Are you saying I was being silly?

You might be onto something

Okay, so way back when, Google needed a way to install and administer 500 new instances of whatever web service they had going on without it being a nightmare. So they made a little tool to make it easier to spin up random new stuff easily and scriptably.

So then the whole rest of the world said “Hey Google’s doing that and they’re super smart, we should do that too.” So they did. They made Docker, and for some reason that involved Y Combinator giving someone millions of dollars for reasons I don’t really understand.

So anyway, once Docker existed, nobody except Google and maybe like 50 other tech companies actually needed to do anything that it was useful for (and 48 out of those 50 are too addled by layoffs and nepotism to actually use Borg / K8s/ Docker (don’t worry they’re all the the same thing) for its intended purpose.) They just use it so their tech leads can have conversations at conferences and lunches where they make it out like anyone who’s not using Docker must be an idiot, which is the primary purpose for technology as far as they’re concerned.

But anyway in the meantime a bunch of FOSS software authors said “Hey this is pretty convenient, if I put a setup script inside a Dockerfile I can literally put whatever crazy bullshit I want into it, like 20 times more than even the most certifiably insane person would ever put up with in a list of setup instructions, and also I can pull in 50 gigs of dependencies if I want to of which 2,421 have critical security vulnerabilities and no one will see because they’ll just hit the button and make it go.”

And so now everyone uses Docker and it’s a pain in the ass to make any edits to the configuration or setup and it’s all in this weird virtualized box, and the “from scratch” instructions are usually out of date.

The end

on the 50 communities here on lemmy he mods to silence discussion that doesn’t align with his views.

Who is he on Lemmy? I didn’t know he was here too. Do you have some examples of silencing discussion that doesn’t align with his views?

I’m aware of reports of him doing messed-up moderation on Reddit, which is sus. If it sounded like I was in his corner I am not. I’m just saying like you were that more clarity would be better.

Edit: There’s also this and this

Yeah. The instant I read “racist, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ views in a position of power” I strongly suspected that this is some bullshit.

IDK man. I’ve heard bad things about carrotcypher before, I have not looked into them one way or another. It’s sort of dicey both ways: I’m paranoid enough to be wary of a moderator who seems right-wing or pro-corporate who seems to be abusing their position, and also paranoid enough to be wary of a sudden hue and cry that a particular moderator needs to be removed because they are “problematic” in poorly-specified ways.

Just taking a cursory look at it: Mike’s defense of carrotcypher seems pretty credible. He looked at all carrotcypher’s past moderation actions and decided that it all looked fine and explained why with details. The criticism seemed a little unhinged. The one link that I saw at a quick glance was a link to a single one-line reddit comment, saying that it called CNN propaganda when it didn’t, and saying he favored deporting Mahmoud Khalil when he didn’t.

Then there was a bunch of stuff like:

this is a wildly disgusting person that you welcome into your space. i know that as a trans woman i cannot trust any fosstodon user while knowing what kind of person you happily let on your staff, whether theyre acting on those beliefs or not. it’s not safe for our mostly queer userbase to talk to your fascist-harboring userbase.

It would have been much easier to just link to some of the messed-up things, instead of asserting them and getting all upset and using the “I’m queer so don’t you DARE argue with me or you will be a ‘problematic’ person too” card.

IDK, I’m not decided on carrotcypher specifically and he might be a big POS and I just haven’t seen it yet. I have seen arguments that he removed particular reddit posts that there was no legitimate reason to remove. I just wish there was more light and less heat about why exactly he is a problem. Basing it on “this is stuff he removed that he shouldn’t have, look, links” is way better, in my opinion, than just being loudly upset about it.

Dude I didn’t pick this weird pedantic fight and get all upset about what Wikipedia says and what a problem it is. You did. Now that it turned out you were making it up, it’s all of a sudden weird for people to care about it. Okay.

Wait, so up there it looks like the actual truth is not “Some years later I tried again but you could no longer make changes IIRC. Just checked, info still missing.” but in fact that the exact information is already in the article.

Glad we had this talk lol. I mean it’s a pretty trivial thing to get upset about even if it were true, I can somewhat believe that some random person might have reverted your edits for bad reasons, but I am wholly unsurprised to learn that there was no grand conspiracy and the information in the article has been corrected now even though you specifically said that it wasn’t.

It strongly looks like you’re making things up lol

It is trivial to check what changes someone did or didn’t make 10 years ago on Wikipedia, if you know which page of Wikipedia it was on. Which page was it on?

What does the article mean “Juniper Networks, despite being a “Good Article”, is also mostly PR”?

It’s all part of their various horseshit attempt at making something which is pretty simple an innocuous into something that it isn’t.

Within the last few days, it looks like someone raised the issue on this guy’s page, the arbitration committee is getting in touch with him, and he’s saying he’ll get back to them. Presumably there’s a minor conflict of interest and they’ll look over the article and make sure he didn’t do anything slanty to it and then tell him to stay away from COI-adjacent articles in the future.

There’s absolutely nothing sinister here, and they are stringing together a bunch of misleading stuff (like “mostly PR”) to make a mountain out of a molehill to discredit Wikipedia. I’ve noticed a bunch of people doing this, presumably there is some organized campaign which actually is sinister in the way they’re implying WP is, that is trying to make people think badly of them.

Yeah. It is rules 1, 2, and 3 that when a low-level employee does this kind of thing for you, you don’t publicly thank them or identify them by name and possibly get them in trouble. Your greatest and most sincere thanks is represented by you agreeing to keep quiet.

Melissa will probably be fine, but maybe not. Just take the cookies.

yes, assuming Trump’s goal is to have more manufacturing in the US, tariffs will

Destroy domestic manufacturing by enacting insane tariffs on the raw materials it depends on, without any nontrivial increase in manufacturing to counterbalance the pain, even in the long run.

This type of command economy “might makes right” stuff can fail catastrophically. As recently as the 1990s, there were people starving in North Korea by the hundreds of thousands (at least) because someone decided that enforcing his will was more important than listening to people who even on the most rudimentary level knew what they were doing.

I mean, if I am more qualified at recognizing horseshit than The Guardian is, that’s a problem. It’s weird to me that you are classifying this view of how Trump operates with respect to things like tariffs and whether or not he is a total moron as a matter of opinion.

I’ve seen them get other things about him wrong before, too. They were super happy about how Trump was finally going to lay the hammer down on the Israelis and create peace in Gaza:

https://ponder.cat/post/1323549

There were a bunch of Lemmy commentators in there, too, saying more or less that it was super easy, Trump had made progress with his tough negotiating, and this was just evidence that Biden hadn’t been trying to do it. Since that happened, Isarel’s occupied roughly half of Gaza and resumed killing at scale, and also starting doing the same a little bit in the West Bank. They’re also not letting any food in.

For example, think about the sheer amount of executive orders he has put out in his first few days of his second term. This must have been planned and prepared.

Absolutely true.

It was not just some random sh*t.

Also true. They put together a detailed plan about it, it was published. Some of it was his own ideas but there was also a lot that was coordinated and coherent, put together by smarter people.

You may be underestimating him a lot if you only think of “insane” etc. It was for a purpose.

Now you’re switching back to talking about tariffs. Those were not for a purpose. He literally thinks (or thought, at one point, I don’t know if he still does) that the country doing the exporting pays the tariff. He put 50% tariffs on Lethoso. That’s not underestimating, that’s just facts.

Other more coherent people have written about his motivations, the source of his tariff ideas, all kinds of stuff. You can do analysis of any of his ideas and the goals (if any) behind them without agreeing with any of it. But this article’s thesis is more or less “he’s trying to devalue the dollar to set right the balance of trade, and it might work” and that is a bunch of sanewashing and horseshit with some additional fantasies about how well Reagan’s stuff worked out thrown in for good measure.

The world is much more than “pro or against trump”. They want diversity and they are doing well.

You don’t need to have diversity between horseshit and non-horseshit. I’m fine with many many points of view, including pro-Trump ones if they make sense (one random example from recently being that he seems genuinely surprised and angry that Russia broke the cease-fire instantly). My complaint with this article is not that it’s pro-Trump, it’s that it is horseshit.

This is one of the weirdest goddamned articles I have ever read.

The US dollar being devalued so people could accept our exports more readily would make some sense if we had manufacturing capacity to make some exports people will buy. We don’t. What will happen is we’ll lose the ability to buy everyone else’s stuff, and the history of where global capital chooses to site factories argues strongly against them moving them back to the US even with a cheaper dollar. It’s just suffering with no upside, short term or long term.

Other insane things he says, like that defaulting on T-bills would be sort of a good thing or that Reagan’s people made “the economy” boom in the 1980s, are sort of side notes. And the idea that Trump is competently executing on plans that can be laid out coherently is also laughable. The whole thing is just insane in multiple overlapping respects. Why are they putting this in the newspaper? This is not the first totally insane pro-Trump story I have seen in The Guardian.

I know it’s only vaguely related, since they’re not US-funded, but at some point I think it would be hilarious (in a particularly poignant way) if the Lemmy developers’ funding got cut off by the process of the explicitly rabid governments they are fans of finally succeeding at destabilizing the friendly Western countries where they live to the point that NLNet wasn’t funded anymore. As I understand it, NLNet is already facing some headwinds because the friendly liberal elements in EU politics are getting replaced by the same kind of “fuck everyone just give money to rich people and also anyone who disagrees with me dies” elements that Russia likes to give money and social-media-shilling campaigns to support.

Surely Russia and China will jump to the front and fund basic infrastructure work for the good of everyone, if that happened. They could count on it happening, instead of having to get jobs.

Surely.

if you assume the network is badly behaved, fedi breaks down. it makes no sense to me that everything is taken for granted, except privacy.

This is backwards in my opinion.

What you described is exactly how it works. Everything in the network is potentially badly behaved. You need to put on rate limits, digital signatures for activities back to actors, blocks for particular instances, and so on, specifically because whenever you are talking with someone else on the network, they might be badly behaved.

In general, it’s okay in practice to be a little bit loose with it. If you get some spam from a not-yet-blocked instance, or you send some server a message which it has a bug and it doesn’t deliver, then it is okay. But, if you’re sending a message which can compromise someone’s privacy if mishandled, then all of a sudden you have to care on a stricter level. Because it’s not harmless anymore if the server which is receiving the message is broken (or malicious).

So yes, privacy is different. In practice it’s usually okay to just let users know that nothing they’re sending is really private. Email works that way, Lemmy DMs work that way, it’s okay. But if you start telling people their stuff is really private, and you’re still letting it interact with untrusted servers (which is all of them), you have to suddenly care on this whole other level and do all sorts of E2EE and verification stuff, or else you’re lying to your users. In my opinion.

1. This is nothing to do with ActivityPub. It’s to do with Mastodon’s custom implementation of “private” posts.
2. Making it extremely clear to everyone that random server software can expose Mastodon’s “private” posts is absolutely the right way to handle disclosure here. Dan didn’t even try to do that, he just fixed the bug, but if he had made a big post saying “hey this is not my fault Mastodon private posts are not private, here’s full explanation about what’s going on” I think that would have been completely fine. This is not a “vulnerability” in the traditional sense like a buffer overflow, it’s just a design flaw in Mastodon which other softwares are by convention agreeing to cater to. I think the culture of security (and the level of clue in general) in the Fediverse has wandered into territory where “let’s all pretend that these posts are secure and get mad at anyone who reveals that they are not” is widely accepted now, but that doesn’t make it right.

Yeah, there’s also this:

A more recent issue came about when Pixelfed’s creator, Daniel Supernault made the details of a vulnerability public before server operators had a chance to update, which would have left the fediverse vulnerable to bad actors, she says. (Supernault has already apologized publicly for his handling of the issue that had affected private accounts.)

In the case of the Pixelfed issue, for instance, the Hachyderm Mastodon server, which has over 9,500 members, decided it needed to defederate (or disconnect from) other Pixelfed servers that hadn’t been updated in order to protect their users.

It is weird to spend almost half the words in this, pretending that something in Pixelfed that wasn’t a problem on Pixelfed’s side was. This is the weirdest “vulnerability” in the world to pick if you want to pick one to hold up extensively as an example.