• 8 Posts
  • 311 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 19th, 2024

help-circle
  • communism@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlIs Lemmy actually growing?
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    35
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 day ago

    Lack of growth does not mean death. That’s a capitalistic mindset. It’s entirely possible for a community to be sustainable based on the people it has and have no need to grow. Lemmy’s not trying to sell a product; there’s no need for it to grow. People can join if they want to, and people can leave if they want to.

    In terms of actual future prospects, Lemmy seems fairly large to me, and regardless of whether its userbase is growing or shrinking, it would have to shrink by quite a lot to become “dead”. Especially as Reddit continues to enshittify, I imagine its userbase will only grow. Hard to find social medias of this nature otherwise; almost all other social media is based around following people, not communities, and also obviously most social media is much more commercialised, less anonymous, much less text-friendly, etc, so link aggregator/Reddit style social medias fill in a niche people want and people who want a social media in this niche will gravitate towards the one they see as the best social media for whatever reason. Maybe Reddit because it’s the biggest, maybe Lemmy because Reddit is shit and Lemmy is federated and open-source, maybe their niche alternative because they’re part of a specific niche community that uses different software, who knows.





  • I don’t do deniable encryption on my root drives, just on external drives, and store the headers on my (non-deniably encrypted) computers. But if you want to deniably encrypt your root drive, Arch Wiki has some info:

    https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Specialties#Encrypted_system_using_a_detached_LUKS_header

    You would still ultimately need an unencrypted header somewhere in order to boot your computer, so if it’s your main daily computer you’d likely carry around the USB stick all day and therefore it wouldn’t work against a state adversary who would obtain the USB stick with your header when they arrest you, if it’s on your person.

    Also, it’s much more plausible that an external drive is genuinely just random data with no encrypted contents than that the drive installed into a computer has no data. I do have some USB sticks etc with genuinely nothing on them because I wiped them with /dev/urandom at some point, and they’re lying around waiting for me to need an unused USB drive. The average person doesn’t have an “unused computer” with nothing on it, just random data on the drive. Especially if you are an activist/organiser, if the state finds your computer with just pure random data on it and no encryption header I think they will assume it is deniably encrypted.


  • Ah lol sure. It depends on what level of state repression you’re looking at. Regular cops will just not bother trying to decrypt a drive if they don’t have the password and you don’t freely give it up (you have the right to refuse to provide a password here, it’s under the same kind of principle as having the right to not incriminate yourself), but I’m sure military intelligence etc will go to the wrench technique. Also deniable encryption for anything particularly sensitive is good for the old wrench technique.




  • I encrypt all my drives. Me and the people I know get occasionally raided by the police. Plus I guess also provides protection for nosy civilians who get their hands on my devices. Unlike most security measures, there is hardly any downside to encrypting your drives—a minor performance hit, not noticeable on modern hardware, and having to type in a password upon boot, which you normally have to do anyway.



  • I use LLMs for search results when conventional search engines aren’t providing relevant results, and then I can fact-check whatever answers the LLMs give me. Especially using them to ask questions that are easy to verify, like mathematical questions where I can check the validity of the answers. Or similarly programming questions where I can read through the solution, check the documentation for any functions used, and make sure the output is logical, and make any tweaks if the LLM gives a nearly-correct answer. I always ask LLMs to cite their sources so I can check those too.

    I also sometimes use LLMs for formatting, like when I copy text off a PDF and the spacing is all funky.

    I don’t use LLMs for this, but I imagine that they would be a better replacement for previous automated translation tools. Translation seems to be one of the most obvious applications since LLMs are just language pattern recognition at the end of the day. Obviously for anything important they need to be checked by a human, but they would e.g. allow for people to participate in online communities where they don’t speak the community’s language.








  • Afraid I don’t have a /dev/sr0. Tbh I built this PC yonks ago, I don’t remember how I plugged in my optical drive. I assume SATA would be the sensible and most likely option.

    I’m on Artix Linux with runit if that matters at all?

    I mean, it doesn’t matter to me whether or not I can eject my optical drive with a command, but at this point I’m just curious as to where the drive is on the filesystem lol

    Edit: I tried loading sr_mod with modprobe sr_mod (which wasn’t loaded for me) but still not seeing any sr* or cdrom in /dev. Again, not too bothered about this, but I’m kinda curious.


  • pretty much all agriculture, grocery, etc would become luxury and less needed or used.

    But if everything is reset every day, you still have the same stock of food available every day, and it never depletes (beyond the depletion that happens in 1 day, but that gets reset quickly). And any money made from selling food is also not kept. I can’t imagine food sellers would be bothered to try enforce their prices when profits etc don’t matter. Maybe food just becomes free. If we’re optimistic, people might prioritise getting food to people who are already starving, since the people who are well-fed won’t be too bothered by going a day without food.