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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • JakenVeina@lemm.eetoLord of the memes@midwest.socialHagrid, no
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    7 days ago

    Did you like the subplot about how slaves who are freed against their will turn to alcoholism?

    Yeah, I thought it was really interesting how there were two characters who gained freedom and handled it in completely opposite ways. I thought it was a great way to highlight that simply ending an injustice often isn’t enough. It takes effort beyond that to truly reach justice/equity.

    Or how when they celebrated Christmas at Grimmauld place, they put little santa hats and beards on the severed slave heads?

    The severed heads themselves were clearly established as one of many things that made everyone being forced to live there uncomfortable. So, yes, I liked the touch of the characters decorating them, and the rest of the house, to try and make it less of a reminder of the shitstain of a family that it used to belong to. The characters make quite a few such attempts, throughout the book, often unsuccessfully.

    Did you like the HIV allegory character who deliberately tries to infect young boys with his disease?

    Yeah, it’s a pretty terrifying concept, and a great lesson about how being a victim doesn’t make someone good. Anyone can be evil. In fact, victimization often becomes the SEED of future evil.

    What about the constant descriptions of “mannish hands” and general authorial misogyny against women who the reader isn’t supposed to like?

    I don’t see how one instance of the phrase “mannish hands” across seven books equates to “constant descriptions”. I can’t say that I liked it or disliked it, because I don’t ever remember reading it. It wasn’t a significant enough detail to remember, just descriptive flavor of what the author was picturing. In retrospect today, yeah, that seems like anti-trans bias subconsciously leaking out, to have a “bad” woman character have masculine qualities. But it definitely doesn’t read that way, on its own.

    Did you like how Harry was supposed to be the saviour of magical england from a fascist movement, and yet he’s a moderate liberal who never makes an effort to fundamentally change any of the systems of the world, and who wants Hermione to stop campaigning against slavery because it’s annoying?

    Given that the books actually give zero picture of how much magical society has changed, after Voldemort’s death, I don’t see how I can answer that. The only thing we know for sure about the world is that Hogwarts and Platform 9 3/4 still exist. I could give a fuck about what Rowling’s expanded on in interviews and musings on Twitter.

    I don’t recall Harry ever once being against SPEW, that was pretty much all Ron, who does eventually change his mind. What Harry DOES have is the fantastic story arc with Kreacher, where he explicitly recognizes how wrong he was to not see the barbarity of the system sooner.


  • The biggest hole in WASM right now is being able to DO anything really useful in it, natively. The only thing you can do natively right now is use the CPU. Can’t manipulate the DOM. Can’t access local storage or cookies or networking APIs, etc. You can call out to arbitrary JS code, but that’s it.

    This is great for some of the big JS libraries that have very CPU-heavy workloads they can optimize in WASM and call to from JS. Like frequently parsing and re-parsing HTML. Or doing game physics calculations.

    I haven’t heard word one about WHEN any of this will be available. Which is particularly troubling, given how long people have been begging for it.

    Of course, none of this stops you from using WASM in the real world, to do quite a lot of things. You’re just gonna have to deal with JS interop, still, do do anything really useful.


  • A quality apology consists of 3 things:

    • An explanation of what you did that was wrong, and why it was wrong
    • An explanation of what you’re going to try and change about yourself, to avoid the same mistake
    • An expression of remose. I.E. the word “sorry” or “apologize”.

    Your proposed apology has all those elements, so you’re already ahead of most folks. But there are a few suggestions for improvement in this thread that I think are also good.

    “if you felt so, I apologize”: I don’t read this as you apologizing for how the other person feels, since you clarified that earlier. But I think it’s fair that others might read it that way, so you’re better off eliminating the ambiguity. You’re apologizing for what you did, without considering that others might (validly) consider it inappropriate.

    “I’ll try to control myself around you”: similar deal, it should be clear that this is about you, not them. And when it comes to swearing in a workplace, it’s pretty-darn common to consider it inappropriate and unprofessional, no matter who you’re around. Maybe part of your apology needs to focus on how the behavior is unprofessional, and you simply needed help recognizing that, as you’re (possibly?) new to the professional working world.




  • Given that sunaurus has explicitly declined to defederate from unpopular and highly-blocked instances, stating that disliking content is not a reason to invoke defederation, I’d have to say this is the least-censoring instance I’m aware of. At least at the admin level.

    At the community level, communities can moderate and censor themselves however they like, but I certainly can’t think of any examples I’d call censor-heavy.









  • As I understand it (and assuming you know what asymmetric keys are)…

    It’s about using public/private key pairs and swapping them in wherever you would use a password. Except, passwords are things users can actually remember in their head, and are short enough to be typed in to a UI. Asymmetric keys are neither of these things, so trying to actually implement passkeys means solving this newly-created problem of “how the hell do users manage them” and the tech world seems to be collectively failing to realize that the benefit isn’t worth the cost. That last bit is subjective opinion, of course, but I’ve yet to see any end-users actually be enthusiastic about passkeys.

    If that’s still flying over your head, there’s a direct real-world corollary that you’re probably already familiar with, but I haven’t seen mentioned yet: Chip-enabled Credit Cards. Chip cards still use symmetric cryptography, instead of asymmetric, but the “proper” implementation of passkeys, in my mind, would be basically chip cards. The card keeps your public/private key pair on it, with embedded circuitry that allows it to do encryption with the private key, without ever having to expose it. Of course, the problem would be the same as the problem with chip cards in the US, the one that quite nearly killed the existence of them: everyone that wants to support or use passkeys would then need to have a passkey reader, that you plug into when you want to login somewhere. We could probably make a lot of headway on this by just using USB, but that would make passkey cards more complicated, more expensive, and more prone to being damaged over time. Plus, that doesn’t really help people wanting to login to shit with their phones.


  • Automated certificate lifecycle management is going to be the norm for businesses moving forward.

    This seems counter-intuitive to the goal of “improving internet security”. Automation is a double-edged sword. Convenient, sure, but also an attack vector, one where malicious activity is less likely to be noticed, because actual people aren’t involved in tbe process, anymore.

    We’ve got ample evidence of this kinda thing with passwords: increasing complexity requirements and lifetime requirements improves security, only up to a point. Push it too far, and it actually ends up DECREASING security, because it encourages bad practices to get around the increased burden of implementation.