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Cake day: December 27th, 2023

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  • that could come in veery handy once microsoft wants to pull some plugs. i guess we can be grateful for the backup that is 1. not 100% in m$ hands any more then and 2nd cannot be as easy destroyed as some backups at archive.org. i actually hoped for someone with enough money to create this type of security after m$ assimilated github and thought like “does nobody see the rising danger there?” but even if china’s great fork might be more reliable than m$ over time, maybe it’s better to have your own backups of all the things you actually may need in future.

    btw did microsoft manage to get rid of the hackers that settled into their network for … how long??

    i guess they’ll tell


  • its amazing how good services can be if some just skip the corporation-obligatory adding of enshittification. i remember an article about a downloadable (but not very legal) DVD with an installer for a (worthless but very popular) OS that included heaps of expensive industry software and the installer was point-klick what you want and then all is done in background and fully usable once done. reading that article it seemed to be a better installer than ever produced by any company for any product.

    however as that payed streaming service seemingly leaves huge amount of bank records and ran for such a long time, i guess it would have been easy to stop their customers from paying them. it rather might seem that the real intentions of content corporations might not truely be what they officially claim. maybe we learn in 25 years that the content corporations really were behind such services, maybe like “better get money from ALL markets!” or such.



  • 🤔 maybe there is a lack of distributed fediversed search engine instances where:

    1. everyone can host a search engine for their very own pages
    2. everyone can crawl other pages and provide (maybe with permissions) the crawled data to other search engines (as compressed snapshots, api …) or provide a search engine by themselves for all.
    3. such search engines can be ranked or marked with “has anti features xyz” and put into followable ‘collections’ per topics.
    4. possibility to add 3rd party rankings and filters, so that one can use only a subset of a search engine list that was pieced together by someone you know or trust, reduced by rankings or filters published by another one you somehow trust to limit the items in the first list.

    then: “for software development i use linuz personal ‘devel’ collection, this way i don’t have to manually click through big G’s gigabytes of SpaMalAds they always only frustrate you with and i am not distracted with dyo stuff when searching for server administration things like ‘puppet stages howto’. for my home projects i use my friends ‘home of DYO’ collection, i get more results than i need but get new ideas as well without seeing work stuff when looking up how to build a puppet stage for my little one. 👨‍👧 for kids its awesome, our school provides a collection including specialized search instances that fit learning, while that collection is also peer reviewed by a company that spezialized to ensure it does to not contain search engine instances that also index any unfitting content pages.”

    oh btw: no i do not have any info about duckduckgo status unfortunately, i stepped over it by myself today 🤷‍♀️


  • smb@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@programming.dev"prompt engineering"
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    3 months ago

    that a moderately clever human can talk them into doing pretty much anything.

    besides that LLMs are good enough to let moderately clever humans believe that they actually got an answer that was more than guessing and probabilities based on millions of trolls messages, advertising lies, fantasy books, scammer webpages, fake news, astroturfing, propaganda of the past centuries including the current made up narratives and a quite long prompt invisible to that human.

    cheerio!




  • there was a study saying that there is not “the” best way of learning, but it is best to combine multiple ways, like with an app, by book, listening to audio only (i listened to radio stations via internet and got some exercise for free), a bit of talking, visiting a country that only speaks that language and so on. trying everything a bit in parallel.

    that is because of our brain learns better when given more different types of “connections” to learn.

    i started with duolingo (website only, not the app and only the free parts) 4 years ago and now i speak quite fluently. but i also partly read a book about grammatics, visited a spanish speaking country (more than once), viewed movies with only subtitle in my language and did lots of phone calls in spanish only.

    my advice is:

    look at free apps, whatever pleases you, take chances, listen to the sound (movies, radio), try to speak, and read easy books or go through exercise books.

    duolingo is good to keep on going while not really motivated as the shortest thing that counts are really only minutes and one can choose to do something that is already easy. this way at least continuation is kept even if pace is down for a while. and it is much easier to go on with pace when not having really stopped.


  • i have to admit, that my point ‘just don’t do it’ in reality does not garantee to prevent any trouble. it still is possible to be sued for things someone else did.

    also one suggestion to think about:

    if the seller just sprays some random changes over a book for every sold version, one would have differences in “every” sold version to every other sold version. by blindly changing those parts to something else you could reveal which exact two/three versions you had for diffing.

    UPDATE: someone else here had the same thought a bit earlier…

    my suggestion to not do it stays the same ;-)

    it could be interesting to figure things out how they work, what could be done to prevent or circumvent such prevention, but actually doing it seems risky no matter what.


  • have a look on “snowdrop” (search together with “steganography”), its basically the opposite of what you want, but worth mentioning here. watermarks could be placed into whitespace (not limited to actual spaces or linebreaks, intentionally changed usage of paragraphs, tabs or even page boundaries could possibly be detected after scanning andeven after OCR. IMHO snowdrop uses -depending on choosen operation mode- small errors like misspelled words, commata etc but also has a mode that comes along with fine grammar and without misspelled words…

    how do you make sure that by diff’ing two versions you do cover "everything’ that has been deliberately placed into both documents but share literally the same informations?

    lets say you bought two books at two different stores with two different watermarks. if the watermark contains the date and time of the purchase and the only difference of this were the minutes because you bought them within the same hour, the remaining watermark would point to all buyers that bought exactly this book in this hour - worldwide. but still it could be “very” precise depending on all other(!) buyers, if they exist at all within that timeframe. what if the watermark includes unix epoch? then the part which is the same in both watermarks would not be bound by hours, but by seconds, 10seconds, 100seconds etc.

    and you could not know if there were other watermarks hidden that just happened to be the same for your two (three.?) purchases (same country, continent, payment method, credit card holder name, name of internet provider used during purchase, browser used etc.) it fully depends on the creator of the watermark what would be included and what not. if you happem to know all that (without any possibleexemptions) you might be on the safe side, but if not…

    my general suggestion here is:

    • if you want to be sure to not getting into trouble, then just don’t do it.
    • if that book is too expensive compared to its content, just not buying it possibly also helps the market to fix the problem.
    • save that time and instead help those who already fight for a better world.
    • search already licence free books (or such as “cc” licensed) and promote those instead, help improving free resources like openstreetmap, wiki* but do not publish licence-poisoned content there, wtite it yourself, alway.
    • write your own book and publish it free.

    just to mention… the “safe” side sometimes seems limited but maybe is actually not, if you really look at it.


  • my 2 cents just in case…:

    A raid6 is not a replacement for backup ;-) i use rdiff-backup which is easy to use, stores only one full backup and all increments are to the past while it is only possible to delete the oldest increments (afaik no “merging”) i never needed anything else. The backup should be one off-site and another one offline to be synced once in a while manually. Make complete dumps (including triggers, etc) from databases before doing the backup ;-)

    i like to have a recreateable server setup, like setting it up manually, then putting everything i did into ansilbe, try to recreate a “spare” server using ansible and the backup, test everything and you can be sure you also have “documented” your setup to a good degree.

    for hardware i do not have much assumptions about performance (until it hits me), but an always-running in-house server should better safe power (i learned this the costly way). it is possible to turn cpu’s off and run only on one cpu with only a reduced freq in times without performance needs, that could help a bit, at least it would feel good to do so while turning cpu’s on again + set higher frequency is quick and can be easily scripted.

    hard drives: make sure you buy 24/7, they are usually way more hassle-free than the consumer grades and likely “only” cost double the price. i would always place the system on SSD but always as raid1 (not raid6), while the “other” could then maybe be a magnetic one set to write-mostly.

    as i do not buy “server” hardware for my home server, i always buy the components twice when i change something, so that i would have the spare parts ready at hand when i need it. running a server for 5+ years often ends up in not beeing able to buy the same again, and then you have to first search what you want, order, test, maybe send back as it might not fit… instable memory? mainboard released smoke signs? with spare parts at hand, a matter of minutes! only thing i am missing with my consumer grade home server hardware is ecc ram :-/

    for cooling i like to use a 12cm fan and only power it with 5v (instead of the 12v it wants) so that it runs smoothly slow and nearly as silent as a passive only cooling, but heat does not build up in the summer. do not forget to clean the dust once in a while… i never had a 5v powered 12V-12cm fan that had any problems with the bearings and i think one of them ran for over a decade. i think the 12volt fans last longer with 5v, but no warranty from me ;-)

    even with headless i like to have a quick way at hand to get to a console in case of network might not be working. i once used a serial cable and my notebook, then a small monitor/keyboard, now i use pikvm and could look to my servers physical console from my mobile phone (but would need ssl client certificate and TOTP to do so) but this involves network, i know XD

    you likely want smart monitoring and once in a while run memtest.

    for servers i also like to have some monitoring that could push a message to my phone somehow for some foreseeable conditions that i would like to handle manually.

    debsums, logcheck logwatch and fail2ban are also worth looking at depending on what you want.

    also after updating packages, have a look at lsof | egrep “DEL|deleted” to see what programs need a simple restart to really use libraries that have been updated. so reboots only for newer kernels.

    ok this is more than 2 cents, maybe 5. never mind

    hope these ideas help a bit


  • quadrillion you say…

    yes, banksters like to create bubbles, inflate, trade with them until all value was extracted, let the bubble burst and then let all bus drivers and other low income people pay for the loss which is the gain of some parasites.

    quadrillion… bubble->add some time->burst

    if we have both two dollars, one for security and one for trading. we both “invest” in buying call orders from each other for a dollar and repeat it a billion times on the same day then we creates a “cash flow” of two billion dollars alone, yet the value behind it was less than 2 dollars.

    that is what high performance traders do, they sell/buy thousands of times per second, creating the illusion of cash flow and worth, yet their actions have negative value, destabilize the market on the long run to create illusion of worth. but that illusion is very welcome as it blinds people and let them believe and invest which then can again be harvested until the bubble bursts…

    lets remove two dollars from my above example… i have now only one dollar for trading so do you. but none for security. would you buy a call-option from someone without security? no. so wont i. thus remove 2 dollars (half of them) and 2 billion dollars of cash flow cease to exist on that day alone!! well, the next day looks the same then. lol. guess that would be called a collapse that 'nobody could have foreseen". lol.

    7 trillion usd is roundabout half of the worldwide existing usd in 2017 (cash and database money, no debts, no could-be-printed, no needs-to-equaled-later) that is if wikipedia is correct and i did not miscalculate the ‘trillion’ which is just a sloppy ‘billion’ here. And further more the “worth” of the really ‘existing’ usd looks to me like a huge bubble by itself waiting to burst some day, but that is not the point or discussion here.

    lets just hope that this “quadrillion bubble” you seem to be fond of does not burst too soon. there are still some resources to be ripped of from earth, some countries that could be enslavelaboured just to postpone the burst of that bubble, so the wave of destruction could carry that bubble for another generation maybe and we are sort of “safe”, but not sure. thus maybe lets hope it bursts rather sooner than later preserving some resources and preventing huge amount of hurt and damage from beeing done while leaving chance for a more stable bubble-free world without manmade intentionally created crisises just to let “others” pay for it.

    intentionally created illusions are in total the most costly “realities” ;-)



  • yeah, thats exactly what i am saying, most of the money ever printed sits in places it will never leave, so IMO there are no 5trillion available on the market and the cash flow does not allow to take out even a “little” bit (speaking in 1e12 terms) before things collapse for the majority.

    oh yes, printing money works exactly like that, it was just printed in the past and nowadays they just increase numbers in databases: plopp and the value of that currency and especially everything that is bound to it decreases, ripping you of what you have saved without even touching your bank account.


  • i guess the number they want to fundraise comes from an AI (maybe because they do not want to think by themselves any more)

    as far as i am right with the “trillion” which is just a “billion” where i live and 1e12 (a 1 followed by 12 zeroes)

    but according to wikipedia (in 2017) there are only:

    14.000.000.000.000 USD existing in the world while they want to fundraise 7.000.000.000.000 USD

    so basically they want half of the USD that had been printed in all history up until 2017.

    maybe they just want to say that they want to push YOU into poverty, who knows.

    may it by getting it from you or by letting some govs print money faster than ever, reducing your money to half or less of a fraction of its previous virtual value.

    But the AI that came up with that number had “good luck” to not come up with the need of “more” money than ever has existed =D

    i think i’ld prefer to use a dice when i really need a random “decision”.

    update: Plz tell me if i am wrong with the numbers or what the current 2024 number of all “printed” (well physical AND digital) USD in the world is at the moment. thx