In a sense what they’re describing here sort of already happened almost 40 years ago from Captain Midnight knocking HBO off-air.

Yes, like I just learned about gearhead.town which is focused on vehicles (cars, motorcycles, etc.), which is an idea I’d had myself but I’m nowhere near skilled enough to operate an instance right now.

My question is more, if I want to comment, how do I decide where it goes? I assume if I’m replying to a specific comment on a post, my reply will just show up there, but if I’m making a top-level comment, can I choose which community it goes in, or perhaps send the same comment to every community? Maybe a comment is appropriate in one community but not another.

How does it handle posting comments, deciding where to put them?

That seems pretty logical

I’ve always mixed it back in

This blog post is from December 23, 2023. It looks like there was only one newer blog post, from November 2024.

They had a fairly detailed blog post a few days or weeks ago about the rollout. The plan is to bring it to open source but they’re still working on issues with it that are easier to control on their own servers. IIRC the code for it is actually in the open source version but disabled. I think they said if you know what you’re doing you could go into the code to enable it but it’s unusably slow right now, or something like that.

I was using it by 2020 for sure, so it predates the macOS and iOS feature. This was most handy in ERP software we were using that had most info display in unselectable windows. Really annoying when you wanted to copy something like a part number or invoice and put it in an email. This got us around that, and when macOS added the feature it still didn’t help us since these weren’t images.

The Power Toys link says it’s based on Joe Finney’s Text Grab, and at the bottom of its GitHub page it links to the TextSniper app as the Mac version, with an affiliate link. I’m guessing that means the Mac app was inspired by the Windows program.

No, this predates having it on either iOS or macOS by a year or two. I still found it more useful because this doesn’t require using images; the vast majority of my usage was when working for a company that had stupid ERP software where much of the data was displayed onscreen but couldn’t be copied.

I think on macOS and iOS it only works in actual image files, but this tool predates that by a year or two. This does the same thing but doesn’t require an image file; you just press the shortcut on your keyboard, draw a box over whatever’s on your screen that you want, and the text in the box goes on your clipboard. I think it’s effectively taking a screenshot but not saving it to disk, so you don’t have to clean those up later.

@[email protected] posted a detailed explanation of what it’s doing, but just to chime in that it’s an extremely basic part of programming. Probably a first week of class if not first day of class thing that would be taught. I haven’t done anything that could be considered programming since 2002 and took my first class as an elective in high school in 2000 but still recognize it.

I have a handy little app on macOS called TextSniper that takes a screenshot of a selected area, then runs OCR on that screenshot and puts the text on the clipboard. It’s perhaps the most useful $10 I’ve ever spent and I’m frankly surprised this doesn’t exist on other systems. A year or two after this was released Apple started letting people copy text directly out of images, so they might do the usual Apple thing of killing it by directly adding it to the OS. There might be something like this on Linux by now but I haven’t heard of it on Windows.

Less than impressed. ~65 years later it still makes him laugh, but I think she also does now, at the childish mayhem of it

When my dad was a kid he used to fill up the empty bags bread comes in then climb up on the fairly flat roof of a shed and throw them at his twin sister. I’m sure those were at least a liter, probably more.

Although thinking about it, 200 ml seems small. I would think I’ve usually been more in the neighborhood of 500 ml when filling them.

I’m no expert but given the repeated efforts from governments around the world to get backdoors added to encryption and frequent pushback from big tech, or at least Apple, I’m more inclined to think there currently, or recently, aren’t backdoors. At least, not easy ones, not official ones. As an example, recall a few years ago there was a terror-related attack in the U.S. where someone tied to Muslim extremists went on a shooting spree before taking his own life (I’m not bothering to look up the details and my recollection could be flawed). The attacker used an iPhone and the U.S. government took the opportunity of strong public outrage to try to force Apple to create a tool to break the encryption on the iPhone so they could examine its contents. Apple resisted and the effort went to court, with the decision eventually being that Apple did not have to break the encryption. The government then revealed that they had access to a third party tool that they used to break into the phone and recover its contents. That’s pretty much been the pattern before and since: a government will try to find a cause that seems likely to gather widespread support and use that to get a backdoor they promise not to abuse, and the companies push back to varying degrees. All the while there seem to be third party tools that exploit various flaws, including zero-day flaws to gain the access the companies won’t provide. My impression is that at least a couple times a year there’s a story about an Apple security update patching these holes and notifying certain users if they may have been targeted.

It’s possible that’s all just theater put on by the U.S. and allies to help Apple or Google tell governments the U.S. doesn’t trust, “see, we can’t even give the U.S. government we’re subject to access, so we certainly can’t give you access.” Given some of the cases that have been used to try to force access, though, I’m more inclined to think the government really doesn’t have the easy access some might like.

Of course, it’s also possible that some of the flaws used by zero-day exploits to gain access are intentionally planted, either by the software companies or by an individual programmer acting at a government’s behest. The later patches could be to maintain appearances to outsiders, since there always seem to be additional flaws. Still, programming is hard enough and operating systems are complex enough that I’m more inclined to say that usually these really are just human error and not something malicious.

None of that is to say that anyone should fully trust these encryption systems. Used properly, they’re probably good enough against ordinary hackers, people just looking for financial rewards. You can keep your family photos, important records, school notes, etc. on them without worrying too much. Financial records you might want to doubly encrypt, just so they’re not so easy to exploit if there is a breach and data dump. If you’re doing something any government cares enough about to really investigate, they’re probably going to find a way into your computer, phone, or cloud service, depending on how motivated they are. Maybe not some impoverished “third-world” governments, but most of the big ones have some resources. I’d be extremely cautious about things that could actually send someone to jail, either in your own country or one that is less friendly.

There is a website that will redirect to the post on your instance but it looks like I did not bookmark it. I expect someone else will chime in with it.