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Joined 7 days ago
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Cake day: January 21st, 2025

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  • People will dislike this:

    The most basic one with little barrier to entry is imessage. Theres a good chance your friends and family already have it and with a few setting changes (no sms fallback, set icloud recovery key, probably some stuff I forgot) you’re damn near at parity with signal.

    All without dad having to download a new app onto his phone and make a new identity!

    Of course you’ll need signal or something for people who don’t use it.

    I use that combination and it’s excellent. If you can be on imessage with someone you’re good and everything works, if not you do signal.

    There will be people you gotta use sms with. They just won’t be able or willing to do something new. Sometimes there’s an equipment problem, their super old provider version of android can’t get an app you both agree on. Sometimes they’re using a Nokia.

    Interacting with sms often may help keep you on your toes about it. I know I’m more careful over text now.

    That combination, imessage and signal, also has a benefit of reducing the chances that you’ll broadcast an awareness of and desire for privacy and security to the whole world all the time.

    In the us, there’s a 50% chance you just look like a normal person and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

    Make sure it meets your needs of course




  • We eat fewer eggs.

    That seems like nothing but eggs are an insanely cheap and fast way to get a decent meal quickly in the morning or to beef up, pun intended, a bowl of grits or oatmeal or something.

    When we run out of eggs we don’t just not eat, we may make something that’s less filling or healthy or may spend more on breakfast because there just isn’t time to make breakfast and the only time permissive option is to pay 8-13 dollars for fast food on the way to work or eat peanuts and coke from a gas station.

    So the egg price has knock on effects for us that are pretty big.

    I’m gonna spend a little time and express something that isn’t being said in the comments:

    people’s purchases don’t exist in a vacuum and the meaning of the price of an inexpensive source of protein like eggs nearly doubling in the span of a year or two isn’t just that it costs more.

    Often, people shop. That sounds like a stupid thing to say, but the effect of the piggly wiggly implementing barcode scanners is impossible to deny. Shopping is where you go into a store with some goal, like a list, and some budget like the actual cash you have in your possession and try to make those two things match up.

    If you’re like me you grew up going on these excursions maybe once a week or more with your parents and understood innately that if you can get something in the cart early, maybe pudding cups or that peanut butter with the chocolate mixed into it, there’s better chance of you enjoying that treat than if you wait till the end.

    As adults you probably recognize that it’s because as a person progresses through the store they’re keeping a tally (my grandmother used a literal calculator) of how much of their budget they’ve run through. It’s a toss up weather they’ll be under enough to afford a very cost ineffective piece of candy from the shelf next to the checkout counter so getting that treat in the cart early means the person shopping has the chance to make little adjustments to make up for its price. I never understood the relationship between relatively expensive sugar added peanut butter and the type of green beans we ate that week but that’s one way it manifested. Cut versus French cut was a price difference and we’d eat the cheaper one to make up for some dalliance in the previous isles.

    Eggs are in the dairy cooler section. Most stores have these all in one place at first because it was cheaper to run the wiring for them and then because of food safety practices and finally nowadays because everyone expects it. For reasons I’m not sure of, people tend to hit those isles last. It might be to get cold stuff in the cart last so those items don’t warm up in the store as long.

    When you’re at the end of your trip to the store, on the last isle, trying to fit the list to your cash, the price of eggs is what determines your choices. If you put back that box of pop tarts you can get two dozen eggs and a loaf of bread. That’s breakfast for a family of four for a week in a pinch. If you swap the stoufers lasagna for a six pack of ramen noodles, a can of beans and some eggs you have a cheaper dinner for four plus some left over.

    If you want to have nicer things to eat and can’t afford to buy them but do have plenty of time, eggs are an ingredient that’s hard to replace in baking. There are substitutes but they’re sometimes more expensive and involve being able to learn a new recipe or do some experimenting which just isn’t in the cards for plenty of people. If eggs cost more it means less brownies, cakes, noodles and a bunch of other stuff because suddenly the recipe costs more.

    Eggs are the gateway to making your grocery trip work for a lot of people and so when you might not know the price of that can of beans off the top of your head, you absolutely know what eggs cost and make adjustments accordingly. Maybe you buy lower grade eggs like “a” instead of “aa” or you buy more eggs and less meat.

    The price of eggs is the backstop to being poor and healthy while maintaining whatever position on the 5d chessboard of equipment, time, money, calories and experience that you occupy or want to be in.

    A lot of the posts and comments I’ve seen that specifically reference eggs have a sneering tone or are either denying the price changes or downplaying their effect. I personally think that expressing such sentiments makes you at best inexperienced and ignorant and at worst a bad person, but opinion aside, those kinds of sentiments aren’t helping anyone to understand who you are unless you just want to be seen as an out of touch elite.

    To go a little further, the price of eggs is an undeniable metric that shows wages haven’t risen with inflation+cpi+externalities. It means there’s a problem in a way that can’t be denied or misdirected from.

    If eggs were 50-100% more expensive and wages had risen across the board by that same 50-100% then no one would be complaining except old timers in the rocking chairs in front of the gas station.

    That’s not what’s happening and now the things that let poor people keep living and not quite poor people buy all their groceries are 50-100% more expensive. If that isn’t alarming to you it should be.






  • So go ahead and take a look at your journalctl output. The left hand side should be timestamps, so you can immediately figure out if it’s starting a million years in the past or sometime you know you had the problem.

    If it is a million years in the past, use the —since flag and specify the time you want to start at as enumerated in the manual file (man journalctl).

    Once you’re looking at the logs in journalctl from a day you know the problem happened, go ahead and use arrow keys and pgup/pgdn to find a reboot. You’ll know when you find a reboot because it’ll look different. The messages will be about figuring out what hardware is attached and changing runlevels and whatnot.

    Once you found where the reboot is, go backwards to find something weird happening in the logs.

    E: By default the parser (program used to handle text) of journalctls output is “less”. If you want to get out of it, press “q”, and if you want to know more “man less”.




  • Just a heads up for people reading this:

    小红书 is a Chinese language app (it added translation just a week or so ago!). The founder claims to have chosen the color red and the 红 part of the name because of his Alma mater stanford [!]. The app is pretty much targeted at lifestyle influencers and women and features prominent shopping and payment integration.

    English speakers nicknamed the book Quotations from Chairman Mao the “little red book”. The Chinese nickname is 红宝书 “treasured red book” or “cherished red book”, not “little red book”.

    Many posts on 小红书 are making light of the fact that Americans flocked to the bored housewife shopping app.


  • No social media is decent on privacy.

    They’re not private. They’re public. You don’t have the expectation of privacy in public. That’s why people might dress differently walking to the store than they do in their bedrooms.

    Social media is an osint treasure trove. It’s lowkey why the idea of osint exists. Don’t expect to have privacy in public spaces like social media and you’ll never be surprised.

    This may come as a surprise to you, but lemmy is social media.

    小红书 is not private. It’s social media and if what another user said is true then the app version uses plaintext http to transfer data. It’s up to you to determine if that’s a problem for you.

    Use a vpn in or around China and your performance might be better. I get a lot of hangs with mullvad us servers.

    It’s a nice experience. Check it out if you like.


  • So that we’re 100% clear, the site and app only stopped working in the us.

    If you were in the us on a browser and used a fresh cache and a vpn in another country it worked fine, famously Canadian users used the time to shit talk American users while they “couldn’t” hear.

    While there’s an argument to be made that the law only explicitly prohibits new downloads (distribution) it also makes reference to maintaining the service. A company that wanted to continue running the company without any ability to gain American users could attempt to skirt that, but eagle eyed readers of law will recognize that sec2.a.1.B pretty much squashes that. Not only does it make datacenters in the us and elsewhere culpable, but the generally held legal definition of words like “internet hosting services”, “distribution”, “maintenance”, “updating” and “application” are not the narrow often colloquial meanings we’re used to, but broad definitions intended to give the maximum applicability to laws regardless of specific technology involved.

    So I think unless bytedances strategy was to explicitly skirt the law and try to keep the servers up for the American users then the “correct” decision was to follow the letter of the law until the new regime that had promised to offer a stay was in power and made that offer officially and in writing.

    From a business perspective, for a company caught between two regimes, giving the “win” to the one you’ll definitely be working with longer is a no brainer.

    I haven’t seen significant right wing or pro trump content on TikTok after it came back on. I have seen plenty of users saying thank you president trump with a whole spectrum of intonation and doing thinking emoji at the message when it came back on. I also haven’t seen decent analysis of its algorithms behavior since then, which makes sense because making a decent analysis of such a black box would take time.

    Changes to a persons recommendations take time. The way that 小红书 surfaces this by changing the “reels” offered to the users explore page when they’ve accumulated enough information to make a change and finished processing it.

    Part of what made TikTok’s algorithm and recommendations seem so magical is that it had a really good way of spicing things up and not getting stuck in a rut and because there was only one scrolling feed, changes to recommendations were just suddenly there.

    Just having said that and having experienced the rinky-dink recommendations after the downtime I don’t think it was a shut down specifically for changes (although they definitely did, why would t you take the opportunity to update everything if you’re doing mandated spin down?) but because it was the smart legal choice.


  • Gayhitler@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWTF is going on with TikTok?
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    7 days ago

    It went dark after the judicial review process found that the law was constitutional.

    The important thing to recognize is that the site stopped operating in the us (which it said it would do in reaction to this decision) after it was clear that it would definitely be violating a law with explicit consequences if it continued.

    One unremarked-upon aspect of the events between Saturday and Sunday was the arson of a representative’s office in retribution for the ban.

    Combined with the crappy algorithm after the shutdown (indicates they gotta actually rebuild all the recommendations), it’s likely that the company shut the site down to be in compliance, intending to go back up if possible once the law was reversed or the new administration was in power, and was offered assurances against legal action and protection against the law after the representatives office was set on fire.


  • dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/(your drive)

    You can do status=progress if you want like someone else posted and if you pick a block size go with either the physical block size reported by the disk in smartcontrol or some multiple of it that coincides with a big even division of your controllers memory. The drives physical block size will be “easy” for the drive, bigger blocks are faster.

    People saying physical destruction are operating in a different world than you and people saying urandom or shred are operating off old (>30 years) information. The same technology that makes ssds unrecoverable black boxes was originally developed and deployed in spinning drives to eek out speed gains because the disk itself can be expected to know better than the operating system where to put shit and makes techniques (which were postulated but never actually implemented successfully in the wild) to recover overwritten data infeasible.

    Alternately just reformat it and don’t worry. No one doing drive rmas cares about your data. They’re already on the razors edge with feedback and customer trust, you think they’re gonna burn their above board bread and butter to run a harvesting operation for a few bucks on the side? That’s usually the purview of your local pc repair shop…


  • When you use mullvad you create a sixteen digit id. You don’t tie an account or email to it, just your secret code.

    If I wanted to answer your question I’d make an account, put five bucks on it using whatever means are functional and quick (a credit card or something) and see how it works. Mullvad is €5 no matter how many months you buy in advance so it’s not a huge deal or commitment to find out.

    Once you’ve bought a month using the least privacy respecting (this is debatable) method you can figure out if it will work for you.

    You may find out that you need to use mullvads encrypted dns service and/or their browser proxy setup. Using the encrypted DNS doesn’t require the use of mullvads vpn servers so you might be able to resolve the isp blocking tor that way without needing to buy mullvad.

    If you find out in that month that everything is working right, re-up another month in your low privacy way then make a new account and select the use cash option. They’ll give you a code to write down. Send a big bill with that use cash code to Switzerland and in a few weeks you’ll have relatively private vpn access.

    E: since the barrier to entry of €5 and some way to transfer it might be too high, you can also try to contact mullvads servers. Make an account and don’t fund it, but create a device profile and a configuration (or install their software). If your error is that the account isn’t funded as opposed to that the servers are unreachable then you’re probably fine.