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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Delete your history and be very selective in what you watch, and YouTube is pretty decent… At least for a few months. After that, either you stuck to your preferences and end up looping over the same content, or you branched out and now it keeps trying to feed you rants full of dog whistles

    I use Firefox and containers along with unlock origin - by using the containers strictly for several narrow interests, YouTube acts like ad free tv for me - perfect background noise


  • I mean the reason people believe that is because it’s a very explicit language. It knows what’s in its memory at all times, and so at the lower layers it’s more secure by nature.

    As opposed to php, you’re less likely to introduce a vulnerability by being sloppy with data sanitation - the language demands you tell it exactly the data structures you want it to put into memory. For that reason, the language is more secure - the parse json function is going to be less likely to be able to run rogue code maliciously embedded inside it than php, and if it does manage to do so, it’s easier to write php to blindly open a hole in the system from inside an interpreter than it is to break out of or hijack the runtime.

    Obviously that doesn’t make it secure. It just means that all else being equal, rust is less vulnerable to a sloppy mistake at any given layer in the stack. Doesn’t mean you can’t make a logical mistake and open up a glaring security hole

    And obviously you can write bulletproof php code, but every layer of the stack needs to be just as bulletproof. Including the interpreter and all your libraries - which historically were very much not bulletproof (it’s definitely much more strict than it used to be, and I think I heard fb tried compilation and I’m not sure if that’s become a thing, but it’s generally is more secure than interpretation for similar reasons)

    All that being said, humans are just dumb and sloppy. We write shit code, and we try to minimize the surface area for mistakes. Rust has a much smaller surface area than php


  • My dad likes to send me videos. He sent me one yesterday… It seemed like he was at a harbor by the 8 pixels that got through

    He also frequently emails me from his phone. I used to ask him to send videos to my email. Even tried to coach him through the process -surely they must have a share button?

    I think iPhones are designed around the idea that “either it just works, or you shouldn’t be doing it at all”.

    Even my technical friends seem to forget the fact they understand how all of this works the minute they look at their phone - I had to coach one through uploading a larger video to Google drive and sending me the link. My brother in Christ, we use GitHub together. We use Google meets regularly. We used Dropbox in college. Why are you acting like I told you to put it on a flash drive and mail it to me?





  • So, for a long time I’ve believed Elon is actually pretty dumb. He’s impulsive, was bad at programming, and frequently gets facts/figures absurdly wrong

    But then there’s that chat log between him and other billionaires… It circled around the idea of private companies bring free to shape social media being an existential threat

    He’s tanked Twitter and publicly boasts about how he turned it around and made it profitable through actions that drove people away from the platform. There’s no way the numbers work from what we knew before it went private, and they’ve stopped paying their bills - his claims are almost certainly false

    And yet, social media companies are listening - frankly, they probably don’t care if it’s true. If rich shareholders believe it, then by copying his methods their stock price will jump. Reddit and discord have started new initiatives that piss off their users since then… None of the methods will immediately collapse a network, but they’re generally targeted towards driving away both power users and rockstar employees. It will starve the networks of content over time, leading to a tower of babble moment where the platform disperses-leaving smaller and fewer locuses of control on pubic discourse

    So I keep coming back to this idea - is he a doing a zero-requiem and becoming the villain to inoculate us as a species against control by billionaires?

    But then I think back to his ego, and think he’s probably just blundering a role he’s unqualified for.

    But then, he does something else so dumb it seems like an intentional fumble, and it gets me thinking again


  • It’s seriously disturbing from a mental health perspective. They’re doing exactly the same things Facebook did that made it most damaging

    The app always gives you something, it will add filler (in the form of front-page content) to your feed, changing the reward schedule and (very literally) training you to doom scroll longer with fewer posts you actually care about. It also gives the opportunity to shove something controversial in your face, which drives outrage based engagement

    It also always gives you messages - if you didn’t get actual replies, it gives you sub suggestions or puts random posts in your notifications to try to get you back in the app

    They also been doing A/B testing to try to maximize in-app time

    It’s a literal recipe for addiction


  • Well, not only did this very nearly happen (a comparable size emission missed us by something like 12 hours), we have a pretty good idea what would happen.

    Fires. Fires everywhere. Very little of our infrastructure is shielded, so basically everything would go offline… But that almost pales in comparison to the sheer number of fires started simultaneously

    We do have hardened installations and a system to give a short warning to places in a position to unplug and protect certain equipment, but that doesn’t matter much in the short term because everything is on fire, and the air is filled with the toxic petrochemical gases we’ve been convinced to build everything out of.

    Whoever survives the early days would theoretically be in a position to rebuild thanks to organizations like the US military - the knowledge of how is protected and there are plans to restore order. Most basic military hardware would be usable with maintenance (unlike most vehicles which rely on a bunch of microchips that don’t appreciate EMPs, and also fire)