Using something like PeerTube is potentially even worse because let’s say you unknowingly open a video where someone in it looks of age but technically isn’t. You as a user help propagate that content while you have it open. You’re not just downloading illegal content at that point. You’re actively sharing it to new people.
I don’t think they’re saying they know better. Seems more like they’re tired of pouring hundreds of hours of free labor specifically into accessibility only to hear people bitch about how they’re not doing enough when the people bitching probably don’t even genuinely care beyond using it as a way to bash GNOME.
To which your response is to take the opportunity to talk shit about GNOME and disregard his meaning, which kinda illustrates his point.
Having learned Nix recently and still not being great at it, writing your personal config is relatively easy. The website has a search feature for options you can use by default, so it’s pretty straightforward. Just search for relevant keywords and set the options you like.
If you want to package software for nixpkgs, define custom options, or anything else that’s going to require custom Nix, it’s… Better than you make it sound but not great. I only read one guide, and it wasn’t great, but it covered the basics well enough. From there, I managed to figure out what I’ve needed so far just from the official documentation for the Nix language. It’s not everything it could be, but it’s not too bad.
If you wanna really get into the thick of it and extensively write Nix for some detailed purpose, you might run into some more problems. I still don’t think it’d be as bad as you make it sound, but you probably won’t be thrilled, either.
They wouldn’t be able to track the printer to you from the fingerprint in that case, but if you ever end up on their radar, that printer is damning evidence even if all the memory on it is pristine clean.
They don’t follow a standard protocol because the industry is dominated by just a few players, and it isn’t in their interests to do that since they want to make customers dependent on them. The industry is dominated in part because the fingerprint tracking creates extra overhead that’s harder for smaller or starting businesses to deal with.
They don’t just have to maintain a database. They have to handle all of the logistics of accurately collecting and entering the data for it. They need legal counsel to get it right. They need to work with distributors and/or retailers to get an idea where they’re going so a fingerprint can be linked to a retail purchase. They have to deal with the inevitable subpoenas at a minimum, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they fulfilled requests without a legal order. It becomes a lot of extra labor beyond just making and selling printers.
We’d have quality printers if it was legal to make an open source one. Unfortunately, every printer is legally required to be a snitch and uniquely fingerprint everything it prints with a discreet dot matrix so the feds can track you down if you print something illegal.
So now, the only companies that can make and sell printers are those capable of and willing to maintain a database of all the printers they sell and the fingerprint they add to all prints.
Your printer is absolute shit because it’s a snitch.
There’s work being done on it, but from my understanding, it’s slow going…
I use a relatively low spec KVM VPS on another continent. Remember, kids, if all your backups are in one location, you don’t have backups. You have copies.
Sure glad that’s not why they did it because you’re right, that’d be kinda stupid. That’s not why they made a secondary layer, though. They made a secondary layer so transaction throughput can grow exponentially while maintaining the security of the blockchain without significantly impacting fees or requiring the blockchain itself to become proportionally larger.
That last part is the real motivation. The goal is to above all else, remain decentralized. That means the average user needs to be able to run a full node capable of verifying any transaction it needs to. To do that, the blockchain can’t grow too quickly, or people will get forced out. If it grew exponentially faster as transactions grew likewise, nodes would eventually centralize in fewer and fewer hands until someone could exert control over the network.
The blockchain is currently something like 650-700 GB, which is a lot, but most people can manage it, even if it might be pushing it for poorer regions. Without the lightning network and with substantial user growth, the only option is to increase the block size, and to achieve an actually usable capacity of strictly on-chain transactions, you’d be looking at sizes on the order of hundreds of TB or pushing into PB territory. Nobody would be able to store the blockchain without a dedicated server rack. Not a single server, a whole rack. It’d costs thousands and thousands of dollars to run a node. Instead, we acknowledge that you purchasing a pack of gum at the convenience store doesn’t need to be immortalized on the blockchain and use the lightning network to secure your transaction without having to create a permanent record.
There are no hard coded minimums. Some providers may demand a minimum commitment, but there’s nothing to stop people in poorer regions from opening smaller channels, especially between individuals. Any business attempting to operate in the region will have to work with that.
There is also a lot of work being done on… I think they call them channel factories? Might be off on the name, but basically create as many channels as possible in as little space as possible to keep it efficient and minimize costs for individuals.
You still use it as a settlement and security layer. The lightning network is made up of pairs of people that both lock money in a new account with a transaction. Both people get a fully signed copy of a second transaction to reclaim the money, but they don’t publish it immediately. If they need to make a new transaction between each other, they just replace the second fully signed transaction with a new one that divides the money according to the new balance. They can do this as many times as they want for as long as they want, and they only have to make two transactions: one to start and one to stop. If anyone tries to cheat, the only thing they can do is publish an older version of that second transaction that favors them, but you have… I think a day or three, I forget, to publish a newer version that proves they cheated, and if you do, you get ALL the money even if some was owed to them, so cheating won’t go well. The down side is you need a node that’s always online or connects to the network frequently so you can be ready to catch a cheater.
To make a network, they use some fancy cryptography to send money to someone if and only if they send it (minus very, very, very small fees) to the next person in line towards the destination. If anyone in the chain refuses or fails to commit, the transaction fails and no money moves at all. Because it’s all secured by the blockchain, you can trust that everyone both can and will complete the transaction exactly as requested, or the whole thing fails and nothing happens.
Bitcoin is great for little transactions if you use the lightning network. Sending on the lightning network means instant payments with no confirmation required and absolutely tiny fees. And the only thing that shows up on the blockchain is the transactions to initially start using lightning network and to take your coins back off the lightning network. Transactions made over the lightning network aren’t recorded anywhere other than maybe by the people transacting.
Man, I wish self hosted email was a reasonable thing to do. But it’s a pain to set up the server and the domain stuff, and once you do, if anyone ever spammed off that IP, you’re probably screwed anyway because good luck getting off the blacklists.
Man, you’re giving me flashbacks to real analysis. Shit is weird. Like the set of all integers is the same size as the set of all positive integers. The set of all fractions, including whole numbers, aka integers, is the same size as the set of all integers. The set of all real numbers (all numbers including factions and irrational numbers like pi) is the same size as the set of all real numbers between 0 and 1. The proofs make perfect sense, but the conclusions are maddening.
And you’re absolutely starving, yes.
So it seems like if you’re using Office on desktop, not SaaS, but they do offer it in a browser, so would that count? Technically, if it’s in JavaScript or something like that, computing is handled locally, but it still feels close enough to count.
These apps aren’t SaaS, but their alternatives are in at least some cases. LibreOffice competes with Microsoft Office, for example, and Microsoft wants people to pay a subscription for it, although I think you can still buy it outright. Pretty sure I’ve heard similar for Adobe products. Not super familiar with all the options, so can’t say if it’s true for all of them.
QuakeWorld and old school Doom for FPS, Beyond All Reason for RTS, Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup for roguelikes, Hedgewars for a Worms-like.
Running a server is very doable. There are packages to deploy and configure almost everything for you and removing a ton of headache.
Getting your email recognized as not spam by the major providers is pretty much impossible. You need all sorts of stuff to help verify integrity including special DNS records and public identity keys, but even if you do everything right, your mail can very easily get black holed before it even reaches a user’s inbox because of stupid shit like someone abused your rented server’s IP years ago, and you can’t seem to get it off everyone’s lists.
Email as a decentralized tool has effectively been ruined by spam and anti-spam measures. You’re effectively forced to use a provider because it’s near impossible to make your outgoing mail work as an individual. I think some of those anti-spam measures are anticompetitive, but I do think some are just desperate attempts to reduce the massive flow of spam.
In a sense, you are hosting the content. You’re retaining a copy (so long as the window is open) and constantly attempting to spread it. It’s literally built on bittorrent protocols if I remember correctly, and it’s already very well established that you can be held responsible for seeding copyright infringing material, so I see no reason at all they’d give you a pass for CP instead. You may not intend to, but remember, my example was someone who looks of age but is not.