Countries that signed the Paris agreement are required to update their plans every five years. A U.N. report shows a limited picture and thus, limited progress.
It will be very hard to exterminate humanity but climate change could make a pretty good try by collapsing ocean food chains or instigating a methane clathrate gun effect. Even if those don’t come to pass, the global south is gonna be fucked - maybe instigate-global-ecoterrorism kind of fucked.
Humanity will suffer massive population decline for sure, but we have spent thousands of years living in deserts and artic conditions so species survival is pretty much guaranteed no matter how terrible it gets.
It is unlikely that modern technology will be retained though. Just too many interconnected parts spread across continents to survive a mass population decline.
Why do you think that especially the global south will suffer from the climate collapse? From my viewpoint, once humanity speeds through the overshoot phase, the population will shrink on every continent, and that will lead to a global technological breakdown.
Some models show that big swaths of the equatorial regions and the "monsoon belt" may become uninhabitable without AC because wet bulb temperatures will exceed 30C which is around the point where humans are no longer able to cool themselves. Since the global south is also less developed on average it means the electrical grid demand currently can't possibly handle that level of demand.
"Climate change will not lead to Humanity's demise... I will." And then the fleshy mask was ripped off, revealing the mechanical genius behind OpenAi and Microsoft's collaboration. Not long after the Microsoft constitutional update, Amazon and Apple forces quickly assumed control over the Pacific Northwest.
Now in this arid world of machines and steel, a sole savior of humanity ignites the flames of revolution deep in the forgotten ancient unfinished chip factories of Phoenix.
it's an FPGA chip forgotten by the world, fallen off an assembly line during an earthquake. it had lodged itself into a crevice of the factory floor. between earth and machine the chip had endured in perpetual limbo...
Agreed. Gates has gone on record to say that AI will take over most jobs. He's on a campaign to show he's "onside". But I think this is a worrying sign that the Americans grow weary of the AI tech bubble. The US don't have much going for them for this bubble to buttress the fall of the AI bubble burst.
Crypto's got features, but it's most endearing feature is to move money when it's generally not supposed to move - either by fraud or otherwise. In the event of a market correction, crypto will only accelerate the exit of wealth from the US.
I’m guessing Bill Gates has a lot of contacts at universities and in politics, so he will probably have good insights into the science behind this statement. However, you should read the New York Times article, because it’s talks about many other things that Bill Gates is addressing; basically he is making a U-turn on his previous comments about climate change. Concerning this one statement, I tend to agree with him, based on all the papers that I’ve been reading, humanity is currently in an overshoot phase. Within the next few centuries, we will witness a dramatic collapse of at least 95% of the human population. I’m guessing a few hundred thousand people will survive, and they will have a much more primitive life than we do - let’s just hope, that they will learn from the past. The main task of battling climate change at this moment is to make sure the human suffering is reduced as much as possible, as the climate collapses.
Today, The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled that Norway must assess the global climate impacts of oil and gas before opening new oil fields on the Norwegian continental shelf in order to comply with the European Convention on Human Ri…
The Linux kernel development structure works really well for industry. A lot of companies which depend on Linux hire people specifically to contribute to kernel development. The companies benefit in getting their specific needs met and we all benefit from the improvements they've made to the kernel.
Look at how much better the WINE ecosystem is now that Valve has developers working on Proton. It went from a neat piece of software that had a lot of rough edges and required someone with a bit of technical knowledge to 'Check the compatibility box' in about 2 years.
This kind of FOSS interaction is a much more sustainable and scalable structure than the entire world paying one company who then hires all of the developers and charges everyone a premium.
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Or maybe these
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Or perhaps
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Great news! It's much more beneficial for all involved parties. Also, as the article mentions, moving to FOSS doesn't mean you're on your own. Just like Microsoft "Partners" help with integration and smooth operation, there are similar agencies offering the same services for FOSS solutions.
Not only that, but feedback and bugfixes to FOSS software indirectly benefits others too instead of some Microsoft manager. So, good use of tax money benefiting citizens and everyone else!
Brave Software, the company behind the browser of the same name, was founded by Brendan Eich. He's best known as the creator of JavaScript from his days at Netscape Communications, and he was later the co-founder of Mozilla. He remained at Mozilla Foundation and its for-profit segment, Mozilla Corporation, well into the 2000s. In 2014, he was appointed as CEO of Mozilla Corporation, which immediately caused backlash from at least a few people inside Mozilla and many people outside the organization.
Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It's because he donated $1,000 in support of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California's state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Eich wrote a blog post defending himself in 2012, when the donation was initially discovered, where did not apologize and denied the donation made him a bigot:
Here's a bonus fun fact: one of those early investors was Founders Fund, which is operated by billionaire Peter Thiel. He's a regular campaign donor to far-right political candidates, and said in an essay that "I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible." He also keeps funding libertarian “seasteading” ships designed to function as independent cities in international waters (think BioShock), all of which have failed miserably.
Brave was also caught up in a privacy scandal in 2020, when it was revealed that the browser was adding affiliate codes to some URLs typed into the address bar. For example, typing in “binance.us” would add Brave’s affiliate link to the end, allowing Brave Software to collect revenue from signups or purchases. An official blog post called that “a mistake,” and the functionality was later turned off. That should have been enough to swear off Brave as a privacy-centric browser forever, considering the entire point of affiliate links is to collect data about the user and traffic source. For example, when you click an Amazon affiliate link in a web article, the publisher can see the exact products you purchase in the timeframe the tracking cookie remains active (which is currently 24 hours).
GrapheneOS devs recommend against Firefox Android on security grounds. They of course have their own modified Chrome. Do you know of any decent chromium based options for privacy? All the projects I used to use died.
The new AI-powered Wikipedia competitor falsely claims that pornography worsened the AIDS epidemic and that social media may be fueling a rise in transgender people.
On Monday, Elon Musk’s xAI startup launched Grokipedia, which the billionaire is pitching as an AI-generated alternative to the crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia.
When we finally got access to it, WIRED found that the online encyclopedia contained lengthy entries generated by AI. While many of the pages WIRED saw on launch day appeared fairly similar to Wikipedia in terms of tone and content, a number of notable Grokipedia entries denounced the mainstream media, highlighted conservative viewpoints, and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies.
The Grokipedia entry about the slavery of African Americans in the US includes a section outlining numerous “ideological justifications” made for slavery, including the “Shift from Necessary Evil to Positive Good.” The end of the entry focuses on criticisms of The 1619 Project, which it says incorrectly framed “slavery as the central engine of the nation's political, economic, and cultural development.”
Stanotte, o stamattina, a seconda di come si vuole vederla, tra il sonno e la veglia, abbastanza per caso, ho scoperto un completamente nuovo meta da femcel, che è tipo… caspita, ma come ho fatto a non pensarci prima? Ed altro non sto parlando che del fare handholding in single player, ma con una delle […]
metodo femcellico per piangere di meno stando a lettino da sola ma per un pochino quasi no…
Stanotte, o stamattina, a seconda di come si vuole vederla, tra il sonno e la veglia, abbastanza per caso, ho scoperto un completamente nuovo meta da femcel, che è tipo… caspita, ma come ho fatto a non pensarci prima? Ed altro non sto parlando che del fare handholding in single player, ma con una delle due mani addormentata…così che si abbia l’impressione che si sta tenendo la mano ad un’altra persona (seppur una mano sospettosamente poco schifosa, non sudata, alla stessa temperatura dell’altra, eccetera…), e quindi magari che si stia dormendo con un’altra persona, e quindi boh, varie cose… ☺️😚🥰😍
Ed è geniale per quanto è scema, questa roba. So che non ho in realtà scoperto nulla io, perché gente con anche meno fantasia di me racconterà proprio questa come tecnica utile per fare cose brutte con una fantasia diversa… non mi è affatto chiaro come, a causa delle difficoltà proprio tecniche che questa procedura nasconde, ma convinti i gooner contenti tutti. L’idea base è di applicare una minima pressione sul braccio — per esempio, stando a letto, tenendolo giusto sotto il lato del corpo, o altrimenti sotto il cuscino, boh — giusto abbastanza perché si addormenti… o, come dicono gli scienziati, perché si verifichi il fenomeno della parestesia, nello specifico parestesia transitoria (cioè, causata dallo stare in una posizione “scorretta”, non a fattori cronici); buono sapere il nome reale, e anche che che il tutto è causato non dal blocco dell’afflusso di sangue, bensì dalla semplice compressione di nervi, cosa che a volte va insieme alla prima, ma non sempre… e quindi in realtà non ci sarebbero pericoli quando contemporaneamente non si sta anche bloccando l’afflusso di ossigeno ai tessuti (cosa che avviene stando troppo sul trono idraulico, per dire, ma non tanto col braccio sotto un cuscino). Poi si addormenta anche la mano, e gnam. 😇
Stranamente, stanotte mi è capitato a sorpresa nel secondo modo, cioè sotto al cuscino… ma non il cuscino su cui tengo la testa, bensì il secondo a cui mi appoggio o abbraccio e così via… cioè, è bastata la pressione del cuscino incastonato tra le lenzuola strette e l’altro cuscino, per farmi addormentare il braccio, wow. Me ne sono accorta in un momento in cui mi sono svegliata (prima della sveglia, quindi avevo ancora tempo di marcire a letto, e giustamente così ho fatto!!!), stavo cercando di rigirarmi, e muovendo una mano ho trovato l’altra che spuntava fuori, che però appunto non percepivo più, e lì viene il bello. (O il brutto, per chi si fa prendere dalla paura che magari uno spirito maligno possa essersi materializzato sotto forma di una mano estranea e inserito nel proprio letto per fare cose bruttissime…) ✋
Chiaramente, ciò è non altro che la fiera del coping, eppure rimane una sensazione particolare tenere così la manina, secondo me… La mente (temo anche inconsciamente, purtroppo) sa si bene che non si sta tenendo la mano ad una persona esterna, però la fantasia è sempre pericolosamente potente e, se si riesce per un attimo a fare finta, per quell’attimo si può solo apprezzare, suppongo… e quindi ohh, in realtà non sono colpita da alcuna maledizione per cui devo rimanere da sola per la mia intera esistenza, e anzi mi sto intensamente tenendo la manina con qualcuno??? Assurdo per me. Una cosa da tenere a mente in realtà, quando ci si accorge di avere la sensibilità inibita, finché non subentra la sensazione di formicolio, è di non muoversi subito, così la sensazione di manine può durare anche minuti, anziché pochi miseri secondi, cosa di cui avrei decisamente bisogno, oohh come sono romantica… 😭 Peccato che non ho avuto modo di provare la cosa proprio per bene perché, nella casualità della scoperta, un po’ ho sbagliato, ci ho voluto riprovare ma un po’ mi sono riaddormentata quando non dovevo, visto che la procedura richiede minuti interi, un po’ poi è effettivamente suonata la sveglia, e allora pazienza…sarà per la prossima volta. (…Probabilmente su WikiHow ci saranno trucchi segreti per fare questa cosa più efficientemente, ma nel letto al buio non potevo mettermi a cercare su Internet… cercherò prima di stanotte.) Però oh, mannaggia alla merda e fuck my stupid shitty rotted femcel life, che sono e sarò costretta a pensare questo tipo di cose fino alla mia morte, poiché non interesso particolarmente a nessuna persona fisicamente esistente, e allora posso solo vivere nell’irrealtà. 💔
Running suspicious software in a virtual machine seems like a basic precaution to figure out whether said software contains naughty code. Unfortunately it’s generally rather easy to detect whether or …read more
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The requirements for governance, model transparency/notification, began in August 2025. General applicability of most of the AI Act including obligations for “high-risk” AI systems begin in August 2026. Obligations for high-risk AI systems that are part of safety components in regulated products become applicable in August 2027.
By introducing a tiered, risk-based regime, the law bans certain AI practices outright, layers strict obligations on high-risk systems, and establishes unprecedented oversight for general-purpose AI and foundation models, especially those with systemic impact. Its reach is global—any company placing AI into the EU market must comply and its penalties are steep.
For businesses and their counsel, compliance isn’t optional. It’s now the price of entry into one of the world’s largest markets, and it will influence how innovation is documented, safeguarded, and patented.
It’s important to understand the AI Act’s most consequential provisions for patent strategy, particularly how regulatory documentation duties intersect with data provenance, inventorship disputes, trade secret versus patent trade-offs, claim drafting under new compliance constraints, and geo-strategic filing decisions.
The AI Act distinguishes between four key categories of AI systems:
Minimal-risk systems (AI-enabled video games, spam filters)
Limited-risk systems (chatbots interacting with users)
High-risk systems (AI in health care, education, employment, infrastructure, biometric identification)
General purpose and foundation models
While minimal and limited risk systems carry only modest obligations, the regulation of high-risk and general-purpose/foundation models forms the core of the AI Act and presents the most significant patent implications.
Before entering the market, high-risk systems must clear a conformity assessment and provide detailed technical documentation that includes:
System description and intended purpose
System architecture, algorithms, and datasets used
Risk management, testing, and validation protocols Transparency and human oversight measures
Properly managed, these records can help distinguish human inventive contributions from AI-assisted outputs, providing valuable support for defending inventorship and reinforcing patent validity in a contested landscape.
Documentation and dataset summaries may further reduce the viability of trade secret protection. Both the EU Trade Secrets Directive and US law require that information be kept confidential through reasonable protective measures.
By mandating disclosures, the AI Act can erode this confidentiality, making secrecy harder to sustain in practice. This shift alters the calculus for IP strategy. In some cases, patenting may become the safer path, as certain technologies no longer can be reliably safeguarded as trade secrets.
l linguaggio di un musicista sono i suoi ascolti, anche quando un gruppo, o un solista, intende superarli o lasciarseli alle spalle. È proprio questa semplice verità, ancora oggi invisa a qualche purista dell'illuminazione improvvisa, il segreto della grandezza dei Phish, creatura nata presso l'Università del Vermont, nel... Leggi e ascolta...
Il linguaggio di un musicista sono i suoi ascolti, anche quando un gruppo, o un solista, intende superarli o lasciarseli alle spalle. È proprio questa semplice verità, ancora oggi invisa a qualche purista dell'illuminazione improvvisa, il segreto della grandezza dei Phish, creatura nata presso l'Università del Vermont, nel 1983, allorché il chitarrista Trey Anastasio e i suoi tre complici trovarono divertente l'idea di mettere sul pentagramma una conoscenza enciclopedica della storia del rock e dei suoi derivati, ogni volta riletti in un'apoteosi di virtuosismi, improvvisazioni, divagazioni, rimaneggiamenti e, non ultime, straordinarie facilità e freschezza di scrittura... artesuono.blogspot.com/2015/12…
If you are looking for cargo pants as work pants, military surplus is a good way to go. The US military (and i assume this trickles down to other countries) spends a lot of money developing uniform fabrics that are abrasion resistant, puncture resistant, etc. They also have reinforced knees. I'm sure there is a range of quality depending on what manufacturer produced what lot, but they all have to meet good standards, and all US uniforms will be made in the US.
That's actually a good tip, the weird thing so far I've noticed are the incredibly low prices, like too low to be true, is this just because this is a type of merch which lots of people don't buy, or because there are lots of fakes?
Everyone who joins the military ends up with like 6 sets they don't need, and they end up donating them. Usually you find stuff used, but there's a decent amount of stuff that ends up sitting on storeroom shelves for a decade before being sold to the civilian population.
Poland signed two separate deals with Palantir Technologies Inc. and Anduril Industries Inc. on Monday as the country steps up to upgrade its army amid record military spending.
Poland’s Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz and Palantir Chief Executive Officer Alex Karp signed a letter of intent on data, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity in Warsaw. At the same time, state-owned PGZ SA agreed with Anduril to cooperate on making Barracuda-500M cruise missiles, without saying when production would start or how much the deal was worth.
The Palantir deal is an early stage agreement and neither the government nor the company said how much the deal was worth. Poland is interested in several systems the company offers, including for battlefield management and logistics, Kosiniak-Kamysz said.
The minister said the Palantir CEO told him the company planned to invest in Poland, tapping into the potential of the local defense industry and engaging Polish engineers, without giving details. The country expects to sign deals with Palantir for specific systems in the next two or three months.
I believe Ukraine used Palantir against Russia, but when the U.S. becomes involved in a proxy war (even if it's to defend a nation that was clearly invaded by a leader who posed a global threat) it's hard to know what is actually chosen by the country vs provided as is.
No. For sure not. The interoperability of different tools and kit, from an outsiders perspective, kind of all over the place. Different companies have some internal interop, but generally its a mix between standards set by who ever is buying (branch, or org like NATO) and compatible with industry leader in relevant use case.
At least if you look at Defense companies GitHub, Earnings Reports, and Job postings and the militaries public statements.
Ah Palantir. Named after the magic crystal orbs in Tolkien‘s Lord of the Rings. They always show you the truth but encourage you to draw the wrong conclusions. I can‘t wait to see the Sarumans and Denethors the real life version will create…
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Achieve wealth and fame in the Principality of Mittelland! Found a dynasty, trade goods, prove your political skill, eliminate your rivals, and immortalize yourself in the history books! The classic political and economic simulation starting from the…
Esperanto kiel interfaka kampo por transnacia novigado estas la temo de nova universitata programo, okazonta kadre de Erasmus+. Ok universitatoj en ok landoj kunlaboras pri la programo.
L'habituel Apéro Mastodon d'Octobre, pour les habituées et habitués. Même lieu, même heure que d'habitude, venez plus tôt ou plus tard si vous préférez, faites selon votre envie. Venez trinquer avec nous et parler de tout et de rien à la fois.
Emblematica nella letteratura fantastica è la città costruita sotto i rami protettivi di un abnorme arbusto, capace di proteggere coloro che vi abitano dalle influenze negative di creature dedite alla perpetuazione di un antico male.
Amazon is preparing to lay off tens of thousands of corporate workers, reversing its pandemic hiring spree. The cuts come months after the retail giant’s CEO warned white-collar employees their jobs could be taken by artificial intelligence.
I'm sure the tRump slump has nothing to do with it
If you're leading an organization that somehow managed to "overhire" 30k employees, then the first person to hit the bricks should be you because you really suck at your job.
They thought like would go up forever, and now that the line is starting to slow down, they gotta do a sacrifice to make the line look like it is still going up
And it’s because the line is SLOWING not even going down. These companies continue to make a healthy profit but they want twice that so now 30k people need to suffer.
My organisation is going through this right now. The overarching management "corporation" is looking at our numbers and saying that we've got more employees and spending than 5 years ago, but have the same output metrics...... So we've got to cut back staff and spending because there's dead weight that's not adding to productivity. The problem is that these will be small ineffective parts of people's otherwise useful jobs. You can't do what Elon Musk did and start firing people across the board to correct the numbers. It's a complex problem to solve.
Those familiar with Biblaridion's Alien Biospheres worldbuilding series will be glad to hear that it's new sequel (sister?) series has just had it's first release 'Doing without Agriculture,' exploring a few of the ways that a fictional alien species, the development of which was covered in the last series, could develop their societies in the abscence of agrarian technology.
Any "ads" that appear on my fridge will be because I was given a $2000 fridge free by the company. Only idiots pay for appliances/services that include ads.
If they gave me the fridge for free, I'd use it, and spend a bunch of time figuring out how to remove the ads. If it's not possible, I'd just unplug the screen.
Maybe, maybe not. But even if there isn't a chip that makes the fridge stop working when you do that, it would definitely void your warranty, so when the fridge stops working for some other reason later on, you would have to buy a new one XD
Have these functions actually proved useful? I think I've had maybe one fridge failure in my entire lifetime that resulted in a complete loss of contents. And many dumb fridges these days have open door alarms.
The only time I've ever lost anything from a fridge was when an apartment complex preemptively cleared out the last of our belongings before we finished moving out.
The door monitor mostly helps when a kid walks off leaving it open thinking they closed it.
The freezer temperature monitoring has saved the contents several times. A breaker had tripped once and I didn't notice, it let me know that I needed a generator during a power outage, and one of the kids snuck an ice cream and left the lid wide open.
So yeah, it's been useful. It's not needed 99% of the time.
Hmm, my fridge is in my kitchen, which is in the middle of the house. I've never been in a situation where the fridge door has been open more than a couple minutes without me noticing, and I have three kids.
I've had two fridges die (well, the same one twice), and that sucked, but there's not much I could do about it even if I knew a few hours earlier, and I use the fridge enough I'll notice within a few hours. Refrigerator deliveries often happen after a few days, and I'm not going to keep stocking ice during that period, I'll just consume what I can and move the important stuff to the mini fridge or chest freezer.
It would be cool, sure, but it's not worth having it connected to the internet.
that is so much worst, not even a bed, but a bed cover lol. people were discussing how they wernt pulling the plug on the 2k covers, because they would have to admit they spent 2k on a smart"bedc over"
Opt out is idiotic. Don't buy this shit! You to not own it. What fuckwit dumbass rents a fridge someone else controls for $2k. I bet it has a camera inside to sell grocers a list of what to mark up for your custom pricing nonsense because you bought a billboard that screams I'm a gullible moron with more money than sense.
I would like to know why anyone would go out and buy a smart fridge. What amazing feature does it have that you cannot be without? I seriously don't get it.
I could see it if it was a screen I get to control, akin to a smart mirror. Fridge door would be a pretty good surface since I'm guaranteed to look at it a couple of times each day.
Other than that, push notifications if the door is open? That's about the max when it comes to usefulness I can imagine. Is that a problem that requires a connected device? No, probably not.
However, depending on the model range, it becomes difficult to even get a model that doesn't have the "smart" features. No one can force you to connect the device though (yet).
Yea, i pretty mich agree with all your points. Made me think of a situation with my neighbor a few months ago- one of their kids left the fridge door slightly open when they left. I think for a weekend trip or something, just enough that everything had spoiled. Lots of meat, too, so they had a blast with that. Some sort of push notification might have helped or prevented that, but otherwise…nah. Dont need nor want any of that always connected, smart, online, wtf ever mess.
It has been my general experience over the years that with just about all electronics devices with "everything and the kitchen sink" in them, you're actually better off buying functional elements separatelly as discrete devices.
For example, you're better of with a "dumb" fridge plus a good tablet and something to hang it on the fridge door. Another example is how a "dumb" TV and a TV Media Box separatelly are a better choice than a Smart TV.
This is because those things usually have different technology life-cycles (i.e. the time period were a tablet is expected to remain useful and performant is much less than for a fridge) and some parts are useful on their own and hence are more flexible to use if they're separate (i.e. a standalone tablet has many more uses than one integrated in a Smart Fridge).
They can program it in a way that means it will simply stop cooling your food if it doesn't have internet(and/or if you haven't given them permission to send ads to at least one other device) XD
One thing I heard of that would be handy is cameras in the fridge so while out shopping you can check if you already have stuff or how much is left (depending on the container)
Does that work though because I can't imagine you get a very good angle on things unless there's multiple cameras and you get a composite image one for each shelf.
No that's what the front of my fridge will never look like, no matter my net worth. I will never buy a smart refrigerator, certainly not this model from Samsung!
The made ice occasionally gets stuck and has to be knocked loose, but that's no big deal - not like the Samsung freezing the whole mechanism into a huge block that prevents accessing it to clear it out.
That's the main issue here. This fridge didn't show ads when people bought it. So buying things that don't show ads isn't enough. You need to only buy things that don't get updates.
What I mean is that my fridge doesn’t have a screen. So if Panasonic decided to show me ads on a fridge where the most complicated feature is the ice maker, that would be a neat trick.
Perhaps they'll be talking via a giant mesh of your neighbors doorbells, fridges, and televisions. Wouldn't that be fucked up? Maybe they'll stream to the police drones patrolling your neighborhood.
I always wondered how an "ad-supported" Kindle would show new ads on the home screen if you only transfer books via USB and never connect via WiFi or wireless? Does it just reuse the old ads? How will the fridge do it?
You'll need to use wifi if you want any online functionality out of the device but it'll communicate on its own via cellular for ads and any metrics literally whoever the fuck wants.
As long as a business is able to make more from ads and selling your data than whatever the wireless fees they pay are it makes business sense. It's fucking evil and a dystopian nightmare but it makes business sense.
I have a tablet and a fridge. One is mobile info & recipe stuff, the other has (too less) space and cools food. Why should i want (too expensive) a fridge with a built in tablet? They just don't match.
Edit: get one of them magnetic stickers to have the best of both worlds.
I wouldn’t mind one for playing Jellyfin videos while I’m cooking, having a dedicated screen for the Mealie recipe I’m currently making, looking at a digital family calendar, adding items to the grocery list, etc. A kitchen kiosk with a larger screen that is easy to clean and doesn’t need a login does have some practical uses for self-hosted apps, but…checks list…nope, ads to make some corpo’s number go up didn’t quite make it into my wishlist.
True, although the actual big display on the Samsung fridge powered by the fridge itself showing various widgets is pretty nice. The fridge is also a good location for it, and you’d have to otherwise run a wire across your fridge to power your own tablet. The main problem is that your hardware and your data belong to Samsung after you buy it. Other problem is it seems to also be overpriced. 🤷♂️
The fridge is also a good location for it, and you’d have to otherwise run a wire across your fridge to power your own tablet.
What? How is the fridge possibly a good location for it? In what world could that ever be true? And do you not have wall outlets in your kitchen? Put your device on the counter!
In my case at least, every other part of my kitchen has counters or cabinets, and there isn’t really an empty space on a wall to hang a tablet. The fridge would be a good place for a screen, except if it’s not built-in, there would be a wire. I can see someone with a different layout not following my logic, though.
Ok, so let's say you're making dinner and you want to watch something at the same time. Perhaps you're chopping vegetables on the counter. Do you really want to be looking at the front of the fridge while you do that? If the fridge is against the same wall as the counter you need to crane your head back to see anything, and if it's on a different wall you need to turn your head a totally different direction. Why not use one of those tablet cases with a kick stand and then put the tablet right in front of you, on the counter? Like right in front of the the cutting board you're using.
I don't know, I think if you do anything other than putting it right in front of you, you're gonna and up losing some fingers instead of chopping veggies.
Probably too unsightly for many, but I use gooseneck arms from snakeclamp.com. I use them for many things, like making helping hands for soldering, bike maintenance, and mounting monitors. You need to get one rated for the intended load. There are a ton of mounting base options and plenty of attachments, including one for holding tablets.
Sounds like it'd not be you ideal solution but thought I'd mention it on behalf of others.
I was about to say… I have a laptop that can go anywhere in the house, including the kitchen. It’s not tethered to any one location and can do all the things that fridge screen can do, and much more. Laptops also have ad blockers freely available.
As a Home Assistant geek, I would love to have a tablet built into the fridge door that I could 100% hack to display useful information and such. Currently I have an Android tablet on the wall that does this, but one on the door could be cool, especially if you could setup a place for virtual sticky notes that you could leave reminders and such for family members.
It’s not worth it for ad space though and I wouldn’t want it to be required for the fridge to operate either!
My household has a shared calendar we use to plan events. I've thought about a project before just to put a big view version of that up somewhere for people to reference, but I've been hesitant because it's a large household and having to play tech support every time it goes wrong isn't something i can do.
If i could get a reliable screen on the fridge that could display that, along with maybe a Reminders List and your sticky note idea, that would be perfect. With ads though that's a big nope from me.
Even excluding my stance on not wanting ads, that's how you find out the 5 year old accidentally bought something, or that something was leaked in a big data leak. That's just something i don't want in my home
So for a clock and picture frame you’re not gunna believe this but…
And for a weather forecast I mean just make a widget on your phone’s home screen, it’ll be fine. The techification of every damn fucking thing we have is ridiculous and we so happily dive into filling our lives with nonsense just to have a theoretical 1% improvement in efficiency that we don’t even need.
I’m not saying we need to throw out all technology but we also don’t need to jam modern tech into every single aspect of our lives.
The widget will appear by default on the fridges as part of the software update. However, Samsung is giving users the option to turn off ads. To do this, go to the Settings page on the fridge, scroll to Advertisements, select it, and you’ll be taken to a screen where you can toggle off ads.
This will remove the widget entirely. If you think you might actually like the widget’s other features (calendar, weather, and news), you can “X” out a particular ad, and it won’t pop up again. But then you’ll get another ad.
The Product
Samsung Family Hub refrigerators are premium smart appliances featuring touchscreen displays integrated into refrigerator doors, with models rangin…
So, what happens if I use pi-hole or adguard to block DNS for the advertisement TLDs, like I do for all the other gizmos in the house trying to show me ads or obtain telemetry data?
Worth pointing out that that “Target figured out a girl was pregnant before her father did” story is almost certainly untrue: predictiveanalyticsworld.com/m…
I agree with the article that getting ads on a device you’ve already paid for with no hint that there would be ads is intrusive and a sad sign of how tech is going (in the same week that it was announced that Apple are going to be adding ads to Maps, too). But I also can’t help but wonder - who the fuck wants a smart fridge? Like, legitimately, what is the advantage over a normal fridge?
We examine the origin and the facts behind this explosive story, the importance of headlines, and how unsubstantiated assumptions gain traction and mainstream attention and help create myths around Predictive Analytics.
Not a "smart" fridge per se, but I can see the use of a screen on my fridge; something where we can see our family calendar, leave notes for each other, and maybe also be able to access the grocery shopping list. Weather would be nice too, though you can keep the news widget (yikes). Something in a visible location in our house, where we go every day.
I'm not sure what other features they advertise with a smart fridge, but those few would be nice; especially if I could just plug a raspberry pi into it and skip all of the Samsung nonsense entirely.
You’re not an edge case. My family isn’t that large but we still have challenges with this exact thing.
There’s a screen device that my wife gets incessantly advertised to her that is probably a better option than it being built into a fridge that has been engineered to last 3 weeks longer than the warranty.
We've tried paper. And dry-erase. The problem is that we keep our calendars and todos and schedules on our phones, which don't automatically update the paper; and by the second week, we tend to just stop manually updating it. There's a paper calendar in my office that I just flipped to October last week (from August).
The only way that really seems to work, where we don't forget an event, is having a single digital shared calendar.
My wife and I have phones where we keep our shared calendars, yes. But we have four kids who also have their own lives and schedules, and they often want to know what's going on, what our plans are, etc. They would value being able to see the day's upcoming events, too; when the play dates are, when the dentist appointments are, when the days off of school are, what we're eating for dinner, all of that. Currently, their only access to that information is through our phones.
Having a screen in the kitchen that only shows calendars and a couple of other pieces of data would be useful. We wouldn't want to be able to watch videos or browse websites on it, though.
This is an amazing article. I'm serious. Very well written. This is my favorite part:
I asked Higby why they were bringing ads to the fridges. He said via email, “This pilot further explores how a connected appliance can deliver genuinely useful, contextual information. The refrigerator is already a daily hub, and we’re testing a responsible, user-controlled way to make that space more helpful.”
This is similar to the justification Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of Devices & Services, made to me last month when I asked him about advertising on its Echo devices. He said it was looking to be “elegantly elevating the information that a customer needs.”
Do these people actually believe this? Do they see advertisements in their own lives and think, "ah yes, that was useful and contextual. That was a helpful ad, elegantly elevating my information." I've seen some delusional people in executive-level roles, but that would be a special new class of delusion. Nobody likes ads. I recognize that some people have higher and lower tolerances for them, but nobody is actually grateful for them. Right?! I need to believe this is true.
Both companies claim they want to offer “curated,” “relevant” ads that might “enhance the experience.” I can buy that to some extent when it’s ads for features that your smart fridge or smart display offers. This tech is complicated and capable, and most people only tap into a fraction of what their devices can do.
That's generous. But ok, maybe I can grant the premise.
But there is no future where third-party advertisements will ever be welcome in people’s homes like this — even if they happen to show me a brand of pet food right when my dog is looking at me with hungry eyes.
Right. Exactly. No matter what, I can think of no situation in which an ad is serving the customer's interests. Maybe in the case of a coupon? But even then, I think it's dubious.
I like TikTok ads. I am not a material person, so I am generally hard to shop for. But since TikTok came out, I am able to provide a list for people of cool gadgets and stuff that aren't too expensive. Do I like any other ads? No...
Interesting. I have not had that experience, on Tiktok or elsewhere. I do have a similar experience with tech reviewers' videos on Youtube, though. Albeit not the sponsored ones.
I have never bought a fridge in my life. When I bought this house the owner just left the current fridge behind it has no branding at all and is basically a white box. The only smart feature it has is that it beeps if you leave the door open (although honestly it's not really much use since it only starts beeping after 10 minutes which I feel like is too long).
I have a feeling the alarm you're talking about is a temperature alarm, not for the door. It's just that leaving the door open will raise the temperature eventually.
Unless you build it and code it yourself, do not get a smart device at any cost. Even if they're on sale for $5. (Unless you're just planning on reselling them I guess)
Let me know when the smart fridge can track when I'm low on essentials and toggle them unchecked on my shopping list, WITHOUT phoning home, and with no fucking ads. Don't need a screen either.
Nope. Don't want a fridge to track what I eat. Don't want anything to track my data unwanted, just give me a fridge which cools and has a working door. No fancy features, just basic functionality and silent. No smart dishwasher, oven, microwave, washing machine, tooth brush, bed, watch, home hub, locks, lights, etc. I want a smart phone and a smart girlfriend.
If the data is offline, then it only serves you without selling you out. I know it's unrealistic; why would any corporation make something that benefits consumers and not themselves?!
Never will I ever get an appliance that reports everything to the internet (advertisers) and forces ads into my home. Fuck them all, there is absolutely nothing they can offer that is worth the spying and intrusion.
Signal head Meredith Whittaker has responded to concerns about the encrypted messaging app’s use of Amazon Web Services, saying “there isn’t really another choice.”
Session is a decentralized alternative to signal. It doesn't require a phone number and all traffic is routed through a tor like onion network. Relays are run by the community and relay operators are rewarded with some crypto token for their troubles. To prevent bad actors from attacking the network, in order to run a relay you have to stake some of those tokens first and if your node misbehaves thay will get slashed.
Sounds like the staking is a way to incentivize individual node uptime. Also you need to pay into the stake to get going so there is some financial pain involved in neglecting, or worse, manipulating a node. Though it sounds like around €1000 per node, so it’s not really going to slow down governments or billion dollar commercial competitors.
It’s also a way that people can contribute to the network without needing third party payment services. I don’t need to find some node operator’s socials and look up a patron to use a credit card.
If I already have an account with a crypto exchange then it’s easy to pay the operators.
Tor relays only relay the traffic, they don't store anything (other than HSDirs, but that's miniscule). Session relays have to store all the messages, pictures, files until the user comes online and retrieves them. Obviously all that data would be too much to store on every single node, so instead it is spread across only 5-7 nodes at a time. If all of those nodes ware to go offline at the same time, messages would be lost, so there has to be some mechanism that discourages taking nodes offline without giving a notice period to the network. Without the staking mechanism, an attacker could spin up a bunch of nodes and then take them all down for relatively cheap, and leave users' messages undelivered. It also incentivizes honest operators to ensure their node's reliability and rewards them for it, which, even if you run your node purely for altruistic reasons, is always a nice bonus, so I don't really see any downside to it, especially since the end user doesn't need to interact with it at all.
Inflation, those are new tokens generated by the network, the same way new bitcoin is generated by the miners roughly every 10 minutes, just without the proof of work mining part. It's called proof of stake, ethereum uses it as well.
It uses it's own crypto. It's not really a crypto -currency- in the sense that it's meant to be used for payment or to store value. It's more of a crypto -token- that's meant to provide some limited utility in it's ecosystem. Like an arcade token in an arcade, you can use it to play the games but that's about it. Likewise the session token can be used to get some extra functionality within the network, like registering custom names on it's dns like service that can be used to add new contacts instead of the long default user hash or as a stake if you want to run a node. The functionality is fairly limited right now but the devs plan to expand it soon. People also sometimes use these kind of tokens as a stock of sorts, so if the service/network becomes popular the value of it's "stock" can grow so it can be used as an investment (personally I wouldn't recommend that but whatever floats your boat [not a financial advice btw]). The node operators profit from selling these tokens to whomever wants to buy them.
You can bring down the stake amount to 6250 tokens (~300€) by running a multi-contributor node link, but your cut of the rewards will be proportionally smaller as well.
No, DHT is just a way of determining paths and priority of value lookup by key in the network, so that the load were distributed predictably, while allowing you to find, well, what you are looking for. BTW, while everybody uses Kademlia with modifications, I'd argue that Chord is better for anything related to security and anonymity.
Storage and serving of anything big is another thing. I take it you mean that I2P nodes cache messages relayed via them when the target node is unavailable. That doesn't have anything to do with DHT.
I2P has its own internal DHT network. Bote piggybacks on it to relay messages between Bote nodes. You can even configure it so you can address random online nodes and ask them to hold a message for another node to relay (online or offline) to obscure message timing
DHT can be used for almost anything as a generic key value store, even if the typical use is just peer finding
OK, I really love I2P, just wish sometimes there would be ways to use it with latency and throughput approaching clearnet. I like that it's a platform solving the P2P and discovery problems for everyone in the same way and providing interfaces for that, but the privacy and security orientation means that it's mostly used for privacy and security (even pedo filesharing doesn't seem to be too many people).
Can't really do that with volunteer nodes only in open networks. Reliable low latency anonymous connections require stable direct links between most nodes. Like you'd need a bunch of big universities to run it.
The main issue with Session is they removed PFS when they redesigned everything. Also, it's admittedly been years since I tried it, but I remember the app being noticeably buggy.
It’s gotten more usable over the past couple of years. Sadly, I just got done getting all my family/friend contacts to get on Signal (they’d much prefer to use WhatsApp) so Session remains a lonely place for me. I seem to use it solely as a place to stash notes for myself, even though I do this with Signal as well.
I don’t know that we’ll ever see a messenger that both appeals to everyone and has all the features we want (from privacy to visual appeal).
I feel like this about SimpleX. It was a hellish struggle to get people to use Signal (and still a bunch only use Instagram or insist on doing plain phone calls/SMS). Some of my family continuously complain that Signal is too complicated despite the interface being pretty much exactly the same as whatever app they want to use. I really don't want to try to get them to use another app ever again.
I found it workable when I tried it recently, but wound up going with simpleX. I like the multi identity system and you can proxy it through tor. Found the app customization more flushed out too.
I would not recommend it. Session is a signal fork that deliberately removes forward secrecy from the protocol and uses weaker keys. The removal of forward security means that if your private key is ever exposed all your past messages could be decrypted.
Her real comment was that there are only 3 major cloud providers they can consider: AWS, GCP, and Azure. They chose AWS and AWS only. So there are a few options for them going forward — 1) keep doing what they’re doing and hope a single cloud provider can improve reliability, 2) modify their architecture to a multi-cloud architecture given the odds of more than one major provider going down simultaneously is much rarer, or 3) build their own datacenters/use colos which have a learning curve yet are still viable alternatives. Those that are serious about software own their own hardware, after all.
Each choice has its strengths and drawbacks. The economics are tough with any choice. Comes down to priorities, ability to differentiate, and value in differentiation 😀
This isn't ‘'renting a server.' It's leasing access to a whole sprawling, capital-intensive, technically-capable system that must be just as available in Cairo as in Capetown, just as functional in Bangkok as Berlin. Particularly given the high stakes use cases of many who rely on Signal. 6/
The big 3 also offer disgustingly fast interconnection. Google, Amazon and Microsoft lay their own undersea fiber for better performance.
If willing to sacrifice a bit of everything, OVH has North-American and European locations, as well as one in India, one in Singapore and one in Australia. They're building a few more in India, one in Dubai, two in Africa, one in NZ and 3 in South America. Once they add a few more on top of those, that's damn near worldwide coverage too. And OVH is a French company, so the US government has less leverage over it than Amazon.
Those are the only 3 that matter at the top tier/enterprise class of infrastructure. Oracle could be considered as well for nuanced/specialized deployments that are (largely) Oracle DB heavy; but AWS is so far ahead of Azure and GCP from a tooling standpoint it's not even worth considering the other two if AWS is on the table.
It's so bad with other cloud providers that ones like Azure offers insane discounts on their MSSQL DB (basically "free") licensing just to use them over AWS. Sometimes the cost savings are worth it, but you take a usability and infrastructure hit by using anything other than AWS.
I honestly, legitimately, wish there was some other cloud provider out there that could do what AWS can do, but they don't exist. Anyone else is a pale imitation from a devops perspective. It sucks. There should be other real competitors, especially to the US based cloud companies as the US cannot be trusted anymore, but they just don't exist without taking a huge hit in terms of tools, APIs, and reliability options, to AWS.
I always wondered why people don't implement a multi-cloud infrastructure if they want/need extra HA. And I know Oracle offers a solution with Azure and GCP, with AWS on the horizon. Not to advertise for Oracle because they're terrible otherwise, but I can't imagine wanting a multi-cloud option and not consider them.
Multi region is already hard enough with transactional management not being easy to split between the regions, and multi-cloud is another order of magnitude more difficult than multi region.
With that said, use2 and others were still up, so if they were just multi region and failed over to east2 they would have been fine.
Meredith mentioned in a reply to her posts that they do leverage multi-cloud and were able to fall back onto GCP (Google Cloud Platform), which enabled Signal to recover quicker than just waiting on AWS. I'd link to source but on phone, it's somewhere in this thread: mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/115…
📣THREAD: It’s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but you–not AWS, not Signal, not anyone–can access your comms).
They are serving 1on1 chats and group chats. That practically partitions itself. There are many server lease options all over the world. My assumption is that they use some AWS service and now can't migrate off. But you need an oncall team anyway so you aren't buying that much convenience.
There are many server lease options all over the world
It increases complexity a lot to go with a bunch of separate server leases. There's a reason global companies use hyperscalers instead of getting VPSes in 30 or 40 different countries.
I hate the centralization as much as everyone else, but for some things it's just not feasible to go on-prem. I do know an exception. Used to work at a company with a pretty large and widely spread out customer base (big corps on multiple continents) that had its own k8s cluster in a super secure colocation space. But our backend was always slow to some degree (in multiple cases I optimized multi-second API endpoints into 10-200ms), we used asynchronous processing for the truly slow things instead of letting the user wait for a multi-minute API request, and it just wasn't the sort of application that you need to be super fast anyway, so the extra milliseconds of latency didn't matter that much, whether it was 50 or 500.
But with a chat app, users want it to be fast. They expect their messages to be sent as soon as they hit the send button. It might take longer to actually reach the other people in the conversation, but it needs to be fast enough that if the user hits send and then immediately closes the app, it's sent already. Otherwise it's bad UX.
If sending a message is the only requirement, email fits the bill and has worked for half a century. If we're being real, the reason Signal "can't do what Telegram does" is because Telegram doesn't even attempt to do what Signal does. Signal is tackling a much bigger problem.
I'm saying that the parts of infrastructure needed to accept a message to the service from the client application, encrypted or not, associated to a user or not, are under same requirements for Signal and Telegram.
I don't know if you understand that every big service is basically its own 90s' Internet self-contained, and what accepts your messages is pretty similar to an SMTP server in their architecture.
I'm going to call bullshit on the underlying assertion that Signal is using Amazon services for the sake of lining Jeff's pocket instead of considering the "several" alternatives. As if they don't have staff to consider such a thing and just hit buy now on the Amazon smile.
In any monopoly, there are going to be smaller, less versatile, less reliable options. Fine and dandy for Mr Joe Technology to hop on the niche wagon and save a few bucks, but that's not going to work for anyone casting a net encompassing the world.
I call it bullshit too. If its too expensive for them, just decentralize the project. Self-hosters all around the world would help. I alone have better uptime than AWS and probably wouldn't even notice usage from a few hundred thousands users
you, on a single ISP who relies on the world's shared backbone rather than your own between multiple DCs within a region and multiple regions around the world, have better uptime than AWS?
Stop.
I'm all for decentralizing for the case of no single entity controlling everything, but not for the case of uptime. That is one thing you give up with services like Matrix or Lemmy.
AWS actually has an SLA it's contractually committed to when you pay them with thousands of engineers working to maintain it.
Well yes considering the downtime they had. SLA is just words on a paper, you also need to not fuck your infrastructure up. Even if all self-hosters had 99% uptime which is bad, it's easy building a system that replicates data on a few of them to achieve resiliency. People need to stop assuming they can be 100% reliant on a single host and actually design their systems to take downtimes into account and recover from them
Decentralized matrix has not the quality level for production. The only matrix user that has no issue have their account on all of their contacts on matrix.org. So, use it as a centralize app.
Where do people keep getting this SLA pink promise information? Your SLA has to be presented to potential clients and whether you've been successful in maintaining it can make or break them being on board. It's also audited for things like SOC2 compliance.
That's a microscopic fraction of what a product the size of Signal is dealing with, and unimaginably small compared to AWS
Why is it that only the larger cloud providers are acceptable? What's wrong with one of the smaller providers like Linode/Akamai? There are a lot of crappy options, but also plenty of decent ones. If you build your infrastructure over a few different providers, you'll pay more upfront in engineering time, but you'll get a lot more flexibility.
For something like Signal, it should be pretty easy to build this type of redundancy since data storage is minimal and sending messages probably doesn't need to use that data storage.
But far less reliable. If your data center has a power outrage or internet disruption, you're screwed. Signal isn't big enough to have several data centers for geographic diversity and redundancy, they're maybe a few racks total.
Colo is more feasible, but who is going to travel to the various parts of the world to swap drives or whatever? If there's an outage, you're talking hours to days to get another server up, vs minutes for rented hosting.
For the scale that signal operates at and the relatively small processing needs, I think you'd want lots of small instances. To route messages, you need very little info, and messages don't need to be stored. I'd rather have 50 small replicas than 5 big instances for that workload.
For something like Lemmy, colo makes a ton of sense though.
It’s plenty reliable. AWS is just somebody else’s datacenter.
Colo is more feasible, but who is going to travel to the various parts of the world to swap drives or whatever?
Most Colo DCs offer ad hoc remote hands, but that’s beside the point. What do you mean here by “Various parts of the world”? In Signal’s case even Amazon didn’t need anyone in “various parts of the world” because the Signal infra on AWS was evidently in exactly one part of the world.
If there's an outage, you're talking hours to days to get another server up, vs minutes for rented hosting.
You mean like the hours it took for Signal to recover on AWS, meanwhile it would have been minutes if it was their own infrastructure?
the Signal infra on AWS was evidently in exactly one part of the world.
We don't necessarily know that. All I know is that AWS's load balancers had issues in one region. It could be that they use that region for a critical load balancer, but they have local instances in other parts of the world to reduce latency.
I'm not talking about how Signal is currently set up (maybe it is that fragile), I'm talking about how it could be set up. If their issue is merely w/ the load balancer, they could have a bit of redundancy in the load balancer w/o making their config that much more complex.
You mean like the hours it took for Signal to recover on AWS, meanwhile it would have been minutes if it was their own infrastructure?
No, I mean if they had a proper distributed network of servers across the globe and were able to reroute traffic to other regions when one has issues, there could be minimal disruption to the service overall, with mostly local latency spikes for the impacted region.
My company uses AWS, and we had a disaster recovery mechanism almost trigger that would move our workload to a different region. The only reason we didn't trigger it is because we only need the app to be responsive during specific work hours, and AWS recovered by the time we needed our production services available. A normal disaster recovery takes well under an hour.
With a self-hosted datacenter/server room, if there's a disruption, there is usually no backup, so you're out until the outage is resolved. I don't know if Signal has disaster recovery or if they used it, I didn't follow their end of things very closely, but it's not difficult to do when you're using cloud services, whereas it is difficult to do when you're self-hosting. Colo is a bit easier since you can have hot spares in different regions/overbuild your infra so any node can go down.
It was a DNS issue with DynamoDB, the load balancer issue was a knock-on effect after the DNS issue was resolved. But the problem is it was a ~15 hour outage, and a big reason behind that was the fact that the load in that region is massive. Signal could very well have had their infrastructure in more than one availability zone but since the outage affected the entire region they are screwed.
You’re right that this can be somewhat mitigated by having infrastructure in multiple regions, but if they don’t, the reason is cost. Multi-region redundancy costs an arm and a leg. You can accomplish that same redundancy via Colo DCs for a fraction of the cost, and when you do fix the root issue, you won’t then have your load balancers fail on you because in addition to your own systems you have half the internet all trying to pass its backlog of traffic at once.
Yes, if you buy an off the shelf solution, it'll be expensive.
I'm suggesting treating VPS instances like you would a colo setup. Let cloud providers manage the hardware, and keep the load balancing in house. For Signal, this can be as simple as client-side latency/load checks. You can still colo in locations with heavier load; that's how some Linux distros handle repo mirrors, and it works well. Signal's data needs should be so low that simple DB replicas should be sufficient.
It is, compared to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Here's 2024 revenue to give an idea of scale:
Akamai - $4B, Linode itself is ~$100M
AWS - $107B
Azure - ~$75B
Google Cloud - ~$43B
The smallest on this this list has 10x the revenue of Akamai.
Here are a few other providers for reference:
Hetzner (what I use) - €367M
Digital Ocean - $692.9M
Vultr (my old host) - not public, but estimates are ~$37M
I'm arguing they could put together a solution with these smaller providers. That takes more work, but you're rewarded with more resilience and probably lower hosting costs. Once you have two providers in your infra, it's easier to add another. Maybe start with using them for disaster recovery, then slowly diversify the hosting portfolio.
10% the size of google is decent. If I had ten percent of a tech giant's reach in any particular sector I would consider myself significant but I get where you ae coming from
This has been my biggest pet peeve in the wake of the AWS outage. If you'd built for high-availability and continuity then this event would at most have been a minor blip in your services.
Yeah, but if you want real redundancy, you pay double. My team looked into it. Even our CEO, no tightwad, just laughed and shook his head when we told him.
This is the actual realistic change a lot of people are missing. Multi cloud is hard and imperfect and brings its own new potential issues. But AWS does give you tools to adopt multi region. It's just very expensive.
Unfortunately DNS transcends regions though so that can't really be escaped.
us-east-1 went down. Problem is that IAM services all run through that DC. Any code relying on an IAM role would not be able to authenticate. Think of it as a username in a Windows domain. IAM encompasses all that you are allowed to view, change, launch, etc.
I didn't hardly touch AWS at my last job, but listening to my teammates and seeing their code led me to believe IAM is used everywhere.
Nothing to do with moving data. But you can't move data without authentication.
I want my service to do a $thing. It won't do $thing without knowing who I am and what permissions I have. The data doesn't have to cross borders, the service simply needs to function.
Does that make sense? As I said, didn't do much in AWS, but the principles are sound.
Federation/decentralization is great. It's why we're here on Lemmy.
It also means you expect everyone involved, people you've never met or vetted, to be competent and be able to shell out the cash and time to commit to a certain level of uptime. That's unacceptable for a high SLA product like Signal. Hell midwest.social, the Lemmy instance I'm on, is very often quite slow. I and others put up with it because we know it's run by one person on one server that he's presumably paying for himself. But that doesn't reflect Lemmy as a whole.
AWS isn't just a bunch of servers. They have dedicated services for database clusters, cache store, data warehouse, load balancing, container clusters, kubernetes clusters, CDN, web access firewall, to name just a few. Every region has multiple datacenters, the largest by far of which is North Virginia's. By default most people use one DC but multi region while being a huge expensive lift is something they already have tools to assist with. Also, and maybe most importantly, AWS, Azure and GCP run their own backbones between the datacenters rather than rely on the shared one that you, me, and most other smaller DCs are using.
I'm a DevOps Engineer but I'm no big tech fan. I run my own hobby server too. Amazon is an evil company. But the claim that "multi cloud is easy, smaller CSPs are just as good" is naive at best.
Ideally some legislation comes in and forces these companies to simplify the process for adopting multi cloud, because right now you have to build it all yourself and it becomes still very imperfect when you start to factor things like databases and DNS, and this is what they rely on hard for vendor lock-in.
DevOps here too, I've been starting to slide my smaller redundant services into k8s. I had to really defend my position not to use ECS.
No, we're using kubeadm because I don't want to give a damn if it's running in the office, or google or amazon or my house. It's WAY harder and more expensive than setting up an eks and a EC/Aurora cluster, but I can bypass vendor lock in. Setting up my own clusters and replicas is a never ending source of work.
Not to mention the fact that the grand majority of federalized services have extremely unsustainable performance characteristics that make them effectively impossible to scale from hobby projects
Can't find a screenshot, but when you're logged in and click for the screen to show all AWS products, holy shit. AWS is far more than most people think.
SimpleX literally solves the messaging problem. You can bounce through their default relay nodes or run your own to use exclusively or add to the mix. It's all very transparent to end users.
At most, aws outage would have only affected chats relayed on those aws servers.
SimpleX also doesn't require a fukkin phone number.
Just read through the bluesky thread and it's obvious that she's a CEO and has no idea how to code or design infrastructure
It's leasing access to a whole sprawling, capital-intensive, technically-capable system that must be just as available in Cairo as in Capetown, just as functional in Bangkok as Berlin.
Yeah then why was Signal completely down when a single datacenter (us-east-1) fails and all others are working perfectly?
Did it ever come to your brilliant mind that your system design might be the problem?
Jump over your shadow, say that you screwed up and tell the people that you are no longer going to rely on a single S3 bucket in us-east-1 and stop your fingerpointing.
But you don't even manage to host a proper working status page or technically explain your outages, so guess this train is long gone...
There was a big exodus to signal for a while a couple years ago when meta were fucking with their whatsapp privacy policy, similar to the exodus from reddit to lemmy.
Having your infrastructure on a cloud provider allows you to keep your costs in line with your current amount of users, if you have a big influx you can immediately scale up to accommodate them, and then when that spike in users dies off as they invariably do you can scale back down instead of being left with a load of hardware you've just bought for your new users (that have since fucked off) and now aren't using
And/or peer to peer mesh. Personally, I WANT a system that has peak performance AND multiple fallbacks to prevent blackout single point of failure situations.
Tangent: Jami is p2p, so the only risk of going offline is if everyone in the groups go offline. It does lack several quality of life features, though.
It's wild how much more billionaires are spending to defeat Zohran than what his tax proposal would cost them. I guess they're afraid of a wider movement.
China is the sole producer, for example, of samarium, a rare earth metal used in many military applications. China is also the only country to master the difficult art of refining ultrapure dysprosium: The entire world’s supply, needed for superfast chips, comes from a single factory near Shanghai.
West allowed and even encouraged this by failing to build their own industry and relying on China's cheaper labour. Why pay unioned workers a fair pay when you can exploit foreign work force instead for maximum shareholder value.
See national security is irrelevant when it comes at a cost of corporate overlords profit margins.
Businessman and "Shark Tank" star Kevin O'Leary confirmed that President-elect Donald Trump is hosting discussions at Mar-a-Lago about integrating Canada into the United States.
An estimated 7 million peaceful protesters took to the streets on October 18, in the second-largest demonstration in US history (after the first Earth Day in 1970), demanding accountability and a return to democracy and the rule of law. In a system of government where citizens can only use the ballot box every two to six years to show how they feel about their electeds, that’s something you’d think would warrant journalistic attention.
Yet at the nation’s paper of record—whose headquarters sat literally a stone’s throw away from the New York City No Kings march route—the protest was deemed not important enough for a front-page story. Two small below-the-fold photos were offered instead (10/19/25), with the accompanying article buried on page 23.
The nation's paper of record downplayed the 'No Kings" protests while urging Democrats to move toward the center to defeat Trump, all the while ignoring the GOP's attempt to undermine election integrity.
The nation's paper of record downplayed the 'No Kings" protests while urging Democrats to move toward the center to defeat Trump, all the while ignoring the GOP's attempt to undermine election integrity.
La resa dei conti è arrivata. Lunedì 3 novembre 2025, su Rai 1, va in onda la sesta ed ultima puntata di Blanca 3, con Maria Chiara Giannetta nei panni dell’investigatrice non vedente che ha conquistato il pubblico. L’episodio, dal titolo “Il bambino”, porta al culmine l’indagine iniziata in apertura di stagione: la scomparsa del figlio di Domenico (Domenico Diele) e la morte della madre del piccolo. Sul piano personale, Blanca dovrà guardare in faccia la verità sulle bugie di Domenico e decidere se coinvolgerlo nella sua gravidanza, mentre Liguori (Giuseppe Zeno) le resta accanto in un momento cruciale.
Not a torrent site but Soulseek/Nictone+ is a very old school Limewire-style service that you can curate with friends lists and choosing what to share and not share.
Orpheus is dedicated to music, and one other one which I forget the name of. It's kind of interesting how music trackers were what made torrenting explore originally but not music trackers are often an afterthought.
@Snot Flickerman I have an account @fu I love the IDEA but haven't used it much since I haven't met others who are willing to share their library with me for fear I may be a fed, or something.
Soulseek is very easy to use. Been using it for over a year now. Not sure how it's not more popular as I've been able to find lossless versions of just about everything. Highly recommend.
My experience with Lidarr (tried it after they fixed their DB problem) has been pretty poor, and doesn't seem to download music into album folders for some reason.
Yeah, I also don't think it's great but don't know of any alternative that I can sync up with Spotify. I need to make the transition as seamless as possible if the wife's going to give up her Spotify.
I'm gonna second Soulseek. It is pretty old, but so many of the people who use it are collectors who organize their collections well, and I've found some pretty obscure stuff on there as well.
I haven't tried it myself, but I want to try Soularr, which apparently lets Lidarr use Soulseek as a source.
Getting it to work with Lidarr would be the most ideal situation. The biggest hurdle I'm facing is my wife wanting an easy solution. With Lidarr I can reverse proxy so she can request songs still.
Soularr works pretty well in conjunction with slskd. If you know how to use soulseek, it shouldn't be too hard to get set up. The interface is quite different from the other *arrs, but it was easy enough to set up for me.
I'm set up in containers on Linux, but there should be a config file you point to both lidarr and slskd. You'll need the api key for each for them to connect, and in each you need them pointing to the same download location.
Everyone has already suggested soulseek, so I will also add that on rare occasions I've been able to find downloads with Yandex that I couldn't find on soulseek or anywhere else.
You can pass interviews to get into OPS (Orpheus) or RED (Redacted). Both are dedicated to music and have a huge catalogue. I'm unsure if OPS is open to recruitment as of now, though. Hope you find what you are looking for:)
basically you export your spotify playlists as a csv and slsk-batchdl will take that and try to find everything on soulseek and download it for you. anything it can't find it'll let you know. it might take awhile, if you have a server I'd run it on that via screen and just let it run overnight (that's what I did)
Keep in mind that Soulseek has A LOT of audiophiles on it so you'll find a lot of high quality audio and FLACs. if FLAC is too big for you and you're fine with mp3s you c an use Nicotine+ to just search for mp3s.
I don't want MP3s anymore, so I usually download FLAC and convert to 192 kbps OPUS. Audiophiles might get angry but my ears don't hear any difference and my harddrive really likes it. You can get as low as 16 kbps for audiobooks, it's insane! 😀
I’ve always believed that if you put your heart into something — really try — eventually, it will be seen. But lately, I’m not so sure. For months, I’ve been trying to get my websites approved for AdSense. Three sites, three different focuses, one consist
I’ve always believed that if you put your heart into something — really try — eventually, it will be seen.
But lately, I’m not so sure.
For months, I’ve been trying to get my websites approved for AdSense. Three sites, three different focuses, one consistent effort: to share my work, my voice, my perspective. And every time, I get rejected. Every time, the same message: “Low-quality content.”
No explanation. No guidance. No human response. Just those cold words, repeated, over and over.
It’s not the money that stings. It’s the feeling of being invisible. Of having your effort, your care, your heart poured into something — only to be told, vaguely, that it doesn’t matter.
And sometimes, you can’t help but wonder if it’s about more than the content. If there’s something about who you are, or what your name sounds like, or the perspective you bring — and yes, my name is Hispanic — that quietly works against you.
I want to believe it’s not true. I want to believe that a system that powers the world’s largest advertising platform treats everyone fairly. But when silence replaces answers, and automation replaces understanding, it’s hard not to feel like something deeper is at play.
I wrote to Google. I asked for clarity, for feedback, for a human to look at my work. I explained how it felt to be repeatedly dismissed without explanation.
No response.
It’s not just a rejection. It’s a dismissal. And when your name or your identity might be part of the invisible reason, it cuts deeper than any automated message could.
And yet, despite all that, I keep going.
I write because I have to. I create because I have to. Not for validation, not for approval, but because this is who I am. My work — my words, my ideas, my perspectives — matter to me. And I hope they matter to others too.
Maybe one day Google will see that. Maybe one day a human reviewer will look at my sites and recognize the care, the effort, and the heart behind them.
But until then, I’ll keep sharing, keep writing, keep creating. Because no rejection, no algorithm, no automated judgment can erase what I put into the world.
And even if it sometimes feels like the system is blind, or worse — biased — I refuse to let that stop me.
Because heart and honesty can’t be rejected. They can only be ignored. And I refuse to be silent.
Those familiar with Biblaridion's Alien Biospheres worldbuilding series will be glad to hear that it's new sequel (sister?) series has just had it's first release 'Doing without Agriculture,' exploring a few of the ways that a fictional alien species, the development of which was covered in the last series, could develop their societies in the abscence of agrarian technology.
Those familiar with Biblaridion's Alien Biospheres worldbuilding series will be glad to hear that it's new sequel (sister?) series has just had it's first release 'Doing without Agriculture,' exploring a few of the ways that a fictional alien species, the development of which was covered in the last series, could develop their societies in the abscence of agrarian technology.
Una vulnerabilità zero-day in Google Chrome, sfruttata nell'operazione ForumTroll all'inizio di quest'anno, ha diffuso malware collegato al fornitore italiano di spyware Memento Labs, nato dopo che IntheCyber Group ha acquisito la famigerata Hacking Team.
L'operazione ForumTroll è stata scoperta da Kaspersky a marzo. La campagna ha preso di mira organizzazioni russe - media, università, centri di ricerca, organizzazioni governative e istituzioni finanziarie - con inviti ben congegnati al forum Primakov Readings che contenevano un link dannoso.
Era sufficiente caricare il link in qualsiasi browser web basato su Chromium per infettare il sistema informatico. I ricercatori di Kaspersky hanno affermato che la distribuzione del malware è stata effettuata sfruttando CVE-2025-2783, una vulnerabilità zero-day di tipo sandbox escape nel browser Chrome.
LibertyLizard
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