Why is the defining feature of being human the property of having a phone number?
Spam is indeed a hard problem to solve, but the issuance of phone numbers is not designed to be used as human identification.
281 karma · joined June 13, 2023
Spam is indeed a hard problem to solve, but the issuance of phone numbers is not designed to be used as human identification.
The answer is already in your reply. This is a pure approach that has 3 dependencies: xlib, xft, and farbfield, while the other solutions proposed (except perhaps some cli options at the bottom) have much larger and complex dependencies like Electron, Node, React, etc.
The point of this isn't to have features but be the absolute bare minimum (to the point of being almost unusable albeit). Personally, I see suckless apps as more of an experiment to see just how bare you can go while keeping foundational functionality. They definitely aren't made to be a featureful app though, only the bare minmimum.
As for why was it made then? Why not?
Simple, I don’t trust a cloud service to keep the data secure, and I don’t trust myself to self host and keep the data safe (and not get corrupted) while simultaneously getting that data on all devices and synced.
The flaw of password managers is that you don’t know the passwords you’re using for your sites. That is, if the data was lost, you’d have to do an account recovery, which for some sites is fine, for others it can be a nightmare though.
Alongside this, it is a hard problem to have to simultaneously get all of these copied-pasted passwords on each device without inherently putting them on the Internet (albeit with a password in front of them). Given a threat model of password managers being inherently valuable targets, data going in and out of them is inherently vulnerable for when an exploit is inevitably found.
I’m not saying any of these problems makes mental hash algorithms or rotating passwords better, but password managers do have inherent flaws that make them still an unideal tool.
Also, I find it ironic in the modern day that a simple sticky note next to your computer is probably one of the better solutions to password management, if people invading your physical space isn’t part of your threat model (which is usually the case).
Everything must be copied over to your server first. Let me say that again: You only see data that is stored on your local instance.
So likes, profiles, replies, etc are all very limited, since your server only stores them from people you follow (since you’re the only user).
Not only this, but this works in reverse aswell. Only servers that know of your existence will see your posts. If no one is following you, only people (and people on their server) you directly reply to will see your posts.
As such, being in a self-hosted instance or small community can be extremely isolating and make it hard to really network with other people outside of the circle that is already around you.
The primary idea being that a user trusts their home instance, but don’t necessarily trust other instances.
If you fetch replies from another server, you are trusting that server to send you real, valid replies, from other servers. You could verify the replies, but this would be an expensive operation to do automatically.
As such, a malicious server could create phantom replies that don’t actually exist, and your trusted, home server would serve these to you. Currently, your home server only shows likes and replies it can validate (it heard it from the server that did it), but once you trust another server, you add a unnecessary middle man for some extra convenience
At the very least, every wall outlet and power bank I’ve seen has text somewhere that tells what it outputs, with the powerbanks aswell having capacity, both amp hour and voltage. Though I will say the text is rather small.
I'm not exactly sure in what case you would want automatic panning for a standard brush, but even for the straight line tool, I feel it would just be better to allow a user to select the two points individually, without the need for dragging the mouse between the locations without letting it drop.
You can pay your rent bill on August 1st, even if you don’t have the money for it until your paycheck on the 12th, and then once you get your paycheck, you can allocate the money appropriately so that you can pay off the bill at the end of the month worry-free.
One sad part of the situation is that even if you aren't required to do something, it can result in you being completely banned from said business's services under the idea that they can refuse service to someone for any reason. With the business model nowadays mostly being franchises, a ban from an entire subset of businesses can be a substantial burden for someone, especially if the business takes up a large part of the market.
Edit: Not to say this will necessarily happen in this circumstance, but it is a very real possibility when refusing to work with certain businesses.
I haven't had this argument very often though, so so far there aren't indications as to its effectiveness. We'll have to see how it turns out.
Anyone who has setup a coding project knows that actually creating the project structure, setting up dependencies, build scripts, making the code compile/be interpreted are all problems that can have extremely obscure, frustrating errors, and they happen before you even start coding.
Then, not to mention, deploying the software. Even if you give someone code, they won't immediately know how to run it. End users get worried at the idea of opening a terminal and running a command in it, no matter how easy it is. Not to mention setting up the software to do so. (Is the right Python version even installed?)
As such, even if an AI could write a perfect script in code from standard text to, say, lowercase all of the words in a document, it would still be hard for non-developers to use because of the surrounding knowledge barrier, outside of the code itself. Although, yeah, it would be easier.
Just where are you from? Sure, I see delivery fees that are "free", which means they're included with the cost of the product. But any time I see a delivery fee tacked on, it's almost always in the double digits, many times up in the 20-30s for a box that is about the size of an Micro ATX computer case.
Not to mention when I have to ship stuff internationally myself and it goes into the triple digits, not even doing UPS which would have costed almost half a grand.
Edit: And I'm just in the US
Have you heard about the mess that was Durov’s channel some months ago? Telegram is now reserving and then selling usernames as NFTs for crypto on a new site: fragment.com (Use a VPN since it blocks access from the US)
Durov first announced it on his channel and the large majority of the telegram community downvoted it to show disapproval of integrating NFTs and crypto into telegram [1]. Telegram/Durov’s response? Disable negative reactions and ignore it. For later posts, talk about how there was such a great response to them (because only negative reactions were disabled), and how they’re moving forward with it.
Then, when they started, what happened to the people with their old names? Telegram took them without warning [2]. And it wasn’t just any common names, multiple chats I was in had their name, their brand taken even though it was multiple semi-common words stringed together to 19+ characters.
[1] and [2] - I can’t find an online source currently on my phone. I can personally vouch for it, but I understand evidence would be appreciated. If anyone can find a source, that would be greatly appreciated.
However I would be surprised if Meta doesn’t continue to possess well above a supermajority of the userbase until another large corporation embraces ActivityPub.
I'll interpret this to mean "If the problem is that Threads owns the majority of the userbase, why didn't you complain about Twitter owning the majority of the userbase?"
I'll reply to that as: Mastodon users did. That's why they used Mastodon in the first place, because they felt too much power was controlled in a single entity, so they complained and moved.
In terms of actions to take, what power was there with Twitter that Mastodon users did not exert? With Threads, Mastodon server owners have the power to defederate and block Threads trying to intermingle with their userbase. With Twitter, Mastodon users were the ones with the power to publicly disclose their Mastodon account and tell users to follow them on there.
In each instance, Mastodon users are doing what they can to reduce corporate overlords from having power over as many people as possible. Even if Threads is more centralized because of other instances defederating with it, the overall reach of Meta is reduced.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Owning the vast majority of the fediverse userbase will cause them to have a large amount of power to compel users or servers to do whatever they want. What do you do when Facebook implements a new feature and all of your followers complain that your using a Mastodon server instead of joining Threads that has this feature they want? You either go against your entire community or let Meta takeover your account.
As such, the resolution is to not let anyone have this much power. It being Meta makes it easier to hate on them, but no single server should own the vast majority of the network, let alone (100M / (100M + 2M + 1M)) = 97% of it [1].
[1] Threads has 100M users and is rising fast, Mastodon was recently stated to have 2M active users, the rest of the fediverse can be estimated to be, say, 1M. As such, Threads has about 97% of the userbase.
Admins have access (through the owner or directly) to that database, which means they can already censor content if they so choose, through manipulating the database. As such, making it an explicit option is needed because it destroys any illusion that censorship cannot occur, because it can occur by the system's design, even if the option isn't present in the software.
(Assuming you're not on a single user server) The problem is, in order for a user to see them, they don't need to explicitly subscribe to them, they need to not block them, which is the default state. Sure, your home feed is people that you're subscribed to, but searching (via hashtags and otherwise) and your federated feed are both looking through all content that the server has found that hasn't been explicitly blocked. Not to mention replies to posts aswell could be from anywhere. This will inevitably, at some point, by the nature of anyone being able to post anything on their own servers, include "unsavory" photos including: Literal suicide, murder, abuse, uncensored pornography, death threats, witch hunts, and more. And yes, this will be included in normal use. I myself saw a spammer that spammed uncensored pornography to a bunch of "welcome to Mastodon" hashtags in the first 30 minutes of my server being up.
> Closing your eyes does nothing.
While this will not cause the actions occurring to stop existing, acting as if the mental health of the viewer is irrelevant is not acceptable. I've known servers where people weren't able to sleep at night because someone spammed videos of animal harm/abuse... and in that case, the admins eventually deleted it and banned them. Your suggestion is to just "let it be shown" and "let the user block it if they don't want to see it". While seeing things once and then blocking is better than not being able to block at all, trusted authorities (admins?) should have the ability to stop content from being spread to users that trust them to handle unwanted content. Sometimes never seeing things is the best option.
Perhaps the middle group here is to allow users to disable administrative "suggestions" and see all content, if they so choose? (Although this is not truly possible with Mastodon, perhaps future federated networks could implement a similar idea)
Program isolation is honestly a feature that other distros should use more often. The idea that programs can only access networks, USB devices, files, and X windows of programs that it's been explicitly let to access is an extremely useful tool that isn't just for people who are worried about government surveillance.
I personally enjoyed having about 5 different Firefox apps that each led to their own VM with its own files, browser history, cookies, and extensions, and even networks that automatically put traffic through a VPN at times. Chrooting and Firefox profiles only help so much, if you can even set them up to be as seamless as Qubes.
I'm of course not getting into the security benefits and all that of Qubes, but its where I feel a lot of people don't realize the benefits of an OS like this. The workflow improvement is just as inspiring as the security improvement from the system.
Likely certain instances have said they’ll federate with it in the meetings, and for other instances that block them Meta will say “Well your admins are the ones who blocked us! Take your problems up with them” to any users that wish to interact with Threads on their instance.
Part of it might be that, but I think it’s also about the previous experiences that people have with programs. How much a person thinks about something is inversely proportional to how much they see it. Typing is just something not many companies have added, so seeing it is off-putting and makes people think.
If you had to type “Permanently Delete This” all day to delete random entries in a database, you wouldn’t think twice before you accidentally deleted all of production.
This is why having the same warning for two different severities is a big problem. People encounter the first and realize it isn’t a big deal, and then glaze through the second because of their previous experience. Deleting an empty folder is fine, but deleting your home directory might not be, even if both are just “deleting a folder”.
Instead, describe the action with a word that is negative in and of itself e.g. “Please Delete Everything”. So instead of “Your account cannot be restored”, it’s “Your account will be (irrevocably) deleted”.
And if a word has a positive affirmation as a substring of the negative affirmation, then avoid using it aswell since it’s a similar principal.
The game’s fun though. And it only takes 5 seconds to actually load it up once you’ve downloaded everything and installed it. So it’s fine, right?
Consider it just like other software like Microsoft Windows. “It’s supposed to make your life easier, so if it doesn’t, why not just stop using it?” Because it still does make it easier, even with all of the crap that Microsoft does that we can rightfully complain about.
Perhaps also consider it like Twitter. Why stay if it’s so toxic? Because everyone is on there, and if you aren’t, then you’ll never talk to your friends, since it’s not like they’d move platforms just for your sake.
Alongside this, considering how hard it is to get people to agree on what they need to take action against, I’d hardly think that over 8000 subreddits would go dark just because they have “powermods” that take the subreddit dark without regard for the community’s opinion (whether that be an poll before announcing, or backlash after announcing). People would’ve (and have in some subs), complained about the blackout if it really was a majority opinion that they shouldn’t participate.
How downvoted are the blackout announcement posts? What are the comments on them (albeit perhaps the mods delete negative comments)? Are there any highly upvoted threads against it?
I’d agree it’s a minority that want the blackout if we also accept the premise that the majority of people just don’t care. And in that case, if no one (or very few, since it’s the internet) is complaining, the mods should indeed do what they feel is right and wanted by many to help their circumstance.