So, the elephant in the room is Chrome killing ad-blocking.
I think that Firefox (and Firefox forks, like Zen Browser) have low-enough marketshare that websites that depend on ad revenue may just kill support for Firefox if Firefox does permit ad blocking.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
As of February:
Chrome: 66.3%
Safari: 17.99%
Edge: 5.33%
Firefox: 2.62%
The software used to view the Web in 2025 is really mostly under the control of either Google or Apple.
I spent a while when choosing a laptop a while back trying to compare based on how many watt-hours the battery could provide, so I think that that’s a useful metric, but I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to mechanically dig that up for all the laptops out there.
The overall goal is to cut the agency’s budget by fifty percent. Shedd suggested using AI to analyze contracts for redundancies, root out fraud, and facilitate a reduction in the federal workforce by automating much of their work.
I am bullish on AI in the long run.
I am skeptical that given the state of affairs in 2025, you can reasonably automate half of the federal government, via AI or any other means.
I also don’t think that the way to do this is to lay off half of the federal workforce and then, after the fact, see what can be automated. If you look at the private sector automating things, it tends to hedge its bets. Take self-service point-of-sale kiosks. We didn’t just see companies simply lay off all cashiers. Instead, we saw them brought in as an option, then had the company look at what worked and what didn’t work – and some of those were really bad at first – and then increase the rate of deployment once it had confidence in the solution and a handle on the issues that came with them.
I don’t think that she personally thinks that it’s a good idea not to be vaccinated. She’s just willing to play to the crowd to the extent of harming it.
Marjorie Taylor Greene Refuses To Reveal If She Has Been Vaccinated When Quizzed
Armed with this new tool, which enables raw access to Bluetooth traffic, Targolic discovered hidden vendor-specific commands (Opcode 0x3F) in the ESP32 Bluetooth firmware that allow low-level control over Bluetooth functions.
In total, they found 29 undocumented commands, collectively characterized as a “backdoor,” that could be used for memory manipulation (read/write RAM and Flash), MAC address spoofing (device impersonation), and LMP/LLCP packet injection.
Espressif has not publicly documented these commands, so either they weren’t meant to be accessible, or they were left in by mistake.
I’d kind of like to know whether these can be used against an unpaired device or not. That’d seem to have a pretty dramatic impact on the scope of the vulnerability.
I’ve been telling myself since about 2016 that I would save up to go all in and build a solid gaming desktop.
Finally, I was at the point of “Fuck it, I’m tired of waiting. I’m buying a 5080, even if it costs as much as 2 PS5s.”
I assume that whatever you’re running right now isn’t terribly new if you’ve been thinking about upgrading for nine years.
The 5080 is a 16GB card. A quick skim on Amazon suggests that 16GB Nvidia cards are in short supply, but that you can get a 16GB AMD GPU without problems.
They aren’t quite as fast on the Passmark benchmark as the 5080, but they also cost a lot less (even if the 5080 were available), and I assume that they’d be a lot faster than whatever you’re running now.
Could go with that (or something less-fancy) and then if you felt that you wanted to spend more for more performance, do so when GPUs become available.
I mean, people do use the Web UI.
I was reading some articles the other day, and the impression I have is that that’s really not true for at least Trump.
The Trump route was more:
Conservatives in the US felt that media had a liberal bias. Whether it did or didn’t doesn’t matter for this discussion — that was the perception.
Fox News offers a viewpoint appealing to conservatives. It becomes essentially the only mainstream conservative media outlet. Liberal viewers watch a variety of news media, but Fox News dominates among conservatives.
Fox News — already somewhat opinion-based from the start — starts to veer off into conspiracy land. Because so many conservatives watch Fox News, this has a major impact.
There’s some back and forth here. It’s not that Fox just pushed ideas that were out there, but that they’re willing to show material based on what people will watch, and they gained more viewers than they lost if they ran bonkers stuff.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/media/fox-news-hoax-paperback-book/index.html
When Donald Trump lost the presidency last November, Fox News lost too. But unlike Trump, Fox was never in denial about its loss. The network’s executives and multi-million-dollar stars stared the ratings in the face every day and saw that their pro-Trump audience was reacting to the prospect of President Biden by switching channels or turning off the TV.
“We’re bleeding eyeballs,” a Fox producer remarked in December. “And we’re scared.”
To fix the problem, Fox ran even further to the right. And here’s the thing: It worked. It was toxic for the American political system, but it was profitable for Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch.
“Fox is a really different place than it was pre-election,” a commentator said to me, with regret, after Biden took office.
The post-election changes at Fox happened one day at a time, one show at a time, but when viewed in totality, they are unmistakable and stark. Practically every change was about having less news on the air and more opinions-about-the-news. It was like serving dessert without dinner, when the dessert consisted of screaming about how awful the dinner was, and warning that the meal might be a socialist plot, and hey, while we’re at it, why are chefs so corrupt?
And because Fox News is the primary trusted source of information for millions of Americans, including Republican elected officials and party activists, the changes affect everyone.
Trump’s loss was a pivot point.
‘We denied the pandemic and now we’re denying the election outcome.’
Fox’s ratings declined in the immediate aftermath of Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, so the slump after the networks projected Biden as president-elect was no surprise. But the precipitousness was a shock. Fox’s afternoon and evening hours fell off by 20, 25, 30 percent, even though the news cycle was nothing short of epic. For people at Fox who were used to winning for years, this was disorienting, and for some downright terrifying.
“Our audience hates this,” one executive said to me in a moment of candor. “This” was Biden as president-elect and Kamala Harris as VP-elect. “They’re pissed,” said a second source. “Seething,” said another.
I granted anonymity to these sources because they weren’t allowed to speak with outside reporters on the record, and because I wanted them to freely offer blunt assessments of the situation.
Fox’s problem was that the audience suddenly had somewhere else to go. On the up-and- coming channel Newsmax, Biden wasn’t called president-elect right away. In other words, Trump wasn’t a loser yet. Newsmax’s 7 p.m. host Greg Kelly kept saying that he believed Trump could stay in office for four more years. “IT ISN’T OVER YET,” Newsmax’s banners proclaimed. While Fox only dabbled in election denialism at first, Newsmax went all-in.
There wasn’t really any major center-right mainstream news source other than Fox News, so if Fox shifts into conspiracy-land, so does the conservative public.
I dunno. Maybe the answer is something like a news source somewhere between CNN and Fox News. Something that a conservative audience is comfortable watching, but doesn’t fly off the handle to the degree that Fox has. It maybe can’t capture an audience that’s as large, but it only needs enough to be viable.
I mean, there are center-right media sources like the Wall Street Journal, but those are kinda not aimed at mass audiences.
She’s a House Representative. As long as the public in her district in, I believe, Georgia, keeps wanting her to be the one to speak for them, she’s gonna stay.
checks
Georgia’s 14th district.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia's_14th_congressional_district
Reserved for future use: krex & krox
Poor “kryx”.
Three-letter words that can be typed with one hand, since I have to type them frequently.
$ egrep "^([qwertasdfgzxcvb]{3}|[yuiophjkllnm]{3})$" /usr/share/dict/words
Lemmy instances can have a maximum size-in-bytes limit placed that the pict-rs instance will accept. Your particular image may exceed the limit on the instance that you’re trying to post to.
Google and Apple and others already do that ad hoc, using signal strength from Bluetooth and WiFi beacons. Can contribute to that by just setting up a wireless access point or several near where you want more signal. Doesn’t even need to be Internet-connected.
Well, that’s a pleasant piece of news among a number of not-so-pleasant news items.
Reddit will now issue warnings to users who “upvote several pieces of content banned for violating our policies” within “a certain timeframe,” starting first with violent content, the company announced on Wednesday.
Hmm. What does this pertain to?
kagis
https://www.theverge.com/news/606904/reddit-rules-bans-violence-doxing-elon-musk-doge
Reddit has seen an increase in rule-breaking posts across “several communities,” and it has issued a temporary ban on one that featured users calling for violence against people who work for the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
That community, r/WhitePeopleTwitter, was given a 72-hour ban on Tuesday, as reported by Engadget. Screenshots shared on X show multiple examples of the threatening posts. Musk later reposted the screenshots, claiming that the users have “broken the law.”
In a note on the subreddit, Reddit says it was banned “due to a prevalence of violent content” and that “inciting and glorifying violence or doxing” violate Reddit’s rules. An unnamed Reddit admin said the ban was meant to be a “cooling-off period” for the community.
Reddit also gave a full ban to a subreddit called r/IsElonDeadYet for violating rules “against posting violent content.” The unnamed admin said Reddit is taking steps “to ensure all communities can provide a safe environment for healthy conversation” in a post on r/RedditSafety.
Ah.
Wick posted the code for a tool that automatically downloads DMs from Twitter accounts. The code specifies Twitter accounts, which existed only until the social platform rebranded to “X” in October 2023, suggesting the possibility that the tool could be used to search through the digital past of government employees looking for disagreeable opinions or references.
Another tool appeared to be designed for collecting sensitive data from government agency org charts. The tool contained fields for capturing the employee’s office, a 1-5 satisfaction rating, union status, and whether or not their position is statutorily mandated.
Well, that’s interesting. The guys who are determining who to lay off are apparently using union status as an input.
Is the Executive Branch taking someone’s union status into account in making a firing decision legal? I’m pretty sure that it’s not for private business.
Discriminating against employees because of their union activities or sympathies (Section 8(a)(3))
It is unlawful to discourage (or encourage) union activities or sympathies “by discrimination in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any term or condition of employment.” For example, employers may not discharge, lay off, or discipline employees, or refuse to hire job applicants, because they are pro-union.
I believe that that also applies to government. That seems like it might be some pretty juicy meat for the public sector union lawyers to work with.
Ehhh. I mean, technically yes, but a proxy for search engine requests is probably functionally equivalent to the end user.
Also, if users don’t know that such a thing exists and goes looking for a “search engine”, they likely also want this.
One of my personal pet peeves is power stations — a big lithium-ion battery pack hooked up to a charge controller and inverter and USB power supply and with points to attach solar panels — being called a “solar generator”. It’s not a generator, doesn’t use mechanical energy. But…a lot of people who think “I need electricity in an outage” just go searching for “generator”. I don’t like the practice, but I think that the aim is less to deceive users and more to try to deal with the fact that they functionally act in much the same role and people might not otherwise think of them.
I am less sympathetic to vendors who do the same with calling evaporative coolers “air conditioners”. Those have some level of overlap in use, but are substantially different devices in price and capability.
Nah, I wrote that when I thought that you just wanted content-based addressing, not that you specifically objected to hash trees being used for the addressing.
BitTorrent and Hyphanet have mechanisms that do this.
Magnet URIs are a standard way of encoding this.
EDIT: You typically want a slightly-more-elaborate approach than just handing the network a hash and then getting a file.
You typically want to be able to “chunk” a large file, so that you can pull it from multiple sources. The problem is that you can only validate that information is correct once you have the whole file. So, say you “chunk” the file, get part of it from one source and part from another. A malicious source could feed you incorrect data. You can validate that the end file does not hash to the right value, but then you have no idea what part of the file that some source fed you is invalid, so you don’t know who to re-fetch data from.
What’s more-common is a system where you have the hash of a hash tree of a file. That way, you can take the hash, request the hash tree from the network, validate that the hash tree hashes to the hash, and then start requesting chunks of the file, where a leaf node in the hash tree is the hash of a chunk. That way, you can validate data at a chunk level, and know that a chunk is invalid after requesting no more than one chunk from a given source.
See Merkle tree, which also mentions Tiger Tree Hash; TTH is typically used as a key in magnet URIs.
EDIT2:
Can’t think of a way to do it with a DHT
All of the DHTs that I can think of exist to implement this sort of thing.
EDIT3: Oh, skimmed over your concern, didn’t notice that you took issue with using a hash tree. I think that one normally does want a hash tree, that it’s a mistake to use a straight hash. I mean, you can generate the hash of a hash tree as easily as the hash of a file, if you have that file, which it sounds like you do. On Linux, rhash(1) can generate hashes of hash trees. So if you already have the file, that’s probably what you want.
Hypothetically, I guess you could go build some kind of index mapping hashes to hashes of hash trees. Don’t know whether you can pull the hash off BitTorrent or something, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is. But…you’re probably better off with hash trees, unless you can’t see the file and already are committed to a straight hash of the file.
EDIT4:
I mean:
$ rhash --sha1 --hex pkgs
7d3a772009aacfe465cb44be414aaa6604ca1ef0 pkgs
$ rhash -T --hex pkgs
18cab20ffdc55614ed45c5620d85b0230951432cdae2303a pkgs
$
Either way, straight hash or hash of a hash tree, you’re getting a hex string that identifies your file uniquely. Just that in the hash tree case, you solve some significant problems related to the other thing that you want to do, fetch your file. Might be more compute-intensive to generate a hash of a hash tree, but unless you’re really compute-constrained…shrugs
I use gdb myself.
I don’t know exactly what you’re after. From the above, I see:
“easy to use”
" the mouse is faster, not slower"
You don’t specify a language, so I’m assuming you’re looking for something low-level.
You don’t specify an editor, so I’m assuming that you want something stand-alone, not integrated with an editor.
There are a number of packages that use gdb internally, but put some kind of visualization on it. I’ve used emacs’s before, though I’m not particularly married to it — mainly found it interesting as a way to rapidly move up and down frames in a stack — but I’m assuming that if you want something quick to learn, you’re not looking for emacs either.
Maybe seer? That’d be a stand-alone frontend on gdb with a GUI. Haven’t used it myself.
EDIT: WRT gdb, the major alternative that I can think of to gdb is dbx, and that’s also a CLI tool and looks dead these days. gdb is pretty dominant, so if you want something mouse-oriented, you’re probably going to have some form of frontend on gdb.
There are other important debugging tools out there, stuff like valgrind, but in terms of a tool to halt and step through a program, view variables, etc, you’re most-likely looking at gdb, one way or another, unless you’re working in some sort of high-level language that has its own debugger. If you want a GUI interface, it’s probably going to be some sort of frontend to gdb.
EDIT2: Huh. Apparently llvm has its own debugger, lldb. Haven’t used it, and it’s probably not what you want anyway, since it’s also a CLI-based debugger. I am also sure that it has far fewer users than gdb. But just for completeness…guess you already looked at that, mentioned it in your comment.