Notices by Daniel Lakeland (dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org)

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/05/off-the-marx-hitler-spectrum/

My German student sent me that blog article and it looks like I should get in touch with that physics professor at UCSD because he's one of the few people I've seen writing that kinda stuff outside of the fediverse at least. #anarchy #ecology #limitstogrowth

@mkj
Unison is pretty nifty. I used to use it to sync my desktop and laptop. It does 2 way sync. But it also handles conflicts, and so its kinda hands on...

Rather than a sync, think of the primary stick as working memory and the backup as historical archives. How could we do that?

My wife's father died last year in his late 90s. He was a professor of Italian literature and culture. He translated Winnie the pooh into Italian as a personal project which he never published. He never published it because Copyright prevented him from doing so without a license which had already been given exclusively to another translator. Now that pooh is out of copyright finally we can put it together and make it available to Italian speakers ... Fuck copyright.

No AP, Signal can NOT be "hacked" as far as anyone is aware. Signal, like any other system, can be MISUSED by the user. For example if you send a message to your lawyer and the prosecutor prosecuting you then you won't have secure comms with your lawyer. Duh. Or if you manually link your signal account to a Russian bot farm they'll be able to see your messages. #signal #infosec

https://youtu.be/92TxCGBNEVg?si=ouvdGYCQAIvvCVaT

This classical guitarist got ahold of a fretless classical guitar and wrote a piece for it. Check it out.

@djl

@HistoPol
It sets up a DNS resolver and a virtual VPN which causes all network connections to go through the app, and then it firewalls those connections. You can turn off internet access to certain apps, filter access to domains, IP addresses, and see logs of everything every app is doing on your phone, block FB, Meta, TickTok whatever you want. Have control over who does what on the network!

Oh my God, how did I not know about RethinkDNS+Firewall+VPN for Android (available on F-Droid) until now? Y'all in the #infosec community been sleeping on this stuff, keeping it all for yourself? #RethinkDNS

So in another thread there was a discussion of how the law came about and it raised a bunch of questions about history and anthropology for me. As a matter of anthropology and history, which came first, codified laws, or states? #anarchy #anthropology

My assumption based on light historical reading is that societies functioned well without codified laws for millennia, and even millennia after the invention of states much of law wasn't codified, it was essentially negotiated ad hoc. I mean Magna Carta was 1215 right?

@ai6yr
Wait, what? Link pls?

The difference between and #Anarchist and a #Liberal is that a Liberal looks at what's happening in the US and thinks "oh my God it's all falling apart", and an Anarchist looks at what's happening and says "oh my God it's all coming together".

The crisis in scientific publishing is at its core another area of tension between authoritarian institutionalism and #anarchy. The people who are calling for "rigorous peer review" and to uphold "high editorial standards" and such are basically at their core trying to uphold a hierarchical view of society. There's "the people who are authorities" and "the little people who must bow to authority". It's trash, in the same way that capitalism is trash and a state run by elected elites is trash.

LOL I woke up to my mentions all blown up with a bunch of messages, and wondered what controversial thing I said right before bed, but it was just tea nerds geeking out on the physics of power distribution and electric teakettles. Keep up the good work fedi.

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
The problems of enshittification are already there even with unicast updates. At the moment the technical problems of updates is solved with vast networks of data centers. Updating a billion android phones is not a cheap process for Samsung or Motorola. They're doing it at the cost of megatons of carbon release per year. We are talking about potentially reducing that to a marginal cost of about zero. A raspberry pi could do it
@dentangle @librecast @onepict

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @dentangle @librecast @onepict

Suddenly streaming things to "the world" is completely democratized. That is, any person who can afford a cell phone can suddenly become a provider of information to a practically unlimited number of viewers without a massive trillion dollar corporation intermediating that access.

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Multicast is a really neat tech that not only allows for greater efficiency in some circumstances, it also allows for greater control of how and what the endpoint consumes. There's a bunch of human and political implications, and certainly push back to be expected from commercial interests.
@dentangle @librecast @onepict

A graphical comparison of the distributions of time-to-completion for naive Multicast vs TCP Unicast, in multiple experiments in three different schedules. (y axis is logarithm of time in hours)

TCP clearly benefits from staggered start. Multicast doesn't seem to matter actually.

#librecast #multicast #ipv6
@librecast @dentangle @onepict

@librecast @dentangle @onepict

This is wallclock duration of client I guess from the end of its initial wait time til it's finished collecting the file. It also would be interesting to see duration of entire experiment in each condition.

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Oh for sure. For example like a an interactive control panel to enable or disable certain streams is a great idea. No one wants billionaires to push harmful updates on them. Of course existing unicast updates have the exact same issue. So it's not a multicast problem per se
@dentangle @librecast @onepict

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
But the idea of doing software updates via multicast is a good foot in the door because it has clear benefits for everyone. Imagine you've got a stadium full of vulnerable IP cameras. No one wants to click "update" on each of 2000 web control panels. And no one wants a botnet of ip cameras. Also no one wants traffic choking their network or to buy a beefy server just to handle the thundering herd of cameras during updates.
@dentangle @librecast @onepict