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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • There is already plenty of empirical evidence to support the claims of the harms of social media, but in spite of this, change is glacial.

    I think at one point you could make the same argument about medicines. The problem is that politicians are appointed with a popularity contest.

    I don’t remember all the arguments of the article, but when you think about it, the harms of social media are medical. It’s possible that we could expand the scope of the current medicine approval boards to include algorithms, with their job not being to understand the algorithm but to understand the research on mental health.

    I don’t have all the answers, but I do think it’s an idea worth exploring.


  • In my view social media is probably not the problem, but the algorithms they use that are designed to be addictive and manipulative.

    I saw an article once arguing that the algorithms should be regulated in a similar way to medicine. Give some base ingredients they can use freely (e.g. sort by newest first), then require any others to run studies to prove they are not harmful.

    There would be an expert board that approves or declines the new algorithm in the same way medicines are approved today (the important bit being that they are experts, not politicians making the decision).








  • A point missing from the headline:

    While being vegetarian appeared to be protective overall, the scientists also found that those who follow a vegetarian diet had nearly double the risk of the most common type of cancer of the oesophagus, known as squamous cell carcinoma, compared with meat eaters. This may be due to vegetarians being deficient in key nutrients such as B vitamins, the team suggested.

    So you can just choose what kind of cancer you want by altering your diet.

    I feel like we’re just gonna end up back where we always do, with moderation being the best policy. Don’t eat too much of any one thing but eat some of everything.


  • You sound like you want to go all in on federated services but there are plenty of other things to do.

    I love Nextcloud, works well when set up through the Nextcloud All In One docker setup, but it is a little different to other things so it might not be a starting point depending on your experience. Lots of apps to add for extra functionality. But don’t replace your cloud storage with it until you’re confident of your backups (and ability). I ran it for years to use for the apps and minor things before I finally went all in.

    I think a wiki is a great thing to have. Use it to document what you’ve done so you can remember.

    Then there’s media. With the storage I guess TV/movies might be out, but there’s Audiobookshelf for Audiobooks, Kavita or Calibre Web for eBooks. I like Jellyfin for music (but using the Finamp app not the Jellyfin one), but others like dedicated music setups like Navidrone.

    I buy my music from Bandcamp where available and Qobuz where it’s mainstream labels, then I can have my own little Spotify. Finamp even lets you download playlists or your whole library to your device for offline listening. I use Findroid for watching things, which also allows downloading. Last I checked the Jellyfin app didn’t have Netflix-like downloading, just downloading the files to your downloads folder.

    I guess you might not fit a whole lot with 300GB storage though, especially after you fit the databases of half a dozen federated services.

    If you have space, perhaps a photo service like Immich or Photoprosm.

    If you have friends maybe a private sharing forum like Zusam.

    If you have family then maybe family tree software like webtrees.

    I run so many things, they all get used, and I’m always happy to talk about them!


  • Firstly, it is much, much easier to compromise the website hosting than the binary itself, usually. Distributed binaries are usually signed by multiple keys from multiple servers, resulting in them being highly resistant to tampering. Reproducible builds (two users compiling a program get the same output) make it trivial to detect tampering as well.

    Yeah this is a fair call.

    But at the same time, I have little confidence in my ability to spot these bugs.

    This is the key thing for me. I am not likely to spot any issues even if they were there! I’d only be scanning for external connections or obviously malicious code, which I do when I don’t have as much trust in the source.

    As a sidenote, docker doesn’t recommend their install script anymore.

    Yeah I used it as an example because there are very few times I ever remember piping to bash, but that’s probably the most common one I have done in the past.