I’ve gone down parts of this rabbit hole (reading, not implementation). Wish I could guarantee that I could set anything up (including just setting up Meshtastic nodes in fun places) without getting arrested for setting up what can only look like an espionage infrastructure network to the government.

Difficult explanations of complex subjects that may not be aligned with the statistical word pattern distribution of the corpus of a dead web.

It’s not impossible that this exact paragraph could be generated. But it was more likely crafted by someone who both understands the subject matter on a comfortable level at the very least, and who understands what parts of it are intuitive enough to create a scaffolding of knowledge that are distinctive to this topic.

I don’t think I could have come up with anything that doesn’t use the word iota a half dozen times and then falling backwards on myself trying to get across the idea of how energy could not exist in measures that are not multiples of a minimum iota of energy (and explaining that it’s just how it is, no I don’t know how that was measured, etcetera etcetera)

This is what LLMs are taking from us, and I say this without a shred of irony

I do miss having languages listed on the side by default. I felt like it gave some depth to how important or culturally isolated a subject can be. For example, a short article available in 30 major languages, a long article available in 30 major languages, and a long article only available in like 3 languages would all feel just a little different.

English is not my native language and a lot of subjects I like (or fixations I may have, knowing Wikipedians) just exist in the realm of English. So these long long pages that don’t exist in many languages have a particular vibe to them.

Did someone just print out the list from the photo that’s been doing the rounds for a month now and post it to TikTok as a copy-and-paste joke?

I think reposting jokes is the lifeblood of the internet but being a meme cover artist seems kind of… hm. Sharing a joke reveals a good (or bad!) sense of humor. Copying it beat for beat reveals something a bit different, but I can’t place it.

The original had an Arabic keyboard in the background. Gotta look out for one of our own.

I didn’t know about this. That’s kind of disgusting.

You’re not being paranoid, this is probably one of the intended uses of this technology. Being able to pretend to care about the children is just set dressing.

Any government-level “for the kids” effort that doesn’t start with paying teachers more than a pittance is a transparent push for something else.

I’ve been routing all of my traffic through UK-located VPN servers specifically to avoid shenanigans like this and the UK goes and fucks it up.

I can’t wait to arm wrestle all my accounts into allowing me to use Swiss servers. Mullvad doesn’t have enough Irish servers for me to reliably exit from there, that would be my top choice (English + GDPR). But then again, GDPR means a fraction of American sites don’t work.

I just really don’t like having my government or the governments of the places I travel to looking at my traffic. And now this ID shit is here. Just let me use the Internet goddamn it, I already pay out the ass for it.

Finding a unicorn country where everything works and all traffic is routed is getting increasingly difficult. For example, if a US news site didn’t want to implement GDPR, it geolocates all users outside the US and blocks them, whilst other US services start to require ID/age verification to post content for non-US users so accessing both easily requires switching location.

You’ve hit the nail on the head, my own post is a bit meandering and this is what I was going for. I hate how many hoops one needs to jump through for basic anonymity online nowadays.

OpenWRT has a package called mwan3 that in tandem with dnsmasq can allow you set the IP addresses associated with a DNS entry to a particular VPN/country.

I think this would be infeasible outside of very narrow use cases, but I don’t know. I don’t have an advanced networking setup, but the way I see it, if I, say, route service A and B to connection 1 and service C to connection 2, I only have control over individual IP ranges/DNS entries. So if my bank IP is routed to connection 1 and one new security background service their app/site uses goes to connection 2, something can get flagged, and I could face an unpleasant with the bank/law. I’ve been trying to avoid things like this. (I have a very rudimentary understanding of networking, I’m not super comfortable doing all of this manually).

I feel as though the most logical way about it would be to compartmentalize connections by application, but I wasn’t able to find an easy way to do this. For example, splitting off a browser window and having that exit from somewhere else. I know split tunneling exists in the basic Mullvad client, and I guess I can just throw my whole network on Connection 1 and route Connection 2 through it (meaning when I split tunnel I find myself on connection 1) but in that scenario I’m doing myself even less favors re: latency and headroom and all that good stuff.

And that’s just the computers. I use a phone as well.

As of right now, Nexus Mods and Reddit are enforcing these new laws. I don’t use either site very often (the latter not since the API exodus). My understanding is that it’s mandatory for platforms of a certain size in the UK after the 25th of July.

The UK is kind of a perfect exit node country (everything is in English!)

Most of the time it’s not the most creative people trying to generate these. I think everything I’ve ever seen from the Twitter generator can be categorically ruled as textbook slop.

Most of the interesting generations are made by people who are enthusiastic about the technology, almost always running local generators, trying to nudge the model into generating images that people are not likely to make themselves. It can be a fun thing to experiment with, especially once you understand a bit more about the internal iterative process of these generators.

As a fun toy, as the ultimate content aware fill algorithm, it’s one thing. As a social phenomenon though, these generators have poisoned the internet and our relationship with visual media as a whole. I’ll watch as my scribbles are iterated into something visually interesting and then minutes later see the IDF on the news posting about terrorizing my country in a sterile cutesy cartoon style - my temporary jpegs are nothing like the latter.

But, being real, after 5 blades, all the satires jumped to unrealistic numbers and more extreme silliness. It was like the various comedy writers figured out that the various razor companies would be glad to slap one more on there, and sell it as an entirely new thing that needed a new handle as well. So they said (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ and went hard.

Are you telling me the Gillette Facefuckerupper of legend isn’t real?

(The Wenger Giant was a real novelty product. Yes I hate consumerism yes I hate “collector” culture but it tickles my brain just right to imagine that I’ll be able to snag one someday. They’re really expensive rarities now and serve no practical purpose but they do reveal that stodgy old Swiss executives can still have a sense of humor. Until then, the trusty no-name gas station multi tool is perfectly usable.)

These were no less atrocious than current Wojak format comics.

FWIW I liked that people scribbled out their shitty ideas, often with zero artfulness in MS Paint, giving it just enough effort to get the idea across. I’m seeing a lot of lazy AI images being passed around using the Twitter image generator and it’s like there’s no threshold for something to actually be funny before being posted.

Hey, thanks for the laptop IT guy! Yeah everyone around the office has been very welcoming, I’m happy to be here. I’m pretty handy with computers so hopefully I won’t be bothering you too much haha…. Yeah anyway, I know you just imaged this laptop, but the thing is, I really don’t like all the fluff in the Windows updates, can I instead provide my own Windows image? It’s straight from Microsoft but you get it through a site called MASS GRAVE. And then you can apply the group policies and enable the drive mapping scripts and reinstall the secure company network client infrastructure —

I think when most people mean work they mean corporate where you have zero control. I’m just happy they let me use PowerTools. At home, manually amputating pieces of Windows has been a bit fiddly but no less fiddly than what people think configuring is still like.

It’s annoying, but for most people, even among the technically inclined, it’s fine. For now. I’m more likely to pivot to Linux than to OSX eventually.

Gregorz Brzeczyszczykiewicz would like a word

I still prefer paper, although not having to store moisture-sensitive fragile things is nice. So is the fact that I can read books that are out of print or hard to find (or banned, yay Middle East), even if fumbling with PDFs isn’t wonderful on the device.

And of course, the obvious: downloading them for free. Which is always ethical when Routledge wants to charge you 85$ for a scholarly work of which the author doesn’t see a dollar.

I got a Kobo and just use the networking to sync Pocket articles. Stock system.

I don’t even think an account is available in my country. Just been syncing over Calibre. It’s not perfect (it uses a community plugin) but once you get the quirks of the Calibre-to-Kobo transfer it’s easy enough.

Now the hard part. Actually reading.

This is exactly why I’d want a GPU in a home server.

That and transcoding. Wonder what the best option would be without breaking the bank/wasting too much idle power. All the GPU talk online seems to be for gaming.

I’ve looked into wiring decent Ethernet through our walls, where the phone lines are. Wooden flooring isn’t very common here so pulling through the wall ducts that have dodgy AC cables and Cat-negative-1 telephone “cables” is the only realistic option. Personally I even think I’d like to run double Ethernet cables anywhere just so I can have flexibility. When I get my own place someday, the cable duct provisioning will be absolutely ridiculous, I’ve already promised myself.

The ducts are complete trash and it’s a miracle the phone lines even worked for so long. Our electricity is so goddamn noisy here that any Ethernet signal would be affected, meaning I’ll definitely need better cables and end up with worse speeds. So noisy that powerline Ethernet really sounds like a punchline. The WiFi isn’t great because the only place the AP/router has access to the phone line is right where it enters the apartment, which is from the elevator shaft - meaning a giant Faraday cage shields half the apartment from the WiFi. We’ve disconnected the phone lines in the walls because those are completely fried and have started to introduce so much noise that it’s audible on the landline and completely kills any synchronization with the phone center. Like it’s fucking bad. All that headache for 2-4 megabit unreliable DSL. Even for Lebanon, the perennially cursed paradise we call home, pretty goddamn bad.

I’ve looked into coax Ethernet, the problem is that every few years a bolt of lightning hits the TV cable network in my neighborhood and deep fries every TV that wasn’t manually disconnected at the start of the storm. Just awful. I suspect the cable integrity is better throughout the walls though. A lot of splitters though.

The best part? I live in a part of my cursed country where they’ve started connecting FTTH. And for some reason they stopped laying the cables mere meters from my building in like 2020 and just never bothered to keep going. And the fiber company has legitimately blocked every phone number I’ve since inquired from. I’m not joking when I say I’ve considered just suspending a thick thick optic (remember the lightning, there’s no grounding here!) SFP cable along the municipal power poles (let’s not discuss legality here, it’s okay, this is Lebanon habibi), putting a nice switch in a neighbor’s house, and just paying for their internet in return for making sure that one port is nice and snug.

I do think my best bet is (when the fiber finally arrives in 2097) some kind of mesh WiFi with no backhaul, or some kind of Ethernet backhaul that relies on routing the meatiest Ethernet cable I could find on the outside of the building.

Another alternative is paying out the absolute ass for a corporate Internet subscription, but microwave internet is susceptible to the weather, and the whole thing is just so much upfront cost that it can’t be worth it. Although maybe going that route five years ago would have been worth it.

Just awful. At least everyone’s on Netflix and short form video now so data caps have moved past the pathetic 20 and 30 GBs they were only a decade ago.

Counterpoint: I’ve probably saved a significant amount of money by having the odds overwhelmingly stacked against me setting off on my homelab journey. lol

I’m so glad I nuked my Facebook a few years ago before these companies were paying this much attention to web automation.