• 0 Posts
  • 73 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

help-circle

  • I honestly couldn’t get very far because his points were not as clear-cut as he was trying to imply and the tone was confrontational. I have a hard time being told I’m wrong on a matter of personal preference that is individually configurable , and where my choices have no impact on others’ experience.

    If he’s venting about his own experience, because the most common choices, which are defaults, don’t match his preferences, go right ahead. But don’t phrase it like anyone who disagrees with you can be demonstrated as objectively wrong with a few simple examples.


  • the preceding anonymous immediately-invoked function that englobes the entire first code block/sample is now off-screen and the code blurb itself is different…

    That bothered me a lot. Then I noticed in his second snippet, only function names were highlighted. What if I’m reviewing someone else’s code and I’m looking for magic strings/numbers that should be factored out as constants or parameters? The first block already has literal values a distinct color; does he expect me to change the syntax highlighting settings on my IDE for every task?



  • It depends on your definition of “can”. Are his actions allowed by law? No. Will anyone stop Trump from doing them anyway? Probably not.

    I also want to make clear, these aren’t “Democrat agencies.” There aren’t formally “Democrat” and “Republican” agencies in the federal government. National political parties are formally private organizations, and local political parties are affiliated with national parties with various levels of control able to be exerted on the local parties by the national parties depending on the specific organizations involved and their relationships. It’s all complicated, but the salient point is it’s all non-governmental. The agencies Trump is cutting funding from are governmental agencies that generally have greater approval/support from segments of the voting populace that generally lean more Democrat in their voting behavior. There are Democrats that don’t support these agencies, and there are Republicans that do. There are also likely people in both parties that support the general cause of the agencies but would prefer they would be run differently or have different policies or regulations. Again, in reality it’s complicated and nuanced.

    Calling them “Democrat agencies” is Trump applying tribalistic language in his usual divisive way to drum up support from his base. The voting populations that broadly support these agencies generally lean Democrat, but that’s not catchy and won’t get people angry and vocally in support of Trump. So he calls them “Democrat agencies” to paint a picture that, despite the Republicans having control of literally all branches of the federal government, Democrats directly control these federal agencies (which is not true), and that therefore they are acting against the will of the public, who he represents by definition (which is also not true), and therefore they should be shutdown. It’s right out of the fascist playbook, and when the media even just quotes his language, they enable him to define the language of the discussion of his actions, and thus they further help Trump shape the narrative of the shutdown.

    Nothing in the shutdown gives him the power to do these things. He was in fact doing all of these things before the shutdown, and he had no legal authority to do any of it then either. He’s able to do it because his regime is authoritarian and does whatever they want, and organizations that stand to benefit from this authoritarian regime have spent the last 50+ years systematically subverting the checks and balances that were built into the federal government to prevent this kind of authoritarianism. Complicit politicians in the legislative branch prevent impeachment and removal from office of anyone in the regime that breaks the law, and complicit Supreme Court judges prevent the judicial branch from delivering injunctions or other judicial relief or safeguards from these actions. There are coordinated (even if it’s just stochastic coordination) bad faith actors at all levels of power in all branches and offices of the US government. It didn’t happen over night, it in fact took decades, but no one stopped it, so here we are.

    From the legal definition of “can”, Trump in fact cannot do most of what he’s doing. But in America laws don’t matter anymore, so in practical terms he can do literally anything now.


  • As far as I’ve ever been paying attention, conservatives only argue in bad faith. It’s always been about elevating their own speech and suppressing speech that counters theirs. They just couch it in terms that sound vaguely reasonable or logical in the moment if you don’t know their history and don’t think about it more deeply than very surface-level.

    Before, platforms were suppressing their speech, so they were promoters of free speech. Now platforms are not suppressing speech counter to them, so it’s all about content moderation to protect the children, or whatever. But their policies always belie their true motive: they never implement what research shows supports their claimed position of the moment. They always create policies that hurt their out-groups and may sometimes help their in-groups (helping people is optional).


  • They had the goodwill of the community when they decided to develop an open source browser engine to keep the likes of Microsoft from taking over the Internet and dictating the rules

    That’s some revisionist history if I’ve ever read any. From what I can find, the first version of Chrome was released in 2008. In the 4 years from 2004 to 2008, Internet Explorer market share dropped from 90% to 70%, with Firefox making up most of that difference at 20% market share and still rising. Microsoft dominance was already solidly in decline to an open source competitor.

    Yes, Firefox was far from perfect, hence why Chrome adoption shot up and quickly over took Firefox and then Microsoft products, but to say stopping Microsoft’s stranglehold of the Internet was the reason Chrome was created is a complete fabrication. Google wanted to harvest your data from day one of the Chrome release. That’s always been the primary goal.



  • My understanding of why digital computers rose to dominance was not any superiority in capability but basically just error tolerance. When the intended values can only be “on” or “off,” your circuit can be really poor due to age, wear, or other factors, but if it’s within 40% of the expected “on” or “off” state, it will function basically the same as perfect. Analog computers don’t have anywhere near tolerances like that, which makes them more fragile, expensive, and harder to scale production.

    I’m really curious if the researchers address any of those considerations.




  • We enable OCSP in hard-fail mode, meaning that if the revocation status of a certificate cannot be verified because the CA cannot be reached, then it will be treated as broken.

    The fact that not every application that uses TLS certificates does this blows my mind. Certificate revocation should be a valid tool to deal with the compromise of cryptographic credentials, but if applications don’t check, then they’re opening themselves (and their users) up to a security vulnerability.


  • Several years ago I created a Slack bot that ran something like Jupyter notebook in a container, and it would execute Python code that you sent to it and respond with the results. It worked in channels you invited it to as well as private messages, and if you edited your message with your code, it would edit its response to always match the latest input. It was a fun exercise to learn the Slack API, as well as create something non-trivial and marginally useful in that Slack environment. I knew the horrible security implications of such a bot, even with the Python environment containerized, and never considered opening it up outside of my own personal use.

    Looks like the AI companies have decided that exact architecture is perfectly safe and secure as long as you obfuscate the input pathway by having to go through a chat-bot. Brilliant.


  • A balloon full of helium has more mass than a balloon without helium, but less weight

    That’s not true. A balloon full of helium has more mass and more weight than a balloon without helium. Weight is dependent only on the mass of the balloon+helium and the mass of the planet (Earth).

    The balloon full of helium displaces way more air than the balloon without helium since it is inflated. The volume of displaced air of the inflated balloon has more weight than the combined weight of the balloon and helium within, so it floats due to buoyancy from the atmosphere. Its weight is the same regardless of the medium it’s in, but the net forces experienced by it are not.



  • Oppenheimer was already really long, and I feel like it portrayed the complexity of the moral struggle Oppenheimer faced pretty well, as well as showing him as the very fallible human being he was. You can’t make a movie that talks about every aspect of such an historical event as the development and use of the first atomic bombs. There’s just too much. It would have to be a documentary, and even then it would be days long. Just because it wasn’t the story James Cameron considers the most compelling/important about the development of the atomic bomb doesn’t mean it’s not a compelling/important story.




  • The size of the cut is what they use for the appeal to the public to build their social narrative, but legally/economically speaking it’s not really the problem. The problem is that Apple effectively forbids developers from having any other mechanism to transact with customers except through their marketplace where they take the 30% cut, hence the lawsuit being about monopolistic practices, not the amount they’re charging.

    Valve handles things completely differently. Sure, listing on the Steam store requires giving Valve a 30% cut of the purchase price, but Steam doesn’t demand a 30% cut of any and all transactions that happen within or related to the game like Apple does. You also don’t have to buy a game from the Steam store to load it and launch it from the Steam client. And Proton works with a lot more games and applications than just those on the Steam store.

    The fact that the two companies charge a similar price for a single relatively similar business case oversimplifies a lot of how the two companies operate.