Primarily active on https://sh.itjust.works/. If you need to contact me, best getting in touch there. @Baku@Baku@sh.itjust.works

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I feel a bit split about this. Seems it is an actual law, and it kind of makes sense. You probably don’t want random components from unknown people and places in your multi million dollar space equipment. But it feels rather arrogant to just demand such things.

    Is NASA actually a customer? Did they pay for a license to use curl (genuine question - I’m not familiar enough with it to know if enterprises and organisations require a paid license)? Are they planning on becoming a paying customer? Do they make donations to the project? If not, it feels kind of rude to send a demand letter to the lead developer of a free piece of software straight up demanding a formal letter stating where the free software is being developed and maintained (for free), or if outside the USA, that the free software has been tested in the USA. Oh, and a bonus demand that such information be returned within 5 business days (naturally with an implied “or else”, just to really make sure those pesky people maintaining open source software for free really get the memo)

    In any case, why don’t all their scary 3 letter spy agencies go and figure it out on behalf of NASA themselves? It’s open source, they could just like, read the source, test the source, and audit the source themselves. Or fork it and make any modifications they’d like to ensure its safety

    I don’t blame the person sending the emails, obviously, they’re just following orders, but the whole email reads as very entitled and arrogant, assuming NASA don’t provide any compensation to the project and projects maintainers for their use of curl








  • Baku@aussie.zonetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlOf course
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    4 months ago

    I’m always worried about inadvertently doing this, so I’ve been trying to make a conscious effort to ask people if they need more context rather than assuming they do or don’t. It’s actually a good approach I think. Although it does depend on whether the person you’re talking to is likely to just say “oh yeah, I know what that is” when they really don’t







  • Baku@aussie.zoneOPtodatahoarder@lemmy.mlArchiving Lemmy instances
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    5 months ago

    Oh good idea, thank you! Yeah, I think because of the federation stuff, it should persist, although I think that will complicate searching and finding things. I’m pretty sure this is the largest instance to go down to date, so I’d rather be safe than to lose things, even if it is only a small instance.

    This does make me a bit nervous for how archiving larger instances will look when one eventually dies, though. A spider that logs everything into a spreadsheet and then splitting into different groups would probably be the best option. Or maybe a local ArchiveBox setup could work too. All the Lemmy admins seem fairly resonable though, so perhaps they might even upload everything directly into the Internet Archive themselves





  • It’s not even the spyware or ads that piss me off the most about “smart” TVs, it’s how they always seem to lag to fucking shit. I’ve mostly used lower end ones, but even a few mid range ones I’ve used are still laggy pieces of shit that obviously have the cheapest components imaginable. Which for a normal tv is fine, expected even! But on a “smart” tv where to do anything at all you have to dig through their shitty, counter intuitive “smart” menu, it just sucks.

    And then you want to watch some normal tv after a long day and the fuckin thing won’t let you because it demands it installs an update, which thanks to those cheap components, takes far longer than it should