Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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  • 700 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • No, simply because even with pure CSS and even pure HTML you can find ways to leak some information about the browser. For example, a background image that only loads on 1920x1080, another for 2560x1440, and so on. Make hundreds of those for every possible resolution (they can be the same file on the server but at a different path), and there you go, you now figured that the client downloaded img/background/2448x1280.png from the server logs. You can use the same trick for fonts as well, you just apply the same trick on a box on the page that is sized based on text content. Repeat for every font you want to test for.

    There’s just a ton of those little features that are for performance optimizations because loading a 4K background on a 480p phone is a bad experience for everyone involved. Sometimes you need to know the size of some elements to position other elements relative to it. You need the mouse cursor position to open popups at the right place. You need the window size to realign popups and modals. You’d have to go back to text based only sites like it’s the 80s and 90s to avoid that kind of fingerprinting.

    And thus Tor’s solution: everyone’s got the same window size, same fonts and everything.






  • The problem with Fedora and especially the atomic versions is that when you Google “how to do X on Linux” you pretty much always get information for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives. The atomic versions have it mildly harder because now you also have to learn how immutable distros work, and you can’t just make install something from GitHub (not that it’s recommended to do so, but if you just want your WiFi to work and that’s all you could find, it’s your best option).

    It’s not as bad as it used to be thanks to Flatpak and stuff, but if you’re really a complete noob the best experience will be the one you can Google and get a working answer as easily as possible.

    Once you’re familiar and ready to upgrade then it makes sense to go to other distros like Fedora, Nobara, Bazzite, Kionite and whatnot.

    I don’t like Ubuntu, I feel like Mint is to Ubuntu what Manjaro is to Arch, Pop_OS is okay when it doesn’t uninstall your DE when installing Steam. But I still recommend those 3 to noobs because everyone knows how to get things working on those, and the guides are mostly interchangeable as well. Purely because it’s easy to search for help with those. I just tell them when you’re tired of the bugs and comfortable enough with Linux then go start distrohopping a bit to find your more permanent home.


  • Ask your admin to turn it off, or if you’re the admin, turn it off.

    They really went with the worst possible way to implement this in that it mangles the post to rewrite all images to the image proxy, so it’s not giving you a choice. So if you want the original link you have to reprocess it to strip the proxy. It’s like when they thought it was a good idea to store the data as HTML encoded, so not-web clients had to try to undo all of it and it’s lossy. It should be up to the clients to add the proxy as needed and if desired. Never mangle user data for storage, always reprocess it as needed and cache it if the processing is expensive.

    Now you edit a post and your links are rewritten to the proxy, and if you save it again, now you proxy to the proxy. Just like when they applied the HTML processing on save, if you edited a post and saved it again it would become double encoded.

    Personally I leave it off, and let Tesseract do it instead when it renders the images. It’s the right way to do it. If the user wants a fresh copy because it’s a dynamic image, they can do so on demand instead of being forced into it. And it actually works retroactively compared to the Lemmy server only doing it for new posts.



  • Lemmy wasn’t ready and still mostly not ready for a mass Reddit exodus. The Reddit API fiasco wasn’t anticipated by anybody and the large influx of users exposed a ton of bugs and federation issues.

    But it’s not a failure, yet. I’m sure Reddit had growing pains after the Digg exodus too. Some platforms take years to become popular. Reddit was small for quite a while before it became more mainstream.

    In a way to me Lemmy feels a bit like Reddit must have been a few years before I joined it 12 years ago.

    The problem is the expectation that Lemmy could replace Reddit overnight, and would immediately be a 1:1 replacement.

    Although personally I like it more here, and I get more interactions than Reddit. But I am a tech nerd, so.


  • Yeah mine’s doing that too, and my dmesg is flooded with USB disconnect and reconnects.

    The thing probably is overheating and shutting off. I believe I’ve seen videos of them catching fire too, not sure if it’s that one or another webcam that looks similar.

    Mine’s on a USB hub with buttons for each port so I just leave its port off until I need the camera and only turn it on when needed.