skullgiver

Black ink doesn't look as black to the human eye as black ink mixed with colours. There are some brands that will let you print black only, but the print quality will suffer.

The colour ink is also necessary so the printing dots unique identifying the printer can be printed on the page. Thanks to those dots the FBI can find exactly what printer was used to print a hostage letter (or any other kind of publication they don't like). You can thank the American government for that one.

In a way LinkedIn is federated. You create a profile or post, and within minutes hundreds of shady data brokers and contact details resellers have a copy of your post available for their customers!

I don't really see the benefit, though. LinkedIn is functionally almost the same as Facebook, and can be replicated by adding a theme to a Friendica instance with a few custom fields. The biggest difference is that LinkedIn allows recruiters to ~~spam and stalk you~~offer you jobs, other than that it's just Facebook where most adults have decided to only talk about work stuff.

I don't think the science is out on that. For instance, your capacity to fall in love with someone is influenced by their smell as it contains information about their immune system (and, by extent, their immunological compatibility with yours).

Most humans have a need for companionship. It's the reason solitary confinement is considered torture in most cases. Our brains and bodies are rigged to prefer companionship over being alone most of the time. Put a human alone in a room with a plastic ball with a face drawn on it for long enough, and that plastic ball will be given a name, a personality, and that human will get upset if you dare "hurt" the plastic ball. In a much more dystopian twist on that experiment, people have started "befriending" LLMs now that they've grown to have the ability to remember a couple hundred keywords about your user account. The human mind craves being around others.

However, I don't think whether you like someone or not is purely a function of what they provide for you. You can enjoy the presence of your friends even if you're sitting in a room silently scrolling on your phone, or watching a TV show.

Their opinions and behaviour towards others definitely also matters. Shared experiences also factor into this stuff somewhere; someone you would normally detest who might've been with you through bad times/some traumatic event might end up becoming a friend. Years and years of positive experiences can also make you find excuses for things you would reject in others (which is why even the worst people can have their families and friends protect them). Your friends may have turned into terrible people over the years, and you will find ways to defend their behaviour to yourself and others just because they're your friends. Similarly, someone you know well might do something terrible out of the blue, and you will recognise that as an outlier event (mental health crisis? sign of illness?) rather than distancing yourself from them like they're some weirdo in the street.

Maybe ask yourself this: if your friends got hit by a car tomorrow, and suddenly lost their ability to hold an interesting conversation, make witty jokes, or play video games with you, would you stop caring about them? If not, then there's clearly more to your relationship with them than the basic experiences they can provide.

I don't think most Europeans would think their royals are classy at all. Even if we stripped them of their power now they'd just be rich people living in large houses their family could already afford anyway. They're basically government pawns we keep around for tradition and to make deals with vain foreign leaders. China does something similar, but they used pandas. If you're a good little friend of the totalitarians, you get to have a panda in your zoo.

You think the leaders of shit holes are going to be interested in presidents? Nah, they meet presidents every day. If you want to placate them, you take our the big guns. You go "Who's a big boy president? That's right, it's you! You can have a sleepover in a real palace just like in the Disney movies! Everyone thinks you're such an important big boy!" These leaders aren't rational-thinking, they're coming from (sub)cultures where displays of wealth and status mean something, and I bet nothing makes a vain guy happier than to say they made a king entertain them. They feel like they're such big shits pushing around our stage puppets.

You'd think those foreign leaders would feel belittled but sending royalty to shitholes works great, politically. The national news broadcaster has this trick where they're officially "royal Dutch news" (because of weird laws, you don't need to be related to royalty in any way to be granted that title as a company) and yelling "royal Dutch news" instead of "Dutch news" when trying to ask questions actually works. Even in countries with presidents. It's extremely stupid but it's been proven to work.

I don't think the royals are anything special but I also don't think the political circus around electing a president and the endless drama that follows will be any cheaper (or better, for that matter). With the way things are going in this country, I'll take King Wimlex over President Wilders, thank you very much.

I don't see why not. Based on the spec, a server submits a request signed by a keyId which the receiving server caches or obtains, but the new server is also queried for the keys belonging to the actor. You cannot reuse the old key IDs (probably) because it'll stay in the cache, but you can just add new keys of your own.

Step 10 of the key verification algorithm explicitly instruct the server to ignore the old key and fetch a new one, in case the other server has done a blind key rotation.

In other words, the ActivityPub spec only verifies that an account was the source of a message at the time a server submitted or forwarded an event. It does not validate that an Update with new text contents belongs to the same server that once Created the object.

Of course, I expect ActivitiyPub software to (mis)implement this spec in different ways. Some software will be protected against domain hijacking, others will leave domains once registered completely useless in the future for common actor names in ActivityPub.

There is, but the protocol is designed that you can't buy a domain for a month, set up a server, and then let it expire, leaving it unable to use ActivityPub for decades after because you posted a few things to Mastodon with popular usernames.

There is public/private key authentication, but the server is queried for its current keys when verifying content. This allows lemmy.ml to forward lemmy.dbzer0.com content to any other server without knowing the private key, because the receiving server will call back to the original server (if they key is not already cached) and use the user's public key to verify the message.

Once the domain expires and a new person buys the domain, that new person is in charge of what keys a domain lists or not. That, combined with the fact blind key rollover is permitted, leaves it up to programmers of individual servers to decide if they accept the new keys or not (the spec says they should).

Note that because of the way federation works, the domain can be bought by someone else who can then use the connections and links to lemm.ee images and posts to peddle spam and other nonsense. It's not a problem as long as the domain name stays under control of the lemm.ee admins, but if they don't renew their registration then anyone can pretend to be the old lemm.ee server.

Best for lemm.ee users to delete images from their posts and comments now so whoever grabs the domain in a year or so can't use it to inject weird shit into your old posts as easily. Of course they still can create new accounts for all.the old account names and post in your name if they want, but the user private keys should prevent that for individual posts if the other server software is smart enough to validate them.

Capsacin is not soluble in water, so water and spicy food don't really interact. Unless the water is contaminated, chugging water won't do more than make you pee.

The capsacin applying signals as if your bowels are literally on fire and your body reacting to it as if it's poisonous will, though. Many people can apply the same trick they can apply when they get the shits from milk: just consume a decent amount of it every day and your body will get used to it eventually. Not recommended if you have roommates or a difficult to reach toilet, though.

Of course it could be that standard Taiwanese drinking water is so contaminated that chugging it does give you mild food poisoning, but that doesn't change the fact that people not eating large amounts of capsacin still get the shits when they eat spicy food.

So far the only companies making you use one are the multiplayer gaming companies that are using TPMs for hardware IDs to ban cheaters and expensive corporate software using them for remote attestation on hardware the company owns.

If you're salty about the whole Windows 10 thing, you've got until at least October 2027 until Microsoft drops support for it (security beyond the 10 year window announced at the launch of Windows 10 cost like 5 bucks a month though) or you can install an OS from someone who's still willing to maintain support for old hardware, like Google's ChromeOS or maybe Linux.

It's only really a problem if you're unwilling to pay for (or pirate) updates and are afraid to separate yourself from the large corporations building your current OS.

Oracle has a generous free server offering. You will need to trust Oracle not to turn off your server because a business customer needs it, though. Availability of their good free tier also fluctuates and you need to figure out their weird IP/firewall/security config.

You need a domain name to effectively federate, too. There are free options available for those too, but they're not very reliable.

We pretty much had this when the first reliable Mastodon<->Bluesky bridge came online. The Fediverse side protested and made the entire system opt-in, making it practically unusable because people that don't have a favourite Linux distro don't know what a fedi is and why they should bridge to it.

When this goes live, I expect people to treat it the same as every other sizeable social media joining the Fediverse, with outrange and block lists.

To prevent annoying trolls from digging through my post history, mostly. I've seen people do this on Lemmy, one person even had a stalker that would go server to server to reply angrily to their posts because he felt "wronged" somehow. Plus, nobody is reading this stuff after a month anyway, the only readership of old comments is AI scrapers trying to steal my words for their algorithm.

Of course, deleting stuff on Lemmy doesn't mean actually deleting anything. You can trivially ignore deletion requests as a server and some seem to keep old copies of deleted content.

There's no automated way to do it with Lemmy so I've written my own automation tool that occasionally runs.