I’m disappointed that it took seeing that ad for so many people to realize what should have been obvious: ring, along with teslas, and any voice assistant listening devices, or any other cloud-based tech that monitors video, audio, or even other data, can be used to set up an unprecedented surveillance network. Phones are a part of it, too, at the very least as tracking beacons, assuming the mics and cameras aren’t being tapped more often than that little activity dot indicates.

There’s a reason why the venn diagram of people who really understand tech and people who are enthusiastic about most new tech in the last decade and a bit aren’t the same circle. The Snowden revelations weren’t surprising on the “what they are capable of” side of things, though there had been hope before they came out that they weren’t crossing the lines that tech would have easily allowed them to. Just like when zuck bragged about the information fb users just gave him, that wasn’t all new but there was an unspoken (and perhaps naive) rule that admins should respect their users’ privacy.

When I was on the webteam for a gaming community, it would have been trivial to set up the login page to also store all user/password/email combos in a location none of the other team would be likely to notice. We hashed the password in the db, but I could change the source code to do whatever. Even if it was hashed on the client, I could have added a temporary unhashed field and get all the plaintext credentials to check who uses the same password for their email. I didn’t because I respected our users, but from then on just assumed that any site admin could see my credentials and never reuse passwords.

That also applies to Lemmy, btw. At the very least, you shouldn’t use the same password for you email and anything else (though also be aware emails are just sent as plaintext to a bunch of servers while being routed to your email provider).

“I’m actively seeking to limit my usage of porn”

Seems like you never grew out of the “shit on others for harmless interests” phase, so you shouldn’t seek out adult content until you’re 18.

Instructions unclear. It was working at first, but then after I ate the tuna, my cat peed in my boots despite being fully litter trained prior.

Shitty mods are shitty mods and reddit neither invented nor cornered the shitty mod market.

I disagree that it takes an obsession to get annoyed by moderator actions you don’t agree with, especially when it happens to something you are actively engaging with. Double especially when you know via that participation that no rules were broken and that it was likely the subject matter itself being censored (or just one side of it) rather than anything that the community was better off not seeing.

Water is air soluable.

It’s just like how salt will disappear in water without needing to get hot enough to melt.

Though both of them still need the thermal energy to do the state change, but they just borrow it from their neighbours.

Yeah, security screws are security theatre. I had an electronics screw driver set that came with a bunch of the rarer screw bits by default. Actually ran into one I didn’t have, then noticed another set with that one (plus other features like the long bendy bit for hard to reach screws) next time I was in the tool section and just bought it.

That said, I won’t be needing this one. Driving a BMW would go against the image I’m trying to cultivate of not being an asshole.

You: the existence of the subway is actually a lie to make Russia look strong to the west.

Bob: oh damn

You: we aren’t allowed to talk about it in English. The birds are microphones.

Similar with mp3 bitrate. While I do think I noticed a difference going from 128kbps to 192kbps, anything beyond that I can’t hear a difference for.

Which clearly means I need to dump 15k into my sound setup because it maxes out somewhere between 128kbps and 192kbps!

Edit: dumb -> dump
aound -> sound

Glad you used “effectively impossible” because I think it is possible, though it would be tedious as fuck to do because you’d have like a hundred different shades where each one gets used only a handful of times. It would probably take a computer program pattern helper where you tell it what colour you’re doing so it can highlight where that thread is supposed to show up. You might need to spin some of your own threads to get the correct shades, too.

That would be like a $1000 pillow for the number of hours that would need to go into it, at least.

I read the comment, then judge the comment and use that judgement and voting scores to judge the community.

I think those are where the name “desktop” comes from, though that term now refers to other computer things.

I refer to them as “tower”, “case” (which is technically just the shell and frame, but can include the contents), “computer”, or “machine”.

Yeah, windows came from a different era where if you’re seeing a new exe, it’s because you put a disk in the drive and explicitly navigated to it. Speaking of which, this isn’t even the first time that convenience ended up opening up a wide security hole because they handled CDs differently and added an autoplay feature that would check the disk for autorun.exe and just run it if autorun was enabled. I started disabling it after word about sony’s rootkits got out but have been appalled to see it enabled by default still ever since then.

I was one of the few that appreciated UAC when it was there and kept it on one of the stricter settings. I’d rather my PC ask than assume, but people bitched about it so they weakened it and eventually just got rid of it entirely I think?

Though a permissions setup would be even better. I didn’t like that UAC was an all or nothing prompt, plus it didn’t give any details about what a program wanted to do. Are you asking because this program is trying to create a new directory in program files or because it wants to replace system32 dlls with its own versions?

It’s an area even Linux can improve in (though probably depends on flavour). I like the android permissions model, where there’s various actions and you can allow or deny categories (though GrapheneOS does it even better by also sandboxing everything). I’d love to see something like that for my desktop, where apps are free to save files but can’t touch files that aren’t their own unless an explicit share is set up, where I might want one app to have network access and no disk access and another to have the opposite. I’d love to be at a state where I could just run any executable from the internet because I know that my OS won’t let it fuck anything up other than its own address space. Hell, could even dedicate a core to monitoring apps to detect if one breaks out of its sandbox without my explicit permission (while the OS also doesn’t use that to enforce the desires of other developers over my own).

It might be sufficient if the case airflow is good. Not sure if you could avoid any heat throttling that way, but I’d guess it wouldn’t need to shut down because of heat.

This one is even worse than just removing the CPU cooler, because that cooler is now blocking the hot air from leaving the case via the rear fan.

No, they pulled the cooler off thr CPU and decided to use it to block airflow entirely to the CPU case fan. Best guess is that they are trying to build an expensive smart oven.

Back in the 00s, a story about CPUs getting so hot they’d start on fire went viral. In it was a video of someone removing the cooler while it was running and then a few seconds later a flame appears.

On the one hand, obviously you shouldn’t remove your CPU cooler while it was running.

But on the other hand, fans and mounts can fail, so this was still a risk even for people who were smarter than removing the cooler entirely.

It prompted CPU makers to add thermal protections that started out as “if CPU hits threshold, cut power”, but over time more sophisticated heat management was integrated with more sophisticated performance and power management.

So these days, if you aren’t sufficiently cooling your CPU, it won’t die much quicker, instead it will throttle performance to keep heat at safe levels. OP would have gotten better performance out of it after removing that plastic. Assuming it was CPU bottlenecked in the first place. Things like RAM choice and settings can make it a moot point because the RAM can’t keep up with the CPU at 100% power anyways.

That “we” isn’t global. Some called it “the CPU”, some called it “the hard drive”, some made fun of those two groups for not knowing what they were talking about.

I believe it was a product of the earlier conflict between copyright owners and AIs on the training side. The compromise was that they could train on copyright data but lose any copyright protections on the output of the AI.

I can’t think of any good reason why links opened via notepad should be treated as trusted. Or any remote exe being treated as trusted regardless of what program is trying to open it, including the windows app store. If anything, the default behavior should be to download the file or open a prompt. I’d call that the second flaw.

Glad to be away from that platform.