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Joined 6 days ago
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Cake day: January 2nd, 2025

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  • It’s the difficulty, Plain and simple.

    I knew in the late 90’s what was coming, and have tried to minimize my own exposure, but family and friends just want the convenience.

    I have a friend who specializes in network and data security and he uses all the privacy-invading garbage like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc, because “it’s convenient”. 🤦🏼

    We need a simple, seamless solution to provide the features people want.

    We have some of these things in Freedombox, CasaOS, and some OSS solutions, etc, but these are all beyond the skills of the average user. They’re even a big challenge for me, because I’m busy.

    Though I’m working on a single-box solution for my family, and which provides backup to each other, media server, phone backup (mostly photos and videos), etc.

    It’s pretty hard to do when phones are resistant to third party solutions.











  • So you have nothing to hide, eh?

    Read more here.

    These tvs, like smartphones, track lots of stuff. And the databases they feed make all sorts of inferences.

    They even scan what you’re watching from other sources and can determine what show it is, and report that info too.

    They know when you’re home and leave, to some extent.

    I’ve read of patents for wifi tech in tvs that will connect to other TVs of the same brand for a connection if you don’t set one up.

    They definitely use their own DNS, and probably have some hard coded IPs so you can’t block them phoning home via DNS (I’ve tested this myself). I can see this traffic even when I setup DNS blocks - they still hit the vendor’s service IPs (looking at you, Samsung).

    These companies are openly antagonistic and adversarial to us, and you “have nothing to hide”?




  • It means that mechanically it can’t bind with dextrose (“right handed” sugars) to form crystals. Think of the game Tetris, and how you sometimes get an “L” shaped piece - that’s your dextrose, and it’s mirror - that’s the invert. They don’t fit into the same spaces, so can never neatly “bind”.

    Corn syrup is an invert, and used to prevent sugar crystallization in things like caramel or even ice cream.

    It takes a very small amount of an invert sugar in a recipe (maybe 10%, depending, but I forget) to prevent crystallization from starting.

    Episode 25 of Good Eats, “Citizen Cane”, has a great explanation by a food chemist, and Alton Brown demonstrates it while making caramel.

    (I may misremember some of this, so any food chemists please clarify as needed).



  • Thanks for this - a reasoned, easy-to-grasp explanation of missions, without a lot of technical jargon.

    It’s this kind of writing that’s needed (from any technical field) for those not in that field to understand it. I’m in IT, and work diligently to provide this kind of explanation to decision-makers. It’s not easy, when in your head you see all the “but this” at the technical level. We have to sacrifice high-resolution detail to provide a “good enough” image for people to comprehend. Sometimes that means being “technically inaccurate” - which then gets unnecessarily criticised.

    I wish magazines like Scientific American (which has seriously gone down hill) wrote like this more.