openpgp4fpr:6B61ECD76088748C70590D55E90A401336C8AAA9
- I have a mini PC hooked to screens in every room other than the bedroom and bathroom, and remote controls with built in air-mouse and keyboard (pepper jobs remotes). This way anyone can pick up a controller in any room and look something up on a shared communal screen as needed, which discourages use of private screens.
When I leave home for less than a day I pack no electronics of any kind and enjoy the peace in my own head to think about the next problems I want to solve in my universe.
I pay with cash exclusively in public so tap and pay is not an issue. If I ever need to be reachable for emergencies I can carry a pager but so far this has not been worth it.
- I host weekly friend-of-friend open events where some people show up most weeks, find a nice comfortable spot to doom scroll in for a couple hours, maybe take a nap, leave, sit in their car for a bit, scroll some more, then go home.
I am just hoping they actually took a break from doom scrolling while driving as then at least I can say I had some non zero positive impact on their lives.
5 years phone-free and I do not miss it. People use them as security blankets to avoid having to be present for more than 5 minutes at a time with other people or even just exist in their own heads. I now find this behavior immature and gross but avoiding it would mean not having friends.
A smartphone is like toilet paper. No one wants to watch you use it.
- When a kid is old enough to pay for their own apartment and bills and has money left over for a smartphone, drugs, alcohol, or other poisons, that will be their choice to make.
Until then, they are not an independent adult, and it is absolutely the responsibility of a parent to keep them away from poison they are clearly not emotionally mature enough to regulate yet.
> she’s currently uninterested in and actively hostile to understanding anything about AI architecture or underlying systems.
Same answer. Most adults cannot moderate proprietary social media algorithms and AI tech so why would we expect a teen to?
When one permits kids to access to things literally purpose built to ensure humans think less, it should not be surprising when they think less.
Burn ChatGPT and Tiktok with fire. Every home would be better off banning things like these.
- We banned proprietary software in our home, self host the internet services we need and want as a family, and block ads in everything.
Gave up my own phone entirely a few years ago partly to ensure kids never see me use one or rely on one so they know such tools are optional in life.
I like teaching kids modern technology starting with a soldering iron making an LED blink, and building a PC from parts, and eventually compiling an operating system from source code. I see absolutely no reason for a kid to ever need unsupervised access to the internet until at least high school, and even then not on a phone, but via desktop computers in common areas where there is accountability.
- Knowingly giving a child poison known to cause lasting damage to their brain sounds pretty abusive to me. It is the modern day equivalent of putting whiskey in the bottle to calm a kid down.
Also it is not about 80s/90s content so much as it is about helping a kid develop a longer attention span. Give them things worth watching more than 10 seconds at a time, or puzzles and project kits worth playing with for hours.
- Spot on. Giving kids a smartphone and unsupervised access to algorithm driven content is child abuse, though sadly a legal form of it. Also, model the behavior you want to see, so put your own phone down around kids and let them see you pursue interests other than scrolling on a small rectangle.
If you need kids distracted for a while, at least take take the time to thoughtfully pick out some books or physical media like DVDs they can enjoy ad-free with dedicated offline media players, or give them a mechanical puzzle, or a yo-yo, or legos, or paper and crayons.
- I literally burned and sold bootleg software to churches as one of my go to hustles as a kid, and have a blu ray burner handy.
Knowing how, and being willing to do it for piles of titles and make cases that are nice to display and browse in the real world alongside mass produced copies, takes a lot of effort and I have better things to do with my limited time.
As is tracking down very rare titles in blu ray quality. Often easier to just buy the most decent cased copies I can and rip for long term storage.
- Once supply chain attacks enter your threat model, you suddenly realize that the entire internet breaks if any one of a few hundred volunteer owned home computers are compromised.
Fixing this requires universal reproducible builds redundantly built and signed by independently controlled hardware. Once you have that then you no longer have single points of failure so centralized high security colo cost becomes a moot issue.
- Yet most distros have maintainers build and sign their own package recipes and/or artifacts on their own random home workstations infected with who knows what so the trust is distributed (but not decentralized) which is the worst of all worlds. And that is for the ones that bother with maintainer signing at all, as distros like nix and alpine fully skip caring about bare minimum supply chain security.
Some distros do build on a centralized machine, but almost always one many maintainers have access to from their workstations, so once again any single compromised home computer backdoors everything.
The trust model of the linux distros that power most servers on the internet is totally yolo, without the funding to even approach doing build and release right, let alone code review. One compromised maintainer workstation burns it all to the ground.
Sorry if this ruins anyones rosy worldview. The internet is fragile as hell, and one bored teen away from another slammer-worm style meltdown.
Relevant context: I founded stagex exactly because no previous Linux distribution has a decentralized trust story appropriate for production use hosting public internet services.
Once you decentralize supply chain trust then the question of "which place and people people do we trust for the one holy server" totally goes away.
- I to am in the bay area, and clearly I have been shopping at the wrong colos. I expected to find nothing with unlimited bandwidth for under $1k/mo given past experience with what may have been higher end DCs.
In any event if I was the volunteer sysadmin that had to babysit the box, I would rather have it at my home with business fiber where I am on premises most of the time because getting in and out of a colo is always a whole thing if their security is worth a damn.
Even given a frugal and accessible setup like that I can imagine 400k lasting 5 years tops especially if paying for the volunteers business fiber and much more especially given I expect some of it is to provide a sustainable compensation to key team members as well. Every cent will count.
- It is not just Google Ads that are dead. Advertising in general, is dead.
No one wants this shit and no matter where you go, people will find a way to block your ads or leave the platforms they cannot easily block ads in.
As soon as you advertisers moved to the internet, you gave users the power to delete you, so thanks for that.
- F-droid makes the most sense when shipped as the system appstore, along with pinned CA keychains as Calyxos did. Ideally f-droid was compiled from source and validated by the rom devs.
The F-droid app itself can then verify signatures from both third party developers and first party builds on an f-droid machine.
For all its faults (of which there are many) it is still a leaps and bounds better trust story than say Google Play. Developers can only publish code, and optional signatures, but not binaries.
Combine that with distributed reproducible builds with signed evidence validated by the app and you end up not having to trust anything but the f-droid app itself on your device.
- As someone that has run many volunteer open source communities and projects for more than 2 decades, I totally get how big "small" wins like this are.
The internet is run on binaries compiled in servers in random basements and you should be thankful for those basements because the corpos are never going to actually help fund any of it.
- I absolutely torrent as a way to discover new content, but I want favorites on a shelf on very long shelf life media where it does not require internet access and is never going to get altered or deleted as streaming services often do, or end up unavailable in the future with no seeders.
There are piles of obscure things for which physical (sometimes bootleg) media exists but no seeders.
For example the mexican hacking drama Control Z, I found 0 complete rips even on private trackers, but I did find some nice blu ray bootlegs with cases and cover art.
Even with blu-ray rips in hand, burning a disk myself and putting it into a nice recognizable case that fits in my blu ray wall cases is a pain in the ass and I would rather pay someone else for this service.
Plus it makes it way easier to hand select shows to hand a kid to play in a portable media player, and avoids the need to give them unrestricted alone time with an internet capable device.
I prefer official copies but if the studios do not allow them and thus do not want my money then bootlegs it is.
- Do not give netflix -too- much credit for this. Netflix permanently closes distribution of most content they touch and kills the very physical media ownership options for content that they built their empire on.
You will be hard pressed to find a blu-ray or dvd release of any netflix show in the US.
As someone that enjoys having a physical offline media collection, and who does not want to support netflix, I am often forced to buy japanese copies or bootleg copies of netflix shows whereas I can buy legitimate US copies from virtually all other studios.
Even hits like K-Pop demon hunters, netflix has forbidden physical purchase or ownership, so piracy is the only option for those who are not netflix customers or want to watch offline on a blu-ray player on an airplane.
- NixOS made a decision to tolerate single party supply chain security to support as many packages as possible even if it means nixos cannot be used for high security applications. This is a perfectly acceptable stance IF they communicate their single-party-risk tolerant threat model honestly so people know they cannot trust nixos in high risk situations.
It absolutely does not have the supply chain security guarantees it is widely believed to have and that is my core problem with it.
Also you wanted to use stagex for haskell today anyway and accept the risks you totally can but you would want to make a docker build layer to import a pre compiled binary from the internet like nixos does, and then it is very explicit that your resulting software has single party trust. We should have all dependencies of haskell but we cannot safely offer it as a precompiled package. That said as an end user you can of course use stagex in any way that suits your own project threat model.
Happy to help if we can!
Anyone can grab a remote and access to summon shared entertainment, order food, do shared research, fact check something, etc... but said screens are just linux machines with no proprietary software or magic addictive algorithms. Just tools.
Also when we walk away from them they do not follow us, and they cannot notify us.
It has completely changed the way my family and I interact with, and separate ourselves from, the internet.
If my phone battery died, I used to panic. Now with no phone, when I leave home, I am just... present, and can get lost in my own thoughts again. A skill I lost for decades with distractions always in my pocket.
Really just moving the screens further away, tethering them to walls, and ditching all proprietary addictive software is easier. Also a couple TVs and mini pcs cost less than one modern smartphone and covers the whole family.