I knew about duckduckgo for years and it was always too much friction to switch. I tried like 4 times but always went back to google when I had to research something quickly. Eventually the friction of using google became high enough though that the friction of switching was not that much higher. I’ve been using ddg and occasionally duck ai for over a year now.
I agree apart from the learning part. The thing is unless you have some very specific needs where you need to use ffmpeg a lot, there’s just no need to learn this stuff. If I have to touch it once a year I have much better things to spend my time learning than ffmpeg command
Agreed. I have a bunch of little command-line apps that I use 0.3 to 3 times a year* and I'm never going to memorize the commands or syntax for those. I'll be happy to remember the names of these tools, so I can actually find them on my own computer.
* - Just a few days ago I used ImageMagick for the first time in at least three years. I downloaded it just to find that I already had it installed.
The thing about ffmpeg is there's no substitute for learning. It's pretty common that something simple like "ff convert" simply doesn't work and you have to learn about resolution, color space, profiles, or container formats. An LLM can help but earlier this year I spent a lot of time looking at these sorts of edge cases, and I can easily make any LLM wildly hallucinate by asking questions about how to use ffmpeg to handle particular files.
Hacking is not just authorised use of a system. Hacking and hacking techniques can apply to systems you fully own or systems which you are authorised to hack.
Hacking is using something in a way that the designer didn’t anticipate or intend on.
Adobe designed pdf to behave this way. Placing layers over text doesn’t remove the text from the file. They have a specific redaction feature for that purpose.
Hacking is any use of a technology in a way that it wasn’t intended. The redaction is so stupid as to almost appear intentional, so maybe you’re right, this isn’t hacking because maybe the information was intended to be discovered.
I think it really depends on what kind of anime you’re talking about. Like if you’re watching one piece fan art and the British police raided you, absolutely ridiculous. If you’re looking at naked artistic depictions of minors then it’s clearly not just “anime artwork”. BTW I’m not saying that someone who looks at that should be treated the same way as someone who harms a child but I’m just saying the cultural acceptance in the uk between those two extremes is vast.
They just said "illegal" artwork, they didn't stipulate. (So this could be incest, bestiality, loli, etc, etc.)
Why would cultural acceptance matter? Classifying drawing something - regardless of what it is - as a "crime" is ridiculous.
Like, for example, I don't like rape (or strangulation, something else they'll start arresting people for now since they recently made it a crime), but I don't want to see people jailed for drawing it, or jailed for looking at anime/drawings/manga/visual novels of/containing it.
I'd rather see people who actually abuse, exploit or cause general suffering to another human being arrested and jailed.
> I think it really depends on what kind of anime you’re talking about
Does it? If I draw a naked stick figure with boobs and say it is 14, is that morally wrong? At what point should a person care? Their point is that a drawing doesn't hurt people right?
Just because it’s hard to spot the point where it becomes immoral doesn’t mean it’s not immoral. I can’t tell you at what point a person should care, and I wouldn’t want to be the judge of that. My point is that saying they’re looking at “anime” is really downplaying what’s happening.
I don’t personally believe the drawings we’re referring to hurt anyone, but that had nothing to do with my argument anyway. Many people will be disgusted by it, and others will not, meanwhile most people seem to be okay with mainstream anime.
> It can in certain circumstances encourage a market or normalise abusive behaviour.
Just like the printed word. Books should be banned and burned. We should start with Orwell since his writing has been used as a manual for so much abusive behaviour.
> Can it? In the same way? It feels like your argument comes down to handwaving. Circumstantial law is hardly a novel thing.
I think that was their point: your argument seems handwavey, because anything can be bad "in certain circumstances".
Hold the door for someone? Seems nice. But you could be insulting them by doing so. Or letting a virus in by having the door open too long. Or wasting energy and contributing to climate change by letting the conditioned air out. Indeed, under certain circumstances, it's bad.
Sure, many things can be "bad" if you are happy to go with increasingly absurd reasoning, but I Think that's quite an unfair misrepresentation of both what I said above and of the arguments that were raised in parliament before this law was introduced. Insulting someone by holding a door open might be "bad" but could you really argue for legislating against it? Bringing in the word bad moves the goalposts quite a bit in order to frame the original position as equally limp and absurd.
How do you determine that though? Do you put the pictures in front of a jury? I am riding the metro daily in a big Asian city and I am pretty sure many of the "anime" ads will be unacceptable on the other side of the world.
I think it’s more complicated that. LLMs have allowed me to do things that I couldn’t do before which definitely made programming and hacking things together more fun, and massively increased what I could do in my limited free time. It also allowed me to manually do the things I enjoy while making the less fun parts go faster. On the other hand I recently tried doing a larger project in codex and it wasn’t fun anymore because codex quickly created a system that was way beyond my understanding, it didn’t work, and I had no idea how to fix it. So I guess it just depends how you use it.
When you think about it, why should you trust any app that tries to trick you when you’re looking for something else? It’s such awful behaviour, I don’t want any part of it, I don’t want to reward it so in any place where I can’t forcibly remove this trash I go out of my way to never click on the ad results even if in the rare case it’s exactly what I searched for.
You are also not the target of these ads. My parents, on the other hand? My mum doesn't have a lot of experience with this stuff, and my dad's eyesight deteriorated. They could definitely fall for lookalike apps in an app store.
This seems like something in need of some laws and regulation. It fosters a kind of phishing-light ecosystem. Apple and Google are laughing to the bank while pretending they're helpless against fraudulent apps. They're not, they're creating a marketplace that makes them viable in the first place.
Some people think ad blocking is unethical but I think until there’s more sensible regulation or behaviour it’s your moral duty to block ads, especially on less tech savvy family member’s devices. We’re in a war and the tech companies have been playing dirty for decades.
I don’t think they would have done it any other way, it always had to be a slow ratcheting of control over the user. If the user hostile experience that exists today was the default back then, everyone would have moved to something else while they still could.
Doesn’t have to be an apple box either. A raspberry pi is what I’m using. I’m in the exact same situation, living in one country temporarily but citizen of another, and I have an exit point in my home country at my parents place on a raspberry pi. Basically any computer will work.
The advantage of the AppleTV is that it's basic consumer hardware that a lot of people have, that you can provide for them at a reasonably low cost if they don't, and that doesn't really require much in the way of tech skill for the person whose house it's in to keep it up to date. You don't even have to do anything to update versions - tvOS will do it automatically.
I can't find it right now but there was a post announcing the port to tvOS on their blog where a developer from the UK (but living in the US) talked about how it let him buy, configure, and ship a simple consumer box that uses little power and needs minimal hands-on maintenance to his parents' house as a replacement for a server he had been running in their house as a VPN endpoint for this sort of thing - so he could watch BBC, etc.
I wouldn't want to update a RPi that's in someone else's house on the other side of the ocean.
Android TV works great as well. I have it running on an old Chromecast that cost less than $50 new.
While I still prefer running a plain Wireguard VPN if possible (i.e. when there's a publicly reachable UDP port), the really big advantage of Tailscale over other solutions is that it has great NAT traversal, so it's possible to run a routing node behind all kinds of nasty topologies (CG-NAT, double NAT, restrictive firewalls etc.)
I have run into the firewall problems before. Even seen them that block authentication but -if already connected to the tailnet before joining the WiFi in question - will continue to pass data. OpenVPN would not connect and couldn’t handle the IP address switch.
At worst, I turn on phone hotspot, authenticate, then switch back to WiFi. A purely serendipitous discovery on my part, but a very welcome one.
Interesting, maybe they block the orchestration servers of Tailscale, but not the actual data plane (which is almost always P2P, i.e., it usually does not involve Tailscale servers/IPs at all)?
I'm sure they do, but the question is, why did OpenVPN fail? It's pure P2P. I've got a dynamic DNS through afraid.org, and that resolves on that network, so it's not just DNS-level blocking. I effectively have a static IP anyway; there's no CGNAT going on, so I've discovered that I misconfigured my DDNS once or twice only when afraid.org emailed to tell me that I hadn't updated in X months.
Were you using the semi-well-known port (1194)? Otherwise, maybe it's just more fingerprint-able, or whatever DPI the firewall uses hasn't caught up to Wireguard yet?
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