/tech/ - Technology

I found a pretty wild website that seems to be all about open source and trash recycling, it's pretty funny: http://www.southplatte.net/
It also has a github with some very out there code:

https://github.com/LafeLabs/HYPERSIGN/blob/main/geometron.js

And an ebook? https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LafeLabs/pibrary/main/geometronmagic/main-large.pdf

I thought it was interesting, thought I would highlight it.

Redhat is going closed source for Redhat enterprise linux (RHEL).

Jeff Geerling the guru for Ansible server deploy scripts is already jumping ship
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/dear-red-hat-are-you-dumb

Behind the scenes this is probably something that resulted from IBM buying Redhat. They're probably going to wreck the RHEL ecosystem with this move. It seems like a short-term cash-grab.

I don't quite understand the legal stuff how they can close off gpl software. It's probably not a big deal given that there are many other enterprise Linux distros, but it's still kinda fucked up to burn such a big project.

anyone know how to edit/add leftychan to to 4chan x

I'm dropping this thing because I thought it was going to be a one weekend project but ended up taking me an entire week and I have to ditch like half of the features I had in mind when I began. Maybe someone here can use it as inspiration for something better.

The idea was basically to have a base program that runs a simulation and can execute arbitrary planning algorithms, which are isolated from the simulation code. In this case I decided to use Zig for the base program and Lua-JIT for the planning scripts because it is easy to embed. Maybe Julia or Python would have been better choices, but I didn't want additional dependencies.
https://git.leftychan.net/sbhr/econ

I think I'm reaching unhealthy levels of being unable to cope with surveillance capitalism. Some random person caught my face for a few seconds during a whatsapp video chat and my day was fucking ruined, seriously.

Prove me wrong.

    #!/usr/bin/bash
    mkdir tmp out
    for i in {1..16}
    do
      p=`hexdump -n 3 -v -e ' 3/1 "%02X"' /dev/urandom`
      convert -size 32x32 xc:#$p tmp/${p}.png
      ffmpeg -loop 1 -i tmp/${p}.png -c:v libx264 -t 0.1 -pix_fmt yuv420p tmp/${p}_1.mp4
      ffmpeg -loop 1 -i tmp/${p}.png -c:v libx264 -t 0.01 -pix_fmt yuv444p -vf scale=15000:15000 tmp/${p}_2.mp4
      echo -e "file ${p}_1.mp4" "\n" "file ${p}_2.mp4" > tmp/${p}.txt
      ffmpeg -f concat -i tmp/${p}.txt -codec copy out/${p}.mp4
      rm tmp/*
    done
    rmdir tmp

Batch upload the content of ./out on gfycat.com, and paste the URLs in 4 lines (Discord will only display 4 images per line). In case your victim's client can handle the cursed video format change, each animation will consume around 2Gb of RAM and you have 16 of them.

Adapt the script to suit your needs. Enjoy the termination of your account and your newfound freedom!

A video game that nintendo had a legal distribution monopoly on was leaked ahead of the official release. They got really mad about that and they are trying to take it out on the video-game emulation communities, by attacking emulation related software projects on github.

So the lesson here is if you give companies like that money they are going to use it to attack your hobbies. I think this legitimizes "pirating" games because you have no legal option to buy these games without also supporting nintendo's legalistic mafia-terror.

If copy"right" wasn't set up like a monopoly, and you could buy these specific games from any distributor not just nintendo, so that you could choose to buy from non-mafia sellers, it would at least be logically possible to make a case against "piracy". But as long as that's not possible "piracy" is basically just self defense. Keep in mind that nintendo doesn't make games, it's just a legal entity, and not the same as the people that make the games like for example programmers and artists.

Obviously there also is the hole deal with DRM which is total hypocrisy, it basically attacks the concept of personal ownership of your possessions. It's property-rights for me but not for thee.

If they were to reform copy"right" and remove the distribution monopoly aspect, so that everybody with the means to distribute copies was free to do so as long as they gave royalties (as a form of revenue sharing) to the people who actually created the stuff that is being copied. Maybe that would work.

But as long as they keep the monopoly part "piracy" is basically just competing distributors that were arbitrarily banned from participating in the market. Some times people make the strange argument that pirates gain from the work of others but that's also true for the capitalists that own nintendo, by that logic all of nintendo's profits are pirated.

I sometimes feel like the copy-monopolists take the most extreme ideological positions, while we don't and that's why this hole shit drifts ever more towards reactionary insanity where Nintendo gets to rape random software devs on github as some kind of bully-frustration release mechanism and it's a crime if you play with toys "the wrong way". Maybe we should redefine piracy as everything that keeps works-of-art outside the creative-commons/public-domain and drm as a product defect. Maybe that will create a counter-weight.

It's potentially possible to use modified low-yield fusion bombs for power generation.

It's definitely not the first choice for generating fusion energy, but since the technology has already been developed, and the production-facilities are build, one might as well repurpose military tech for civilian use. Weaponized bombs and energy-generating-bombs are similar but not the same, so the currently existing low yield bombs aren't directly usable for this but they could be modified or recycled for raw materials. Existing weapons-stock can be burned up in power generation.

The technical principle is that you put a low-yield thermonuclear device into the center of a giant hollow vacuum "filled" metal-sphere that is lined with led, and by detonating the fusion bomb, the big metal ball gets really hot, and you can use that as a high-grade heat-source for power-generation.

It might be useful to do this as a power-satellite in earth orbit, because space already has a gratis vacuum and you can use a mirror array to send infrared heat-energy to many different power-receiver stations which reduces the load on electrical grids. It can also be used to power container ships and huge water desalination plants.

This would use mostly off-the-shelf parts which would greatly reduce the engineering requirements, and could be build very quickly. As a parallel development high priority project, this could go online in a few years.

The economics on this are pretty good, even capitalism might be able to pull this off, because this is not a long term project and upfront capital costs aren't that high. The political aspect might be harder however, because mass-producing tiny h-bombs might ruffle some feathers.

Samsung is lobbying to get a general exclusion order against phone-screen imports in the US.
They claim it's because screens that are imported by the phone repair-shops do a muh-patent-infringerino.

The real reasons is because Apple wants to switch their screen supplier to BOE, and Samsung wants a monopoly on screens.
Samsung can't go after Apple directly because Apple has enough money to wage patent-warfare until the end of time.
Samsung can't go after BOE because that's a Chinese company, and patent-trolling doesn't fly in China.

The result is going to be the destruction of the repair industry, and a precedent for banning technology parts as a means for installing a monopoly. If you aren't allowed to get parts for fixing your stuff, it's more corporate shit encroaching on personal possessions.

here is a video from Rossmann going into more details
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=HD8Y4xS7fMU
His take is to make Samsung a dirty word.

My questions:
Would it not be a better strategy to bypass this by (legally grey) relabeling tech parts and importing them anyway. So that Samsung gets cut out completely ?
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