denismi (u/denismi) - Readit News

denismi commented on GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions twitter.com/jaredpalmer/s... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

denismi · 7 days ago

Outside of work, I'm a very sporadic coder. On some side-projects where I'm using Actions, I'll have an inspired few days of progress followed by completely idle weeks/months/quarters.

Losing free Actions doesn't particularly bother me, and I have no issue with paying what is most likely a negligible amount, but I don't really want to have a credit card on file which could be charged some unbounded amount if somebody gets into my account. I've shut down my personal AWS for similar reasons.

Is there any way of me just loading up a one-time $20? That will probably last well into 2027, and give me the peace of mind that I can just let it run. If my account's compromised, or I misconfigure something that goes wild, I am perfectly happy to write off that amount and have my incredibly-low-stakes toy projects fail to build.

denismi commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

256_ · 14 days ago

That's definitely an interesting argument I haven't seen before.

I suppose it depends on how effective these types of measures actually are, and also on how many adults refuse to identify themselves. I would assume governments are more interested in spying on adults than under-16s, so the adults are probably more relevant here.

I hope you're right, though. Maybe there'll be a renaissance of smaller platforms. Probably not, but I can hope.

denismi · 14 days ago

This legislation left it entirely up to the service providers to determine implementation, and so far they don't seem particularly motivated to disrupt my usage by asking me to prove my age.

My suspicion is that fairly simple heuristics of age estimation, combined with social graph inspection, are probably enough to completely disrupt the network effects of "social media" for kids, and achieve the stated objectives well enough that I never have to.

Maybe it turns out that I'm wrong, but why even risk it? If the true policy goal is extending mass-surveillance, why waste so much political capital on such a round-about approach which might yield nothing, or even set back your existing capabilities.

MyID (myid.gov.au) already exists, and could easily have been mandated, or "recommended", or even offered as a means of age verification now. But it wasn't.

denismi commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

256_ · 14 days ago

A lot of the arguments I see in this thread are about whether modern mainstream social media are bad for young people. When the debate becomes about that, it's very easy to defend these types of Orwellian laws. It becomes "This is a problem, therefore the solution is good", without questioning the solution itself. I think this type of thinking is demonstrated, or perhaps exploited, very well by this article (I'm not implying the WEF is secretly behind everything, I'm just using this as an example):

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/davos-2025-special-a...

The first part of that article is an absolutely scathing, on-point criticism of mainstream social media. I find myself agreeing with everything said, and then, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the article pivots to "therefore we need completely 24/7 mass surveillance of everyone at all times and we need to eradicate freedom of speech". That article is like a perfect microcosm of this entire international shift in internet privacy.

People and their governments seem to agree that modern social media is a problem. The difference is why. The people think it's a problem because it harms people; governments think it's a problem because they don't control it.

I think that the root cause of this shift to mass surveillance is that people in democratic countries still have a 20th-century concept of what authoritarianism looks like. Mass surveillance is like a novel disease that democracies don't yet have any immunity to; that's why you see all these "it's just like buying alcohol" style false equivalences, because an alarming number of people genuinely don't understand the difference between normal surveillance and mass surveillance.

denismi · 14 days ago

Australia is a Five Eyes country, with carte blanche access to data that the incumbent social media companies freely share with all the acronym deep-state authorities.

Could you elaborate further on how preventing a sizeable proportion of its citizens from communicating through these established spy-nets, causing them to disperse out to unpredictable alternatives they might not be able to control, increases mass surveillance?

denismi commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

jgilias · 14 days ago

Kids being banned from social media is just one side of the coin. _Everyone_ else being forced to KYC with random websites is the other. I can’t help but wonder, which of the two outcomes is the actual goal here.

denismi · 14 days ago

So far I haven't been KYCd by anything.

Aside from YouTube I don't particularly engage with any of these often, but my Google, Facebook, Discord, Twitter, Bluesky, (current) Reddit, Slack, Telegram accounts all seem to be BAU without new requirements.

If the 80% of us currently holding unambiguously-over-16 accounts are exempt, and it only affects future over-16 users as they're onboarded, then it is a very blunt and very slow form of data harvesting which won't yield useful results until years/decades after all of the relevant decision-makers have moved on, retired and/or died. So this seems unlikely?

denismi commented on Mozilla's latest quagmire rubenerd.com/mozillas-lat... · Posted by u/nivethan

Fnoord · 23 days ago

I guess Mozilla also wants to jump on the AI bandwagon.

Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?

Also, I really do think there should be a fat warning about uploading data from browser to a third party. Yes, every bloody time. Not everything the browser shows is publicly available data. There are people who are going to break the law with this tool (ie. using PII with LLM), and the people who are damaged are going to be innocent third parties who didn't opt-out or opt-in anything.

The BS with not being easily able to disable a feature like this is probably to deter, or because 'user studies' showed people don't want to disable it. Well, fuck that. It isn't rocket science to have a checkbox which just deals with these values in about:config.

denismi · 23 days ago

> Out of the five options available, only one is European (the one I am using). What I don't like is how I cannot add my own custom endpoint. What if I run Mistral locally (with Ollama, for example) and want to use that?

Set up your preferred self-hosted web interface (OpenWebUI or whatever, I haven't looked into this for a while), point it at ollama, and then configure it in Firefox:

browser.ml.chat.provider = http://localhost:3000/

At home I point this at Kagi Assistant, at work I point it to our internal GenAI platform's chat endpoint.

denismi commented on Supercookie: Browser Fingerprinting via Favicon (2021) github.com/jonasstrehle/s... · Posted by u/vxvrs

soulofmischief · a month ago

I got different IDs in regular browsing vs incognito mode in Firefox.

denismi · a month ago

I got different IDs in regular browsing vs my first incognito window vs my second incognito window.

denismi commented on Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/signa11

denismi · 3 months ago

It is fucking wild that we need to resort to putting pig kidneys into humans to squeeze out a few more months of life, while tens of millions of perfectly good human organs are burned or left to rot in the ground each year.

denismi commented on Pass: Unix Password Manager passwordstore.org/... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

denismi · 3 months ago

I recently moved away from pass after a decade or so.

Two main reasons:

1. This laptop up was set up with flatpak versions of all GUI applications, including Firefox, and the browser plugin just doesn't work. I persisted with the work-around of `pass -c <path>` from the run command prompt for a while to paste into the browser, but its not ideal.

2. I realised that the Android app was archived. There's at least one fork, but who knows how that will be maintained going forward. https://github.com/android-password-store/Android-Password-S...

For now I'm content with hosting vaultwarden and using various Bitwarden clients.

denismi commented on Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything wsj.com/business/retail/t... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

mattmaroon · 4 months ago

The tariffs this time are far in excess of anything he did previously or promised to do while running for office again and took nearly everyone by surprise though.

denismi · 4 months ago

This pre-election BBC summary - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy343z53l1o - pretty clearly spells out what has eventuated, describing it as a "central campaign pledge":

> Trump has made tariffs a central campaign pledge in order to protect US industry. He has proposed new 10-20% tariffs on most imported foreign goods, and much higher ones on those from China.

denismi commented on The First 1k Days williamjbarry.substack.co... · Posted by u/wjb3

mquander · 4 months ago

It's very stylistically visible. For example, it's covered in `it's not just X -- it's Y" phrasings that are default LLM house style.

denismi · 4 months ago

The em-dash everywhere. The constant bullet-lists with bolded titles. The emoji-annotated asides for emphasis.