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Joined 8 days ago
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Cake day: April 10th, 2025

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  • I used to mildly follow the biohacking scene a bit over a decade ago.

    Lots of stories of DIY implanting an RFID chip into your hand or finger … and mostly a whole bunch of stories about infections, a few about ‘wait the battery died now i have to dig it out’ … basically just learning the hard way all the lessons actual medical implant designers learned 30 or 40 yeats prior.

    For now, our cyberpunk dystopia is gonna be mostly low tech, inexpensive jerry rigged solutions with as little high tech as necessary.

    Why do you think anyone that actually knows anything about cybersecurity laughs at the idea of having a ‘smart home’ filled with easily hackable or just self-bricking bluetooth doodads?

    I saw a post a few hours ago about Seattle officially turning on its AI camera system.

    People saying ah yeah, tear em down Seattle!

    … these would in all likelihood be the same people that would have their phones on them while they do this, with wifi and gps and bluetooth all actively pinging out their exact identity and location to every nearby wifi hotspot/router and cell tower… and cop cars with a stingray device that acts as a mobile spoofed wifi/4g/5g man in the middle attack that sniffs all your data as it passes it back and forth to a real data source…

    …unaware that gait analysis (exactly how you carry yourself when you walk or run) is a far more reliable way of fingerprinting a person than facial analysis, in the context of a surveillance system…

    The simplest solutions are often the best.

    Leave your phone at home, and get some glasses frames with bright IR emmitters. Not guaranteed to work against higher end cameras, but against most surveillance cameras? Bright enough IR light will just make you a giant glowing white spot.

    Harder to do gait analysis on an amorphous blob.


  • $9.99 on Amazon, probably can find similar prices for similar stuff at a hardware store or auto supply shop.

    If you wanna conserve your night vision, just find one with a weaker lamp or variable strength dial… and then wrap some red plastic wrap over the lamp.

    A laser would have to be pretty strong to illuminate much more than the exact point its aimed at… meaning you either wouldn’t really gain much illumination from the laser and wouldn’t be able to see the toilet… or the laser would be so strong you’d be able to see the beam itself, and that’d wreck your night vision.

    Also, for it to actually be safe to uh… install in your unit, it’d have to be made of bioinert material, medical grade stainless steel or some such, otherwise it would get infected… and if you are more of a grower than a shower, doesn’t matter what its made if, its basically going to hurt and cause damage as your willy goes from nilly to silly.

    Save your junk the trouble, choom.



  • As someone with an actual Econ degree:

    … Yeah, a whole lot of ‘technical signals’ aka, chart reading that a lot of ‘retail’ (ie, amateur) day traders use… is basically astrology.

    Its not quite as absolutely nonsensical as astrology, which is just absolutely 100% bullshit… like, a 50 MA crossing a 200 MA downward… definitely does indicate that stock is not having a great time right now… but as far as the “power” of such a signal to reliably indicate future trends?

    No, basically no. There are some technical indicators that have a slightly higher correlation coefficient of being a reliable leading indicator, but the correlations are not really that strong… there are just way too many other confounding variables.

    Even the quants who work for hedge funds… who use some of the most advanced and complex mathematical models in the world to try to untangle all of those confounding effects…

    …well, they are on average, over a decently long timescale, no better, or even slightly worse than random chance at picking stocks, bonds, a portfolio that will grow more than just the average.

    Part of this is because… if a technical trading strategy that actually works to generate outsized gains… is actually figured out by one of the big boy quants… the other big boy quants will notice this and reverse engineer it from analyzing what their rival is doing.

    Then, once all the big boys are using the same strategy… well now it doesn’t return outsized gains anymore.

    … Which is why all your 401ks are basically index funds for their stock component, which is just a weighted average basket of whichever particular market, usually the DJIA or SP500 as the Nasdaq is historically a bit more volatile.

    Now, all that being said… one arguably ‘technical indicator’ that always has been correct in the last 100 years… is when the bond yield curve inverts… the economy and stock market generally suffer a downturn roughly proportional to the time and magnitude of the bond yield curve inversion… soon after or right as the bond yield curve uninverts.

    Except for right now, the last few years.

    We have now, in the last 4 or 5 years, had 3 periods of yield curve inversion, 2 uninversions… and the broader economy has technically not yet entered into a recession, a period of negative GDP growth.

    But it looks like we are heading now for basically something akin to the Great Depression, as the latest inversion is pretty widely being interpreted as ‘investors no longer see the US Bonds as the defacto save haven, the USD as the defacto world currency’… which means the dollar will devalue as demand for it goes down… which means even if the tariffs went away and never came back, all our imports would be more expensive… and our exports won’t be worth as much… and our external debt to other countries will become even more onerous…

    And we are kind of massively reliant on importing material things and exporting services or non physical ‘products’.

    (Great work Mr. Trump -.-)

    So… yeah you can’t really make a day trading strategy out of that.

    Beyond all that, its probably also worth mentioning that GDP per capita is not a reliable measure of actual wellbeing of the population of a country when it has enormous wealth disparity.



  • … If you do it occasionally, when contextually appropriate… it is funny, a self aware reference to how they spend a lot of time on twitch streams, and are expressing disbelief.

    When you do it all the time, reflexively, regardless of context… yeah, that may indicate that that just is your baseline norm for social interaction and you fundamentally cannot or do not distinguish between the contexts of online interaction and irl interaction.

    There a whole lot of kids now who are just basically raises from near birth by screens. Parents with no free time or parents who don’t give a shit just give the kid a distraction rectangle so they don’t have to … raise them.


  • I only use the term ‘females’ in the context of … some kind of discussion of medical or biological studies … or to differentiate between a girlfriend and a platonic female friend…

    But I am guilty of the whole open fridge and sigh thing.

    However.

    If I turned around and David Attenborough was physically present, narrating me… I think I would be overjoyed and just try to get him to watch a nature documentary with me.

    Or even better, go outside and just continue to be amused at his narration of me, and see if I can’t get him to a park or something and see if he switches over to narrating the ducks.




  • Yes but you also just said ‘Not true’ when I said ‘migating an account to another PDS would complicated.’

    I do grant that I … could be interpereted to have overstated the ability of an ActPub user to migrate instsnces… though I did just say ‘it would be complicated’.

    It is arguably complicated, so complicated it is impossible.

    And I did try to make it clear that getting into that level of features/capabilities of ActPub, I was not sure, and that perhaps a lemmy mod or admin could clarify.

    I am not saying you said this, but the whole problem here is that a lot of BlueSky users and fans consistently keep acting like BlueSky has all these different kinds of capabilities and features now, working currently…

    … when at best, they are planned future features, and at worst, they are an intentionally misleading early access video game style roadmap, with a bunch of super enthusiastic but low technical knowledge early adopters who basically are just enthralled by buzzwords and hope… and those fanboys/girls will just be strung along by promises the devs don’t actually plan on ever implementing, because they don’t actually have much incentive to… and then years later the early users will either realize they’ve been duped, or become delusional, hardcore uberfans, bereft of logic and perspective.



  • It is very, very clear, reading your other comments that you are incapable of grasping the concept of a decentralized or distributed network paradigm.

    Maybe go look at how torrents work, how I2P works, how a MeshNet works.

    Other metaphors would be a guerilla warfare network of cells vs a top down conventional hierarchy where individual units are allowed a degree of autonomy within certain bounds.

    The AT Protocol system is not capable of operating in a non centralized manner.

    Your only option is to point your PDS at either the official network of Relays… or set up your own system of Relays, and point your PDS at that.

    Likewise for an AppView, you can either point yours to sync with the official network of Relays… or another network of Relays.

    There is no meshing, where nodes on the mesh control what other nodes they interface with… there is only branching or forking, setting up an entirely parellel structure, that is not capable of synchronizing with the original.

    Beyond that, you still have not addressed that you said a blatantly self contradicting statement; that people self host relays, but also they don’t self host relays because that is costly and the self hosted relay code available to the public is experimental and mainly used for reasons tangential to the core function of a production ready relay.

    And for the I think third time I have asked this, not of you personally, but in this thread:

    Who is hosting a Relay other than BlueSky?

    Can you provide evidence any independent person has figured out how to do this and is actually doing it?

    I would gladly accept new information and adjust my own understanding accordingly, but all I have seen in this thread so far is multiple people claiming that there are self hosted Relays, and then either providing no evidencd, or showing that they don’t understand the subject and post a link to a guide to, or example of, somehow setting up an AppView or PDS.



  • I mean…

    ⚠️ Warning ⚠️ ️

    Account migration is a potentially destructive operation. Part of the operation involves signing away your old PDS’s ability to make updates to your DID. If something goes wrong, you could be permanently locked out of your account, and Bluesky will not be able to help you recover it.

    Therefore, we do not recommend migrating your primary account yet. And we specifically recommend against migrating your main account if you do not understand how PLC operations work.

    Also, the Bluesky PDS is not currently accepting incoming migrations (it will in the future). Therefore this is currently a one-way street. If you migrate off of bsky.social, you will not be able to return. However, you will be able to migrate between other PDSs.

    This is literally the first thing you see on the page you just linked.

    And it was last updated 7 months ago.

    So I think you mean to say that account migration in BlueSky is currently in development, and is problematic and essentially experimental, and maybe sometime in the future this will change but also maybe not, who knows.

    You are right though that is not possible in ActivityPub.





  • All that has to happen for a ‘Blackwall’ analagous scenario is enough undersea cables get cut/sabotaged.

    Then you’re looking at a much more localized internet, where actually having a reliable or high bandwidth connection to a very far away place requires you to either have an insane jerry rigged solution, or a lot of money to pay for an increasing valuable, still existing intercontinental line.

    Of course, we very much could also end up with a more intentionally constructed type of widespread firewalling as well… they already exist.

    China’s great firewall, tons of other countries that have internet and/or social media killswitches…

    … And we are already seeing massive bandwidth from corpo AI scrapers trying to harvest data to train their AIs leading to people making new ways to detect, block, and or trap them in infinite loops, to save their own servers from going down.