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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Lemmy is not encrypted, my comments are public, your comments are public, we both know that. Anyone with a raspberry pi or an old netbook can scrape them.

    If I use an encrypted service and all of a sudden everything that I thought was encrypted was decrypted by the service provider without my consent? That’s breaking encryption.

    If on the other hand I use an encrypted service and they tell me that they can no longer offer the service, my data will be destroyed after X days, and I need to find another way of storing my encrypted data because of privacy invading government policies? That is not breaking encryption.


  • For many things I completely agree.

    That said, we just had our second kid, and neither set of grandparents live locally. That we can video chat with our family — for free, essentially! — is astonishing. And it’s not a big deal, not something we plan, just, “hey let’s say hi to Gramma and Gramps!”

    When I was a kid, videoconferencing was exclusive to seriously high end offices. And when we wanted to make a long distance phone call, we’d sometimes plan it in advance and buy prepaid minutes (this was on a landline, mid 90s maybe). Now my mom can just chat with her friend “across the pond” whenever she wants, from the comfort of her couch, and for zero incremental cost.

    I think technology that “feels like tech” is oftentimes a time sink and a waste. But the tech we take for granted? There’s some pretty amazing stuff there.













  • Living things are “entropy eaters” — they take in energy, reduce their own entropy, and poop out entropy to the environment. This is fine, and it doesn’t violate any thermodynamics if you look at the whole picture.

    So I think the point is that creationists take a myopic view and only look at the creature itself, where indeed it reduces its own entropy…but that’s because the creationists are stupid and ignore, you know…everything else.

    This is true not only for individual animals, but for evolution itself — more complexity in animals can be viewed as a decrease in entropy (again, this is only a problem if you ignore the rest of the universe).

    Their argument is the same as saying that you can open your fridge door to cool off your room.