind of use, but just because homeless shelters allow anyone to eat their food, and sleep in their beds, that doesn’t make the rich man who exploits that charity ethically or morally justified. The rich man who exploits that charity (i.e. free labor), and offers nothing in return, is a scummy dog cunt; there are no two ways about it. The presence of lecherous parasites can destroy the entire charity; they can mean the difference between sustainability and burnout.

    FOSS should always be free for all personal, free, and non profit use, but once someone in the chain starts depending on FOSS to generate income and profit, some of that profit should always be reinvested in those dependencies. That’s what FOSS is now learning; to reject the exploitation and greed of lecherous parasites.



  • I believe this is what some compression algorithms do if you were to compress the similar photos into a single archive. It sounds like that’s what you want (e.g. archive each day), for immich to cache the thumbnails, and only decompress them if you view the full resolution. Maybe test some algorithms like zstd against a group of similar photos vs individually?

    FYI file system deduplication works based on file content hash. Only exact 1:1 binary content duplicates share the same hash.

    Also, modern image and video encoding algorithms are already the most heavily optimized that computer scientists can currently achieve with consumer hardware, which is why compressing a jpg or mp4 offers negligible savings, and sometimes even increases the file size.










  • If they agree that Trump/Republicans are fascist, ask them why they think it’s an acceptable risk to allow the government to construct the most pervasive and advanced surveillance state that has ever existed for fascism — a system so advanced it would make Himmler cream his pants — why build big brother so all they have to do is simply take over, turn a key, and use it against the world?

    If they’re insane and think Trump/Republicans are the good guys, repeat the above but swap out the perpetrator for liberals/trans/immigrants, or whatever “other” is the flavor of the week.

    If they’re not American, ask them what they think will happen if the world’s strongest ever superpower — a kleptocratic failed state, straddling the knifes edge of fascism — with a secret police who have backdoor access to the tracking device in their pocket, all their data, and all their historic communications — became a fascist dictatorship? … Point out how “woke” they are (sex before marriage, gay marriage, whatever) … and ask them how comfortable they would be if the tens of thousands of people working at the NSA/CIA were converted into fascist “troll farms”, and started using AI and analytics of all their personal data, to unilaterally wage a cyber war on everyone they deem “woke”? Do they think their government or military could defend them from a bad actor that has the ability to hack anyone on Earth… A bad actor who, if they want you out of the picture, just has to remote into your machine, download some child porn, and tip off the local police… Good luck trying to prove your innocence. You don’t even know what most of those words mean! You weren’t even aware that this was a possibility 30 seconds ago!



  • If you only included projects created in the last 2 or 5 years rust would be ahead of C/C++, possibly ahead of all other strongly typed langs. Kotlin is usually chosen explicitly for modern Android and Java lib interoperability.

    I would be willing to wager that within the next 1-2 decades, LLM transpilation will be used to replace most C/C++ code, too. LLM’s can’t be trusted to write code, but they can be trusted to transpile in combination with TDD. If a codebase is already well tested then transpilation is many orders of magnitude easier.



  • This is why privacy policies are a virtue signaling joke. They all start with “we respect your privacy” which is so objectively, categorically, false 99% of the time that it should be considered illegal (e.g. false advertising) for the org to even associate those words with their business, in any capacity. Every evilcorp has one policy that is hundreds of pages long and covers everything they ever have done, and ever will do, across every subsidiary and product of the entire umbrella organization. The whole privacy policy system is designed so every consumer rubber stamps them and legally absolves the corporation for everything they will ever do, because it’s impossible for any human to read or understand them. By impossible I mean literally impossible – you would need more than a lifetime to read them, let alone comprehend them…

    If we didn’t live in a capitalist dystopia, privacy policies wouldn’t be needed most of the time, because data laws qould be so comprehensive they explicitly apply for 99% of interactions, and every system would be designed from the ground up for zero trust (e.g. all data is E2EE). But in the 1% of cases where they are needed they’re dynamically generated from templates, based on a users current preferences/settings. The “use X app” policy would be different from the “integrate all of my other various PII linked services to my account” policy. In the case of a completely offline calculator, with no API, and no telemetry/analytics (or them all disabled by default) the policy would not even be a link; just a one-liner that says “App can be used with zero data collection”. If you download the app and choose to enable a data collection setting, that’s when you would be shown the policy related to the specific data points that setting relates to.




  • I consider this post as more of a thought experiment. If this sounds extreme to you, then the mass surveillance of society is even more extreme.

    The fact governments almost always exempt themselves should be all that’s needed to prove the measures violate a democratic societies rule of law and civil liberties, and that their promotion should be considered treason — an attack on the civil liberties of the entire population is an attack on democracy itself.