aldalire

Let's just all stop and appreciate that libgen is a thing in the internet. It has saved me so much money with very overpriced math textbooks during college when my family was low-income. It contains virtually all the books, and even obscure ones. It provides low barriers to entry for knowledge for people wanting to advance their career, and perfect for finding epubs for books to send to my kindle. (I buy physical copies of books, it's just convenient to have a kindle instead of volumes of lord of the rings while travelling)

Overall, this is what the internet promised. Fast, easy, universal access to information. It sucks that governments are trying to take it down, and do what governments do best which is to restrict the flow of information and restrict freedom.

10/10, libgen is the best thing in the internet. Long live libgen

Any reading recommendations to plunge further into this new rabbit hole? 🤔

I first got introduced to Monero by Mental Outlaw's videos by around late 2022. I actually first mined monero before having owned any (which is a weird flex but ok) and I must say the lack of overpowered ASICS encouraged me greatly to try to start mining. I would hate mining bitcoin on my old laptops because it's futile against machines literally built and engineered to optimize mining. I knew I'd have a fair shot at making some pennies mining monero. And my only real competition are botnets. In the end I got around 50 cents worth of monero through mining!

Although, I would love to figure out a way to make mining more profitable. Has anyone figured out a way for beginners to optimize hash rate for XMR? I have also heard about merge-mining.

As far as using and obtaining monero, I bought Monero through Kraken. Don't use the regular kraken site, because they'll charge you higher (i believe it's like 2%) fees. Go instead to, pro.kraken.com. The interface looks a lot more complicated. Figure it out and make a market order, you'll get significantly lower fees (at around 0.5%). Or maybe even better, make a limit order, set the price you want to buy monero at like 2-3 dollars cheaper, and take advantage of monero's volatility RNG :) Monero was bullish for the past couple days, though, so i was like fuck it i'll make a market order i don't care gimme my freedom cash. Also, it takes 1-2 days to withdraw your monero from kraken. Also,

USE A NON-CUSTODIAL ACCOUNT AND WITHDRAW YOUR XMR WHEN IT IS AVAILABLE IMMEDIATELY.

privacy wise, i think multiple small withdrawals gives you plausible deniability that you were just transacting with monero, and not holding it all, for tax reasons. Besides, you SHOULD only ever transact with monero from your non-custodial wallet (aka, from your wallet app) to ensure you are getting the privacy benefits of monero. Transacting with monero from Kraken is stupid, since they can just associate the transaction address you gave them (if your bakery advertises "pay at " then if kraken sees a transaction they know you're paying the crypto bakery). So, get your freedom cash earlier rather than later ^_^. Also, make a new receive address and sending your kraken monero through that

(As an alternative to the adage buy low, sell high,) Buy monero when monero is low, transact with monero when monero is high. Seriously. I bought so much cool shit with this currency. Lemme list them to you.

1. Anonymous ukraine phone number through https://stealths.net/ which you access through a proton mail account which they provide provide for you (change the passwords on those things)

2. Amazon delivery from https://monezon.com/

3. Domain name from https://njal.la/

4. Monero hoodie from based.win [still haven't received it]

I've also became an executor from Monezon. It's kinda fun to handle people's amazon orders and you get some non-kyc monero.

Overall, 10/10 community. Love this vision of a more free internet, and, eventually, free world.

My gf and I have had discussions about teaching morals to kids. In that vein, I asked myself, would I teach piracy to my kids? Yes, it’s technically illegal and carries inherent risks. But so does teenage sex carry the risks of teenage pregnancy, and so we have an obligation to children to teach them how to practice safe sex. So, is it necessary to teach them how to stay safe in the sea? How to install adblockers, how to detect fake download sites that give you computer aids? Show them how to use a VPN and choosing the right one (a true pirate must always choose a VPN with port forwarding capabilities, so you can still seed) I feel like this is all valuable info we all learned as pirates the hard way, and valuable information to pass on to our kids.

I definitely want my kids to know about libgen. Want a book you want to read about? Wanna learn about dinosaurs from a college level textbook for whatever reason? Just go to libgen, son!

And I attribute most of my computer literacy and education to piracy, trying to install cracks to various games, trying to make games work, and modding the fuck out of skyrim as a young teenager. That, and also jailbreaking android phones. All the interesting things i’ve ever done with computers was probably against some BS terms of service.

So, is piracy something you would actively teach your kids? Sit them down and teach them how to install a Fallout 3 FitGirl repack? Or is this something you’d want them to figure out themselves?

Apparently Apple can end-to-end encrypt your iCloud, but it’s opt in because they still want to profit off your data >_<

To enable this, go to Settings -> iCloud -> Advanced Data Protection

You need to have all the devices under your apple account to be fully updated, and you’ll need to remember a 28-key passphrase for recovery

I hate how big tech treats privacy as an afterthought. This should have been the default. But oh well. Spread the world people.

Hello :)

I just finished my first arch install I wanted to set my sights on something more challenging. So, I booted a live image with QEMU Virtmanager to try out gentoo, and after reading the wiki I thought to myself “man i should have started with gentoo”

The arch wiki is good in its own right, but as a beginner i felt really confused and overwhelmed. I felt like I had to google terms just to catch up. The gentoo wiki, however, is really good at explaining concepts and the overview of the technology. When the Arch wiki just says “use mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2” or something the gentoo wiki actually explains what sda, sdb, etc and ext4 means. I sort of learned it the hard way with arch, but i learn and understand lot more from the gentoo wiki. I love that it explains partition tables, filesystems, heck it even explains what is an IP in the networking section. Making a gentoo system and reading the wiki is basically an interactive computer science course lmao

So, thank you gentoo wiki :)

I believe that the only two privacy extensions you really need to meet 90% of your privacy goals are uBlock origin + NoScript

uBlock origin is effective because it stops the injection of ads which might contain and inject code. NoScript forces you to look at which scripts you really need for the website to function. Say you visit a trusted site, like your lemmy instance, then you can enable running of javascript by default the next time you visit the site. You'll be surprised how functional some sites are even without javascript. I did not like the idea of browsers having Javascript: it's remote code execution and if there's anything malicious in there and your browser is not patched against it you're fucked. This way yeah it'll be annoying when you first visit a site but it remembers your settings for the next time you visit.

Hello mateys,

There's a lot of discussion recently about the ethics of piracy. A lot of good points have been made out of a handful bad ones. The most compelling one is of course the data preservation one, that piracy is the only way to mass preserve digital media in a medium that is prone to error.

However, sometimes discussions about the ethical justification to privacy often lead to rationalizing. Pirating, as others have exclaimed, is at best morally grey, and there are some cases, namely pirating works of small creators, where it is actively harmful and wrong.

I would like to share my perspective on it. I studied some game theory in college and that course made me look at the world in a different way. I believe piracy is a perfect example of a game theory concept known as the prisoner's dilemma and evolutionary game theory, if you all haven't heard about it. My essay is less of a justification of piracy, but more of an explanation of why piracy happens and grounding it in theory.

As a background for this concept, here's a scenario. Let's say you're a criminal faced with two options: snitch or stay silent. There is also another criminal, your accomplice, who is also in jail and faced with the same option. Depending on your response and your accomplice's response there are different payouts:

I stay silent and accomplice stays silent: 2 years of jail for both of us

I stay silent and accomplice snitches: 5 years of jail for me, 1 year of jail for the accomplice

I snitch and accomplice stays silent: 1 year of jail for me, 5 years of jail for my accomplice

We botch snitch on each other: 3 years of jail time for both of us

Most of you probably know where this is going, but bear with me because i'm gonna go further. The quick analysis of the situation is that there is a best-case scenario, which is both of us staying silent. But this best-case scenario can only happen with the result of cooperation. This is because if one of us flips, the other will have to serves longer sentence. The best case scenario can only happen if we both agree before the game that we will stay silent so we can guarantee the outcome, or else we will serve the longer sentence if the other betrays us.

So, what if we play this game without cooperating beforehand? Well, looking at my options:

if i stay silent, i can either get 2 years or 5 years of jail time

if i snitch, i can get either 1 year or 3 years of jail time

when faced with both these options, which strategy will you choose? of course, I do not want to got to jail for 5 years. Snitching definitely looks mad appealing to me when looking at it from this perspective. That's why, in game theory, snitching is what's called a nash equilibrium. Staying silent is not a nash equilibrium, because if the other snitches then I get a resulting jailtime which is worse off than if i just stayed silent.

Note that this does not mean that everybody should snitch. It's just that, given the choices handed to us, snitching is the one that will result in the least bad jail sentences. As with life, there may be other factors at play, such as the fact that if I snitch, the gang boss might kill me when I get out, which will definitely affect my decisions whether I should snitch or stay silent.

Okay. So how does this relate to piracy? What if we now play this game at a massive scale. Each and every one of us is faced with two options: pirate or buy. Currently, the majority of people actually buy software and media!

But wait. If buying is analogous to staying silent, and pirating is analogous to snitching, why aren't we at Nash equilibrium? why isn't everyone pirating software? My sweet summer child, I present to you the concept of law. The purpose of the law is precisely to coordinate people so we don't fall into our shitty Nash equilibriums and ruin everything, and it does it precisely by attaching a more negative result to snitching (pirating). That's why we have stoplights (seriously, we talk about stoplights a lot in my game theory class) and why (mostly) everyone follows stoplight laws. (before you say tRagEdY oF tHE cOMmONs!!!! the guy Garrett Hardin who coined the term was a hardline eugenicist and his intellectual contributions is a shitstain in academia so shut the fuck up.)

(for people that are curious, this is the realm of Evolutionary game theory. It studies the scenarios where each individual pair off in a population and play a game, and studies stable populations and stable strategies under this model. Ironically, i learned this from Game Theory, Alive by Anna R. Karlin and Yuval Peres. which i got from libgen XD)

So, as we have it, we have a majority of people buying software, with a minority of pirates who are getting that software or media for free. We aren't at nash equilibrium!! More technically, piracy is stable strategy under the parameters of the system. We pirates know that buying all the software we interact with will just make us poorer and sad in the end, and we'll be stuck with all the DRM. But on the other hand, it's untenable if everyone just pirates everything all the time! We pirates profit so long as the majority of people keep buying software. This puts us, pirates, at a very precarious position. It is dangerous when the population of pirates to increase, because this will cause things and create domino effects which will put us at nash equilibrium due to more regulation of piracy and a crackdown of piracy, leaving us worse off and needing to adapt to these changes.

My advice:the most stable strategy right now is buying software whenever you can spare the coin and if you think the value of the software to you matches its price, but pirating if it's convenient or unaffordable.

Too long, didn't read: piracy is a stable strategy under the current parameters of the system. If everybody pirates it fucks everything up. So, be as sneaky as you can. Also, read up on your evolutionary game theory you pleb

Hello!

I've been obsessing about the lisp language recently. I've been in the periphery with learning about Haskell and functional programming. I have actually kind of avoided learning lisp because of its "ugly" syntax at face-value, despite being raised by Emacs as my first (true) editor. I woke up one day and decided enough was enough, i'm gonna learn lisp and gain a deeper understanding of Emacs and also programming. And dear god was it so worth it.

Just today I coded this function for Eratosthenes' sieve, and I had so much fun coding it! I like to go through Project Euler's archived problems when starting off with a new language because it really forces me to interact with the code rather than passively reading a programming book (I'm reading Land of Lisp, it's so unhinged I love it)

(defun range (start end)
  (if (< start end)
      (cons start (range (1+ start) end))))

;; Checks if d is a factor of n
(defun factorofp (d n)
  (zerop (rem n d)))

;; Sieve in lisp??
(defun sieve (n)
  (let ((primes (range 2 n))
        (curprime 2))
    (maplist (lambda (tail)
               (delete-if (lambda (n)
                            (factorofp curprime n))
                          (cdr tail))
               (setf curprime (cadr tail)))
             primes)
    primes))


CL-USER> (sieve 1000)
(2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 41 43 47 53 59 61 67 71 73 79 83 89 97 101 103
 107 109 113 127 131 137 139 149 151 157 163 167 173 179 181 191 193 197 199
 211 223 227 229 233 239 241 251 257 263 269 271 277 281 283 293 307 311 313
 317 331 337 347 349 353 359 367 373 379 383 389 397 401 409 419 421 431 433
 439 443 449 457 461 463 467 479 487 491 499 503 509 521 523 541 547 557 563
 569 571 577 587 593 599 601 607 613 617 619 631 641 643 647 653 659 661 673
 677 683 691 701 709 719 727 733 739 743 751 757 761 769 773 787 797 809 811
 821 823 827 829 839 853 857 859 863 877 881 883 887 907 911 919 929 937 941
 947 953 967 971 977 983 991 997)

I love lisp because it is at its core a functional programming language, but (as i do in my sieve function with the outermost lambda) i can specify localized points where I define, use, and mutate state. It gives me the best of both worlds, functional and imperative.

Lisp has made me kinda like coding again. Every function feels like writing poetry, especially with the indentations. People say our parentheses are ugly but they're wrong and they're the ugly ones.

I've occassionally played some Dota2 before but I'll be mainly switching to Dota2 after League releases their kernel level anticheat. I mostly play on arch linux (the league of linux community is the best), and I love that Dota2 supports linux natively while I have to literally hack my system and, in the past, patched some binaries to ensure that league barely works on my system. I'd often have the game crash on me right before the game starts because League's spaghetti code can't handle my system.

Overall, I feel like Dota2 is the better game holistically. The UI is better polished, the gameplay is more well balanced, and it doesn't feel like a shithole like League feels like now. I have long been contemplating making the switch, and I feel stupid at this point sticking to League up until they literally kick me out of their game because they want to require a kernel-level anticheat (aka spyware) that will block me from playing on my linux system.

I grew up playing League and I'll miss it, but I love MOBAs and Dotas is the de-facto best there is. My relationship with League can best be described as Stockholm Syndrome at this point, and I'm happy they're releasing me.