Awesome. Perhaps now there will be some renewed focus on screen reader support?

It’s a different kind of world. You need a different kind of software.

That’s an interesting thought. There’s a lot of cases you see where people have stripped a comic’s name from the bottom of the image, but that’s not really what this project was designed for. Aletheia will guarantee you that the person/company sharing the media is who they say they are, but critically it won’t prevent infringement.

The example I give in my talk is that InfoWars could take a BBC news story and say “we made this”, but it wouldn’t let them modify that story and claim that “the BBC made this”. The goal is to be able to re-connect what someone is saying with the reputation of the person saying it, with the hope that we can start delegating our trust to individuals and organisations again.

I wrote a version of this in Python a few years ago, but it depended on external tools like ffmpeg to work, limiting its portability. The Python requirement was also a major factor for adoption.

If it were ported to Rust, doing the (de)serialisation internally, I believe that it could have far-reaching implications on how we share and consume news:

https://danielquinn.github.io/aletheia/

If you’re interested, I presented the Python version at PyCon UK a while back.

Not throwing any shade, just some advice for the future: try to always consider the problem in the context of the OSI model. Specifically, “Layer 3” (network) is always a better strategy for routing/blocking than “Layer 5” (application) if you can do it.

Blocking traffic at the application layer means that the traffic has to be routed through (bandwidth consumption) assembled and processed (CPU cost) before a decision can be made. You should always try to limit the stuff that makes it to layer 5 if you’re sure you won’t want it.

The trouble with layer 3 routing of course is that you don’t have application data there. No host name, no HTTP headers, etc., just packets with a few bits of information:

• source IP and port
• destination IP and port
• A few other firewall-specific bits of information like whether this packet is part of an established connection (syn) etc.

In your case though, you already knew what you didn’t want: traffic from a particular IP, and you have that at the network layer.

At that point, you know you can block at layer 3, so the next question is how far up the chain can you block it?

Most self-hosters will just have their machines on the open internet, so their personal firewall is all they’ve got to work with. It’s still better than letting the packets all the way through to your application, but you still have to suffer the cost of dropping each packet. Still, it’s good enough™ for most.

In your case though, you had setup the added benefit of Cloudflare standing between you and your server, so you could move that decision making step even further away from you, which is pretty great.

What’s a PPA?

If you really want an app-like interface, you could make use of Epiphany’s “Install as Web App” feature. Just open Epiphany, go to your Lemmy instance, login, and then select “Install as Web App” from the main menu. Like magic, you get a “Lemmy App” that you can bring up like any other app.

This is my experience in GNOME. Presumably though, it’d work with any desktop environment that respects the XDG standards.

Why didn’t this become a thing? Surely in 2024, we should be able to build packages from source and sign releases with a private key.

Ooh! Thanks for this! I had no idea it existed.

Nifty! I wrote something similar a couple years ago using Vosk for the stt side. My project went a little further though, automating navigating the programs you start. So you could say: “play the witcher” and it’d check if The Witcher was available in a local Kodi instance, and if not, then figure out which streaming service was running it and launch the page for it. It’d also let you run arbitrary commands and user plugins too!

I ran into two big problems though that more-or-less killed my enthusiasm for developing on it: (1) some of the functionality relied on pyautogui, but with the Linux desktop’s transition to Wayland, some of the functionality I relied on was disappearing. (2) I wanted to package it for Flatpak, and it turns out that Flatpak doesn’t play well with Python. I was also trying to support both arm64 and amd64 which it turns out is also really hard (omg the pain of doing this for the Pi).

Anyway, maybe the project will serve as some inspiration.

Personally I install it with pacman and generally avoid Flatpaks due to annoying problems I’ve had with it limiting filesystem access in the past. My biggest problem is that it seems to “forget” that I’m logged in if I don’t use it regularly, meaning I have to regularly re-auth it on my desktop since I use it infrequently there.

Ubuntu. They’ve managed the worst of both worlds: like Debian, everything is old (though admittedly not as old), but unlike Debian, everything is broken/buggy/flakey. It’s the old-and-busted distro that I’m routinely told is “the only Linux we support”.

What exactly is the appeal of Docker Desktop on Linux? I can run docker just fine without it, so what’s it doing for me?

Right? This was so educational!

DNS is hierarchical majesty.

As far as I’ve seen, they don’t provide any advantage over a string with spaces, which doesn’t work well either when you’ve got values with spaces:

not_what_you_think=( "a b" "c" "d" )
for sneaky in ${not_what_you_think[@]}; do
  echo "This is sneaky: ${sneaky}"
done

This is sneaky: a
This is sneaky: b
This is sneaky: c
This is sneaky: d