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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Pretty much everybody in this thread who is laughing at Amazon’s drones is thinking of drones as they are right now. But Amazon is not using drones because it’s a good idea now. They’re using drones now so they already have the experience and the setup when inevitable technical progress happens.

    The drones might never work out or they might eventually work out, but this is exactly how Amazon got so big in the first place. They started selling books online when a lot of people still weren’t sure whether that could work and they started selling cloud computing almost ten years before anyone else thought to do that.



  • Comparing to macOS is actually impossible because fde can’t be turned off on Macs at all. Macs (and iPhones etc.) handle encryption of internal storage transparently in hardware at pretty much no overhead and without the CPU even having access to the key. You can only choose whether a login is required for the Secure Enclave hardware to be able to access the key.

    On other platforms it’s pretty much a hardware question too. PC vendors and hard disk vendors could do the same thing Apple is doing regardless of whether the OS is Windows or Linux or whatever. How fast the OS based encryption is only matters on hardware that doesn’t have this functionality.












  • My understanding is that if an instance suddenly dies, all the federated instances that subscribe to its communities will still have the text content because they store copies locally. So knowledge should not just go away. Media is a different story though.

    I think new posts/comments in those communities would then not federate at all anymore since the host instance would not acknowledge them. So the communities turn into isolated local ones.

    If the host instance comes back and the communities are re-created, they’ll be empty on the host instance but I think other instances won’t delete the old content unless explicitly requested.



  • In 2004 I was still running a Usenet server. Online games were run by the community too. I spent so much time on MUDs.

    It seems like now we are in this cycle where someone builds something shinier and fancier, it briefly becomes the next best thing, and then they find out it can’t make money (or just survive) unless it becomes significantly worse, and then the next best thing appears. But because of all the steps back there is little real progress. Lemmy too is, functionally, not that different from Usenet. It has pictures and votes and is generally more modern. But what I see highlighted in contrast to reddit is that it’s distributed. Like Usenet. It’s not supposed to be a breakthrough but after reddit it feels like one.