The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

We already declared that with the advent of photoshop.

I think that this is “video” as in “moving images”. Photoshop isn’t a fantastic tool for fabricating video (though, given enough time and expense, I suppose that it’d be theoretically possible to do it, frame-by-frame). In the past, the limitations of software have made it much harder to doctor up — not impossible, as Hollywood creates imaginary worlds, but much harder, more expensive, and requiring more expertise — to falsify a video of someone than a single still image of them.

I don’t think that this is the “end of truth”. There was a world before photography and audio recordings. We had ways of dealing with that. Like, we’d have reputable organizations whose role it was to send someone to various events to attest to them, and place their reputation at stake. We can, if need be, return to that.

And it may very well be that we can create new forms of recording that are more-difficult to falsify. A while back, to help deal with widespread printing technology making counterfeiting easier, we rolled out holographic images, for example.

I can imagine an Internet-connected camera — as on a cell phone — that sends a hash of the image to a trusted server and obtains a timestamped, cryptographic signature. That doesn’t stop before-the-fact forgeries, but it does deal with things that are fabricated after-the-fact, stuff like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_guy

You’d still need to turn it on if it’s in hibernate. Well, you might not need to push the power button, might have a laptop that can, while off, key off the lid switch. But the laptop’s still off when it’s hibernated.

That depends on how you define the web

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1]

gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:

https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/

Gopher is a well-known information access protocol that predates the World Wide Web, developed at the University of Minnesota during the early 1990s. What is Gopher? (Gopher-hosted, via the Public Proxy)

This proxy is for Gopher resources only – using it to access websites won’t work and is logged!

I questioned Reddit doing so, and now we’ve got it on the Threadiverse. There are privacy issues unless your home instance is proxying images for you.

How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer?

Gopher predated the Web.

I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with <em></em>, <a href=""></a>, and <h1></h1> anymore, for example.

It doesn’t work with private DNS servers or forward DNS over VPN.

Like, you want to have it query some particular DNS server?

From man 5 resolved.conf:

   DNS=
       A space-separated list of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to
       use as system DNS servers. 

       For compatibility reasons, if
       this setting is not specified, the DNS servers listed
       in /etc/resolv.conf are used instead, if that file
       exists and any servers are configured in it.

If you specify your private server there, it should work. For VPN, I mean, whatever VPN software you’re using will need to plonk it in there. Maybe yours is not aware of systemd-resolved, is modifying /etc/resolv.conf after systemd-resolved has already started, and it doesn’t watch it for updates?

In my /etc/nsswitch.conf, I have:

hosts:          files myhostname mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] resolve [!UNAVAIL=return] dns

I’m assuming that the “resolve” entry is for systemd-resolved.

kagis

https://www.procustodibus.com/blog/2022/03/wireguard-dns-config-for-systemd/

With systemd-resolved, however, instead of using that DNS setting, add the following PostUp command to the [Interface] section of your WireGuard config file:

PostUp = resolvectl dns %i 9.9.9.9#dns.quad9.net 149.112.112.112#dns.quad9.net; resolvectl domain %i ~.

When you start your WireGuard interface up, this command will direct systemd-resolved to use the DNS server at 9.9.9.9 (or at 149.112.112.112, if 9.9.9.9 is not available) to resolve queries for any domain name.

It’s been a long time, but IIRC Windows’s file dialog also remembers your recently-used files for quick access in the file dialog, and I assume that Explorer has a thumbnail cache.

It looks like GTK 3 has a toggle for recently-used files:

https://linux.debian.user.narkive.com/m7SeBwTP/recently-used-xbel

While the guy sounds kinda unhinged, I do think that he has a point — he doesn’t want activity dumping breadcrumbs everywhere, unbeknownst to him. That’s a legit ask. Firefox and Chrome added Incognito and Private Browsing mode because they recorded a bunch of state about what you were doing for History, and that’s awkward if it suddenly gets exposed. There should really be a straightforward way to globally disable this sort of thing, even if logged history can provide for convenient functionality.

Emacs has a lot of functionality, but I don’t think anything I use actually retains state. If emacs can manage that so can oyher stuff. Hmm. Oh, etags will store a cached TAGS file for a source tree.

thinks

Historically, bash defaulted to saving ~/.bash_history on disk. Don’t recall if that changed at any point.

There’s ccache, which caches binary objects from gcc compilations persistently.

Firefox can persistently cache data in the disk cache or for LocalStorage or cookies.

System logfiles might record some data baout the system though they generally get rotated out.

Most of the time though, I don’t have a lot of recorded persistent state floating around.

Further complicating this, the Threadiverse also has “display names” for communities — something which I think is probably a mistake — and one has to know how to get the actual name for the bang-syntax link. For example, the display name here is “New Communities”, but the actual community name is “newcommunities”.

I’d like standard bang syntax to be able to link to a post and comment as well in a home-instance-agnostic fashion. That doesn’t exist today, and we can’t really do it today without Mbin, Lemmy, and PieFed adding support.

DNS

There’s systemd-resolved. I don’t know if you mean that it has some kind of limitation.

Honestly, the bang syntax for home-instance-agnostic community links isn’t very obvious to new users. It’s not a piece of standard Markdown syntax, either, so it’s not like someone can use knowledge from Reddit or elsewhere.

You can use VoIP if you have a cell data connection.

twitter doesn’t work for me rn)

https://nitter.space/moschino_bunny/status/1457773412957376530

Frankly, this should be implemented with something like a combination of:

https://github.com/QazCetelic/lemmy-know

Lemmy Know (let me know) is a lightweight CLI application / Docker service that monitors Lemmy for reports on posts and comments and sends notification. These can be sent to a Discord channel with a webhook or as MQTT messages (schema), which is useful for more complex setups with e.g., Node-RED.

https://www.home-assistant.io/

Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/mqtt/

MQTT (aka MQ Telemetry Transport) is a machine-to-machine or “Internet of Things” connectivity protocol on top of TCP/IP. It allows extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport.

https://github.com/DevelopmentalOctopus/ha-buttplug

Buttplug.io Integration for Home Assistant

https://intiface.com/central/

Intiface® Central is an open-source, cross-platform application that acts as a hub for intimate haptics/sensor hardware access

Some collection of hardware devices from:

https://iostindex.com/?filter0Availability=Available%2CDIY&filter1Connection=Digital&filter2ButtplugSupport=4

That’d permit for, say, having message events drive a state machine to control devices or something like that.

I would guess that it’s probably not much by way of change — theoretically, maybe just a single line patch — to cause this check not to take place.

That’s actually a really interesting question.

I understand that Apple takes issue with packages that can themselves “take packages”. But historically, I don’t believe that Google has. Of course, Google also hasn’t done the registration thing historically, either.

I don’t see why it would need to be affected.

The constraint to require a valid signing isn’t something imposed by the license on the Android code. If you want to distribute a version of Android that doesn’t check for a registered signature, that should work fine.

I mean, the Graphene guys could impose that constraint. But they don’t have to do so.

I think that there’s a larger issue of practicality, though. Stuff like F-Droid works in part because you don’t need to install an alternative firmware on your phone — it’s not hard to install an alternate app store with the stock firmware. If suddenly using a package from a developer that isn’t registered with Google requires installing an alternate firmware, that’s going to severely limit the potential userbase for that package.

Even if you can handle installing the alternate firmware, a lot of developers probably just aren’t going to bother trying to develop software without being registered.

I wouldn’t put it entirely outside the realm of possibility, but I think that that’s probably unlikely.

The entire US only has about 161 million people working at the moment. In order for a 97 million shift to happen, you’d have to manage to transition most human-done work in the US to machines, using one particular technology, in 10 years.

Is that technically possible? I mean, theoretically.

I’m pretty sure that to do something like that, you’d need AGI. Then you’d need to build systems that leveraged it. Then you’d need to get it deployed.

What we have today is most-certainly not AGI. And I suspect that we’re still some ways from developing AGI. So we aren’t even at Step 1 on that three-part process, and I would not at all be surprised if AGI is a gradual development process, rather than a “Eureka” moment.

I haven’t been using instant messaging programs much for some years, but checking https://old.reddit.com/r/xmpp/ I see:

https://www.glukhov.org/post/2025/09/xmpp-jabber-userbase-and-popularity/

This has an estimate of 13–20 million users globally for 2023, but warns that because many servers don’t publish information about their userbase, there’s necessarily uncertainty. According to it, Germany is the country with the largest userbase, followed by Russia, followed by the US.

jabber.org is a major server.

https://jabberworld.info/servers/

I’m not familiar with Arch’s updating scheme, but I’d bet that it’s pretty similar to Red Hat’s and Debian’s. If you don’t complete an update, boot it up — even if it’s in a semi-broken state — and just start the update again. Even if the thing dies right in the middle of updating something boot-critical, so that it can’t boot, you can probably just use liveboot media, mount the drives in question, start a chrooted-to-your-regular-root-partition root shell, and restart the update.

Doing that and installing or reinstalling packages is a pretty potent tool to fix a system. It’s not absolutely impossible that you can manage to hork a system up badly enough to render it still unusable in that situation — I once wiped ld.so from a system, for example, and had to grab another copy and manually put it in place to get stuff dynamically-linked stuff like the package manager working again. But that’ll deal with the great majority of problems you could create.