Recent submissions

Comment · 26 days ago
Wow, that comment is extremely misleading and exaggerated.

1) Everything in the universe, including the sun's solar radiation, is finite. It's just a matter of scale. The heat in the earth's core is practically infinite for humanity's current and near-term needs.

2) The heat generated in the earth's core is a combination of fission decay and residual heat from the earth's initial formation. The fission reaction is locked away 5000 KM deep (as in 5 million meters), deep-enough that it poses no threat even if you drill down thousands of meters to tap into that. That is very much not true of man-made nuclear fission.

3) There is still no long term storage mechanism that is guaranteed to keep nuclear waste for the several million years it would take to decay to safe levels, considering possible things that could happen over that time scale.

Comment · 3 months ago
The GPL relies on copyright ownership for its effectiveness, and copyright ownership of LLM output is a legal gray area right now.

"...prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output." [https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10...]

If code generated by LLMs turns out to be effectively public domain, that could seriously water down the legal standing of copyleft licenses. Fortunately there is still enough human-authored code that long-standing projects as a whole are not at risk of losing all copyright control, but as more LLM-generated code is incorporated, and human authored code is deleted, the copyright slowly gets washed away.

Having said that, I suspect the big AI companies have enough lobbying power to influence the legal system and lawmaking in the future.

Comment · 6 months ago
I get an IPv6 address from my ISP (a /56 I believe), but I wish there was some good information on how to update my OpenWRT VLAN configuration, routing, and firewall rules to be able to support native IPv6 on my devices. Would love to be able to have direct IPv6 connections to the internet from my devices, but I want to make sure I can do it safely.
Comment · 7 months ago
From https://opensource.org/osd:

> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

A non-commercial clause is a discrimination against a field of endeavor and thus non-open-source. The license cannot restrict how the user is able to *use* the software and still be open source. There can however be requirements to distribute the source code when distributing the software, ala GPL.

Comment · 7 months ago
The power of correlating your real ID with your browsing activity on the internet.
Comment · 8 months ago
They also have the guarantee that the code licensed under the GPL, and all future enhancements to it, will remain free software. The same is not true of the MIT license's weak-copyleft.
Comment · 1 year ago
My keepass database has around 400 different entries in it. If I needed to transfer to a new password manager, it's not feasible to go around to 400 different sites to register new passkeys. In case one might say the answer to that is oauth, I'm also not interested in putting my faith in Google/Microsoft/Apple being benevolent arbiters of my ability to access my accounts.
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
I think technical people understand the mechanics of using Passkeys, having them backed up to multiple devices etc, but there's no way my 70 year old father is going to be able to understand that. He barely knows the difference between the computer login and his gmail login. My parents are also not wealthy-enough to have Apple take care of all of this for them. He has a hand-me-down Linux laptop because all he needs is Google Chrome. Thankfully I've been able to teach my parents to write down their passwords in a password book.

I can't tell you how many times I've ask my father "what's your google password" and he says "I don't have a google password". I like the idea of eliminating passwords, but inevitably his phone is going to break or his computer is going to crash and he needs a way to recover.

Comment · 1 year ago
So do I, but this is annoying because I need to have physical access to both of the keys when setting up 2FA on an account, or hope that I remember to add the backup yubikey when I get back home.
Comment · 2 years ago
Bah, not open source, rather BSL licensed. Stop it with the open-washing already!
Comment · 3 years ago
Computer security is hard, and I think a "security label" would give a false sense of safety. Requiring manufacturers to respond to critical security vulnerabilities for a given period of time sounds like a good idea, but such rules often have unintended side-effects (like impacting startups, who maybe couldn't afford the certification or can't guarantee long term support). What we really need is local-only device access, so that I can firewall a device off completely from the internet, and still make full use of it with a local controller like home assistant. Locking down devices with the threat of DMCA violations to reverse-engineers actively reduces device security, and takes away my ability to fix devices myself.

This overall strikes me as much lower priority than the currently ongoing ATSC 3.0 DRM doom. Please please please do something about this nightmare that broadcasters are imposing on the public. Don't let broadcasters take away my ability to watch live TV without an internet connection (resulting in a complete emergency broadcast system failure?). Don't let broadcasters take away my ability to record/time-shift live TV using software-based DVRs (e.g. Plex, Jellyfin), which could never possibly meet the "Nextgen TV" certification requirements!

Comment · 3 years ago
Up until 2 years ago, I used to use an HDHomeRun Prime with a cablecard for just basic cable (only a dozen or so channels) because I had terrible antenna reception in my apartment (I was only about 2 or 3 miles from the transmitter, but with a hill in-between). It cost me something like $60/month for just the basic cable (from RCN). Fortunately I've now moved and have great OTA reception on ATSC 1.0 so I was able to ditch the expensive cable service.

I really think the basic broadcast channels should be free to watch on whatever medium you choose. These should be free on clear QAM cable without needing a cable card.

Comment · 3 years ago
This has already happened unfortunately. In my area (Boston) nearly all of the ATSC 3.0 channels were encrypted the day they went on the air (CBS, ABC, NBC). As a result, they are unwatchable. We need to petition the FCC to force broadcasters to remove the encryption.
Comment · 3 years ago
For anyone using an HDHomeRun or any other OTA capture card, this effectively kills the ability to watch and record content using Plex/Jellyfin/Emby/etc.

Only "certified" devices are allowed access to the encryption keys. Only closed, fully locked down black box recording systems will ever be "certified". Don't have a Windows machine with a fully verified HDCP chain? Sorry, you can no longer watch OTA TV.

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