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RedClouds

@ RedClouds @lemmygrad.ml

Posts
9
Comments
138
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Is Germany Looking to Put a Backdoor into Arch Linux?

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  • So for sure, everything you said is correct. One compiler, the push to rewrite software (This one I do 100% agree with, I do write Rust, but for greenfield stuff, it's not really useful to rewrite working, stable, secure software, in Rust). Security work isn't mutually exclusive, and what agencies do elsewhere doesn't represent what it doe here.

    I guess my best argument here is that I don't think Lunduke cares about what he claims, I think he's a right wing propagandist that looks for any reason, no matter how small, to push controversy and pull people to his blog to make money.

    So yeah, you're right, security wise it's not a nothing burger, and is suspicious. Though I will still say that even though the Rust evangelists have rightfully been told to back off a bit, there's lots of companies that have decided to rewrite a lot in Rust.

  • Is Germany Looking to Put a Backdoor into Arch Linux?

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  • About this issue:

    The self-replicating back door is a.... real stretch of an argument. This is the kind of things that governments and billion dollar corporations think about. It's (one of) the reasons the Apple has maintained it's own programming languages. Big tech agencies often house their own compilers and make their developers use it (even if it's just a copy of the open source ones) to ensure that if a compiler is compromised, they can continue working on it under their own direction. Also, if Germany could get a self-replicating compiler vulnerability in a compiler, it would hit much harder and further to just attack GCC, which is the main compiler for 90% of c code, which is 90% of the infrastructure of software (Yes, many of those language libraries you use, use C underneath, or at least, their compiler is written in C).

    Furthermore, this is a problem for any language that only has one compiler, and a second implementation of rust has been in the works for gcc for awhile (gccrs I believe). Also, there's many many places where there's a push to move C code to Rust to increase security, this isn't 'wierd'.

    There are so many other problems to consider before going down this route. supply chain attacks, trust verification, code signing, all these come in play way before this. Plus it's not like Germany owns rust, they can't necessarily inject a compiler issue into rust the way Lunduke argues.

    The real issue is that most security vulnerabilities are caused by things Rust seeks to fix, use-after-free and double-free causing crashes that can be taken advantage off by a clever malware writer. Writing in Rust is (a slow and somewhat painful way of) making software more secure, not less.

    About the agency

    Additional note, this govt agency (and I'm no fan of Germany's govt necessarily, but just to note) has given millions to many open source projects. Let's encrypt, pypi, yocto, the openprinting stack, activitypub (you know, from the fediverse, how this platform runs...). They've also recommended languages other than Rust for projects too.

    About Lunduke

    He's a racist transphobe maga hat wearing techie (keeps the hat hidden, also don't know if he's actually a fan of trump, but he's an alt-right conspiracy theorist). I'm "passionate" about talking about him because I followed him for a number of years, now kinda regrettably (we all make mistakes, it's best to learn and move on, but still, this one hurt, I was a big fan for awhile).

    He used to live in Portland, Oregon, and during the pandemic, he moved away because the city had become something that he "didn’t like". That was when the city started to show its real anti-fascist and anti-Trump sentiments. That was also when the whole anti-police movement happened in Portland and Seattle.

    I became suspicious of him after that, and then he basically said that he didn’t want to talk in public about the things he actually wanted to talk about, but that you could pay him money to subscribe to his journal and he would actually discuss those topics. He then left YouTube on his other channel and, I think, left the Lunduk Journal channel, but later came back for a video once in awhile.

    I found some of his writings that were public and non-paid, and he talked about anti-trans topics, gender-neutral bathrooms, and things like that. He has a big enough base that he can pretty much single-handedly create controversy. Although he’s a big Linux fan, he’s a massive critic of all the diversity, equity, and inclusiveness that the field tends to promote.

    He really fuels the conspiracy that "the left" is the worst part of technology. He wants to make technology seem like a right-wing thing. He’s been denouncing the fall of Linux for a while now, mostly because he thinks the developers of Linux are too woke.

  • Is Germany Looking to Put a Backdoor into Arch Linux?

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  • Yeah, not everything he says is necessarily garbage, but he's a maga hat wearing techie who keeps the maga part under wraps because of the "woke police". He has a written blog that's more public, and talks anti-trans and whatnot.

    He's convinced all govt is bad, but not for the reasons us commies do :P

    Rule of thumb is that if he's complaining of something, it's probably some alt-right nazi shit underneath (But a broken clock is right twice a day soooooo)

  • I need some help while I work on getting a job

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  • Sent! Good luck!

  • Comradeship // Freechat @lemmygrad.ml
    RedClouds @lemmygrad.ml

    The burden of being right all the time

  • Late Stage Capitalism @lemmygrad.ml
    RedClouds @lemmygrad.ml

    Capitalist confirms that money and stealing are the only thing you need to be successful

    www.theverge.com /2024/8/14/24220658/google-eric-schmidt-stanford-talk-ai-startups-openai
  • Late Stage Capitalism @lemmygrad.ml
    RedClouds @lemmygrad.ml

    A liberal coming to understand that capitalism cannot solve medicine.

  • rent free

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  • Yeah, they said all the cities looked ugly with parking lots so they just "pretend all parking is underground" and igore the costs/upkeep with something like that.

  • Palestine @lemmygrad.ml
    RedClouds @lemmygrad.ml

    where can I buy high quality Palistinian flags? And to donate.

  • Ask Lemmygrad @lemmygrad.ml
    RedClouds @lemmygrad.ml

    Anyone know if this charity to send wheat to cuba has problems? from the peoples forum.

    secure.givelively.org /donate/peoples-forum-inc/let-cuba-live-bread-for-our-neighbors

  • Are there any decent arguments for free will?

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  • Yeah, as I just responded to someone else, this is the weird intersection between science and philosophy. If I had perfect knowledge about the universe, but I can't predict this quantum interaction, then do I have enough knowledge to predict your actions? How much room do I have before this interaction becomes "well, i can predict with statistical chance, and that is good enough".

    BTW, I wasn't throwing up my hands with "we can't predict quantum, so it's all moot'. Like, yeah, I now there's statistics around it, I know more than I let on in that comment, I wasn't here to lecture about quantum mechanics, and as I stated, the ones that do state that this is not fully known science.

    Like, literally we don't know if we have free will. That's why this is a philosophical argument. This is just one piece.

  • Are there any decent arguments for free will?

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  • This is why it's hard to talk about any scientific facts, even when surrounding a philosophical argument. Yes, maybe we could find a way eventually, but we need that evidence first, and as of right now, there's evidence to show that we actually can't have perfect knowledge.

    But yeah, "anything could change" is like, always there, so, sure.

  • Germany’s last solar module factory threatens to close, blames China rather than their own uncompetitiveness

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  • This is just so goddamn funny.

    Oh no! We can't compete on the global market because China is creating... High quality solar panels at affordable prices...

    It's just impossible to compete! The evil see see pee destroyed our business!

  • Are there any decent arguments for free will?

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  • There's one practical scientific argument against free will. And that is that: that:

    1. Given the base of all decision-making, and even thoughts, in humans is on chemical reactions in the brain.

    2. The chemical reactions we are referring to affect neurons firing. Neurons firing is actually how the brain works.

    3. The action potential is what determines whether or not a neuron will fire. The action potential is based on a ton of teeny tiny interactions at the chemical level.

    4. Those teeny tiny chemical reactions are quantum.

    5. Quantum things are inherently unpredictable. No, I do not mean they are difficult to predict. I mean, even with perfect knowledge, they are literally unpredictable.

    6. Even with perfect knowledge, you will not understand entirely if someone is going to have particular neurons firing, and they can have many downstream effects because there are billions of neurons, and sometimes entire thoughts are caused by only only thousands of them, and literally that would be unpredictable.

    Okay, but here's some caveats.

    A. Just because something is unpredictable does that mean you have free will. In fact, in theory, if it's completely unpredictable, even if you have perfect knowledge, then that actually means you don't have free will and that your actions are just random. So I wouldn't call that better.

    B. Anybody who claims they understand quantum mechanics is lying. Even here I'm kind of just using it as a philosophical tool because I have no idea if you can actually predict anything in quantum mechanics. I just know that the quantum mechanics scientists basically say that you can't.

    Back in my liberal, scientific, neurological, philosophical days. This is basically the end of the conversation I made it to in terms of free will. I haven't really thought about it much since then. Food for thought if you are interested in thinking about it further.

  • Is there a political group that believes in achieving communism through socialism but is opposed to the state ?

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  • I think the other comments are worth reading. I just wanted to make an addendum that I'm not sure that this is anything more than a definition technicality.

    Of course, Marxists use the term "state" to define an entity which oppresses some group of people as a communist. We want to oppress the bourgeoisie.

    But let's think for a moment about what a government is or what a state is. It is a group of people that either represents the people's interests or doesn't, but either way it is a group of people that create rules and laws and have an effect on other people in society.

    So if we decided not to have a state or government or anything like that, but then revolutionists still understand that socialism is required as an intermediary step to communism. So they build a group, whatever they call it, which is in fact a group of people that creates laws and regulations and make sure that the capitalists don't get out of control, etc.

    What would you call that? Is that a state? Is that a government? Is that just a group of people? Either way, it seems to create the same function that a state or government might do. Therefore, this to me seems like a technicality of definitions.

    Let me know if this isn't how you're thinking about it. Maybe it's deeper than just a definition change, and maybe I miss-understood something.

  • How can some people be very intelligent while being douchebags at the same time?

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  • I'm gonna be honest. I kind of probably was sort of somebody like that back in my liberal days.

    I put in a lot of wiggle words because I don't know exactly what you're referring to, but it definitely is how I felt.

    I've done a lot of college. I have science degrees, I have a computer science degree, and I have spent a lot of time in my free time, in my liberal days studying math and science and skepticism and woodworking and finance and repairs and all kinds of stuff.

    Pre-Marxism, my favorite types of podcasts were literally just random podcasts talking about random science-y or factual things, and I absorbed it all, and honestly it probably prepped me to learn about Marxism too because I learned to be very focused and able to take in a lot of information very quickly. In essence, I practiced being able to learn a whole lot even when not under school pressure.

    But...

    I don't think anybody would have called me a mean person or an asshole. In fact, even when I told people I felt that way, they were like, "Nah man, you're fine."

    But I was talking to liberals, not Marxists. My perspective has changed a little bit ( Just joking, it's changed an exceptional amount.), and in a lot of ways I actually do kind of consider myself a douchebag compared to what I know now.

    No matter how much someone knows about a particular topic, it's really easy to put blinders on about every other topic. I got pretty good at this over time trying to admit what I didn't know, but I think that's what helped open me up to Marxism versus all the people who aren't willing to learn about it because of the scary communist terms.

    I put on my alternative hat and I think, "Okay, from this person's perspective, what do I think? What would they think? How would I feel if I was in that position?" A lot of people don't do that. They learn science or facts or something very specific, but they aren't very good at emotionally connecting to other people.

    It's why emotional intelligence is considered something completely separate from typical intelligence. And of course you can't really measure either of those things very accurately. They're just words that we use to describe them. But you can tell when somebody has low emotional intelligence.

    I definitely held emotionally charged beliefs about China and Russia and pretty much anybody that the Western newspapers told me to hate. It wasn't very easy to see things from other people's perspectives. It took a lot of time to open up and that requires dedication. And if somebody's really interested in math or science but not interested in people, they aren't going to put in the time.

    Liberal democracies really like it when people learn science and mechanics and engineering and finance because that is stuff that the professional managerial class does, and that helps the bourgeoisie make money. But learning about Marxism and communism and the idea that there is oppressive systems and not just individual faults of individual people, well that threatens the existence of the establishment. These indirect, or even direct, threats of the establishment get translated into a culture among liberal democracies that biases against these ideas, even among the intellectuals.

  • Alabama prisoners' bodies returned to families with hearts, other organs missing, lawsuit claims

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  • Shoot, sorry about that comrade. Missinterpreted on my end. Sometimes I fail to see the sarcasm.

  • Alabama prisoners' bodies returned to families with hearts, other organs missing, lawsuit claims

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  • Edit: I failed to see the sarcasm in comradsalads post. Sometimes I fail to get out of Reddit mode. Haven't even been on there in a long time! Keeping this comment for history. Sorry comradesalad!

    Is that what's going on in this case though? Because the prison isn't claiming that.

    A federal judge held a hearing in the Dotson case last week. Al.com reported that the hearing provided no answers about the location of the heart. The lawsuit filed by Dotson's family contended that the heart might have been retained during a state autopsy with the intention of giving it to the medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham for research purposes. Attorneys for the university said that was "bald speculation" and wrote in a court filing that the university did not perform the autopsy and never received any of Dotson's organs.

    So no, the prisoner did not donate their organs to trade off a shorter sentence. That should be easily provable, with documentation and evidence to back it up.

    By the way, I'm a communist, I think that morally the best thing would be for organ donations be done by default, and we have an opt-out system. I think that prisoners have rights and should not have their organs taken against their will, but it would be ethically better if there was an opt-out system instead of an opt-in one.

    Of course the real issue here is the propaganda from Usonians that China harvests organs from prisoners against their will, while at the same time Usonian prisons are seemingly doing the same thing.

    Also also, isn't it just capitalist garbage that people can trade organs for shorter jail sentences? Like, what the actual fuck? Organ donation rates should absolutely not be determined by how many prisoners we have. That's fucking disgusting. I absolutely disagree with "no ethical concerns with this course of action" even when someone in prison donates as a trade off.

  • Mandatory reading for all Lemmygrad users

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  • Congrats on not dying another year!

  • Late Stage Capitalism @lemmygrad.ml
    RedClouds @lemmygrad.ml

    The worst devices of CES 2024!

  • Why do Brits make so much better content than Americans on YouTube?

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  • I have a feeling (And I'm in the tech field so it's not like my feeling is uninformed, but I also don't have a lot of data to back this up so sorry about) that because most people who watch YouTube are in the United States ( And because of how populous we are as a country as opposed to a conglomeration of countries. ), the algorithm sort of promotes them a little easier. Whereas people in other countries, Britain included, have to get more popular before they are shown to most of YouTube's audience.

    I saw a thing years ago about why PewDiePie was the most subscribed person. Although I think that information's old. I don't think he's number one anymore. But it basically came down to "he moved throughout Europe a lot and then moved to the United States." And because of that, they kept showing his stuff To new audiences based on the region he moved to, but then he kept his subscribers and his subscribers kept seeing his content over time. And once he ended up in the States, he had the biggest new audience of all, and since he already had a lot of subscribers, it just rolled up from there.

    Now, to be fair, that was years ago, and the YouTube algorithm has probably changed many times since then. But I still bet that there's some regional bias, and the fact that there is so many people in the United States, and that their content gets pushed so much more regularly, is probably just a product of that regional bias.

    Now of course there's like twice as many people in Europe as a whole compared to America, but borders matter to the algorithm. So with all the countries cut up a lot smaller and with states not having the same border rules as countries do, things in the United States just tend to spread faster, quality be damned, I think.

    Because YouTube doesn't publish their algorithm in any way, we will probably never know the real reason. But this is as close as I can get based on what I've heard about previous algorithm practices.

  • Excellent read on China's continued efforts to ensure that wealth couldn’t “game” the education system.

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  • Jesus christ, that chinese bourgeoisie is literally planning on emigrating to America because his children in China would have to... Play fair and equal to the other children in school, and he couldnt just pay for themthem to win... What a fucking asshole.

  • Can we sell people on a digitally-planned computerised economy?

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  • I'm of two minds about this. Let me explain.

    On the one hand...

    People are scared of "Marx", "communism", and sometimes even "socialism" (Though some people think it means "just some parts of europe with more social programs than us", and those people are wrong, but at least have positive associations with the word). Terms like 'tankie' get thrown around loosely, and the USSR, China, DPRK, Cuba, are all "bad places" that westerners don't want to be associated with. In this way, re-naming things can help introduce the concept in a fresh way, because most people actually want to bring about the change that communists/socialists do, but they are conditioned to ignore everything positive about it's history. So far, my biggest problem with explaining communism to people is using communist terms, this throws them into a bad place and think my arguments are wrong from the get-go. But if I introduce something in a terms-neutral way, explaining in great detail instead of using descriptive communist terms, most people are on the same page (With some exception because liberals still believe in 'personal freedom', and it can be difficult to get them to track all the way from a 'peoples congress' to a party that only acts in the way the ->people<- want. Most people of western countries think that it's basically impossible to build it, but would like it if it's possible.... Ugh these people need to learn about China...)

    On the other hand...

    If we continue to use terms like "Means of production", "liberal", "fascist", "dialectics", "materialism", "reactionary", "neocolonial", etc. then people can look these terms up, read old books, and see that the arguments of communists/socialists of the past 200 years have been talking about this. It's a powerful message to send, that this is not new, this information has been suppressed, that the red scare did actually control information and was just as authoritarian as any socialist country they've heard of, and these things are relevant and important to know. Connecting communism to historical events and ideas is important.

    On the third hand...

    This, of course, takes a lot of time. I'm a new commie and it took me a few months of just reading, listening, and studying before I even really uttered the word "communist" to anyone I knew. I just didn't feel comfortable until I could understand enough to speak intelligently about it. Most people are not patient enough to do that, they want to scroll tik tok, facebook, twitter (or x), or reddit, or whatever they do daily, and not think about these complicated things. Most people get their "info" from these garbage sources, and it takes real effort, that a lot of people don't have the energy to give, to understand these things.

    As a final argument...

    I don't know if I want to sell a bunch of libs on the idea of robots building/running everything. See, like in the movie "Elysium" (Yes it's a lib film, not communist, but it does give insight into the struggles of the global south from a lib perspective, and was actually inspired by the writer getting arrested in Mexico and seeing 'the other side of the fence' himself, and forcing some self-reflection about living in a rich place bordering poverty) a lot of those libs will see the shiny technocratic future of making their lives insanely, extremely better, but won't extend that privilege to the global south. If we, as communists, sell them on this future, but then when we are in charge, do something like open our borders, or actually treat Mexico like human beings, or even build that technocratic future of robots building things, but we spread the wealth, and instead of making our lives 1000x better, we making the entire world 100x better, but maybe only make our lives 1.5x better, then those libs might see our work as a 'failure', or as a 'compromise'.

    Anyway TLDR: libs believing in a technocratic future prefer to see see themselves ->living<- on Elysium, having that personal medical machine keeping them young and pretty and acne free forever, instead of letting those medical machines heal disease worldwide, saving a billion lives.

  • In Goebbels' diary, he talks about his concerns that foreign workers were breeding with Germans, something that he writes that he will deal with later.

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  • Ah yes, banning outsiders from having sex with your women. Totally not something fascists would do.

  • An excellent thread on Lenin

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  • This one was hard for me to shake as well. It was common double-think to believe that most government institutions were corrupt, except for the ones run by Democrats. The dems were fine. The more dems the better. Blah, blah, blah.

    And at some points in time I would see CNN or NPR say some stupid shit that was easily falsified. And I would "Give them a pass." It was weird because I was even conscious of it, but my attitude was on the lines of "well, there isn't anything better out there."

    Also the Gell-Mann amnesia effect comes to mind.

  • Ask Lemmygrad @lemmygrad.ml
    RedClouds @lemmygrad.ml

    Anyone have a copy of, or a link to, the "Capitalism, Socialism, and the Physical Quality of Life" article?

  • Comradeship // Freechat @lemmygrad.ml
    RedClouds @lemmygrad.ml

    Check out the lib rage at r/bonehurtingjuice

    reddit.com /r/bonehurtingjuice
  • Late Stage Capitalism @lemmygrad.ml
    RedClouds @lemmygrad.ml

    Inside the AI Factory

    web.archive.org /save/https%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Fintelligencer%2Farticle%2Fai-artificial-intelligence-humans-technology-business-factory.html