• 15 Posts
  • 281 Comments
Joined 7 years ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2019

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  • Some things that help me at least:

    • Only use bed for sleeping.
    • Don’t use screens at least an hour before bed.
    • Keep phone out of arms reach when in bed. Ideally in another room (these devices weigh heavy on our psychology, and the further they are from us, the less distracting they are).
    • Leave blinds open at night so you wake up with the sun. Try to sync your body / circadian rhythm with your environment if possible.
    • Get lots of walks and outside time during the day. If you have a lot of energy, work out more during the day.
    • No coffee / intoxicants in the evening.
    • Drink lots of water.
    • Don’t try to fix your sleep problems at night. Most of your remedies should be getting on the right foot the next day, and making habits of those.



  • Dessalines@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.mlMatrix or Signal?
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    1 month ago

    You can’t simply say “we must assume” as evidence.

    Okay yeah you definitely didn’t read it. Large sections in that doc just before that are on phone number identifiers, NSLs, and 5-eyes countries, the US goverment pushing signal in privacy spaces… literally the reasons why signal isn’t trustworthy. Unless you can tell me what an NSL is, then I’ll assume you didn’t read it.

    While there may be other US government requests they are not alllwed to disclose, they were legally required to provide the same information to the courts, and we can see what they provided.

    Did you ignore the large section on NSLs? These come with a gag order, meaning its illegal for signal to notify their users about them being spied on.

    In fact, they implemented “Sealed sender” in 2018 where they are not able to see who the message is being sent to.

    This is a “just trust me” from signal, since neither of us have access to their centralized DB, but you also ignored two paragraphs down, where it showed that with message timestamps and recipient information, this would be trivial to find the real sender of a message, regardless of sealed sender. Again, actually open source software can’t say “just trust me” like signal can, we actually have to show code to prove it, and let people run that code in a private manner.

    And sure, while the US government funds Signal, you know who else endorses it? Edward fucking Snowden. If anyone knows about secure messaging, it’s the man that physically removes the microphone and camera from his phones before using them.

    Elon musk and jack dorsey also endorse signal. An endorsement means nothing, especially for centralized software based in a 5-eyes country.



  • Dessalines@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.mlMatrix or Signal?
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    1 month ago

    Signal is a centralized, US-based service which requires your phone number (thus your real identity, IE name and address), has social networking graphs of everyone you talk to, and must forward that information to the US government when asked, as well as (by law) not tell you that they’ve been asked to do so. During the Obama era, 60 NSLs were issued for this private information every single day.

    People overlook its privacy concerns for the same reason they do with apple: it has a shiny interface and is easy to use, and makes people very attached to it. Behind all that, is a surveillance network that its creators have explicitly said they do not want it to be able to run in a decentralized, private manner.

    It has a long history of privacy offenses below (such as refusing to publish its server’s source code for years, its reliance on other US tech services (amazon, google), US-government funding, and a US-defense-tank friendly administration) which get ignored or shouted down by many of those above. See the article below.

    Why not signal.

    Pretty much any alternative is better, as long as its not hosted in a five-eyes country, and especially if it doesn’t require phone numbers or real identities like signal does.

    I personally have been using SimpleX for friends and real life contacts, and Matrix for larger more anonymous group chats.


  • Any negative speech: especially harsh, slanderous or divisive, that provokes equally charged emotional responses.

    One other thing I’d like to add: It’s not just that rage-inducing content is out there, that’s always been there. It’s that it gets rewarded by big tech, by making sure that highly responded content, gets pushed to the top.

    Capitalist tech companies have an incentive to platform this content because it increases the on-site time, and their own popularity, to the detriment of their users mental health. It also helps them push pro-capitalist narratives that atomize and isolate people who should be united by a shared humanity and class status.

    tbh we’re somewhat guilty of this in lemmy also, with the Active sort allowing new comments to bump posts to the top of feeds.

    The only real way to fight it, is to keep an eye out for these toxic / combative threads and posters, and remove them if necessary. Since we don’t capitalist incentives to keep people on site or serve ads, it serves no benefit to keep rage-bait posters around.




  • Registration applications (which are pretty much required on all lemmy servers now) have stopped about 95% of them. Some still get through of course, but the admins of every server are doing hard work to prevent it.

    The other 5% are quickly discovered and reported, and they can be banned (and their content removed), at the click of a button.

    The LLMs are getting creative with how they answer, and people also are applying with half of the responses LLM based, and half real. But its still not hard to spot them when they give all the same predictable answers.

    Its interesting because applications are how the old forum-internet used to keep out bots and trolls, and its still the best method to this day. There’s still work to be done, and it’s a never-ending battle, but I think overall we’re winning and doing better than western surveillance platforms like reddit, youtube, or facebook.