Do not disassemble.

  • 0 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • It’s mostly true, but not entirely. The data “on the internet” has to live somewhere. For instance, when you DM someone on a social media network-- would you consider that private? I assure you the content of those messages can be read by the website’s admin-users.

    If you’re hosting your own non-social web service (like, personal cloud storage or something), then that is arguably private for you, but if you let someone else also use it, then it is not private for them, because you can almost certainly see their file content, having access to the server directly.

    Encryption can throw all of this off; a service like Signal is private-- the admin-users of Signal can’t see your messages. Generally speaking any service that warns you that all your data will be lost if you forget your password is probably private. If they can recover your data, they have access to your data.

    Edit: Better word choices.







  • VanillaOS is pretty neat. It has an immutable (kind of) OS, lets you choose which package formats you want to use (flatpak, snap, appimage, etc) and leverages containers (a la Distrobox) and their package manager Apx to give you seamless access to packages on other distros. It’s Ubuntu-based right now but the next release is switching to debian.

    To be fair, I don’t have much time on it. My daily drivers are a chromebook and a steamdeck, but I did dust off an old laptop just to check it out for a little bit.









  • It was mostly rhetorical. There’s no way to know that you want the application to have extra access to some folder needed for your theme. That’s the exact kind of thing that would be better handled on a user-input level. You applied your theme, you notice that it is broken with the app, you apply the new expanded permissions to get it to work with your theme.



  • I can’t say with any specifics but flatpaks are sandboxed on purpose, when you override something you’re giving it more (or less) permissions than the developer thought they’d need. “Automatically giving permissions the developer didn’t think they’d need” seems like a crazy thing to try to automate, no?

    Check out Flatseal if you haven’t already. It’s a GUI for flatpak permissions. Might make your life easier in the future.


  • It’s funny because lately I have been applying that quote to people being terrified of “AI”. (I hate that we use that word to describe stuff like LLMs, but that’s another topic.)

    There are countless points in history where a technological advance has rendered some human labor less or no longer needed. There’s nothing to be done about it; that’s how progress works-- it’s why we’re not mostly farmers anymore.

    The solution to technology rendering human labor less or no longer needed is for society to divorce the need to work from living a comfortable life. It’s certainly not to try and hold back or eliminate the technology solely to protect human labor.

    Don’t be terrified of “AI”.