Digital Mark

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  • 92 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 20th, 2022

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  • If you can’t afford an iPhone, that’s tough, but I live in the US where it’s 56%, and around the world it’s 28%, which is not “doesn’t exist”. And in any case Signal exists for the others. Yes, if you use a freecycled GNU/Linux phone with not-sold-in-Shenzhen wireless chipset not supported by any carrier so it has to be hardwired to ethernet, you’ll have a harder time.

    And if you do try to do everything at once, you fail at everything. Which is what happened after Google EEE’d and crushed XMPP, it’s unsupported in full by anyone. There’s no money in open source networking, it’s near impossible to fund the people who work on critical infrastructure, let alone new toys.

    Meanwhile, there’s a system that’s been working for 35 years.



  • You don’t have to solve every problem in a single application. If you need privacy, use iMessage or Signal.

    Public chat is by definition not secure, anyone can be sitting in the room logging, so it’s not that essential as long as client-server uses TLS. Modern IRC does have SDCC chat, but not all clients will use it, so stick to secure messengers.




  • Digital Mark@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you believe in Aliens?
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    6 months ago

    Is there other intelligent alien life in our Galaxy? Probably. Given how fast life formed on Earth, there must be millions of other life-bearing planets, and intelligence can’t be that rare, but it might be short-lived.

    Are there UFO sightings? Yes, people do see unidentified flying objects. Some of them can be explained, some cannot.

    Are the UFOs aliens? I don’t know, I’m a “curious agnostic” on the subject.

    There’s a LOT of UFO sightings, and evidence from good observers, including US Navy aviators. The US Air Force continues not to cooperate, and officially denies any sightings exist. The very enthusiastic refusal to look at evidence, aside from Project Blue Book, is suspicious.

    It’s technically plausible that someone within 50-ish light years of Earth could have heard our radio, sent a ship here, and use drones or manned ships to observe us without interacting. There could also be many other explanations.

    We don’t know, and until the last couple years there was no effort to investigate.







  • Digital Mark@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAre we all fucked?
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    7 months ago

    I grew up during the Cold War, I had zero expectation that I’d live to adulthood, and I’m still unconvinced the world after 2000 exists. The way to cope is nihilism and/or activism.

    Nuclear war, global warming makes the Earth uninhabitable, new plagues wipe out everyone, AI poisons us or creates nanotech grey goo, fascists take over and gas everyone who isn’t them, a dinosaur-killer meteor hits the Earth again, eventually the Sun expands and fries the planet. You personally are going to die, probably long before any of those.

    So you can either say “fuck it” and do your usual stuff anyway, or get involved in trying to stop or delay one of the disasters. Have fun with it.

    Or as Morty says: “Everybody’s going to die. Come watch TV.”





  • In addition to the things everyone else has brought up:

    • MacPorts gives you everything on any BSD or Linux machine, on your Mac.
    • iTerm2 is the best terminal on any platform, there’s amazing capabilities in it. You didn’t know your terminal was so inadequate!
    • AppleScript, Automator, and every programming language on Mac; Shortcuts, Pythonista, LispPad, & Hotpaw BASIC on iOS; make automation of the system and programming little tools incredibly easy. Everything is accessible to the power user, it’s not like Linux where some GUI features are scriptable, and others you’ll be writing a C++ program to reach some API because it’s not exposed to anything.

    As the old ad says (which got me to buy in): Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null