@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

wizzwizz4

@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org

I like tools. Tools exist to serve a purpose; good tools serve many purposes. The purposes are the important part – but I'm no good at solving problems. I hope my tools will be enough.

Testimonials from satisfied costumers:
• "this pun is so fucking bad and i hate you for it" — https://snug.moe/@miko

If I'm doing wrong, please tell me. Either I don't know (and you've saved everyone a lot of grief), or I do know (and I should face consequences).

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

SomeGadgetGuy, to windows
@SomeGadgetGuy@techhub.social avatar

It just clicked in my brain. What I haven't been able to articulate about why I'm so anxious about Recall. I'm sure others have already gotten to where I am.

It's worse than "a system that tracks everything you do" and stores that info in a basic database that could be easily compromised.
It's worse than a nanny surveillance tool for companies to spy on their employees.

It's inescapable.

It doesn't matter if I make a dozen "how to disable recall" tutorials. The second YOUR data shows up on someone ELSE'S screen, it's in THEIR recall database.

It won't matter if you're a master expert specialist. You can't account for EVERY other computer you've ever interacted with. If a family member looks up an old email with your personal data in it, your data is now at risk.

If THEIR system is compromised YOUR data is at risk.

I just went from "vague feeling of unease" to "actively writing templates to canvas elected officials, regulators, and attorneys general."

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@droidboy @helgztech @SomeGadgetGuy Off-the-shelf infostealing malware that is known to Windows Defender can exfiltrate the Recall database. (source: https://doublepulsar.com/recall-stealing-everything-youve-ever-typed-or-viewed-on-your-own-windows-pc-is-now-possible-da3e12e9465e via https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/06/03/privacy-of-windows-copilot-recall/)

sullybiker, to random
@sullybiker@sully.site avatar

It's on Reddit so I have already eaten my own fingers this morning, but this is an interesting find about the dangers of automotive telemetry. Of course they're fucking selling it. One ithat made me think of @onepict
https://www.reddit.com/r/Hyundai/comments/1d4e4nn/dear_hyundai_you_just_lost_a_customer_for_life/

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@kinetix @onepict @sullybiker The people who say "no" are often those who've said "no" to Reddit. There's some level of selection bias going on.

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Is there a good resource or book for learning about some of the details of how webservers work?

For example if I want an IP address on a intranet to be a webpage that people on that intranet can go to... how would I set that up from scratch. Let's say I have a machine with a static IP on the local net... (but what I really also need to understand is how a static IP is established locally, a DNS?)

Maybe the dream book or resource doesn't exist. But I ask anyway.

(it's macs if that matters)

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@futurebird I'd start with a high-level overview RFC 9110 (start at section 1, read until bored, then skip to section 3), then go for the nitty-gritty in RFC 9112.

The contents of RFC 9111 is important once you've got more than a couple dozen users, or if any of them have to pay for bandwidth, but I'd wait to read that until your head stops spinning from RFC 9112.

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@futurebird If you have a web browser, install ncat from https://nmap.org/download.html, and have a little play around with https://nmap.org/ncat/guide/ncat-usage.html#ncat-listen.

(Watch the Network tab in your browser's F12 developer tools, probably with the "persist logs" setting enabled. Also watch the terminal output.)

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@futurebird For getting a static IP address: your IP address is whatever you say your IP address is, if you can get the traffic routed to you. On local networks, that's handled by ARP. (ARP's RFC is incomprehensible, but you can get the gist from RFC 5227.)

Basic idea of ARP: traffic on the network is sent to MAC addresses. When you want to send to an IP, you shout "hey, who's 192.168.1.1?", and some device replies "hey that's me", then you use that MAC.

RL_Dane, (edited ) to random
@RL_Dane@fosstodon.org avatar

I was at someone's house today and there was no way to set the thermostat because the internet connectivity was down.

This is the kind of crap that radicalizes you.

The thermostat was put there by the builder.

Addendum for further explanation: I was there for something work-related, and the house is vacant for the moment. You're supposed to connect the thermostat to their app, but I couldn't get the app to see the dumb thing, even after joining its own hotspot.
Really unnecessarily confusing.

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@RL_Dane "Put there by the builder" means "present in other houses" means "a handy internet guide would be helpful to others".

What's the make and model, and do you have the time/opportunity to reverse-engineer the blasted contraption?

simon_brooke, to Scotland
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

Destroying the planet we live on -- the only planet we can live on -- is of course totally legal and even supported and subsidised by governments around the world (including 's).

But PROTESTING against destroying the planet? That's illegal. That's very, very illegal. Don't even think about doing that.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/23/alarm-as-german-climate-activists-charged-with-forming-a-criminal-organisation

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@SpaceJellyfish @TomSwirly @simon_brooke

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

See especially, the paragraph beginning “I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers.”

miki, to random
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

LaTeX pro tip:

If you need to write a simple fraction like 1/2, 1/4, 2/3 etc, where both the numerator and denominator are a single digit, you can just write \fracxy instead of \frac{x}{y}. I personally find this form to be far more readable with a screen reader and wish I discovered it sooner.

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@miki It also works if the denominator is a single symbol (e.g. \frac1x). If the numerator is a symbol, you need a space (e.g. \frac xy).

pluralistic, to random
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

I have been a published writer since I was 17, and never in all those years have I encountered worse editorial suggestions than the automated ones generated by Microsoft Office365.

Makes Clippy look like EB White.

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

It's a real shame, because Microsoft Word's grammar checker once made it worth using Microsoft Word.

It was:
• local
• CPU-bound
• fast
• deterministic
• customisable
• ubiquitous.

LanguageTool (https://community.languagetool.org/ruleEditor2/index) is in the same category, but doesn't have enough rules to be useful, and those it has are… iffy. Nothing else I'm aware of comes close.

Why did Microsoft replace this perhaps world-leading technology? I haven't read the relevant @pluralistic book, so I can only speculate.

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

And it's connected to the whole rest of the Fediverse, which is certainly not a women-only space. Things you post here will be seen outside the context of this magazine.

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

Why not?

wizzwizz4, (edited )
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

Your definitions are overly simplistic. There are bigender people who are male and female and are still non-binary.

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

Do you have any reason to believe that, other than your intuition? Plenty of aspects of reality are unintuitive, and people, in my experience, can be even less intuitive than quantum mechanics. As non-binary identities go, bigender isn't a contested one.

Consider giving https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Bigender a brief read, and checking out the references.

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

(This is incorrect.)

Since you say so, you must know what a gender identity is. Tell me then, what is gender? What principle makes something a gender, or not a gender?

wizzwizz4, (edited )
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

Regarding your "hot and cold" analogy: warm menthol applied to the skin feels hot and cold. In thermodynamics we have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature:

> A system with a truly negative temperature on the Kelvin scale is hotter than any system with a positive temperature.

If you clarify what you mean by "hot" and "cold", I'm sure I can find plenty more examples where the real world doesn't match your simplistic, obstinate understanding.

0x4d6165, to random
@0x4d6165@wanderingwires.net avatar

Don't wanna use Go cause it's corporate interested in but annoyed by Rust because it's compiler is so heavy common lisp is cool but doing some basic modern stuff in it is kinda annoying ughhhhh. Where is the good programming language.

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@alcinnz @0x4d6165 The trouble with Lua is that – in practice – it has no standard library. (Lua does come with one, but when it's embedded in a thing, it's always modified.)

Tcl's a bit better in that respect, but its data model takes more getting used to than Lua's. (Tcl's like Smalltalk-OO minus Java-objects, if everything's a string; but it does have objects under the hood so you have to sort of act like it's Copy-on-Write OO if you want to predict its memory / performance characteristics.)

noybeu, to random
@noybeu@mastodon.social avatar

🚨 noyb has filed a complaint against the ChatGPT creator OpenAI

OpenAI openly admits that it is unable to correct false information about people on ChatGPT. The company cannot even say where the data comes from.

Read all about it here 👇

https://noyb.eu/en/chatgpt-provides-false-information-about-people-and-openai-cant-correct-it

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@waggers5 @noybeu Except (a) that's not the product that OpenAI is marketing; and (b) even if it were, the model does contain personal information about many people. (GPT-3.5 Turbo answered "What's Beyoncé's birthday?" with "Beyoncé's birthday is on September 4th." (And now I can't say "I've never used ChatGPT" in internet arguments: I hope you appreciate this sacrifice.))

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

Have any #phonetics and specifically vocal production and perception ppl studied the donald duck voice, bc its like a stunning example of perceptual degeneracy with acoustic variability. Those phonemes are nothing like normal speech and are produced totally differently too

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@jonny I'm pretty sure they have: I remember reading a fairly detailed description on Wikipedia.

Ah, here we go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaryngeal_speech#Buccal_speech

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

What if computing weren't divided into siloed "applications"? What would that look like? How could we do it while still keeping software development decentralized?

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@freakazoid Pluggable modules, with a (probably graphical) interface, and preset configurations for things like graphics editors, web browsers, and word processors.

The graphics package has a toolbox, from which you can pick up tools (changing the cursor mode), and draw over any drawable surface. Dirtied surfaces would prompt you to save them before they overwrote their contents, unless you'd told them otherwise (e.g. if the state was being handled by some state node behind the surface).

mmu_man, to random French
@mmu_man@m.g3l.org avatar

Anyone knows a good web form #password brute forcing tool?

This *** Samsung copier we got donated we don't know it, and the panel fails to boot, and reflashing it requires… the password 🤷

poke @aeris @imil

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@mmu_man Can you bypass that by putting it in service mode? Usually with these things, there's a way for the manufacturer to fix stuff if you ship it back to them for repair, and you can just do those things yourself.

bugaevc, to random
@bugaevc@floss.social avatar

Is Linux secure?

Let me rephrase, is a huge pile of C code, running in privileged mode in a shared address space, highly concurrent, using its own homegrown memory model based on volatile instead of the one the language spec defines and the compilers implement, dealing with untrusted data, implementing many complex protocols, data formats, & functionality, managing a bunch of "objects" with complex ownership and lifetime semantics, embedding its own JIT — secure?

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@Suiseiseki Yeah, that's Richard Stallman's version of the software / not-software distinction, and while it's the only way to be a free software zealot while still using commodity hardware, it's not useful.

Nobody has reverse-engineered a modern x86 chip from looking at the circuitry. All the high-level behaviour of an x86 chip is controlled by microcode: the CPU comes with microcode written by Intel, and there are precious few threat models where it makes sense not to use microcode updates.

gadgetoid, to random
@gadgetoid@fosstodon.org avatar

Is it even legal for the literal UK government to run YouTube ads that are just text over graphics and the only audio is music? How are those accessible? 🤔

Normal adverts just being music and text raises an eyebrow, but this feels especially egregious.

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@gadgetoid You could bring it up with the Home Office Digital, Data and Technology people. They're world-leading in the digital accessibility field (sadly, this isn't hard) and probably know the right people to yell at.

drewdevault, to random
@drewdevault@fosstodon.org avatar

WIP Redis fork:

https://codeberg.org/redict/redict

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@drewdevault That's an excellent README. I might steal the approach.

mwl, to random
@mwl@io.mwl.io avatar

As a straight middle-aged white dude who worked for decades in tech, my superpower is admitting that I don't know enough about something to have an opinion.

You could also develop this superpower.

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@mwl Do you have any advice for communicating “I don't know enough about this to have an opinion, and I know more than you about it”?

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

I'm trying to learn some number theory - elliptic curves and their L-functions. It would help to do some calculations and look for patterns. But I'm no good at programming. Can anyone here write a little program in Sage, which I could modify? Even better, maybe some folks could join in and explore this together on Mathstodon.

I want to to count the solutions of some cubic equations with integer coefficients in two variables. I want to count the solutions in the field with pⁿ elements. If I choose the equation and a prime p, I want to see the number of solutions for n = 1, 2, ..., 10 (say).

Below I did this for

y² + y = x³ + x

Here the number of solutions in the field with 2ⁿ elements turns out to be

2ⁿ - (1+i)ⁿ - (1-i)ⁿ

In general for an elliptic curve and a prime p the number of solutions is

pⁿ - αⁿ - βⁿ

where α is some complex number and β is its complex conjugate. This is called Hasse's theorem, and I explained it starting here:

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/motives/8.html

But next I'd like to try

y² + y = x³

again with the prime p = 2. This one may follow a different pattern, because this curve has a "cusp" for p = 2.

[Narrator: or does it? Read the comments.]

Of course there must be people who understand all this stuff, but it's sort of fun to figure things out oneself... umm, at least if someone helps out a little. 😅

wizzwizz4,
@wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org avatar

@johncarlosbaez I don't know Sage the same way I know most programming environments, but I know it the same way I know my scientific calculator. (I can press the buttons, and I can read all the buttons until I find the right button.) So this is likely very inelegant, but…

from sage.all import *
p = 2
def bruteforce_it(pred):
for n in range(1, 11):
F = FiniteField(p ** n)
count = sum(1 for x in F for y in F if pred(x,y))
print(n, count)

bruteforce_it(lambda x,y: y ** 2 + y == x ** 3)

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