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ajnin commented on Solarpunk is happening in Africa   climatedrift.substack.com... · Posted by u/JoiDegn
ajnin · a month ago
Ah, capitalism. It's only rainbows, children laughing and happiness. Well, if you're a potentially profitable customer, of course, otherwise you're left on the side of the road. And if you're not part of that low 10% that can't repay the costs and presumably gets violently thrown back to the last century.

Are massive infrastructure projects a failure ? Most definitely. But is corporate driven development the panacea this articles makes it out to be ? I don't think so. Especially telling is the last bit explaining how 3 households of a village sign a contract, then 30, but never does the whole village get solar. Public projects have that universality that is sorely needed. Should that one person that can't pay be left in the dark ? Too poor, too sick, too old, too unique, not profitable!

ajnin commented on Passkeys: They're not perfect but they're getting better   ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/pas... · Posted by u/ashergill
petre · 2 months ago
> Web sites have no business deciding how things are handled on user devices but it's precisely what passkeys enable.

On the contrary, their operators can decide whatever they like, but I won't be visiting them if they go the passkeys route. I can live w/o Netflix or Disney just fine.

Your PII will leak off their platform anyway.

ajnin · 2 months ago
You'll also have to live without banking, government ID ... The "I don't need those services" rhetoric only goes so far.
ajnin commented on Keep Android Open   keepandroidopen.org/... · Posted by u/LorenDB
ajnin · 2 months ago
Android has not been really open for a long time now.

- Many APIs have been moved to Google Play Services (which is not open source), and many apps have come to rely on them. You can emulate it partially but not fully, see second point below.

- Some features like device attestation / SafetyNet fail on non-"official" devices, for example many banking or government ID apps refuse to work on open source os like GrapheneOS

ajnin commented on Passkeys: They're not perfect but they're getting better   ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/pas... · Posted by u/ashergill
joshuamorton · 2 months ago
> Or logging in to your bank without an iPhone or an android.

This is already possible (and common!) many banking apps, for better or worse, use device attestation features that require varyingly official copies of android. Were you already complaining about this?

ajnin · 2 months ago
> Were you already complaining about this?

Yes, "we" were, definitely. I already can't freely choose the OS that I have installed on my phone because I'm limited in the apps that I can install. For example many government ID and banking apps will refuse to work on GrapheneOS even though that OS is security-focused and will probably keep you safer than your regular Chinese Android flavor. But it's not sanctioned by a big international corporation so it's a no. Is your argument that we shouldn't complain since it is already happening somewhere ?

What's an "official" copy of Android ? AOSP is supposed to be open-source. "Official" means controlled by a multinational corporation. I'm very puzzled that the reaction to these entities gaining even more power, outside of democratic control, is met with a "oh it may me worse, it may be not" type of reaction.

Would you be ok if for example your government's website to pay your taxes mandated a device with attestation knowing you can only get one from Google, Apple or Microsoft ?

ajnin commented on Passkeys: They're not perfect but they're getting better   ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/pas... · Posted by u/ashergill
ajnin · 2 months ago
> websites which [...] also want to know how the passkey is being handled by the user’s device to keep their accounts safe

This is exactly where passkeys go too far. "to keep their accounts safe" is always the excuse used to reduce the freedoms of users. Web sites have no business deciding how things are handled on user devices but it's precisely what passkeys enable. The boundary of control of a website used to stop at the interface between the site and the user. Now that boundary will extend to the devices. The idea of property and ownership is attacked again. The device is not something the user owns and has full control over but something that is a gateway to access content controlled by the big Internet companies.

Knowing this, how long until Netflix, Disney other content providers (sorry I don't know which ones are popular right now) demand use of a passkey originating form a device with a Trusted Platform (aka Untrusted User) Module ? This is part of a long plan initiated years ago with Windows TPM requirements, Microsoft account requirements. The gap between closed and open platforms will widen and the path is clearly to apply the Smartphone model where everything is closed, controlled, DRM'd, to other computers. We're lucky the IBM PC architecture was an open one but the war on that is on.

ajnin commented on French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence   bbc.com/news/articles/cvg... · Posted by u/begueradj
yard2010 · 2 months ago
[flagged]
ajnin · 2 months ago
All the cells in the solitary confinement wing of the prison where he's incarcerated (La Santé in the middle of Paris) are exactly the same. Due to safety considerations the inmates don't have common utilities like showers or dining area so they have everything in their cells where they remain most of the time. It's not preferential treatment, in fact it could be considered quite cruel to have almost no contact with others.
ajnin commented on French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence   bbc.com/news/articles/cvg... · Posted by u/begueradj
catwell · 2 months ago
It's way more complicated than this.

First, this is mostly about things that happened before his election.

The tribunal ruled he did not personally benefit, and he did not directly solicit money to finance his campaign either.

However, some of his closest allies (who would become his ministers later) did the latter. The tribunal could not find any direct proof he was involved but ruled there were enough "converging indications" that he knew and did nothing to stop it.

ajnin · 2 months ago
This is disinformation.

The tribunal didn't rule he didn't personally benefit. It ruled that he conspired to corrupt the leaders of Lybia to steal money from the Lybian people and fund his electoral campaign. In my book becoming president of France is certainly a "personal benefit". There are numerous factual evidence, documents from Lybia, fund transfers, secret meetings of his closest friends with Abdullah Senussi, who has been convicted to life in prison in France for orchestrating the bombing of UTA flight 772 which resulted in 170 deaths and is also currently investigated for another plane bombing.

The money he got allowed him to spend about twice the allowed amount on his campaign, giving him an unfair advantage in the election. In other words he dealt with terrorists to potentially steal the presidential election. What Sarkozy did is extremely severe, I'd call that high treason. He got far less that he deserved.

Also it's worth mentioning that it is his third conviction. He already got a 2 years and 1 year sentence which were confirmed in appeal in other cases.

ajnin commented on A laser pointer at 2B FPS [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=o4TdH... · Posted by u/thunderbong
MostlyStable · 2 months ago
As I understand it, this is sort of simulating what it would be like to capture this, by recreating the laser pulse and capturing different phases of it each time, then assembling them; so what is represented in the final composite is not a single pulse of the laser beam.

Would an upgraded version of this that was actually capable of capturing the progress of a single laser pulse through the smoke be a way of getting around the one-way speed of light limitation [0]? It seems like if you could measure the pulse's propagation in one direction, and the other (as measured by when it scatters of the smoke at various positions in both directions), this seems like it would get around it?

But it's been a while since I read an explanation for why we have the one-way limitation in the first place, so I could be forgetting something.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light

ajnin · 2 months ago
No, as he explains in the video, this is not a stroboscopic technique, the camera _does_ capture at 2 billion fps. But it is only a single pixel! He actually scans the scene horizontally then vertically and sends a pulse then captures pixel by pixel.
ajnin commented on What I Self Host   fredrikmeyer.net/2025/10/... · Posted by u/FredrikMeyer
ekjhgkejhgk · 2 months ago
How come everything is "opinionated" these days, and since when has that become a compliment? I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.
ajnin · 2 months ago
What this really means is that there are few configuration options, that it works mostly out of the box, and that it fits the tastes and needs of the developer. I can't really fault open source devs for that, it's a way to conserve resources. If I don't like something I go look elsewhere (or think about building my own then abandon the project in a git repo somewhere).
ajnin commented on Eels are fish   eocampaign1.com/web-versi... · Posted by u/speckx
ajnin · 3 months ago
I'm surprised to learn that it is surprising that eels are fish. I mean, they live in water, they have fins, they're generally fish-shaped... What's more surprising is their incredible life cycle and reproductive journey. I'm surprised the author didn't put that in the title.

u/ajnin

KarmaCake day3094November 1, 2014View Original