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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 14th, 2024

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  • A paper-only journal would defend against the state, but not against people you live with. A digital journal can be encrypted, but an intelligence agency could potentially gain access

    A digital journal doesn’t need to be any more government-accessible than a paper journal.

    Depending on your threat model, this could require special hardware, special software, or both. In order of ease of setup, I would suggest:

    • Keep all your data on your own physical media. No cloud services, period.

    • Keep it encrypted.

    • Disable network connectivity at every level that you possibly can, such as:

      • OS level: disable wi-fi, disable blutooth, and disable networking entirely.

      • Firmware/BIOS level: If you BIOS has options to disable networking components (especially wireless ones), do that.

      • Hardware level: If your laptop has a switch to disable wi-fi, use it. If ethernet, unplug the cable. Etc.

      • Physical level: Remove any removable wireless cards or antennas.

      • Wallet level: buy a computer than never had wi-fi or bluetooth in the first place. This could mean a retro computer, or could mean using a micro-pc like some models of Raspberry Pi.



  • Neither of those can stream video in real time AFAIK. They will back up the video file on some unpredictable schedule after you’re done recording. So not ideal for a situation where your phone might be seized or destroyed.

    But if that works for you, there are lots of open-source options that work similarly. SyncThing can sync to any server, and all you’d need to do is make sure your sync destination is network-accessible somehow (VPN, internet-facing server, whatever). Lots of cloud drive apps can auto-upload photos and videos, and some of those are open-source.

    A better off-the-shelf proprietary workflow might be a Zoom call with cloud recording enabled. Then you’d be protected against a sudden (and perhaps permanent) loss of network connectivity.



  • Is it more for situations that need to be compatible with most *nix systems and you might not necessarily have access to a higher level scripting language?

    Yes, and also because integrating Python one-liners into shell pipelines is awkward in general. I’m more likely to write my entire script in Python than to use it just for text processing, and a lot of the time that’s just a pain. Python isn’t really designed for one-liners or for use as a shell. You can twist it into working in those use cases, but then I’d ask the reverse question: why would you do that when you could “just” use awk?

    On macOS, Python is not installed by default. So if you are writing scripts that you want to be portable across platforms, or for general Mac administration, using Python is a burden.

    This is also true when working with some embedded devices. IIRC I can ssh into my router and use awk (thanks to it being included in Busybox), but I’m definitely not going to install an entire Python environment there. I’m not sure there’d even be enough storage space for that.


  • After working for many years in a “fast pace environment” I can’t help but notice that I have increasing difficulties to do simple tasks.

    How many years are we talking?

    A lot of what you describe sounds like you’re starting to have “senior moments”. If you’re past 50, that’s pretty normal. Which is not to say it’s good. “Normal” does not mean good. It just means common. I don’t think you should look for anything exotic if the mundane explanation fits your observations.

    Low-tech suggestion: Keep a notepad in your pocket. Make to-do lists. Cross items off it when you’re done. Maybe put the time in when you cross it off.

    • Put water on stove
    • Turn off stove
    • Make tea
    • Drink tea






  • Yep. On a Blu-ray disk, you have 25-100GB of space to work with. The Blu-ray standard allows up to 40mbps for 1080p video (not counting audio). Way more for 4K.

    Netflix recommends a 5mbps internet connection for 1080p, and 15mbps for 4K. Reportedly they cut down their 4K streams to 8mbps last year, though I haven’t confirmed. That’s a fraction of what Blu-ray uses for 1080p, never mind 4K.

    I have some 4K/UHD Blu-rays, and for comparison they’re about 80mbps for video.

    They use similar codecs, too, so the bitrates are fairly comparable. UHD Blu-rays use H.265, which is still a good video codec. Some streaming sites use AV1 (at least on some supported devices) now, which is a bit more efficient, but nowhere near enough to close that kind of gap in bitrate.


  • 99.999% would be fantastic.

    90% is not good enough to be a primary feature that discourages inspection (like a naive chatbot).

    What we have now is like…I dunno, anywhere from <1% to maybe 80% depending on your use case and definition of accuracy, I guess?

    I haven’t used Samsung’s stuff specifically. Some web search engines do cite their sources, and I find that to be a nice little time-saver. With the prevalence of SEO spam, most results have like one meaningful sentence buried in 10 paragraphs of nonsense. When the AI can effectively extract that tiny morsel of information, it’s great.

    Ideally, I don’t ever want to hear an AI’s opinion, and I don’t ever want information that’s baked into the model from training. I want it to process text with an awareness of complex grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. That’s what LLMs are actually good at.