Neat!

I have already looked in XMPP, but it required SSL certs and I did not have the mood to configure them.

There are definitely XMPP clients that do end-to-end encryption that do not rely on TLS for key exchange, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_the_record_messaging

Off-the-record Messaging (OTR) is a cryptographic protocol that provides encryption for instant messaging conversations. OTR uses a combination of AES symmetric-key algorithm with 128 bits key length, the Diffie–Hellman key exchange with 1536 bits group size, and the SHA-1 hash function. In addition to authentication and encryption, OTR provides forward secrecy and malleable encryption.

The primary motivation behind the protocol was providing deniable authentication for the conversation participants while keeping conversations confidential, like a private conversation in real life, or off the record in journalism sourcing. This is in contrast with cryptography tools that produce output which can be later used as a verifiable record of the communication event and the identities of the participants. The initial introductory paper was named “Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGP”.[1]

I’ve used Pidgin with the libOTR plugin that implements that protocol.

A YouTube representative confirmed that the practice will now become commonplace “as we’ve seen…strong viewer response.”

I have often lamented about those boring times when I have to suffer through a plain old paused screen, with nary an ad to be found.

Well, all your alternative major browser engines are from Google’s Chrome. If your concern is degree of tight association with Google, you probably don’t have preferable realistic alternatives.

I’d also add that I’m not particularly worried about Firefox. Maybe one day, but as things stand, I’m fine with 'em.

Endoscope profile pics are the future.

The ~/.ssh/known_hosts file only contains public keys. I mean, maybe someone doesn’t want to hand out the list of hosts that they talk to, but exposing it doesn’t expose the private keys, which are what you really need to keep secret.

Those are in ~/.ssh/id_rsa or the like, depending upon key type.

I have not used it, but labwc is apparently an openbox-alike compositor for Wayland.

Firstly, we believe that there is a need for a simple Wayland window-stacking compositor which strikes a balance between minimalism and bloat approximately at the level where Window Managers like Openbox reside in the X11 domain. Most of the core developers are accustomed to low resource Desktop Environments such as Mate/XFCE or standalone Window Managers such as Openbox under X11. Labwc aims to make a similar setup possible under Wayland, with small and independent components rather than a large, integrated software eco-system.

looks dubious

The problem here is that if this is unreliable – and I’m skeptical that Google can produce a system that will work across-the-board – then you have a synthesized image that now has Google attesting to be non-synthetic.

Maybe they can make it clear that this is a best-effort system, and that they only will flag some of them.

There are a limited number of ways that I’m aware of to detect whether an image is edited.

• If the image has been previously compressed via lossy compression, there are ways to modify the image to make the difference in artifacts in different points of the image more visible, or – I’m sure – statistically look for such artifacts.

• If an image has been previously indexed by something like Google Images and Google has an index sufficient to permit Google to do fuzzy search for portions of the image, then they can identify an edited image because they can find the original.

• It’s possible to try to identify light sources based on shading and specular in an image, and try to find points of the image that don’t match. There are complexities to this; for example, a surface might simply be shaded in such a way that it looks like light is shining on it, like if you have a realistic poster on a wall. For generation rather than photomanipulation, better generative AI systems will also probably tend to make this go away as they improve; it’s a flaw in the image.

But none of these is a surefire mechanism.

For AI-generated images, my guess is that there are some other routes.

• Some images are going to have metadata attached. That’s trivial to strip, so not very good if someone is actually trying to fool people.

• Maybe some generative AIs will try doing digital watermarks. I’m not very bullish on this approach. It’s a little harder to remove, but invariably, any kind of lossy compression is at odds with watermarks that aren’t very visible. As lossy compression gets better, it either automatically tends to strip watermarks – because lossy compression tries to remove data that doesn’t noticeably alter an image, and watermarks rely on hiding data there – or watermarks have to visibly alter the image. And that’s before people actively developing tools to strip them. And you’re never gonna get all the generative AIs out there adding digital watermarks.

• I don’t know what the right terminology is, but my guess is that latent diffusion models try to approach a minimum error for some model during the iteration process. If you have a copy of the model used to generate the image, you can probably measure the error from what the model would predict – basically, how much one iteration would change an image or part of it. I’d guess that that only works well if you have a copy of the model in question or a model similar to it.

I don’t think that any of those are likely surefire mechanisms either.

On the subject of the repeated murder attempts against him, he added: “There’s something going on. I mean, perhaps it’s God wanting me to be President to save this country.”

On one hand, the Almighty appears to have thrown several assassins at Trump but had them fail. One might take that as an expression of divine endorsement for Trump’s leadership. But, then, on the other hand, He hasn’t sent any against Harris.

Definitely a tough theological knot, that one.

For example, Google Chrome has stopped the use of auto-play video.

Even setting aside ads, that was virtually always something that I did not want.

If websites like CNN want someone to watch video, put the video up with autoplay off. If someone wants to watch it, they can start it playing.

That doesn’t sound like it’s an incredibly difficult problem to solve from a technical standpoint, if the creator is the one being hit. Just need either a software package – or, if the limitation here is content creator bandwidth, service – that pushes a video to multiple streaming video providers.

Might be an issue for third-parties creating mirrors of YouTube content, though.

List of URLs submitted to Reddit on this domain:

https://old.reddit.com/domain/reclaimthenet.org/

As best I can tell, it seems to be mostly material related to conspiracy or political promotion of Donald Trump.

I’m also not incredibly sanguine about some of the Reddit users regularly submitting material from the domain. For example, /u/ExtHD is submitting material from this domain and from alethonews.com, like “Georgia to apologize for starting 2008 war | The country will find the strength to apologize to the Ossetians for the “bloody conflict” and strive to restore trust and unity between the two brotherly nations”. That looks kinda like Russian information campaign stuff to me.

The first Wayback Machine snapshot of the top-level webpage on this domain shows it promoting Laura Loomer’s stuff (the woman who was recently in the news as being responsible for the “pet-eating Haitians” thing).

https://web.archive.org/web/20190320223919/https://reclaimthenet.org/

For me, video is rarely the form that I want to consume any content in. It’s also very obnoxious if I’m on a slow data link (e.g. on a slower or saturated cell phone link).

However, sometimes it’s the only form that something is available in. For major news items, you can usually get a text-form article, but that isn’t all content. I submitted a link to a YouTube video of a Michael Kofman interview the other day talking about military aid to a Ukraine community. I also typed up a transcript, but it was something like an hour and a half, and I don’t know if that’s a reasonable bar to expect people to meet.

I think that some of this isn’t that people actually want video, but that YouTube has an easy way to monetize video for content creators. I don’t think that there’s actually a good equivalent for independent creators of text, sadly-enough.

And there are a few times that I do want video.

And there may be some other people that prefer video.

Video doesn’t actually hurt me much at this point, but it would kind of be nice to have a way to filter it out for people who don’t want it. Moving all video to another community seems like overkill, though. Think it might be better to have some mechanism added to Threadiverse clients to permit content filtering rules; I think that probably a better way to meet everyone’s wants. It’d also be nice if there were some way to clearly indicate that a link is video content, so that I can tell prior to clicking on it.

One thing that I found out was that as “most-Minecraft-like” games for Minetest, there’s apparently Voxelibre (renamed Mine Clone 2) and Mineclonia (fork of Mine Clone 2). Just out of curiosity, if you looked at both, what made Voxelibre particularly appealing relative to Mineclonia?

I’ve played Minetest, even contributed some code IIRC, but that was some time back, haven’t ever played the derived games. Kind of thinking about maybe giving it a go now that there’s apparently more there.

I’m not the person you were talking to, but I agree that I don’t think that they have trouble distinguishing between nuclear and non-nuclear waste.

deleted by creator

You can still get a few phones with built-in headphones jacks. They tend to be lower-end and small.

I was just looking at phones with very long battery life yesterday, and I noticed that the phone currently at the top of the list I was looking at, a high-end, large, gaming phone, also had a headphones jack. The article also commented on how unusual that was.

Think it was an Asus ROG something-or-other.

kagis

https://rog.asus.com/us/phones/rog-phone-8-pro/

An Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro.

That’s new and current. Midrange-and-up phones with audio jacks aren’t common, but they are out there.

Honestly, I’d just get a USB C audio interface with pass-through PD so that you can still charge with it plugged in and just leave that plugged into your headphones if you want to use 1/8th inch headphones. It’s slightly more to carry around, but not that much more.

Plus, the last smartphone I had with a built-in audio DAC would spill noise into the headphones output when charging. Very annoying. Needed better power circuitry. I don’t know if any given USB C audio interface avoids the issue, but if it’s built into the phone, there’s a limited amount you can do about it. If it’s external, you can swap it, and there’s the hope that their less-limited space constraints meant that they put in better power supply circuitry.

Nuclear waste doesn’t really pose problems substantially different from other forms of waste. There’s lots of waste that isn’t good for you if you come into contact with it, and stuff that’ll remain in that state for a lot longer than anything radioactive enough to be a concern is.

voxelibre

I was going to ask “how does that compare to Minetest?” But after a bit of investigation, apparently it is a renamed Mine Clone 2, which is a game for Minetest.

Words per minute meaning literally words or characters?

Words. Well, IIRC in tests it’s something like an abstract word of fixed length, something like 5 characters or something, as that’s the average word length in English. Like, it doesn’t mean you’re typing “antidisestablishmentarianism” over and over, one word each time.

kagis

Yeah:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute

Since words vary in length, for the purpose of measurement of text entry the definition of each “word” is often standardized to be five characters or keystrokes long in English,[1] including spaces and punctuation. For example, under such a method applied to plain English text the phrase “I run” counts as one word, but “rhinoceros” and “let’s talk” would both count as two.

Karat et al. found in one study of average computer users in 1999 that the average rate for transcription was 32.5 words per minute, and 19.0 words per minute for composition.[2] In the same study, when the group was divided into “fast”, “moderate”, and “slow” groups, the average speeds were 40 wpm, 35 wpm, and 23 wpm, respectively.

With the onset of the era of desktop computers and smartphones, fast typing skills became much more widespread. As of 2019, the average typing speed on a mobile phone was 36.2 wpm with 2.3% uncorrected errors—there were significant correlations with age, level of English proficiency, and number of fingers used to type.[3] Some typists have sustained speeds over 200 wpm for a 15-second typing test with simple English words.[4]

Typically, professional typists type at speeds of 43 to 80 wpm, while some positions can require 80 to 95 (usually the minimum required for dispatch positions and other time-sensitive typing jobs), and some advanced typists work at speeds above 120 wpm.[5] Two-finger typists, sometimes also referred to as “hunt and peck” typists, commonly reach sustained speeds of about 37 wpm for memorized text and 27 wpm when copying text, but in bursts may be able to reach much higher speeds.[6] From the 1920s through the 1970s, typing speed (along with shorthand speed) was an important secretarial qualification, and typing contests were popular and often publicized by typewriter companies as promotional tools.

Stenotype

Stenotype keyboards enable the trained user to input text as fast as 360 wpm at very high accuracy for an extended period, which is sufficient for real-time activities such as court reporting or closed captioning. While training dropout rates are very high — in some cases only 10% or even fewer graduate — stenotype students are usually able to reach speeds of 100–120 wpm within six months, which is faster than most alphanumeric typists. Guinness World Records gives 360 wpm with 97.23% accuracy as the highest achieved speed using a stenotype.[7]

So it’s not a typo or whatever, if that’s what you mean.

Because 3 - 4 words per second seems a bit much to me and whoever talks that fast?

It’s pretty fast, but then you’re talking about a professional text-entry person using the fastest plain-text entry mechanism we know about in a speed test. I’m sure that that’s not something demanded of a stenotypist in a normal real-time transcription session.

My guess is that you probably could still make practical use of it if you didn’t need real-time transcription by doing a recording and then playing back with software that can do time stretching to accelerate the rate of playback; you could transcribe more-quickly.

'course, automated transcription’s getting better too, and that might also be an answer on that front.