A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

  • 5 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • I think there’s more low quality than just the basic print with all the wrinkles and creases in it. For once the head is “painted” realistically, the shirt is a slightly different style and then the hands and legs are yet another style. There’s some obvious AI artifacts and it didn’t fool people, seems they were able to tell.

    And then with real art there’s some layers to it. It’d have a deeper meaning, tell us something about the people depicted, or society at times or how they’d like to portray it. Or there’s an entire interesting story about the artist, what kind of struggles they had… At least it’d invoke some astonishment in somebody. And I don’t think there’s any of that with this picture. That’s just the “empty plate” in-your-face meaning. Some children don’t have food. But doesn’t seem to me, the picture in itself tells more to the audience, or makes them think about what the statement might be, wonder what it’s trying to express, or make them question anything. And that’d be what turns art into art.

    At least that’s my take on the definition of quality in art. I mean people put a bathtub out there along with some butter and it’s art. Or paint a canvas black and be done with it. On the other hand I can take a visually appealing photo of me with my smartphone and it wouldn’t be art. So in this case I don’t think quality is concerned with the visual aspect of it in the first place.


  • Could be performance art. But people did that before. Sneak into a museum and put something up. So it’s not an original idea.

    “The work isn’t about disruption. It’s about participation without permission,” he said.

    And I think the “without permission” holds true on several levels. I mean on the one hand they just put it up. And doing it with AI adds another level on top. I mean the AI companies are known for not asking for permission when they train their generative AI models. But I don’t see this being discussed in the article. It’d probably be the only thing turning this into some form of art. An AI picture in itself certainly isn’t art. Also like how the paper is wrinkled and it doesn’t look good at all and “empty plate” is just a shallow in your face meaning and even I can tell how there isn’t any art or deeper meaning to it. And most people I know who are close to art, and they’re musicians or properly draw stuff as a hobby aren’t really pro AI, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them use AI or mix it into their works.


  • Didn’t they just release their Ryzen AI Software as a preview for Linux? I think that was a few days ago. I don’t know about the benchmarks as of today, but seems they’ve been working on drivers, power reporting, toolkit and have been mainlining stuff into the kernel so the situation improves.

    I think CUDA (Nvidia) is still dominating the AI projects out there. The more widespread and in-use projects sometimes have backends for several ecosystems and they’ll run on Nvidia, AMD or Intel or a CPU. Same for the libraries which build the foundation. But not all of them. And most brand-new tech-demos I see, are written for Nvidia’s CUDA. And I’ll have to jump through some hoops to make it work on different hardware and sometimes it works well, sometimes it’s not optimized for anything but Nvidia hardware.


  • It’d be a really bad situation. I mean we rely on VPNs and tunnels a lot. For half the people doing home-office, logging into the company’s VPN is the first thing in the morning. Field crew relies on them. That’s an additional layer of protection in the ATM of your bank…

    It’d wreck half the economy in the process. Or “they” need to outlaw specific things. Like private VPNs. And gather a list of private VPN providers and ban them via a great firewall. That’s possible. And would make life worse in a country. It’s possible to circumvent these measures. And it’s difficult to discern traffic and distinguish VPN traffic from other encrypted traffic so the country might want to implement some harsh measures as well. A police force knocking on people’s doors if they suspect them to evade law and demand they show their computer and smartphones.

    So in conclusion your best option is probably to move to a different place if you can afford to, once that becomes reality.




  • What’s the encryption and signing on a hardware level for? I mean dependent on what’s that good for and who controls it, it’s trusted computing, or treacherous computing as Stallman calls it…

    (I mean it’s not working out great for GrapheneOS either. Back in the day I had a phone I owned, with privacy features added and alternative background services so I had a pretty much Google-free experience. These days it’s all locked down, I hand out my private metadata to Google, can barely ride a train without, or get a discount in the supermarket. I can’t do backups and I’m f***ed if I want to cross a border to a more restrictive country because these guys are in on it as well. They’re probably going to use it to limit what I can install. And more and more manufacturers lock down bootloaders etc and I thought we were past this. Graphene itself advised me to switch to proprietary code in the name of security and they’ll have a look at the code later, once Google eventually releases it. All of this is due to (or related to) these security measures working way too well and that’s also why they’re being used. I wish my phone didn’t have a TPM but a simple disk encryption like LUKS on Linux instead. And I don’t see many reasons why we should copy these very bad dynamics.)

    I think the overall idea is nice, though. We had these project ideas to just plug in a box and be self sufficient in the self-hosting community since the SheevaPlug. Or the FreedomBox. There are some hardware projects as well like the Home Assistant Green or back in 2019 they tried to sell a Pioneer-FreedomBox. None of those match exactly with your proposal, but I think they’re pretty close. Maybe get in touch with them and see if you can participate in a new iteration, or read about their past experience with the proposed target audience. Especially FreedomBox seems like a good fit to me. They’re not very loud, but afaik still around. And they’re Free Software nerds, which seems to align with your idea, minus the locking it down and transferring control to other parties via the TPM.



  • I guess politicians like that just exist. We had Ursula von der Leyen for that. She was big time into internet surveillance and censorship before proceeding to other endeavours, defence and then president of the european commission. Her list of controversies, shady contracts and deals and investigations is pretty long. So yeah, I’d say there’s likely something shady going on in the background with those people. But investigating them doesn’t seem to do anything, at least not in Germany. That just makes them become president of something or similar things.



  • I got a nice Dell Latitude 7390 for like 250€ a year ago. I usually just have an eye on the sales page of my local laptop refurbisher and go for the best Dell or Lenovo laptop in my price range. Since that’s mostly devices returned from leasing by businesses, they’re the more serviceable models than regular consumer models. But serviceability is somewhat limited these days. You’d have to check individually how many RAM slots are available (if any) and whether the BIOS accepts random wifi cards.


  • Yeah, looks like a coordinated effort. They’re re-aligning other things as well. They also forfeited their pledge not to develop AI for weapons and surveillance. Joined that “age restriction” effort to collect people’s IDs. And I’ve seen a massive crackdown on Youtube, from ramping up advertisements, making it harder to circumvent these, or download videos, to what they pay to creators which has also reportedly changed substantially.

    I guess Android is amongst the more annoying ones, because we all rely on smartphones and the operating system on there.



  • Lol. I guess they’re speaking from own experience? I mean even being the cautionary tale is a valid way to teach people something?? They do other stuff as well which they outline as bad. For example use Cloudflare, which has an even worse effect than rely on AWS. And this “Farcaster social network reimagined” which they have everywhere on their site has some open-source code and surprise most of it is MIT licensed, they got venture funding… So… I’d say they’re ticking all the boxes of what (they said) is bad.

    To be fair, they don’t really claim to be any better. They seem to specifically omit mentioning it. And they conclude “dance with it” is the right course of action…


  • Yes, somewhat accurate. And a big issue these days. I don’t really see how Web3/crypto-stuff comes into play. To my knowledge it’s a niche on the decline. And has always been part of different dynamics. These projects are often aimed to mine some theoretical pile of money from the start. There is some crossover with the open-source world, but that’s rarely what it’s about.

    Btw, community-owned infrastructure with Web3 would be nice. But I think there are several other ways to operate community-owned infrastructure. Many applications don’t need a blockchain to work just fine.



  • I’d say that depends on exactly what you’re trying to protect. They’re both large American companies with control over your data and your data and metadata will end up in their respective clouds. Push notifications will be handled by Google services if you use Android, but there’s an equivalent mechanism for iOS just that it uses their servers. They handle some details differently, but I don’t think any of those options deserve the word privacy.



  • There’s always a possibility of someone posting arbitrary content when a platform allows user content or combines content from many sources. I mean we do have moderation here and illegal content is supposed to be removed or flagged. However as the operator of some internet service, you are ultimately responsible for what’s on your instance. So you definitely do need to make an effort to stay in control. Btw, there are possible compromises, such as using an allow-list of instances you federate with, so you don’t pull content from sources you don’t trust and didn’t approve.