• 18 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • You can add as many compliance officers as you want to. Hell, you can grab ALL the cops who hang out at high schools and sexually harass/assault kids and make this their job.

    It won’t matter if they actively choose not to resist. Which is what almost always happens with stuff like this.

    I like Mamdani’s messaging a lot. Stuff like this… reminds me about how worried I am about his ability to act on that messaging. But, “fortunately”, the christofacists are more focused on attacking Minnesota and Illinois than New York so this might not have to meaningfully be tested.



  • Tor exit nodes are vulnerable to various levels of attacks.

    But it also doesn’t change the underlying problem. If you put ALL of your traffic through Tor? Cool. You have accomplished nothing (other than flagging yourself because of what exit nodes you are accessing from) because your cookies and even behavior are still being correlated.

    Like… it doesn’t take much to question why FightThePower_6969 looks at both /r/antifa101 AND /r/denver, for example. Ooh, and they also look at /r/warhammer40k and have a cookie from this website listing bus schedules and…

    I do agree that tor is an amazing (if problematic) tool and it is generally the gold standard for when you need to obfuscate traffic in a way that doesn’t involve giving mullivad your credit card number. But people still need to understand what traffic they are putting into each different port. And even realize that there are some truly nasty tracking methods out there that can do nasty stuff with even OS level DNS caching between browsers.


  • And why would you trust your own ISP more than reputable VPNs?

    1. Define “reputable VPN”? There is little to no meaningful third party auditing and mostly all we have to go on is if they are on the record for having “cooperated with law enforcement”
    2. The point is you need to actually understand what you are trusting who with. You want to watch AEW for cheap? Cool, whatever. You want to masturbate to porn without providing your ID? Maybe think about who is more likely to get a call from what orgs. And if you are doing something truly sensitive? That is when you need to learn a WHOLE lot more about what privacy and personal security actually are.

    The point is that people just say “linus rogan had a promo code and this solves all my problems”.


  • Heh.

    Our IT department is so incompetent that… let’s just say I have made it a point to leave a paper trail in my inbox of me highlighting issues and complaining because I can’t rule out a full investigation.

    Last year we had a “technical all hands” which basically means IT have fucked up to the point that engineering/platform are now responsible for untangling the mess from first principles. And we actually were allowed to look at the logs and were seeing “attacks” from all over Western Europe. I suspect IT would still be trying to call the FBI for help if one of our PSEs hadn’t sighed and said “how much of our staff are running VPNs?”. And then we had to explain what those are… to the people who actually manage the VPN we use to remote in.

    STILL not sure if I am more horrified that they didn’t understand that VPNs exist or that they had just not noticed that much mystery traffic until that day.


  • From what I can tell… that is actually what most people WANT in their VPN. They don’t care about privacy or anonymizing data. They just want to hide information from the LAN admin and/or appear to be in a different region for the purposes of content (used to be so they could watch European Netflix. Now it is so they can watch Colorado Pornhub…).

    I dunno. I’ve been in far too many Internet Arguments ™ with people over what they ACTUALLY think a VPN is. People watch ltt’s ads and figure they just pay for a VPN and leave it on 24/7 and that will solve all their problems. When the reality is that they are actively ignoring their actual cookie and activity based footprints and it just means that Google et al have a note that says “John Doe of 123 Fake Street in Bumfuck Wisconsin connects via an endpoint in Denmark”.

    And while I wouldn’t trust microsoft at all for… anything? Do y’all really think those black box companies paying youtubers to lie to you about what VPNs do aren’t collecting your data?




  • Do yourself a favor: Learn on TinkerCAD/Fusion 360 or OnShape. No, they are not open source and both have some REALLY nasty caveats for free users. But both of those are THE most user friendly CAD tools out there and you’ll be able to google anything you need. Learn the fundamentals and the language first.

    Once you have that down? FreeCAD is surprisingly not horrible these days and I think I even actually like it. But FreeCAD is still heavily restricted by being “for users, by coders” as it were. So operations that might take one step in every other tool could take three or four because that maps a lot better to the underlying math libraries. And you’ll need to constantly translate between what everyone else calls something and what FreeCAD calls it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaTNTUzA5dM is a very good video comparing the two (just watch it at like 1.25x because Deltahedra has a very very very slow speaking cadence…). But they key is that if you know what you are trying to do in the language everyone else speaks, translating that to FreeCAD becomes super easy. Rather than not even knowing how to ask for help in the first place.

    OpenSCAD is REALLY nice for building something in a vacuum where you know every dimension you want and have very clean (or nonexistent) interfaces to existing geometry. But, odds are, the vast majority of what you are going to be doing is matching to reference images or even reference parts.


  • On a warm and dry day? Maybe?

    But if it is cold? Some printers have built in heaters. They aren’t strong enough to handle that. And if it is moist? You ACTUALLY will be someone who needs to dry your filament and good luck.

    As for fumes and microplastics? That is the other big advantage of the enclosures (that I tend to try to avoid mentioning because people are fucking stupid). Even with no filter you are going to be getting a lot of benefits from the residues and the like hitting the walls first. And most of the CoreXYs can trivially add an actual filter to the vent… many that you print yourself.

    It isn’t the same as a proper exhaust system but… ain’t nobody doing that.


  • You can still get an Ender 3 (essentially the end result of RepRap). Every vendor has their own.

    That said? If you buy a printer in 2025 (let alone 2026) and it does not have an integrated enclosure, you are opening yourself up to a world of hurt. The price difference isn’t that much anymore and even just having a box to hold the waste heat in solves like 90% of print problems.

    Bambu are, above and beyond, the best bang for your buck. They ALSO are ahead of the curve on locking things down to support only their networked slicers. Which… is a huge concern with stuff like this.

    Personally? I love the Qidi printers. I have a Q1 something or another and convinced a friend to get a different model. They use a semi-open fork of Klipper so you can theoretically make something work when it is abandoned. Which is good because the various CoreXY printers are no longer all based on the same standard so part kits aren’t (easily) interchangeable. And, of course, you can use Orcaslicer or whatever else you want.

    Keep in mind that is all FDM. For Resin (SLA?), the ship has already sailed and people are genuinely happy to run slicers with literal fucking ads in them. Assuming the vendor doesn’t lock them out of even that garbage.


  • Assuming you get a hold of a human:

    Be nice to them. Be assertive but also be nice. That will get them to go off script if they are allowed to or escalate you if they aren’t.

    If you treat them like “monkeys who aren’t allowed to go off script”? They will GLADLY repeat the same questions over and over and make your life a living hell. Because with customer support? Their metrics often benefit from you getting angry and hanging up.





  • Sounds like updating firefox and/or ublock will get past most of it.

    Personally? I am not as opposed to google making life harder for people who want to run an adblocker, considering that is the site’s revenue (specifically the targeted ads based on user data). But I actually pay for youtube premium and have been having to refresh every video between clicking and watching it and that is just fucking stupid.

    Although, it also means that shorts no longer autoplay. So when I actually want to watch a short that a channel I like put up, I only see THAT short rather than however many others before I click away.



  • It also causes the problem that no fix is searchable. All fixes require a community member to respond.

    Incorrect. While I find the search capabilities of Discord (and the Discord/Teams likes) to be… bad, it isn’t THAT much worse than a phpbb in a lot of ways.

    What you lose out on is the ability for search engines and, increasingly a concern, LLMs from being able to index it. I shouldn’t have to explain why that might be a “pro” as far as the folk actually doing support are concerned.

    As for delays? If it is a well supported bit of kit, a quick search and a skim of the FAQ (Discord is actually really nice for having a way to aggregate questions like that in an almost ticketing like system) is going to cover the major stuff. And my experience (on both sides) with Slack et al is that users are generally glad to help out.

    It does suck because, unless it is a super common issue, you need to actually ask a question and interact with a human. But it also tends to mean that people are a lot faster to have you run a few tests rather than respond once a day to a thread.

    For the support people, they have to answer the same questions over and over and over because there is no way for users to search for and solve their own problems.

    Tell me you’ve never provided support without telling me you’ve never provided support, heh.


  • So… they wouldn’t be raw dogging stack overflow? Because raw dogging the code you get from a rando off stack overflow is a bad idea?

    Because you can just as easily use generative AI as a component in test driven development. But the people pushing to “make coders more efficient” are looking at firing people. And they continue to not want to add the guard rails that would mean they fire 1 engineer instead of 5.