Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

  • 5 Posts
  • 93 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Oh I can explain this: You were born with a destiny that doesn’t make sense anymore because the gods had to make some changes to the timeline. Sounds simple enough but some people have actually been given theirs or someone else’s prophecy so now they have to make it happen… Somehow.

    To resolve this situation they often have to come up with clever solutions to make sure the prophecy still happens in a way that the (new) timeline can handle. Such as “experiencing plague” and “getting caught rolling with a naked woman in public”.










  • The largest contributors to Open Source make their money from patents and other IP.

    The data in that video is (probably) accurate but your statement is completely wrong: In that list only Intel makes anything but trivial amounts of money from patents. In fact, Microsoft, Google, and Docker have famously lost shittons of money thanks to patents. They basically siphoned money out of those companies into the pockets of lawyers and provided absolutely no benefit to society.

    For fuck’s sake: Features were removed from Android because of software patents!

    Not only that but Google makes almost all of its money from advertising, not “IP”. Same for Meta which is oddly missing from the graph (even though they contribute to and maintain a ton of FOSS stuff).

    Then let’s talk about #1: Redhat. They absolutely would be 1000% behind banning software patents. It’s nothing but trouble for them.

    I’d also like to note that Microsoft has been very much in favor of software patents since they were invented by the courts (remember: no legislation added software as a category of patentable subject matter: They exist as a result of court rulings!) because they thought they would put an end to open source software (see: Halloween documents). However, software patents have actually cost Microsoft more than they ever helped the company! In short: They’re idiots. They opened a can of worms that’s kept them constantly under attack but because those worms also hurt their perceived enemies they’ve doubled down on their decision.



  • Why? Software patents are already covered by copyright. Anyone can write software and they automatically get assigned the copyright for it. The barrier to entry is basically zero since everyone has a computer and nearly anyone can learn to program by simply taking the time to do so.

    I mean, I also don’t think patents should exist in general but there’s a pretty clear difference between software and things in the physical world. Software is “just math”. And I mean that literally: 100% of all software that exists can be reduced to math that you could–in theory–perform with a pencil and paper.

    There’s a lot of reasons why software patents shouldn’t exist far beyond the scope of patents in general.


  • Imagine if any company could just copy an indie game and scale it up/polish a bit and get all the sales.

    You’re describing the entire mobile games industry. You think all those top apps in the app stores are 100% original? No. They copied other games.

    Also, patents have nothing to do with that. Software is covered by copyright.

    Furthermore, “back in the day” manufacturing was expensive and required huge factories to build stuff (in quantity). The barrier to entry was enormous! People were mostly uneducated and there was not much in the way of “shared engineering knowledge”. Ten thousand people could look at a car engine and have no friggin clue how it worked. That’s why patents were necessary: Disclosure

    These days disclosure has become irrelevant. Any engineer can look at an invention or product and figure out both how it works and how it was made. At the very least, they can figure out a way to make it. Just look at all the Youtube channels where every day people are making complicated machines, parts, and electronics! The mysteries are gone. Disclosure is unnecessary.

    Since the entire point of patents was disclosure why do we still need them?



  • Learning how to ride a bike as an adult can be a bit scary and much more difficult than for a child. But it isn’t rocket science! You can do it 👍

    REI has an excellent guide on learning how to ride as an adult:

    https://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/how-to-learn-to-ride-a-bike-as-an-adult.html

    As an experienced street and mountain rider, I read it and it makes perfect sense. Follow their advice but also:

    • Bring a first aid kit (for the large variety of bandages) and a great big tube of Neosporin/triple antibiotic ointment. There’s a chance you’ll get a scrape on your first try. It shouldn’t be anything serious (barely any pain sort of scrape) but you don’t want an infection 👍
    • Don’t try to pedal right away! Just push with your feet on the ground and get used to balancing when coasting. Also remember: There’s a threshold where you’re going fast enough to easily balance or too slow where it’s easy to fall to one side (instead of falling though, you’re an adult and will simply place your foot down after stopping by holding the brake, right? 🤣).

    Once you get used to pedaling to keep yourself going it’ll be like a switch: Before that moment you didn’t know how to ride a bike and now you do! I’m certain it’s a great feeling because I still remember it when I learned to ride as a kid! It’ll likely become a “core memory” 😁

    Don’t stop there though! Practice balancing on your bike while moving slower and slower. Get the hang of a rapid foot-down (or dismount, haha). Eventually you can get good enough to literally stand on your bike while not moving at all and that impresses other people vastly more than any other bike trick I’ve ever performed, haha. Even super experienced, professional riders will be like, “WTF! How do you even do that‽” Hahaha

    Anyone can do it it just takes lots of practice and if you try it every single time you stop it’ll eventually come naturally. Of course, you’ll look super goofy/clumsy the first hundred times (haha) but eventually you’ll have a biking superpower 😁👍

    Edit: Once you’ve decided that biking is for you take some time to learn how to do basic bike maintenance. Even if your tires are fine deflate one and take it off then put it back on. You don’t want to be figuring out how to do that in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road (and always travel with an extra tube… That’s what tiny under-the-seat bags are for!).

    Nobody likes having to change out a tube in the middle of a trail/out on the road but is inevitable if you bike a lot. Also, if you smash your wheel hard enough it can get bent enough that you can’t ride. No big deal though! Just bend it back! I used to encounter so many people on trails carrying their bikes with bent tires and I was like, “oh! Let me fix that for you…” <WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!> against a log/curb and it would be straight enough to ride on again 😁👍



  • Riskable@programming.devtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldWebsites: Then vs Now
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    1 month ago

    There’s vastly more malicious code now than there was back then. Every company that has an online presence is constantly under attack. Constantly. There isn’t an IPv4 address that exists that isn’t scanned and have an attempt at hacking performed within seconds of being connected.

    Not only that but today’s malicious code is much better at what it does with hundreds of amazing features and methods of branching out using different attack methods. Today’s malware is so good it updates itself very carefully/as secretly as possible so that some old compromised machine that no one thinks about anymore can become the next vector of attack inside your network.

    All it takes is one active vulnerability

    Keep all your shit up to date, people! When was the last time you checked your router to see if it had updates? Hmm‽


  • People are accepting of ads because ads are literally everywhere. A world without ads would be very strange indeed!

    Every logo that exists and every product that has its own name/brand printed on it is an ad. Every product name in a catalog or simple list is an ad.

    A world without ads would be like hundreds of years ago when you could buy soap that just looked like soap with no labels and no packaging at all. When the only food you purchased was bare produce/meat (or the whole animal). But even then any assembled/manufactured product would have some sort of “maker’s mark”.

    I mean, how long have humans been branding cattle? That’s the original use of that term!