makeasnek

makeasnek, 2 days ago

There are many open source wiki softwares: zim, dokuwiki, etc.

makeasnek, 3 days ago

Banning porn nationwide is part of Project 2025’s plan. defeatproject2025.org

makeasnek, 2 days ago

In the ground, very deep, forever, for not nearly as much money as you might think. It takes up very, very little space. It’s not green liquid, it’s pieces of glass.

makeasnek, 2 days ago

I’d love to see more nuclear power generation. Nuclear power is the densest form of power on earth, it’s safer than even renewables and doesn’t have the huge e-waste or energy storage problems that come with it. It’s very, very safe even compared to windmills depending on where you draw the box. I have never met anybody who actually understands nuclear power safety or waste disposal who is against it. At best, they say “renewables are currently cheaper so let’s focus there” but they’re not like “Nuclear is bad”.

makeasnek, 3 days ago

Is there a system that can get information to someone, maintaining anonymity for the sender the whole way through? Like having an open drop box where you’d be able to put whatever documents you want into it.

Yes many journalistic organizations have secure drop-boxes for this purpose. You have to either trust that their drop-box doesn’t record your IP address/other info OR use an anonymity system like Tor or I2P to make sure whatever they record doesn’t reveal your identity.

makeasnek, 4 days ago

How to contact your MEP. We beat this bill last time, we can beat it again www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

makeasnek, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Actually, tipping on social media posts are an excellent use for Bitcoin. I regularly tip on nostr, it works well, I wish lemmy had it too. Good luck enabling transactions that complete in under a second, globally, for less than a penny in fees, with any other system. And without requiring you to hire an absolute team of lawyers to setup accounts and manage liquidity and make deals with foreign banks to backstop that liquidity. Oh and don’t forget about counterparty risks, chargebacks, currency conversion, and long settlement times! Bitcoin solves that all magically for basically free.

makeasnek, 3 days ago

As somebody who:

• Uses nostr (and prefers it)
• Uses AP via Lemmy & Mastodon (and likes it)
• Knows what AP and Nostr are and how they work and the pros/cons of the two network designs are

I also found this site confusing AF. It sounds cool and interesting, probably? I can’t tell lol. Is it a network bridge operating at the level of a relay? Is it an app you can use to connect and post/read to/from both networks at once? What the hell is it?

makeasnek, 3 days ago

It’s done off-chain because on-chain would be expensive and slow. On-chain takes 10 min and $1.50-$15 in fees depending on the day. Lightning takes < 1 second for < 1 penny in fees.

Lightning transactions are secured by the base chain, so you’re not at risk of losing any funds. The transaction data is “off-chain” because there’s no reason for it to be “on-chain”.

makeasnek, 3 days ago

Nostr is an open protocol. Plenty of questionable people have contributed to Linux, I still use the OS. Tor was made by an alleged rapist. I still use Tor. Open protocols are sometimes used or made by nasty people. Lemmy and email are “censorship proof”, they are both good protocols. Lemmy used to be 100% annoying tankies, but as it grew so did the diversity of the userbase. Nostr is going through the same thing.

You choose who you follow, so you choose who ends up in your feed. For the “public square” areas (trending tweets etc), relays set their own moderation policies just like lemmy, that feature is identical. Find a relay that suits your moderation preferences. Most nostr apps can automatically filter out anything related to crypto/nsfw/politics/other less popular topics and prompt you to do so. If something slips through you can easily click ban and move on.

Tips are a cool functionality. On one social network, content creators don’t have an opportunity to get paid for the content they post. On the other they do. Which one do you think will attract the most content creators? My bet is on the second. I like being able to send tips to people who write good posts. But it’s an optional feature, you don’t have to use it.

makeasnek, 5 days ago

These laws are being passed by politicians who generally don’t understand technology. What they will achieve is a reduction in privacy and liberty for every citizen in the EU and easier methods to clamp down on dissent. Just because it’s not technically perfect or difficult to implement fully doesn’t mean it’s not a threat. It’s one step closer totalitarianism, and what’s stopping totalitarianism is everyday people, one step at a time, battling it back.

makeasnek, 5 days ago

Good point about the article date, but it is coming up for a vote this week patrick-breyer.de/…/council-to-greenlight-chat-co…

makeasnek, 5 days ago

🫡🫡🫡🫡🫡

makeasnek, 4 days ago

And it also shows that states can pay for things without the need to collect taxes for this, for example we saw this during COVID, when sizeable amounts of money were created to give an impulse to the economy and to the people who temporarily lost their income sources

And surely printing money doesn’t cause inflation right. Value isn’t free. If you have the same demand for a currency and increase it’s supply by 10%, it’s going to cost 10% more of that currency to buy any given item.

makeasnek, 5 days ago

Can I follow you on nostr?

makeasnek, 5 days ago

Nostr is an open protocol. Plenty of questionable people have contributed to Linux, I still use the OS. Open protocols are sometimes used by nasty people.

makeasnek, 8 days ago

Yes, most projects implement validation of some sort as even well-intentioned BOINC users will occasionally submit invalid workunits due to computation errors, random memory bits flipping, etc. Validation schemes range from simple to complex but suffice to say yes they nearly universally have some sort of validation mechanism. People have attempted to cheat BOINC before simply in pursuit of a “high score” compared to other users, so the BOINC ecosystem is well acquainted with proper defenses for such behavior. There are even cross-project competitions people can participate in, people join teams etc, so the competition can be quite fierce.

makeasnek, 7 days ago

There’s been some talks of making a BOINC WASM client, I’d love to see it happen

makeasnek, 7 days ago

Thanks for the link!

makeasnek, 7 days ago

Depends on the BOINC project

makeasnek, 7 days ago

I won’t mention here as I don’t want this post to come across as promoting cryptocurrency, but this script was originally written to protect a faucet for a cryptocurrency that does exactly this (and has been since 2012). This cryptocurrency records user contribution to various computational projects (BOINC, Folding at home, etc) and can also be used for torrent seeding or other forms of contribution. So it could be used in this manner to verify a user has contributed X amount of computation over Y time periods.

The faucet handed out coins but the problem is that users want all the free coins right? But we only want to give a few free coins to each user. So we make them do the “work” and make sure the cost of work is > value of coins, so they have no motivation to hit the faucet multiple times. This is the original purpose of the script.

makeasnek, 7 days ago

Yes I no longer host the site this code was designed for but the code still works and can be repurposed for anybody who wants to use it

makeasnek, 7 days ago

This is well beyond my sysadmin capabilities unfortunately. This is more a proof-of-concept and would need some tweaking to be run at that kind of scale.

makeasnek, 8 days ago

The hero we need

makeasnek, 9 days ago

Almost ready for it’s prime time I think. We just need a bit more on the UI/mobile app friendliness to make it shine for all.

Yep, been using it for a few months now and it’s getting really good. Not quite as polished as mastodon (as least in the app I’m using), but still very fully featured.

makeasnek, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

Lemmy is “uncensorable” and offers identical moderation abilities in the “public square” aspect. E-mail is “uncensorable”. Uncensorable does not equal unmoderated. It means if you want to publish something, nobody, not the even the government, can stop you (though they can throw you in prison but that’s outside the discussion of protocol). It doesn’t mean anybody has to choose to listen to what you publish. It does not mean relays have to include you in their list of public tweets. Relays can pick what tweets/etc they show. They can choose what goes through their relay. What they can’t do is stop you and another user from using the protocol to DM each other. As long as one relay allows your traffic through, the traffic will flow. They also can’t stop you from tweeting, they can just choose not to show your tweets. If I want to follow somebody, frankly, it should be no business of a relay operator or the government or anybody to prevent me from following them, just like it should not be the business of the government to decide what books I am legally allowed to read. By building networks which are “uncensorable” we can guarantee that it remains not their business for future generations. So that they can live as free, or freer, than we do.

The internet, as a structure, is “uncensorable”. This is good. Power should be decentralized. The whim of a government shouldn’t dictate how the entirety of the internet operates, and it can’t. People in power love censorship, it is to their advantage that we are not able to organize among each other using common communication platforms.

makeasnek, 9 days ago

DMs aren’t as relevant in Lemmy so I get why securing them isn’t a priority, but in Mastodon or any twitter clone it seems like a relevant feature I’d like to have some security/privacy with. Instance admins, and anybody who breaks into their server, being able to see all DMs seems like a security flaw that should be engineered away. Even Facebook, the place with the worst privacy, has E2E encryption (or so they claim, who really knows)

makeasnek, 9 days ago

Finding good people to follow has been a challenge for me both on mastodon and nostr. But I find just posting and seeing who likes my posts and then following them has got me a decent feed curated at this point. And searching hashtags for topics I’m interested in.

There are some bridges so you can follow mastodon users on nostr and vice versa, but it’s not quite the same. We’re still pretty early adopters on both platforms at this point.

makeasnek, 9 days ago

It definitely started as mostly crypto bros, kinda like how lemmy was 100% tankies, but it’s gotten better. Lots more human rights activists and scientists and even just regular people on there now. A lot of human rights/privacy activists/orgs are joining up to it after nostr got some promotion at their conferences. Ultimately your feed will be who you follow so luckily you’re in control of that. The default settings for most nostr apps even include a filter to remove anything crypto, NSFW, and other controversial topics related.

Still very early days for all these platforms.

makeasnek, 9 days ago

Why do we even need relays in the first place?

To store message content. To hold message content if you send a message to an offline contact and vice versa. To handle getting things across networks (clearnet to Tor and back if you only are connected to one). To work around NAT etc. To moderate “public square” type features (ie trending posts). Many reasons.

What if one relay is on clearnet and the other one is on Tor?

No problem, relays can communicate cross-network. They relay things between each other so traffic will find a way through as long as one node speaks to both networks.

What if relays I use are not rechable by my contact, that lives in censored country like China and can only connect to relays in there?

As long as there is a relay path between you and your contact, there is no issue. Relays can be run through Tor and other anonymity networks which are very difficult to distinguish from other forms of encrypted traffic.

Why do we even need relays in the first place?

makeasnek, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

Okey, so relays can pass message to other relay? Didn’t know that, so thanks.

Relays currently don’t talk to each other. But users are typically connected to multiple relays and publish simultaneously to multiple relays. Likewise, a user pulls in data (tweets etc) from multiple relays. My client is connected to ten. So to give you a more accurate answer to your question, to DM another user, you and that other user need to share a relay. If you are crossing networks (such as clearnet->tor), this means one of those relays needs to talk to both networks. If you want to follow a particular person but aren’t normally connected to a relay they are on, your client can connect to a relay just to get content from that particular person. All of this is handled automatically, of course.

But then, why not use network like Yggdrasil? Which would be basically like Nostr, but can relay any TCP/IP packet for any app, instead of just Nostr notes.

Taking a cursory look at this, it sounds more like a general routing protocol not something that is specifically designed to relay message content or other formatted data (ie you build your apps on top of it, it’s just a protocol for packet delivery). Nostr could conceivably run on any base routing protocol like Tor, I2P, or Yggdrasil though I don’t know of any specific implementations either way. As long as the relay has a way to resolve addresses and send data to them over TCP it should be fine. Hadn’t heard of Yggdrasil yet thanks for letting me know about that I’ll do some more reading later.

makeasnek, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

Still some of those, as with any social media platform. I have come across a few objectionable things, I just blocked and moved on. But you pick who you follow so you pick who shows up in your feeds. Each relay has their own moderation policies, so (like Lemmy), you can pick relays which suit your moderation preferences (which effect the “trending notes”/public square section). Most nostr apps by default upon install will ask you if you want to automatically filter out crypto/nsfw/foul language/etc. I picked at random and didn’t enable many of the filters.

makeasnek, 9 days ago

Interesting project, cool to see that you are passionate about this. Nostr does much of this and can do it entirely in-browser without having to trust any particular relay like AP/Lemmy/Mastodon does. It has encrypted DMs. Might want to check out the protocol.

makeasnek, 9 days ago

No, but if a linux distro implemented a local-only version of this, I would be interested in using it.

makeasnek, 9 days ago

My memory isn’t perfect, it would be nice to have a second set of eyes, and I could describe things to it aside from knowing the exact words. “What was that website I visited within the last six months where I played an online game that was like snake but different?” or “What was that cryptocurrency i was researching which was touting it had perfect forward secrecy?” “Who was I emailing about the football game” etc.

makeasnek, 10 days ago

Here’s a list if you want to find your rep www.cnn.com/2024/03/13/politics/…/index.html

makeasnek, 11 days ago

Disagree with this one, voters should have the final say in who is electable. If there’s an 85 year old out there who can convince 51% of the electorate to vote for them in the primaries, go for it. This rule will become a problem if life expectancy continues to increase at the rate it has the past 50 years, with AI and some major changes in genetics, we are poised to solve a lot of causes of death in our lifetime, which means longer life expectancy.

makeasnek, 11 days ago

Or because they’re just genuinely well received by the public. One of my reps has been in public service for decades and I actually like most of his positions. The longer you are in office, in theory, the better you will understand the legislative system and be able to push issues your constituents want. If you do, you keep getting re-elected, if you don’t, you don’t.

Regardless, this is a problem of FPTP and the primary system not age. Primaries select for who is considered the “most electable” not the candidate “most want”. Fix that system, and age is not an issue. Or if more people who don’t like 80 year olds participated in the primaries this would also be less of an issue. But they don’t, they just complain about the “lesser of two evils” choice even though they had a “lesser of 10 evils choice” and chose not to participate in it.

makeasnek, 10 days ago

Lindows

makeasnek, 10 days ago

The distro used by the one laptop per child project. Fascinating GUI

makeasnek, 10 days ago

Idk about nostalgic but north korea makes their own linux distro, that’s gotta rank high on the interesting list

makeasnek, 12 days ago

Link without paywall: archive.is/TvS0F

makeasnek, 12 days ago

There is an apt variant that can do this, but nobody uses it. BitTorrent isn’t great for lots of small files overhead wise.

IPFS is better for this than torrents. The question is always “how much should the client seed before they stop seeding and how longs should they attempt to seed before they give up”. I agree something like this should exist, I have no problem quickly re-donating any bandwidth I use.

makeasnek, 11 days ago (edited 11 days ago)

Wait till you find out about some of the nazis etc who have contributed to the linux kernel. One guy even murdered his wife! And Linus himself is… well let’s just say some of his behavior is “problematic”. Oh and Richard Stallman my lord. Lemmy/AP has some interesting people as well. Nostr is an open protocol worked on by dozens of people. I would also question the motives of a “journalist” who makes it their business to dox anonymous developers, especially people developing software that could get them imprisoned in certain countries.