Both are mesh networks, with slight differences. The idea is that volunteers run relay nodes with LORA (which has a range od a few KM, depending on visibility), and you also have client devices, and if you have a large local community of enough nodes and users, you can have an off-grid communication network where data is being sent node to node (both client and relay) before it finds the recipient. Both networks are encrypted.

Most cities already have a pretty good coverage. Meshtastic has a few issues that Meshcore tries to solve, mostly in regards to scaling, but tbh I havent researched it enough to be able to correctly list them (just like this answer is mostly a simplification). There’s plenty of blog posts that explain it a lot better.

You can get standalone Meshcore devices (with a screen and keyboard) for around 70$, and devices that connct to your phone through bluetooth and you send messages through the network from an app for even cheaper.

My guess is that it’s not entirely adversary-proof, but it probably beats having a phone with you to communicate when you’re doing anti-goverment sruff.

And if you’re asking about Anarchist Library, there’s this site that has a lot of articles, zines and books about good operational security, how to behave on protests, what to (not) bring, first aid against common crowd control, and general anti-goverment guirrella stuff so you can protest as safely as possible.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index

Now is the time to look into Meshtastic or Meshcore.

The devices are pretty cheap, and the more poeple have it ready when needed, the better.

Also, stock up on guides from the anarchist library. Having an offline copy so you don’t have to search for it later will help with going under the radar.

You are right, I’ll fix it. Always confuse those two :D

That’s so ugly it hurts to look at.

Why is there so much empty space? The visual design is attrocious, the columns are just randomly placed without any thought, margins or symmetry.

It looks like it’s incomplete? There are now visual guidelines to separate elements, it’s hard to read and it looks like it’s missing something.

The only joy I’ve ever gotten from LLMs was telling my work-heavily-recommended Claude that I want him to act, talk and treat me like SHODAN in every conversation.

Hmm, I wonder how well would formal verification work with LLMs. I’m not really a fan of vibe coding, but the little I know about formal verification, it could very well work as a way how to prove your vibe-coded slop isn’t shit.

I’ve looked into formal verification once few years ago, but it’s too much math and thinking for me to grasp. If I remember it right, I guess the problem would be that you’d (or, LLM would, in this case) have to correctly describe the code in the formal verification language, and it would have to match 1:1 with the code, which is a point of failure? So we’d be back to square one, but instead of having to verify every single line of code, you’d have to check the proof. But maybe I’m wrong.

The scary part is the mental state he was able to get into with only a randomly generated text. If you haven’t already seen it, I highly recommend the Down the Rabbit Hole video about it, although it’s pretty heartbreaking. So much wasted talent.

There’s people like him who are similarly psychotic, but couldn’t usually get to the point where they could access a tool that would trigger them. Personalized chatbots were mostly a niche non-tech savy person doesn’t really get to that easily.

Now, it’s everywhere. A lot of people will loose their sanity over this.

I wouldn’t be surprised if something like that popped up very soon. Probably is in the works on someone’s drive already.

I remember hearing an arugment against AI coding that if it’s so good, why aren’t there apps popping up left and right? Which was true at the time.

Now? In the past month, I’ve seen a pretty in-depth Murloc-tamagotchi addon in WoW (that kills your FPS), a whole open-source custom World of Warcraft client, an E2E Tor-based messenger (that signs messages with 128b CBC key), a game engine based on a lost Standart Model of physics that was mentioned by Tesla, but lost to time, that someone reverse engineered (which had very TempleOS vibes, as far as the authors mental state goes), a Matrix protocol on Cloudfare microservices (that skipped message signature verification), and I could go on.

Open-source is going to become a hell to navigate. I was already anxious about using FOSS tools due to malicious typosquatting clones, supply chain attacks and general security of using someone’s FOSS code on my PC. Now, add vibe coded shit to the mix, and finding a good FOSS projects and tools will be hell :(

You can stream video and voice over IRC?

Tbh from my experiences, AI is also turning current senior devs into juniors. The skill erosion is real, and I could see it on myself just after a week of trying out Claude (since we’ve gotten access at my job).

The skills I’ve spent a great part of my life acquiring are really not worth whatever advantages AI use may have, even if I just did my job to earn a paycheck and didn’t care about the quality of my output, as long as it’s acceptable. It may feel easier now, but eventually you will have to pass another interview, and good luck when the last time you actually coded without AI was a year ago.

If I would’ve trained a markov chain on a set of cyberpunk novels, and other texts with similar context, I’m pretty sure I would’ve also gotten an “AI” that would be ready to kill and blackmail, lol.

Any recommendations? My only experience with defcon is through recordings of the talks from there, and they’ve always been phenomenal, and some videos from the events like various CTFs. Never really looked into it more. I think I also saw a documentary a few years ago that was pretty sick.

The algorithm is probably made to maximize the time you spend on the platform, and is really good at it. (I mean, just look how good are ML algorithms on text -> picture, and add to it that the algorithm that does your info -> engagement has decades of data and training on billions of people).

My theory is that it has misaligned, because it turned out that radicalizing people into right-wing bullshit will glue them to the social network very effectively, so it just started to do that. It makes sense - once you start spewing right-wing bullshit, it will probably isolate you from your IRL friends, you will have an echo chamber on the social network, and it is made to sound like some kind of deep truth no one else knows.

You getting left-wing content might be simply because it would not be efficient to try to convert you, so the algorithm is trying something else that’s more effective on the (minority?) of people like you.

Defcon is my biggest regret about the whole “US going to shit” situation. I’m from Europe, and I was planning to eventually attend, but there’s no way I’m going there until USA gets their shit together, which I suspect won’t be during my lifetime at this point.

They should move it to Europe, especially for this kind of event, I’d suspect that for a lot of attendees and speakers, who tend to be pretty anti-systemic, going into US safely at this point is not an option.

I’ve been using Graphene for years at this point, and so far it has been amazing.

I have two profiles, main one without Google Play services, and fortunately a lot of apps just work out even without them. Some complain about it, but still work at least as far core functionality I want is considered, and for the few that don’t, I have a second profile that runs sandboxed Play Services and just switch when needed.

I’m a little bit worried about Google’s push around installing apps from other sources than orignal Play Store, or the new integrity API, but I’m willing to just stop using any app that requires it, and change banks to one that either doesn’t require an app for login, or can work without play services. Fortunately, my current one works without, for now (mBank).

I’ve had a similar experience at my job, where we’ve gotten an unlimited access to a few models.

There’s one huge problem I’ve very quickly ran into - skill attrition. You very quickly get lazy, and stop being able to critically think about problems. Hell, I’ve only had access to it for two weeks, and I’m starting to see the effects. “Can you add this button?” is a very simple change that I could probably make immediately, but AI can make it a little bit faster, and without me putting in the effort. Or it can at least show me the correct script to put it in, without me having to go scouring the code looking for it. It’s addicting, and quite scary. YMMV, you might have stronger willpower and be able to switch between lazy and locked in mode, but I very quickly found out I can’t.

But is it useful? That very much depends on what do you want out of your job, and both cases have major (and mostly similar) problems.

If you don’t really care about the quality of your job, and are there just to work your 8/5 and get money, hoping to just balance effort vs. quality so they won’t fire you, the it might help. Especially at this point, where management isn’t really used to it that much, you can get away with a lot. But, eventually, you will very probably need to look for a new job, and good luck getting through an interview when you haven’t really thought about code without the help of an AI for the past two years. The fact that you started coding before AI is the only advantage you now have against literally EVERYONE who can do the same job with AI. And every day you don’t write a piece of code from scratch, you are loosing that advantage.

I have I job I don’t particularly care about, but I still use it as a learning opportunity. It might be vastly different in other projects, but my job is mostly just support and bugfixing on a game that has been released for years at this point by a large developer, so nothing really involved, so I can usually afford to use my time to research things I wasn’t familiar with, look into things we could do better thanks to new tech or updates that have been released, and how to refactor or rewrite our code into it. Or making tools that would make our testing easier. I could just not do that, easily get my paycheck, and be glad I have a somewhat stable position, but that would not help me much. In this case, AI is actively harmful for what I’m trying to get out of my job, even if it works pretty well. It only erodes my skills I have, which are not very practiced even without AI, since bug fixing isn’t really much of development. Adding AI to the mix would just throw away my years of college and dozens of projects I’ve learned on. And I won’t learn anything new.

Obviously, if you care about your job output and want to do it perfectly, you don’t want to erode your skills, and you don’t want AI output in your code. AI by definition outputs mediocre and average work, riddled with hard-to-spot bugs, and you should not be ok with mediocre if you really care about the work you do and leave behind.

Especially the point about the pretty large probability of having to seek a new job eventually is IMO the most important thing that’s really worth considering, before you go all in on AI. It’s something that a lot of programmers spend years (and in less developed countries thousands of dollars) in learning, and throwing it away in favor of a service that will very soon need to massively ramp up their costs to get out of red and earn billions they have invested into it is not worth it.

Currently, AI is cheap. It also actively harms your ability to do the job without it. They have also invested billions of dollars that they need to eventually make up, and you will eventually need to pass a job interview. Keep that in mind when deciding to offload your thinking to AI.

Remember that (I think) C++ race condition in RTG software, that killed people with something like 0.0001% probability and it was a huge deal and a reason to immediately retire the devices (or maybe just fix the bug, the point is that in medical, it’s super important to have a high success chance)?

I’m sure AI doing diagnosis will be able to get to a higher success chance, lol.

EDIT: From a quick search, it looks like mis-diagnosis chance in doctors is around 10%. I still don’t think AI can do better.

I’m also betting on Graphene. Been able to get by with a profile without Play Services, thankfully my bank doesn’t require it, but if they ever do (or the new integrity bullshit), I’m immediately switching banks to one that doesn’t.

That’s the only app I need on my phone, anything else I can get without if they require it.

In a hypothetical situation where you get a law passed in your country, where it’s mandatory to perform age verification on all social media apps, it’s simple.

No verification? Jail time. Will they go after you? They could, if someone pointed them towards your server. (I think they even have to, at least in our country, the government has to persecute a crime they are made aware of if I remember my college law courses right)

In some states, if I understand it right (based on a quick googling, might be false) failing to do verification for porn can be considered as a felony. It’s a slightly different example (porn vs. social networks), but if the laws are written in the same way, there’s not really much you can do about it.

Completely anonymous hosting that’s in no way tied to you (through IP, credit card, location, domain, logs, etc) is difficult. While you’d still probably be fine if you have a private-use server, you’d still give anyone who doesn’t like you and knows about it a pretty easy way how to make your life a lot more difficult. This of course heavily depends on how would (will) the laws be written in your country, but give the track record of lawmakers understanding tech, there is a chance that even small self-hosted stuff would catch flak. If it’s written in such a way to not be i.e limited by user count, then there’s not much you can do.

A lawyer would probably be able to talk you out of it, but you’d still be charged and it would suck (and be expensive) to deal with.

So, yeah. “How could the government force me to enable it” boils down to “jail time”. I mean, it’s basically a similar question like “how could the government stop me from using Telegram or VPNs”, and IIRC there are some examples for that already.

EDIT: Not having public sign-up enabled could be a way around it, since random people can’t make an account there, so you’re basically doing age-verification by a veto. However, if someone under-age got into your server, they then have a leverage on you, since they are there illegally (in the hypothetical scenario).

This is a good reminder for people to run Snowflake relay if they can. Just installing the relay extensions is all you need to do.

I’ve had the extension for a bit now, and I usually get a few connections the moment I open my browser. I quickly forgot about having it installed, and it never gave me any trouble.

Snowflake allows you to connect to the Tor network in places where Tor is blocked by routing your connection through volunteer proxies located in uncensored countries.

Similar to VPNs, which help users bypass Internet censorship, Snowflake disguises your Internet activity as though you’re making a video or voice call, making you less detectable to Internet censors.