Yog-Sothoth

Alternative title: Tumblr tumbles

“work harder for my riches, you MAGA bitches!”

devil’s avocado: this move has saved many people’s cherished photos from disappearing by having them auto save. before Google photos I’d run into cases (I used to do home IT support) where people had years of family photos disappear because they didn’t back them up properly. Having to communicate what happened was never fun.

is Google photos perfect? No, but it’s a great solution for people who don’t want to manage their data.

fully aware! just don’t care much since its so cheap ($270 for 20 TB!) and my last externals (two 10 TBs) served without issue for ~5 years. Just gotta make sure you have backups and upgrade every few years.

I can see why you’d draw those comparisons to “spontaneous generation” or “God of the Gaps” – it’s a common misconception when people first encounter the idea of emergence. However, that’s not quite what Emergentism, especially in the context of consciousness, is suggesting.

The key difference is that emergent properties aren’t truely “spontaneous” or without a basis in the underlying components. Instead, they arise from complex interactions between those components, often in ways that are not easily predictable from studying the individual parts alone.

Think of it like this:

• Water’s wetness: A single H2O molecule isn’t wet. Wetness emerges from the collective behavior and interactions of many water molecules. We don’t say wetness is “spontaneous generation” of a property, but rather a property of the system.
• A hurricane: A hurricane is a complex, self-organizing system with emergent properties like its destructive power and eye. These properties aren’t found in individual air molecules or even small air currents; they emerge from the large-scale interactions of atmospheric conditions.

In the context of consciousness, an emergentist perspective suggests that consciousness isn’t located in a single neuron or even a small group of neurons, but rather emerges from the intricate network activity and complex interactions of billions of neurons in the brain. It’s not about throwing our hands up and saying ‘it just happens.’ It’s about recognizing that complexity can give rise to novel properties that aren’t reducible to the sum of their parts.

The challenge isn’t a lack of evidence that something is happening (we clearly observe consciousness), but rather the difficulty in fully understanding and mapping the incredibly complex mechanisms that lead to this emergent phenomenon. It’s an active area of research, and while we don’t have all the answers, it’s a far cry from “God of the Gaps” because it proposes a naturalistic, albeit complex, explanation rather than invoking something supernatural.

While theories like Orch-OR offer a different approach, many neuroscientists find the emergentist framework more consistent with how complex systems behave in other areas of science.

I’ve been running my server on an old laptop and a 20TB external hard drive connected via USB. it’s not fast, there’s a multi-second delay when the drive goes to “sleep” if nobody has used jellyfin in a while, which makes it appear to not work, but once it spins up it works like normal. this has let me keep things simple and cheap. I back up to another 20TB hard drive, which I recently bought as I could finally afford it. beefy hardware is great but not necessary, if you’re okay with some limits.

Americans have the right to bear arms just as much as they have the right to shout fire in a crowded theatre — it’s a right that can be regulated and both already are, one needs more regulation, but people don’t seem to understand.

is this not domestic terrorism?

do we actually know that no US citizen has been sent? Without due process, there’s no way to confirm. Or am I missing something?

So I upgraded and tested not adding a trusted proxy (using Traefik in front of Jellyfin) and nothing broke. Was it supposed to break or is it just that its insecure? Am I less secure by not adding it as a trusted proxy?

everyone does their own thing, but semantic versioning is specifically:

• Major: Incompatible changes (breaks existing code).
• Minor: New, compatible features.
• Patch: Bug fixes, small improvements.

it’s only gotten better. now you can run it in your browser and play local files

https://webamp.org/

to add even more to what’s already been said, even if Signal’s infrastructure was compromised and they could see messages traveling through their servers, each one is encrypted, the keys are rotated with every message (cracking one, which is nearly impossible, doesn’t give you access to previous or future messages), and thanks to Sealed Sender, only the recipient knows who a message came from. There are many other layers that they’ve engineered to ensure they can’t know anything about you, like private contact discovery, using secure enclaves, remote attestation, etc.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Signal is a publicly available app that provides encrypted communications, but it can be hacked.

This is misleading statement that will only confuse people who want to use a secure messenger.

To clear things up with anyone who’s not technically inclined: Anything can be theoretically hacked. Signal has not been hacked and has no history of being compromised.

The Signal “hacks” that linked people’s Signal client to devices that aren’t theirs were sophisticated phishing/spoofing attacks. The equivalent of getting someone to click a malicious link via email because it looked like the real thing.

A reminder that you still need to do your due diligence even when using a secure service. Technology alone cannot completely protect you.

H.265 is patent encumbered. Blame the 2 or 3(?) patent pool holders (for-profit corporations, unlike non-profit -and-slowly-losing-market-share Mozilla) for not making it free to use for everyone.

This is why AV1 is preferred, it saves bandwidth and there’s no threat of being sued into oblivion.

But then you’re indirectly giving the enemy (Google) power by increasing their browser market share, which in turn lets them dictate the future of the web.

Tesla facilities face wave of attacks as Elon Musk delves into politics

I love good news!

Just a reminder for anyone not in the know:

While Bluesky is better than Xitter right now, don’t forget that it’s still a centralized service that has censored - and will continue to censor - content they disagree with. Bluesky Relay servers costs so much to run that it’s only financially feasible for big corporations to run them. This forces centralization, although technically can be decentralized, and puts it’s end users onto the same path of enshittification that Xitter and other social networks have gone through.

Mastodon, while imperfect, is actually decentralized (including DM’s - all Bluesky DMs are centralized amd can be viewed by its admins) and cannot suffer this type of censorship.