papasquat's recent activity

  1. Comment on What are your current pain points with Linux? in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    You can absolutely do that. I ran KDE with i3 as the wm for years, and it was great. I had helpful utilities for connecting to wifi, suspending, dimming the screen and so on, while using the...

    My ideal would be something like i3/sway with just a few key bells and whistles from a larger DE.

    You can absolutely do that. I ran KDE with i3 as the wm for years, and it was great. I had helpful utilities for connecting to wifi, suspending, dimming the screen and so on, while using the window manager I wanted.

    The people that endlessly scream about bloat aren't worth listening to, they're not living in the same world as normal people.

  2. Comment on What are your current pain points with Linux? in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Mobile OSes had a huge advantage in that they were a greenfield implementation during a time that security started being taken seriously in OS design, and they've had the luxury of being...

    Mobile OSes had a huge advantage in that they were a greenfield implementation during a time that security started being taken seriously in OS design, and they've had the luxury of being controlled by a single entity that also controls the major distribution of software on it.

    Microsoft wishes they had the level of control that apple and Google have over their OSes. It vastly simplifies things when you can say "hey, were making this change to our sandboxing/permissions structure/whatever, fix your apps in 3 months, or we'll yank it off the app store".

    Linux, and even windows will never have that level of control, which makes doing "proper" security much, much more difficult.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Pretty horrible practice from both the provider and the consumer's POV. As a consumer, you get to have random people siphoning the bandwidth you're paying for, and the risk of misconfigured ACLs...

    Pretty horrible practice from both the provider and the consumer's POV. As a consumer, you get to have random people siphoning the bandwidth you're paying for, and the risk of misconfigured ACLs on the device exposing your traffic.

    As a provider, you get to lose out on potential customers who don't feel the need to pay you anymore when they can use their neighbors wifi through the wall for free.

    No clue why a default open SSID would be desirable for anyone. (Except people who want to mooch off their neighbors wifi I guess)

    4 votes

  4. Comment on LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Yeah. If the data is valuable enough to them, that would absolutely be within the realm of possibility. I've also heard of manufacturers embedding LTE radios in devices for communication like...

    Given the initial topic I wouldn't be surprised if LG was considering a deal with Comcast just for that kind of thing at this point.

    Yeah. If the data is valuable enough to them, that would absolutely be within the realm of possibility. I've also heard of manufacturers embedding LTE radios in devices for communication like this, but I have to imagine that an individuals data isn't valuable enough for that to make sense at scale for a TV.

    Plus, they can count on 90% of people just connecting the thing to their wifi anyway, so all of these games are probably unnecessary for their bottom line.

    4 votes

  5. Comment on Farmers turn to perennial grains as one solution to extreme weather in ~enviro

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Yeah. One of the problems with living in a democracy unfortunately. People do not generally vote for bitter pills that improve their lives in the future. They mostly vote like children, for things...

    Yeah. One of the problems with living in a democracy unfortunately. People do not generally vote for bitter pills that improve their lives in the future. They mostly vote like children, for things that they see benefiting them right now.

    Its the root cause of why so many long term issues get kicked down the road forever.

    3 votes

  6. Comment on LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    I see networks without WPA2/WPA3 a lot, but those are almost always locked down with captive portal authentication. Xfinitywifi definitely is, as part of comcasts "Xfinitynow" service (which as a...

    I see networks without WPA2/WPA3 a lot, but those are almost always locked down with captive portal authentication.

    Xfinitywifi definitely is, as part of comcasts "Xfinitynow" service (which as a sidenote, is also fucked as a business model). LG TVs wouldn't have access to those without paying Comcast.

    Its possible that someone is either running a 25 year old router, or manually removed the password on their AP, but basically any consumer wifi router of the past few decades has WPA2 authentication out of the box, and most of them have randomized passwords.

    Its of course entirely possible to find open public wifi, but personally I've just never encountered it in the past 10 years or so.

    7 votes

  7. Comment on LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Yeah, but would lots of other people? That's always been the issue with privacy concerns. I hate tracking, I hate ads, and I hate being spied on. I'm willing to pay an extra $1000 for a TV that...

    Regardless, personally I would rather pay the cost upfront rather then be nickel and dimed and a/b tested and exploited and influenced for decades.

    Yeah, but would lots of other people? That's always been the issue with privacy concerns. I hate tracking, I hate ads, and I hate being spied on. I'm willing to pay an extra $1000 for a TV that doesn't do those things.

    Is the average consumer though? Probably not. They will mostly just buy whatever has the biggest screen at the cheapest price.

    Screen brightness, color reproduction, and contrast are all things that move the needle at the high end, but probably still isn't, even in the market that high end LG TVs compete in.

    Its just something that, bafflingly to me, most people don't care about.

    17 votes

  8. Comment on LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    I use a Google TV streamer. There are probably other, better (cheaper) options for android set top boxes, I've heard the Walmart brand one is actually quite good. To me, android is where its at...

    I use a Google TV streamer. There are probably other, better (cheaper) options for android set top boxes, I've heard the Walmart brand one is actually quite good.

    To me, android is where its at for streaming boxes.

    It strikes the right balance between a good 10 foot user interface and lack of fucking around with it, that a lot of open source HTPC projects don't, and openness allowing me to stream content from wherever I want, including legally grey areas, that solutions like the apple tv and Roku don't.

    My wife is pretty smart and techie, and could figure out an HTPC, with a little pain, but it wouldn't be very pleasant. My parents and friends that come over absolutely could not though, and I don't want to give everyone that comes to my house and uses my TV a 20 minute course on how to fuck around and put a YouTube video on.

    If Google ever truly gets rid of sideloading on android, I'll be once again searching for something acceptable, but for now, Android TV is where its at for me.

    7 votes

  9. Comment on LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    I don't know about you, but I haven't seen an open SSID in years. I've heard this concern before, but realistically, where are people still running unauthenticated wifi networks?

    I don't know about you, but I haven't seen an open SSID in years. I've heard this concern before, but realistically, where are people still running unauthenticated wifi networks?

    10 votes

  10. Comment on Farmers turn to perennial grains as one solution to extreme weather in ~enviro

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    How do you do that though? I guess you could tarrif the hell out of out of season foods, but it doesn't seem like a political strategy that's likely to gain many votes. The practical platform...

    How do you do that though? I guess you could tarrif the hell out of out of season foods, but it doesn't seem like a political strategy that's likely to gain many votes. The practical platform you'd be running on would be something like "vote for me, I'll make bananas more expensive". It doesn't seem like something with a lot of political support behind it.

  11. Comment on Farmers turn to perennial grains as one solution to extreme weather in ~enviro

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Doesn't traditional wheat get completely ripped up during the harvesting process? If these are perennials, and the goal is to presumably not do that, do you need a more specialized kind of combine...

    Doesn't traditional wheat get completely ripped up during the harvesting process? If these are perennials, and the goal is to presumably not do that, do you need a more specialized kind of combine to harvest them so that they aren't destroyed?

  12. Comment on Starting a video game creation club in ~creative

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Second this. There's a very clear difference between doing work with the goal of learning and doing work with the goal of making money. If you're out to make money, you should use whatever tools...

    Second this.
    There's a very clear difference between doing work with the goal of learning and doing work with the goal of making money.

    If you're out to make money, you should use whatever tools are at your disposal to keep costs down, and quality and output high.

    If you're out to learn, you should only use tools that help you achieve that goal.

    They're completely different motivations, and in my opinion, if you're doing projects with the aim of learning, using AI is just completely wasting your time. You might as well just not bother doing anything. Sure, you'll get a finished game quicker if you use AI, but getting a finished game delivered isn't the goal. Learning about game development is.

    To me, it has no place in learning. A lot of that process is just frustratingly banging your head against the wall until something quick. There's no shortcuts to that process. That's the reason why when you ask a teacher a question about something you're stuck on, any half decent teacher isn't going to just straight up give you the answer. They'll ask questions to make you think about certain fundemental things until you're able to come up with the answer yourself. That's learning. Just asking a question and receiving an answer is just... receiving information, which you may or may not actually understand.

    1 vote

  13. Comment on Starting a video game creation club in ~creative

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    I wouldn't necessarily say that. Games are as simple or as complex as you make them. With cursory, basic programming knowledge, you can make a simple text adventure game in Python in 15 minutes....

    I wouldn't necessarily say that. Games are as simple or as complex as you make them.

    With cursory, basic programming knowledge, you can make a simple text adventure game in Python in 15 minutes. You can make a simple puzzle game in a few hours with some basic GUI programming skills.

    You can use a tool like RPG maker to make a basic RPG in a few hours.

    Of course, making a game good enough to make money is another thing entirely, and that shouldn't be the focus of any club at all, because at that point it's not a club, it's a job, and jobs have a tendency to no longer be fun.

  14. Comment on Musk | Official teaser trailer in ~movies

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Sorry, best we can do is "he had his flaws just like anyone, but ultimately, he's a visionary and forever changed the world for the better and will be remembered for millennia"

    Sorry, best we can do is "he had his flaws just like anyone, but ultimately, he's a visionary and forever changed the world for the better and will be remembered for millennia"

    11 votes

  15. Comment on Proposal to ban development of AI superintelligence by US Senator Bernie Sanders and US Representative Greg Casar in ~society

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Honestly, I don't really see that ever becoming a thing at scale, just because it's not a very efficient way to spend tokens or compute power, and it's not really how we've seen technology develop...

    Honestly, I don't really see that ever becoming a thing at scale, just because it's not a very efficient way to spend tokens or compute power, and it's not really how we've seen technology develop in the past. Like, when tractors were invented, they weren't shaped like mules and slotted into a yoke with a person driving them.

    I suspect what work looks like in the future looks similar to the evolution you see today. Instead of having, say, 5 engineers on a team, you have one or two, and those engineers just prompt most of the time. Instead of having 5 layers of management, you flatten it out and have maybe 2, because you don't need as many people to do the same work, so you don't need as many people to manage them.

    Headcounts shrink, but people don't necessarily get 1:1 replaced with an AI agent, and the people running the agents are doing different kinds of work than they once were.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on Proposal to ban development of AI superintelligence by US Senator Bernie Sanders and US Representative Greg Casar in ~society

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    This entirely hinges on your thesis of AI not actually being that useful, and companies being sold a complete lie. That's increasingly becoming harder of a position to defend as the tools get more...

    Governments regulate companies, not the other way around. The governments can 100,000% entail stronger worker protections, if not outright ban mass scale AI if they wished.

    This entirely hinges on your thesis of AI not actually being that useful, and companies being sold a complete lie. That's increasingly becoming harder of a position to defend as the tools get more capable though. I've seen studies similar to what you were referencing, and most of the ones that I've seen have been early in the technologies infancy. Companies have continually gotten better at implementing and are becoming less reckless with their token spend as they've stared dialing things in.
    There's no universe where AI somehow gets less productive.

    So if it's a case that we see even slow growth in AI productivity, no country can unilaterally ban AI outright, because they'll get completely outcompeted on a global market.

    That's the whole issue at stake here. Its a Mexican standoff. Even if a country would like to protect their labor force, they're worried that putting measures in place that are too aggressive will cause that work to go elsewhere, and they'll be left behind. That's why we still haven't seen significant anti AI legislation anywhere, despite us thinking about these problems for the past four years.

    You really need international agreements in place to assuage those fears.

    6 votes

  17. Comment on Proposal to ban development of AI superintelligence by US Senator Bernie Sanders and US Representative Greg Casar in ~society

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    We're already there. I know the common take on recent mass layoffs is that AI is just an excuse to do them, and that companies would have done them anyway. Some of that is certainly true, but AI...

    I have recently gotten a feeling that in 12 months we’ll have AI services that can replace many people working office jobs.

    We're already there. I know the common take on recent mass layoffs is that AI is just an excuse to do them, and that companies would have done them anyway. Some of that is certainly true, but AI tools have also greatly increased productivity in certain areas, reducing the need for labor. This is most obvious in the tech sector, but it's also very prevalent in basically any industry that requires dealing with large volumes of language, whether that language is formal, like programming, or natural, like copywriting, paralegal work, marketing, and sales.

    Its accelerating, but LLMs have been public, and useful for four years now. The economy's transformation has been well underway for a while, and the average worker is not coming out ahead.

    That said, theres no legislation that a single country could pass to curtail that transformation. The cat is out of the bag. The only way to control it is multilateral treaties that the major industrial powers are signatories to, along with inspections, penalties, and so on. Similar to nuclear non-proliferation. The only thing that any one country can do alone is enact polices that dampen the negative impacts of the transformation on the average citizen. They can't meaningfully stop or delay the transformation alone.

    3 votes

  18. Comment on What are your current pain points with Linux? in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Do you do freelance work, or some other arrangement that allows you to use your personal computer for work?

    Do you do freelance work, or some other arrangement that allows you to use your personal computer for work?

    1 vote

  19. Comment on What's your line? in ~life

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    I briefly owned an MSP, and I'm pretty convinced that the successful ones who have stuck around for a long time are almost universally shady. Its such a low margin business, and especially...

    I briefly owned an MSP, and I'm pretty convinced that the successful ones who have stuck around for a long time are almost universally shady.

    Its such a low margin business, and especially starting out in the SMB space, no one wants to pay for anything.

    I would have clients come to me with problems, pitch them projects to solve them, and then have them say "too expensive. Do it for 1/4th that".

    If I was in a position to tell them to fuck off, I would have, but I was growing a business, so I frequently told them that I could do a really substandard job that would likely fail for that price. They always assumed I was just making things up to make a bigger sale, so they always went with whatever the cheapest possible option was.

    The solution would inevitably fail, then we'd have to burn billable hours to fix it, which the client would eventually say they werent going to pay for, since "we were the ones that messed it up".

    It was a neverending losing battle. It sucks because the entire business model from the start was for us to use heavy use as infrastructure as code and automation to reduce the amount of man hours it took to do support, and invest that time into continually improving our platform and automation. Clients were supposed to pay one yearly contract cost, and everything IT related was covered. No licenses, no hardware capex, no billable hours, no salaries, and so on.

    From the very start we ran into issues because every single customer wanted to nickle and dime every single service, and if we were truly billing them the cost of customizing each service, they would have ended up spending more money in the long run. We didn't do that though, because customers would just not pay, threaten to leave, threaten legal action and so on.

    It was such a miserable time, I sold my share in the company a year in. It really soured me on a lot of small business owners.

    These were profitable companies who's owners were quite wealthy, and they weren't willing to invest in the main tool that let their companies be profitable. Their employees were miserable because of things constantly breaking, their customers were frustrated, but they didn't really care.

    The only way I could see consistently making money with that kind of customer base is to rip them off, which I was never willing to do, so my choice was pretty clear.

    8 votes

  20. Comment on 1Password wades into a right-wing mess after funding a Linux project in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    You can drop a keepass file in OneDrive or GDrive and use it pretty easily. The user experience frankly sucks compared to online password managers, and I think most people who advocate for it and...

    You can drop a keepass file in OneDrive or GDrive and use it pretty easily.

    The user experience frankly sucks compared to online password managers, and I think most people who advocate for it and deny that are being disingenuous, but it's not that bad, and pretty easy to set up, it's not like you need a docker environment or anything.

    7 votes