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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • In this context “self host” can ironically mean using a cloud service for hosting. You can use a file based password manager and just sync the database. Solutions like KeePass have apps for many platforms, and they can often even directly load from cloud storage, like Google drive, OneDrive or DropBox. The password database is strongly encrypted, and even if your storage gets compromised, your passwords are still safe (assuming a good password or some then better security was used to encrypt it).

    You give up the convenience of having a single service and having to get each device to access the file. But that’s it. It’s not that hard and so much better than a password service, even if just for their attack surface, or the “likely target” these are.


  • Ah the Internet classic: calling someone’s comment irrelevant, when you clearly haven’t even read, or at least not understood it. It isn’t that long of a comment. Try reading it again.

    Oh whatever, here’s another attempt at explaining it: there’s a huge difference if my passwords are in a place where people generally keep passwords, or if they are where only my passwords are. If someone has never heard of me, but they attack my cloud-password-solution and get in, they still get my passwords. Someone attacking me personally, if he’s truly competent as a hacker, in probably screwed either way. At least he can only attack me, he can’t attack “some public thing” and get my stuff “by accident”. Think “personal safe in my home” compared to “public bank” (ignoring the fact that a bank is insured and all that for this analogy).

    Your second point would be valid if open source didn’t exist. First of all I didn’t imply that it was inherently safe, I implied that there isn’t a single point of trust, which was my would point. Even if you can’t read/audit it yourself, there are projects that have public audits by reputable security companies. Plus if there truly were backdoors, assuming a non-tiny user base, someone would’ve probably noticed.

    Then your final point seems to acknowledge the attack surface, but the problem with the “locally encrypted blob” is that this statement from the cloud provider is another thing you just have to believe them on. They might do that, they might not. Many don’t even claim that, because people like convenience and want options for password recovery to their password service. those two are mutually exclusive.


  • Stop using “the cloud” to store your passwords. Unless you control said cloud, you have to trust someone to not fuck up their security that you now depend on. Everyone eventually does.

    The difference is also, that someone who’s job is storing other people’s passwords is by definition a target. So is the fuck up, someone will notice. If you host those yourself, or you rent a place where you can host them for yourself, that is just one person’s server. The interest and possible gain for someone gaining access is so small, it’s even unlikely. So when you inevitably fuck it up, the chances someone notices before you do are relatively small.





  • Maybe they down vote because they think I don’t like the research or think it’s pointless (far from it). The only thing I dislike is the reporting about it, and even there mostly the clickbaity headlines intentionally misrepresenting the facts. It’s clearly intentional, because when reading the articles it usually becomes quite clear that the author was well aware.

    I can also imagine that articles like that stop at least a couple of people here and there from adopting solar for their home, cause they read what they think means that there’s about to be a 10% efficiency increase for panels. Clearly that’s a time to wait, not to buy! The number is people that only read the headline is probably uncomfortable high, but I got no clue what the actual percentage is, or if those that don’t click through take the headline at face value…



  • That’s pretty definite by any measure.

    Not really, sorry. The complaint still is that the announcements are of some magical huge improvement that is just not real. They might work in a prototype, maybe in a laboratory, or the thing just disintegrates after being exposed to water or something. Of course the results influence existing or future products, that’s how the real world improvements come about.

    By the time you modify the prototype (or whatever) into something that is actually real world production viable, with a reasonable lifespan and production costs, there’s barely anything left in common with the hyperbolic announcement about fantasy stuff.

    I stand by that statement you highlighted. And the fact that it isn’t hyperbole. With all of these achievements being released as clickbait news articles, somehow when something exciting it’s actually everything the market, it’s crickets. Like solid state or “salt” batteries are starting to become products, seen any articles on those posted here recently? Or in news outlets in general? I haven’t, but I honestly could’ve just missed them, or they didn’t gain as much traction.



  • You guys really seem to have a hard time to understand my point, so that’s on me. Clearly I didn’t explain it very well. First, look at my reply to GreyEyedGhost. Let me reemphasize from that post: I have never said or intended to imply that there were no advances made in the last 20 or 30 years. I have no idea why you keep bringing up long term (price) developments at all. It wasn’t even about price at all, please go back and read my comment again.

    Let’s address your points: Of course stuff has gotten cheaper, as that’s how “scale of production” works. That’s how the price AND the “doubling of installed capacity every 3 years” were achieved. Nothing about that is a technological breakthrough, it’s just production capacity you need for this.

    Of course there were improvements in technology (solar efficiency, battery density and others, wind “stuff”, …). But none of those were anywhere near those claims that you read in these pseudo-news. It’s a percent here or there. Look at the nice graph on Wikipedia. See how those lines go up very very little per year? Yet in the article that sparked this thread, it’s a whopping 10%! Unfortunately, the cells fall apart when they get warm. No idea how a solar panel would ever get warm. But hey, let’s make another headline claiming amazing gains, can’t ever have enough of those!


  • We’re saying the same thing with different words. Your prespective it’s “its’s so great”, mine is “it’s gotten slowly better”. I’m sick and tired of reading about some irrelevant technological breakthrough with +10% solar efficiency or +30% battery density in some laboratory every 2 weeks. Actual change comes in (very) low single digit percentages for efficency of panels per year (or similar for battery density). Not once in the last 30 years did we have an actual jump for stuff you can buy (within a short timeframe) that comes close to the hyperbole in these reports. The advancement in price can probably be attributed to scale of production most of all though. Who would buy

    why are you reading posts in a technology community? That seems self-destructive. Go actually look at that community maybe? Only the energy-pseudo-news in here is like that. The rest is mostly actual (relevant) news around technology and/or companies in that space. That’s my ENTIRE POINT. Thanks for emphasizing it. It’s not just that: renewable energy news has been like that for actual decades, no other field has this problem as far as I can tell.


  • All these news about in-development technologies in the renewable energy sector are causing real fatigue for me. This would be great news if it was commercialy viable, but it isn’t. It never is. If all the news about amazing new battery technologies were viable, we’d have 10x the capacity by now with cells that have zero fire risk and last 10 million cycles. But it’s always laboratory conditions.

    Gonna be honest, I kinda stopped paying attention to news like this, it’s a flood of theoretical advancements. I care about it when I can buy it.

    That being said, obviosuly the state-of-the-art technology has made significant advancements in the last 10 years, but it’s been incremental (it always is) and nowhere near the numbers that are thrown around in reports and articles like this.


  • I agree that the current state of laws is overkill by about an order of magnitude, and that’s obviously bad.

    But you do need some amount of protection for works created. Imagine being a photographer, you can’t make money. You make some nice photos, and how do you sell them? If you send a sample to someone, they can just print that and you can do nothing. There’s no copyright after all. It isn’t somthing you can protect legally, so you can’t stop them or sue them for compensation. There’s also a flip side from the corporate perspective: You might find employment as a full time photographer in places that need them, but what about all the companies that just need an occasional picture? You can’t contract it out, because you have no way to negotiate anything if their work isn’t protected, you can’t even look at samples cause nobody would ever dare showing any or they might just be used.



  • It highly depends on the job. Some companies run fully on Windows, no exceptions. There it obviously would not help. But many still either host various services on Linux, or buy hosting/cloud commuting that is Linux based. There it might even be necessary.

    It also depends on what you mean by “power user”. I would generally advise you to look into the server side of things. In my work, there are zero Linux machines that have a GUI of any kind installed. t The 50 or so Linux machines are all administered through SSH and Shell.