I’ve always felt like the best lies have at least two layers. You think you’ve seen through something and can feel satisfied about it, so now you can stop looking. Otoh there weren’t people with “Truman Show psychosis” before that movie and there were after, so maybe it wouldn’t have been the best choice.

Used laptops on ebay are still decently cheap if price is the issue, lots of stuff in the $50-100 range

Looking at https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/ it looks like they only have categories for desktop, tablet, mobile, so presumably laptops are included

In this case that wouldn’t even be required, because what is being blocked here is a transfer between the publisher and the developer.

federal bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments that deploy Flock-style automated license plate reader cameras

This is so such local governments have other funding withdrawn until they get rid of the cameras, presumably

I might try opencode, I just have not gotten it to work well yet to put together an overall understanding of a codebase, and guess that maybe it is more straightforward with whatever interface the author of this blog post is using, particularly with prompts like the one he mentions:

look at the xfwm4 source in detail and determine everything there is to know about $FEATURE.

tbf I only started looking into using agent frameworks and getting them to do this very recently and only tried a few, maybe it’s doable, but what little I’ve tried did not work. Hermes running Qwen3.6 at 64k context, but many files in the codebase exceed that on their own, and that did not get handled gracefully.

Pretty levelheaded opinion, using it mostly for code analysis and review seems like a good idea. Personally I draw the line at using services like Claude, but I’ve been trying to do this kind of task with local models and haven’t figured it out yet, run into issues with context limits. I like Xfce and will keep using it.

I wonder if it’s possible to train birds to attack drones

That’s fair, and I don’t know about backpacks, but commercial conspiracies to get anti-privacy products into schools absolutely do exist. I know someone who worked for years with technology training programs for school employees and much of the funding was coming from Google, with the main effect of pushing chromebooks and their cloud ecosystem. Lots of free stuff, innocuous seeming propaganda and networking, and hiring people to do this who the target audience will respect and relate to. Money buys access and influence, don’t imagine that lobbying is only a thing in the context of high level government officials. The idea of competing with this as someone with an axe to grind, no bribes to offer, and large cultural differences with the decision makers… maybe it could move the needle slightly, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

I feel that training kids to think of an extreme level of surveillance as a normal and unremarkable thing to be asked to comply with is going to have terrible consequences because it means a generation of adults with the mindset that it is no big deal.

I do now, but I used to lay in bed for multiple hours most nights before being able to fall asleep. Here’s a list of things I do that I think help:

• get exercise during the day
• mostly avoid caffeine and alcohol
• avoid spending time in my bedroom other than for sleep
• take 0.5mg melatonin half an hour before bed
• only take naps occasionally and not as a regular habit
• sleeping mask + earbuds playing white noise + specific pillow arrangement that keeps my head in one place, basically a whole set of stimuli that is specific to sleeping
• eat breakfast in the morning

If he’s taking a clear position that the controversies over whether AI is a net negative for society may have merit but still are not going to be considered because that sort of thing is not the priority of the project, it seems reasonable to not lay them all out or get into why AI may or may not be overall bad. You can say that choice is wrong, but it isn’t an evasive statement.

There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but “is it useful” is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually used it.

It’s implied to be included in ‘other questions’, and that whether AI is useful to development efforts is the only question being considered for whether to permit its use.

There are view keys, but that wasn’t considered to be enough when Binance was demanding more access to fulfill their new compliance requirements and other privacy coins were making changes to give it to them.

Monero is private by default, and lacks ways to make exceptions to that privacy for governments. They don’t like that, because they want to spy on people’s finances, and have been both banning it directly and putting pressure on exchanges to get rid of it. For instance a few years ago the US government got Binance to delist it as part of the settlement terms of a lawsuit against them. Kraken is a US company and is the only centralized cryptocurrency exchange left that both offers Monero and will let you withdraw/deposit US dollars.

The text in the email says a lot:

These limits are being introduced as part of Kraken’s ongoing efforts to maintain risk-based compliance controls while continuing to support XMR trading and transfers.

Emphasis mine, they are doing it to try to keep the government happy, government does not like financial privacy.

It would be nice if these kinds of projects moved towards developing and using interoperable standards, so using something like XMPP seems like a good direction. It makes sense that people have different preferences and dealbreakers for software but it seems like it should be unnecessary for open source chat programs to be the subject of contentious arguments about which one people should use. The argument should be whether to keep using Discord etc. or switch to a unified open ecosystem, not Discord vs picking one of many separate small networks.

So, what are good alternatives? Anything that accepts anonymous crypto payments and doesn’t have accounts?

I get that AI isn’t without its problems, especially Grok with that “Mechahitler” nonsense a bit ago, but there seems to be particular vitriol here. I’m genuinely curious to know why people hate it so much here.

The internet has gotten a lot worse at nuance. People don’t know how to have a perspective other than pro or anti for controversial things, and if you’re going to think of AI as a brand with a team then the team it seems associated with is big tech fascists, a group Lemmy’s userbase will naturally regard as an enemy. Similar story as with cryptocurrency, it’s seen as a brand, and associated with all the negative things that are done with it. Technologies are seen as themselves having a moral stance.

It’s very believable, who wants to admit to having a different opinion when everyone is so angry about something?

I wonder what the ideal placement or naming of such a file would be, where are credential scrapers going to check first?