Victor Villas

Pretty alright, but struggling with ennui a little bit. I don’t know how to live without short-term challenges, and for now I have none.

It has been great! First holiday season away from my family as a newly minted expat, but I’m lucky to have four/five other couples from my home country going through pretty much the same thing, so we’ve been each others support . Me and my partner are positively surprised at how well things have been working (mostly)!

New Kurtzgesagt video, a new opportunity to improve my filter bubble by blocking anyone who starts parroting factoids about their ties with the Gates Foundation 🤭 great day

Morning Show seasons 2 and 3 condensed in a single week

Mine has been working fine, but the instance did lose all my “Mark as watched” videos, and for some reason one specific channel never makes into the Subscriptions panel, but I just have it as a favourite and it ends up almost the same. The instance I was using for Piped is now borked, so I’m hanging onto Invidious for now.

BookWyrm on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/bookwyrm

Glad someone is finally taking on a fediverse alternative to GoodReads

Firefox is just the only decent option. And while at it, use Piped or Invidious while you still can, people!

I’m in total agreement that OSS builds more secure software. What I’m saying is that these companies are not in the business of building safe software.

From there, I see no advantage to closed-source here.

I think the easiest mental map is this: doing things well has a cost; doing things poorly can be cheaper; if it’s way cheaper and there’s some method available to de-risk it even if a little bit, no matter how little effective it is, it might be financially advantageous to pick the inferior option. This is not just for security, but pretty much everything.

What a complicated way of getting a building floor reassignment

You’d still need an account, but I think you can plug Zapier into a group to create RSS feed items from posts.

From there you can use your RSS reader of choice, FOSS or not

There’s also the graph API if you want to DIY, also needs a token with group permissions

Holy guacamole, Argentina was at the precipice’s edge and finally decided to take a step forward

Sorry for the comrades who will have to deal with this hell

I think you might have read it backwards, I equated closed source with security by obscurity. And obviously you can have both, if you pay extra.

Sure, finance is not technology, but I think it’s worth it pointing out that it’s not arbitrary or just greed or whatever, it has technicalities too.

So really it’s just a polite way of saying “yeah you better be thankful.”

lol that escalated quickly

When I hear “you’re welcome” the only thing I think of is that I’m welcome

Am I going to be behind the competition by doing this?

Yes, because you are due a lot more diligence with open source, and that will slow down your releases.

If the most secure crypto algorithms are the ones that are public, can we ensure the security of a bank’s apps by publicizing it?

You trade security by obscurity for security by expert oversight. I’m not a lawyer or baking auditor, but I’d say while zero-days are problematic for open source software projects; they can be life-ending for banks.

Is there a technical reason they don’t publicize their code or is it just purely corporate greed and nothing else?

This is a false dichotomy. Financial reasons to not publicize the code are technical reasons. Finance is technical.

We really are social creatures. Went big on Orkut, Facebook, WhatsApp, and of course the current trends are YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. I think the only one that didn’t really take off that much (relatively speaking) was Snapchat.

Even finance apps had way too much social features, looking at you PicPay with the worst timeline feature ever: see people’s payments to each other lmao

Not unpopular with me at all, my wife also prefers regular YouTube because the video quality tends to be better. YouTube just handles variable connection speeds better, and the buffering and quality switching is very smart. I mostly agree, the watching experience is superior.

But YouTube ads are among the highest annoyances of my daily life right now, they simply could not be less relevant for me. Because I’m in NA it’s adamant that I buy an EV or an SUV, a bunch of fast food ads, it’s just too much. I’m willing to spend 20 seconds waiting for Piped to buffer instead of 8 seconds of YouTube ads.

And I’m not really hoping Piped will ever go mainstream, because as you said, if that happens they’re toast. Piped and Invidious have to stay niche to keep flying under the radar - well not really under the radar, YouTube already sent a Cease and Desist to Invidious, but I guess for now they’re not invested in enforcing it yet.

Yes, it’s a client. Well, for better or for worse, no chance that this huge of a user base will move to piped. I don’t understand why it’s not super famous yet, but I guess invidious and piped are simply fringe tech still.

That’s why I said that YouTube would need a major tragedy to get a real hit, real alternatives like Peertube are going to struggle a lot against the network effect. Nebula has a much better shot given the amount of content creators invested on it, and it’s still a long shot.

I’m placing my bets on piped video instead, for now at least. YouTube needs something more tragic, like getting acquired by Elon Musk, before it bleeds for real.

H-h-how? HOW? do they ‘anonymize’ DNA?!?!

If you really curious, it is possible depending on the sections of the DNA being shared and how aggregated they are. Not saying that this will be the case - it’s quite likely that this sale would be done prioritizing value instead of privacy - but it is possible. The key part is to not treat the whole DNA as a data sample, but specific sequence sections, as isolated as possible.

And the Netflix example is instructive but not super relevant here. If you already have your SNPs in a public database out there, then yeah 23andMe might not be able to effectively anonymize your samples; but you don’t (I hope).

At this point I’m just holding for dear life to piped.video, because illegal front-ends are my only hope to keep watching YouTube.