The US government did extensive research on a potential truth serum. The single most effective solution they found was vodka. Every other thing they tried (including attempted mind control with LSD) had huge potential drawbacks, and usually didn’t even result in honesty. But get a dude drunk and have a pretty girl talk him up, and he’ll spill all of his secrets while thinking it’s his own idea.

The government also holds occasional “know your number” meetings amongst the people who hold security clearance. Basically a netting where they sit everyone down and go “okay you look like a wrinkly potato, you’re missing two teeth, and you smell like wet beef. At best, you’re like a 3 out of 10. Maybe a 4.5 if you bothered to shower before you hit the bar. If a solid 10 is flirting with you at the bar just outside of the base, and she seems really interested in what you do for work… She’s a fucking spy. Know your number, and know what you can reasonably pull. Because if you’re pulling above that number, you’re being honeypotted.”

If you’re going the iGPU route, you may want to look into out-of-date (from a year or two ago) enterprise/corporate fleet laptops. There are always a ton on the market because the C-level execs always demand the newest and best laptops, even if they’re just going to use them for emails; the CEO would be embarrassed if they found out they had a worse laptop than the programmers or 3D modelers, after all. So the company IT is always milling through enterprise laptops.

And when they go to list 20 identical laptops on eBay at the same time, (because they just upgraded an entire department,) they’re not concerned with how much money they’re actually getting for each resale. The person making the listing is just some lowly IT schmuck who will never see a dime from the sale, but is forced to list them because the bean counters in accounting want to recoup expenditures. If you try to buy used from a personal sale, that person is going to be focused on getting the most money possible; No gamer is selling their year-old GPU unless they really need the money. By sticking to laptops that are popular in corporate settings, you’re able to ensure that:

1. There are a lot of identical models on the market, driving prices for each one into the ground.
2. The seller doesn’t actually care about things like minimum sale amounts, because they’re just trying to get this stack of old laptops off of their desk.
3. It has probably only ever been used for email and PowerPoint.

You can often find two year old like-new $2000 laptops for like $250. Hell, just a quick google search of “Thinkpad X1 Carbon 2024 i7 1TB used” turned up multiple eBay listings for like $200. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon (current model is Gen 13) is a $2600 laptop, but the Gen 12 is only going for a few hundred.

Payment processing is one of those things that really should have been treated as a public utility from the start. The same way we treat water, electricity, and phone lines. But even getting the internet treated as a utility has been a losing battle thus far.

For the curious, sideloading apps requires you to run a server on your computer, and refresh the signature on the app at least once a month. Because iOS automatically kills any apps with out-of-date signatures, only automatically refreshes signatures on official App Store apps, and doesn’t allow any signatures longer than 30 days.

I’m sure their privacy policy gave the standard promises about storing their private data in a secure way, which they did not do.

Their ToS can be found here. Section G of their Limitation of Liability tries to shield them from liability against data breaches. But if they were criminally negligent, the ToS won’t protect them. The Data Protection section basically just says “check our Privacy Policy for info on what we collect”, which is pretty standard fare for a ToS.

The Security section of their Privacy Policy is also extremely boilerplate. Here’s the entire thing:

Security of Your Personal Information
The security of your Personal Information is important to us. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card number) on our Services, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL).Tea Dating Advice takes reasonable security measures to protect your Personal Information to prevent loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. Please be aware, however, that despite our efforts, no security measures are impenetrable.If you use a password on the Services, you are responsible for keeping it confidential. Do not share it with any other person. If you believe your password has been misused, please notify us immediately.

This one particular sentence may end up burning them though:

Tea Dating Advice takes reasonable security measures to protect your Personal Information to prevent loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction.

I think most people (and the courts) would agree that putting a password on your database is a reasonable security measure that would be expected per this Privacy Policy. Especially since their next sentence goes on to elucidate that users should keep their passwords confidential.

Mine used to be fantastic for recipes. It was nice having a small screen in the kitchen dedicated to recipes and background music. You could ask it for a recipe, it would automatically search for one, trim the mandatory “story of my family eating this meal so I can copyright it as a creative work” intro, and compile the recipe in easy-to-follow steps. But now I ask it for a recipe, and it just goes “I didn’t understand, but here are the search results.” Which just opens a web browser, meaning all the biggest reasons to use it (not digging through search results, skipping the intro, compiling everything into a step-by-step list that you can follow along with, etc) are all gone.

I only had it because it was a gift, but it was honestly extremely handy when my hands are busy and I didn’t want to be digging around on my phone constantly. But not anymore, because at least I have an adblocker on my phone.

It’s primarily the Tankie Triad; That’s .ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad.ml. To a lesser extent, some people also include lemm.ee too. The reason tankies are so widespread on non-communist posts is because .ml is the Lemmy dev’s home instance. So if you want to see updates for lemmy’s development, you need to federate with .ml. Which means even non-tankie instances are inevitably exposed to all of the tankieposting.

I didn’t bother actually checking the individual points, because I was simply using it for illustrative purposes. The actual location of the points is largely up to interpretation, based on personal biases and viewpoints. For instance, plenty of .ml posters would likely object to calling Leninism highly authoritarian, or lumping it in with Maoism. But this particular compass does both of those.

The precise location of individual points really depends on personal biases, but I agree that the “Republican” point is wrong on this chart; Pretty much all of America’s political discussion takes place on the right side of the graph.

Yeah, the “it’s just cartoons so it’s not harmful” argument falls flat pretty quickly. There are much better arguments to be made for why the law is dumb.

The full spectrum is really more like “authoritarian vs libertarian”. Political policy should really be split into two different spectrums. On one spectrum, you have financial policy. On the other, you have social policy. The two normally get lumped together because politicians campaign on both simultaneously. But in reality, they’re two separate policies. So the political spectrum should look less like a single left/right line, and more like an X/Y graph with individual points for each person’s ideology. Something more like this:

On this graph, as you go farther left, the government has more ownership and provides more, (and individuals own less because the government provides more for their needs). As you go farther up the chart, social policy gets more authoritarian. So for example, something on the far right bottom corner would be the Cyberpunk 2077/The Outer Worlds end-stage capitalist where megacorps inevitably own everything and have their own private laws.

Once you separate the two policies into a graph (instead of just a left/right line) it becomes clear why “small government” doesn’t necessarily correspond to “fewer laws” when dealing with politicians.

That’s the big part of what makes GDPR so wide-reaching and impactful. It protects European residents, not European IP addresses. If you’re a resident of Europe, you’re covered under GDPR. Even if you’re visiting the US. That’s why even Americans get GDPR questions when visiting sites, because the site can’t just filter by IP location to determine whether or not you need to be shown the GDPR prompt.

Enforcement can be trickier, sure. But to be clear, GDPR does cover non-European companies as long as they’re interacting with a European resident.

More like women can create a profile for men in their lives, and other women can share their experiences with that man. It’s sort of a publicly sourced Burn Book. It was apparently started because the creator’s mom had some bad dating experience, and basically lamented about how there wasn’t a good way for women to share stories about the men they’ve dated. Like “wouldn’t it be nice if women could stick red flags to a dude, to warn his potential partners in the future?”

So if a dude is an abuser, his victims can create a profile for him, where other women can share their experiences too. If a dude cheats, he can be put on blast for other women to see. It’s basically an “is anyone else dating this man” local Facebook group, but much larger and more in-depth.

There are some ethical concerns about it, especially regarding potential abuse; There’s nothing stopping an abusive woman from wrecking her ex’s future dating life by lying about him. But the women using the app basically say that the potential safety in dating outweighs the potential for abuse.

Because Executive Orders aren’t laws. They’re just guidelines for the executive branch of the federal government, which the POTUS is in charge of. It can’t affect private entities like AI businesses, because that would require an actual act of congress.

Notably, this would potentially determine what kinds of contracts the executive branch was able to make. For instance, maybe the government wants to contract out a LLM instead of building their own. This EO could affect which companies are able to bid on that contract, by adding these same restrictions to any LLM that they provide. But on its own, the EO is just that; an order to the executive branch of the federal government.

I’d love to see where you got your stats, because it looks like you may have cherry-picked a specific group of men for that 60/40 split. The overall split for men in 2024 was closer to 52/46 Republican/Democrat. 52% is still obviously above 50%, but a 6% split between the two is nowhere near the ~20% split you listed. Some specific demographics of men come close to that 60/40 split, but that says more about those specific demographics. For instance, married men swing harder right, but married women do too.

Men are not going to win this battle and prove they are better than women in this regard because the men who would misuse such an app are solidly in the majority.

I think there’s also a lot of confirmation bias, in the sense that you need to consider why people would seek out such an app. Why would women seek out a women-only app? And inversely, why would men seek out a men-only app? The answer to each will be fundamentally different, which means the user bases will be fundamentally different as well.

Basically, what types of women would go out of their way to engage with a women-only app? Chances are good that the average woman has probably had the thought before, and is doing so to try and stay safe. The active engagement is seen as a positive thing, and she’s willing to jump through a few hoops (like uploading a photo ID) to get there.

Now imagine the inverse. Most guys probably wouldn’t even think of using a men-only app for safety reasons. Like it’s not even on their radar, because safety while dating isn’t something they’re concerned with. Most men probably wouldn’t think of seeking out a men-only app at all. So the pool of men who would be willing to go out of their way to engage with a men-only app is going to look vastly different. The average user likely won’t reflect the average man, because the average man wouldn’t even think to seek out a men-only app. Or if he does, he doesn’t feel strongly enough about it to jump through any hoops to engage. It means the average user would most likely be one of the extremely toxic manosphere/men’s rights advocate/creep/etc stereotypes instead.

To be clear, this isn’t a “not all men” post. Because the reality is that it’s certainly enough men to be concerning. My point is simply that the confirmation bias will be a large factor in whether or not the user base actually reflects the average person.

It’s basically the same way the average Lemmy user doesn’t reflect the average person. If you looked at the average Lemmy user and tried to print that into society, you’d expect the average person to be a Linux-using communist programmer.

Yes and no. They’re going after uploaders, and the vast majority of uploaders post on private trackers. Some may also crosspost to public trackers, but that’s usually after a delay, or a third-party reposting it.

Private tracker security is, at best, security theater. You (a random nobody) can get an invite with nearly no effort. You really think a billion dollar industry can’t manage to get in and spoof as a legit user? There are entire companies that specialize in corporate espionage. Use a VPN (or seed box) even on private trackers.

Unless I’m misunderstanding, that doesn’t sound like a bug at all. Outside of a few specific circumstances, devices shouldn’t communicate with anything outside of the given subnet mask. Rejecting traffic outside of that subnet mask is exactly what it should do. And why wouldn’t your pihole be in the same subnet (or at least be included in the subnet mask) for the LAN? You can have the pihole’s IP address be whatever you want, so give it an IP in the same subnet.

The secondary DNS isn’t for redundancy; machines will split requests across the two for load balancing. If you only have one running, you’ll end up with ads slipping through as the device still uses the default secondary DNS.