Interesting, I didn’t realize still gif was lossless, I was thinking in comparison to lossy formats like jpg.

it explains it using other formulas. It’s like if the teacher taught you trigonometry using algebra. They expect you to either already know algebra, or to learn it from somewhere else. You could say that the teacher is just restating trigonometric questions in algebraic format, and that might be a fair way to interpret it, but that also might be enough for people who already know algebra

I initially viewed this as xenophobic, and was like “the comic author can’t be this stupid right?”

But actually maybe the message isn’t the typical “perceived good thing with hidden negative downside” that their comics typically have. Maybe this comic is just saying not to judge a restaurant’s staff by whatever ethnic food they make.

Even if you have a password for your ssh key, malware on your system can just wait until you enter the password.

My point is that SSH access is very powerful, and effectively means that the security of the SSH server is reduced to the security of the SSH client. If your SSH client is pwned, so is your server. If you have 10 devices each with ssh access to each other, then if any one device is pwned, all devices are pwned as well.

This is not the case for systems designed for file sharing only. For example with syncthing, if one device gets pwned, all it can do is send files to the other devices.

I don’t think in this case the logic is circular, it just explains how the light cone shows that FTL breaks causality, and assumes that you’ll learn the math behind the light cone somewhere else. Maybe the author assumes the light cone can be better learned from other sources

Authoritarianism is the more efficient governing model.

The hard part is picking the right authority. That’s what the other models factor in. But yeah authoritarianism can be more efficient if we pick the perfect authority

Some people have done such horrible things beyond a shadow of a doubt that even death is too much of a mercy. They should be kept alive and tortured mentally and physically every day until they die of natural disease processes.

but…why? What good does this serve? It just wastes time and resources on the torture

still gifs have good compression? I recall that motion gifs are notorious for large file sizes, but are still gifs the opposite?

Most people probably don’t care but it can be a security risk, allowing malware to move “laterally” between all your devices. For my main devices I don’t give them SSH access to each other, but I do give them SSH access to my secondary devices (like a Pi-Hole)

I think you should at least donate if you can. It’s not about whether you are forced to use it, but whether you appreciated the service (which you probably did if you used it over all the other services available). If the service goes away due to lack of funding, you’re still forced to use email, but you’ll just be forced to use a worse email service.

definitely an intentional meme template, and a pretty good one too

I would argue that your examples are about manipulation of people, not of the currency. Similar to the craziness of the GME (Gamestop) era, where it felt like everybody and their dog started buying GME stock. Or, say, a news outlet causing panic and a bank run. Though you’re right that since crypto still doesn’t have broad adoption, it’s easier to manipulate the smaller userbase.

Manipulation of the currency would be more like the government printing more money. This is not possible in crypto, where power is decentralized.

The instability is definitely unfortunate though. It’s a chicken and egg problem. If crypto had wider adoption, and was accepted in many stores, then it would become more stable. Just look at how much more stable the big crypto coins (bitcoin, eth) are compared to smaller altcoins. However, due to low adoption it’s still quite unstable, and that instability hurts adoption 🙃

I believe they are talking about this: https://dev.to/cypheroxide/why-i-left-hyprland-52fd

I think you may have also been thinking about labyrinths, which only have a single path

Nope, I considered this as well.

GNU Taler is built on top of existing payment systems. It’s just a token you exchange money for, like those arcades you go to where you exchange money for arcade tokens. So it’s only as decentralized as the system it’s built on top of.

It does provide some privacy, but only for buyers, so this doesn’t prevent censorship. If the banks want to ban porn sites from accepting money, or block Steam from accepting transactions for porn games, they can. Censoring sales is the same as censoring purchases.

On top of that, if GNU Taler is built on top of centralized banking like it’s currently pushing for, then it inherits the same problems. The government can say “Poor people can’t be trusted, so we won’t let poor people get tokens, they’ll just have to use trackable methods like Paypal.” Or they can have a social credit system and say “Only people with 5000 credit or above can use Taler.”

And the government and banks still control the value and supply of the currency. They can print money however they want.

GNU Taler also doesn’t try to solve the distributed consensus problem. Afaik, it offloads the problem to the implementation. I have no idea how current implementations deal with multiple servers disagreeing on the ledger of transactions (say, due to network issues or server crashes), but it sounds like it trusts that servers will cooperate, and uses government audits to verify compliance. Again, centralized, and vulnerable to corruption, coercion, and collusion. GNU Taler could technically be built on top of bitcoin and blockchain, it even says so in the official FAQ, but that’s not their current vision

Imagine walking clockwise around an city block. You keep turning right, but just circle the block, never leaving it. Same concept.

What problems? And crypto gets associated with crime because the currency is harder to control, which is precisely the point. Governments love being able to control their payments systems, just like they love to define what a “crime” is.

Nobody expects things to never break, but stability is a spectrum and clearly hyprland is less stable than the average. That’s the main conclusion I got from the post at least. And less stability means more time needed to fix. Nothing you can do about that aside from switching to a different DE

manipulated by whales? are you talking about 51% attacks? censorship? Can you link some concrete examples of major crypto coins getting manipulated? I think there was a potential 51% attack on Monero but IIRC nothing actually happened.

I only put “if it’s big” to help readers imagine a large pile and how it would become more inconvenient the larger the pile. Language is not as precise as math or programming. If you’d like you can imagine the sentence as saying something like “imagine a big pile. It’s definitely not O(1)”

That is an incredibly detailed reply. Thanks.

Not in the case at hand. But yes, I do believe offline ppl are entitled to the same benefits w.r.t. public services. E.g. our human right to healthcare and education is not preconditioned on being online. It’s inalienable.

The problem with offline is that it’s more expensive, and often less convenient. I don’t see a fundamental reason why offline communication must be available. Let’s assume that your country added a fundamental rule (for example for the USA this would be a constitutional amendment) saying that all goverment services should collect the minimum amount of data necessary to function. So they would have to support things like Tor, to avoid collecting IP addresses, etc. Would this be enough for you to waive the offline requirement? Because the world is always marching towards more efficient communication, and an offline requirement could hold society back for little benefit.

Another factor, for example, would be that if I boycott Microsoft and the gov uses MS for email, I effectively lose my boycott privileges if email is the only means of communicating that the gov accepts.

I fear this is unavoidable. If you depend on certain services (like interacting with the government), then you simply can’t fully boycott that service or any dependency of that service. For example, if the government only accepted post mail, you would not be able to fully boycott the postal service. But I feel like your idea of boycotts is also too extreme. If you want to boycott Microsoft, and all local grocery stores used Azure somewhere in their infrastructure, would you stop buying groceries? I see boycotting as simply doing your best to avoid a company’s products.

An analog mechanism is always needed as an escape from the tyranny of poor design. Without an analog mechanism there is little incentive to implement a good design.

Analog systems need to be designed too. And they can be just as tyrannical, inconvenient, and invasive.

The problem is not lack of possibilities. It’s lack of competency.

Lack of competency is often simply lack of incentive. What incentive does the government have, for providing privacy-friendly services? Of course, they have incentive for the opposite. Tracking users gives them power, and makes their job easier.

Likewise, if they have incentive to track people, why would they provide an offline option, which is both more expensive and bypasses their tracking measures.

Based on your entire reply, it sounds like what you mainly want is privacy. It’s an important distinction, because I reckon that it will be easier to ask the government to enshrine privacy as a fundamental right, rather than offline access as a right, since offline access is much more expensive to provide.