oehpr

OK. I have a modest proposal:

Anyone can use any emoji they want.

To achieve this users declare emoji's in a known format the browser recognizes inline in text, which includes a content hash of the emoji they wish to use. eg. ":T15PXExNem0xX:"

Browsers use a DHT and local emoji datastore looking to the DHT to fetch any emoji's seen in text but not present locally.

You may submit a picture to your browser to create an emoji, but it must be a 128x128 webp image. The browser calculates the hash, and puts it in your local datastore. You may now use this emoji anywhere.

A few things to think through here:

1. Would be nice to have an non profit come forward and make a nice big server act as a reliable hub to the emoji database. The nice thing is, basically anyone can step forward at any time and provide servers to the network. Anyone can serve the emoji to anyone as they are addressed by their hash.

2. Regarding offensive or hateful emoji's, I think the question "What if this is used to promote hate?" Is a good question to be asking. But try to keep in mind that the system I am outlining is meant to be communication infrastructure, not a platform. Think of it like a different way to write text. This system in and of itself isn't a platform at all, as the only way to discover and use emoji's is to see someone use it somewhere else. You can browse your local datastore, but that's it.

3. What about REALLY hateful or outright illegal content? IPFS is a guiding light here (in more ways than one if people are familiar with the project). Lists can be made of Violating content by third party organizations and browsers could be configured to subscribe to those lists, very similar to the way ad blocking networks work. Apparatus could be constructed from there to support DMCA and abuse reports and distribute block lists. These subscription lists are user configurable, in case those apparatus are captured or abused and users feel the need to revolt.

Likely more issues than this? I don't think there's anything that is insurmountable. But that's the rough outline. Instead of relying on the unicode consortium, take advantage of content hashing distribution networks to create user defined emoji's instead.

I think about a system a lot when stuff like this comes up. Because I ask, what would be the most popular examples in such a database look like? Do we think it would be close to what the unicode consortium laid out?

It's really clear that hacker news puts its thumb on the scale of pretty much everything in a pointedly opaque way. It's really easy to see this in action if you go down to the bottom of comments section and you'll notice a bunch of examples of comments that have negative total votes and are older sitting above comments that have positive votes and are newer. Makes me wonder, is hacker news applying global weights to users? If I post on a page, is there some metric I don't get to see that just says "this person starts with an effective -2 votes"?

I have completely lost patience with it. I no longer use the hacker news front page. Try using the hacker news search instead: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=*&dateRange=last24h

This is just the top in the last 24 hours, or you can switch it to last week to catch up. Plus the search is pretty nice and very fast so if you're looking for something specific it's convenient. This sort's explicitly in order of votes and nothing else. It's a lot better.

I'd tolerate all this rank fiddling better if it was transparent as to why things were being sorted the way they are. But that's not going to happen. Make the best of it you can.

That is so cool!!! I have always wanted something like this! Arg I wish other filesystems supported a strategy like this!

True, but when you point out practical realities like this to monopolistic institutions, they don't have to care.

They will instead ask "well why isn't the connection good at the concert? What can we do to fix that?" (ie. "we don't have to change when we can make you change")

It IS true that if you don't have to verify the ID of the ticket holder then admissions will go much faster. So long as they can make that plausible sales pitch, they can use it as justification for whatever byzantine DRM system they can dream up.

I would say that "learn" button is a little unclear. It might be better to just have the whole learning section beneath the question, always visible. That will also help drive home the intent of the page, since so many people think this is some weird interview questions prep site.

It gives you an impetus to learn and a question to test your understanding. I'd say there's a pretty good track record for this style of teaching.

I have to presume that the driving impetus of all of this is that they're trying to avoid the actual requirement of checking the ID. Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions.

But I mean, obviously, any kind of system like this strikes me as the same sort of thing as DRM. That you can somehow protect the message from the person you're sharing the message to. How can you avoid reselling if you don't verify the original purchaser? It just seemes ridiculous on its face.

The solution doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good. Good enough is good enough.

I wish Solvespace and OpenSCAD would have a baby so I could have the best of both worlds.

Yes.

People assume that because they are correct.

It is always vacuous. Always. If it wasn't, money would not be changing hands.

No one's paying corporate sponsorship money so I can have more foot to centura carpet interaction in my house. They're paying openAI money as compensation for them actively making their product worse.

I'm surprised the advertisers are playing ball here.

Advertisers want access to people who are willing to pay more money and they want the service that does show their ads to be as accessible as possible. And they're able to more effectively negotiate for consessions as they're less diffuse.

I think the fact that higher priced subscriptions that promise "no ads" exist at all is a good indication that even advertisers are losing power to monopoly gatekeepers.

Following the inevitable enshitification pipeline I guess.

I love this stupid thing

I wonder if they would be willing to accept a pull request that removed the custom stream target? After all if you're streaming to an unknown site, that might constitute support for that site by the obsproject. I mean the mere existence of this setting means that OBS must condone the use for kick.com already. I'm sure there are services with even worse morals than kick.com's, OBS may be unintentionally supporting even those!

Wouldn't it be better to just support approved vendors? That way we know that only trustworthy and upstanding services will be used. I mean maybe custom has some fringe use cases beyond public broadcast... but frankly speaking are you really going to preserve those marginal use cases when the morals of a society are at stake?

Truly a sensible decision on their part.

check out firefox containers. You can launch a specific container as a new tab with the hotkey "Ctrl+shift+#", depending on what you have set.

I have ctrl+shift+1 for personal, 2 for work, 3 for banking.

It's a super rapid way to run multiple contexts in the same window. Really recommend it.

I'm trying to figure out if this post is sarcasm.

The first half definitely made me think sarcasm, then the second half... I mean I know some people actually believe this... Then I noticed you said "encryption" instead of "protocol". Breaking an encryption standard is obviously very hard, breaking a protocol is obviously not nearly so hard.

On the other hand, taking this stance would be insane given the post we're talking about. A company that actively circumvented apples security measures. So you must be being sarcastic. You just have to be.

Remember, on the internet it's kinda hard to tell. Make sure to throw in a /s unless you really REALLY sell it.

A history you can't understand is a history you can't remember.

You know if it also took the time to utilize the bandwidth while it has it. Like via shouldn't stop downloading if a game doesn't request the files.

They might even be able to integrated a bit of brains into it and keep a record of which files tend to be historically requested next for a game. In the background you're slowly grabbing those, and those threads pause for direct requests. I guess this is simpler but it feels like using via is costing you by inducing longer load times for the whole game.

.... And this is why we don't just add it to the price? This is the grand reason?

Wouldn't it be far better to establish a rock solid precedent that the price there is the price you pay? Every exception that remains is an opportunity for weasels to justify why they are also the very important exception to the rule.

You sure that's worth a rounding error?

If I recommended something to you but didn't believe it was actually worth recommending, is that immoral? Well I basically lied to you...

But it's ok! Because I also financially benefited from it.

Yes, marketing is immoral.

you have to make tradeoffs. If you want to ban reselling, you ban reselling.

Scalpers locking out fans is a universal concern. How often do you hear the success story of "I can't make the concert so I sold the ticket online". Come on. An industry has propped up. This is small potatoes.

I dunno why this always gets brought up. What causes inflation? Money moving in the economy. Don't want to cause inflation? Give your money to rich people, they will just sit on it. Same as burning it. Give it to poor people and they use the money to get the things that they need. Moving the money. Causing inflation. Which means your assets are less valuable, and poor people move up.

It's only reflecting the relative shift of the country.

You reach your hand down to lift someone up, and shock and horror, you are no longer above them.

... wuh?

OH THEY MADE AN ANDROID BROWSER.

ok. In my defense I did consider "DuckDuckGo made a browser"? and googled it before I posted this comment, but I did not find any results. Your comment made me dig deeper to find the Android one.

I still think that sentence is a bit stilted though, it's got some department of redundancy department vibes. But I yield the point on that one.

... does this article seem a little low quality to anyone else?

> By far the most private browsers are specialist non-tracking browsers that prioritise no tracking, such as DuckDuckGo...

wha???

> Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well. For example, it could be helpful if an online store reminds you every three months you need a new toothbrush, or that this time last year you bought a birthday card for your mum.

Wha?! The technology google is deploying wouldn't even support that. Frankly the level of personal invasion required to achieve this...

Was this just like a bit of biting sarcasm or something? Dry wit that flew over my head?

This article seems off.

How am I supposed to select a decent widget from the market? Buy them all? Think really hard about it? I do not understand your position at all.

I have to agree reviews work very well. But it distresses me that, knowing the absolute tsunami of garbage that awaits us without it, we are SO laissez faire when it comes to protecting that system. We allow companies to game reviews with kick backs, we lets spammers in posting fake reviews. This is currently our one wall of defense and cracks in it should terrify us.

I think people would pick up the change of ownership and flee for greener pastures. Think MySQL.

Actually, to be honest... can anyone think of an example where a company bought a competitor with a large user base, and then just outright, or even gradually destroyed their acquisition? Mismanaged, sure. But destroyed? Nothing comes to mind immediately. Like was Vine destroyed or mismanaged?

Maybe this distinction doesn't matter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There were (are?) A/B tests being done to lock people out. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36287411

Love this! Interesting direction with real potential.

Something worth considering is potentially just jumping ship to a reddit alternative like Saidit, like you mentioned.

The trouble these alternatives have is their userbase have to be, in bulk, the users banned from the centralized social media apps. But if Apollo takes THEIR userbase, then those people arn't negatively selected. They're just people who have phones.

It's a better alternative to dying. Diversifying support for multiple backends could serve to protect you. Non trivial but it seems necessary at this point.

Yes I've hit this as well! Such an annoying behaviour.

However I think it's a good habit to make records in `~/.ssh/config` for each of your servers anyway just to keep tabs what, where, who, and with what keys.