mark

mark, 3 hours ago

@cstross https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16kBY2dO-Gk

mark, 2 days ago

@b0rk Can confirm that on my machine using Chrome it is currently rendering correctly.

What turned out to be the issue?

mark, 7 days ago

@cfiesler definitely get that birth year cleaned up because that's going to end up trying to align with international passport documentation.

mark, 9 days ago

@lauren I suspect that without S230, Mastodon is not practical for the US.

If every site owner were legally liable for everything said from their node (or, for that matter, everything transited through their node,) uh oh!

mark, 10 days ago

@cstross Does the Recall data ever leave your local machine? I was under the impression that all the search etc. is implemented local-side, so the GDPR ought not apply.

mark, 16 days ago

@netbsd Figuring out code is tainted by use of copyrighted code from another source is as straightforward as string-matching, maybe some fuzzy matching.

How would one identify code generated with the assistance of an LLM if the contributor doesn't admit to doing that?

mark, 17 days ago

@cfiesler I feel like this guy is engaging in a one-man (well, one-man-and-the-whole-fucking-company-he-owns) crusade to prove right the libertarian-leaning idea "Internet services are infrastructure and should be politically-agnostic."

Which is a shame, because things could be so much better if we stopped deluding ourselves that we have to keep handing people weapons to hurt each other because it's only fair if everyone has them.

mark, 17 days ago

@lauren I worked with a colleague at Google who's byphrase was "Don't optimize for the unusual case." Every time I hear about someone losing their account permanently and being lost in the labyrinthine halls of the recovery process that assumes a particular type of spherical point-like user, I think about the fact that he still works there and his philosophy is closer to the centroid of Google's philosophy on software than mine.

... anyway, a friend's parent got his Yahoo account compromised a little while ago, and he was able to reclaim it with one phone call. Someone at Yahoo checked the recent access logs, confirmed that it was obvious that someone had radically changed the access pattern of the account immediately after a password change, and just reset the password back. No muss no fuss.

So now I tell people to get a Yahoo account if they can.

mark, 17 days ago

@RickiTarr I envy your ability to cross the adulting threshold. 😉

Past forty, and I just emptied the laundry room of clothes wanting to be washed for the first time in two years. And that only happened because my wife went out of town and I was so bored that I had to find something to do.

(My new trick is to aggressively pare down the clothing I own so that I have to keep doing laundry or I will run out.)

mark, 22 days ago

@davidaugust This sounds like the old military chestnuts "Everything is air-droppable at least once" and "Everything is amphibious if you can get it back out of the water." 😉

mark, 22 days ago

@davidaugust Fortunately, their space and air divisions are so separate they may as well be different companies.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what to predict as a result...

mark, 23 days ago

@RickiTarr I'm going to have to look this one up. I wonder if they were trying to get into a Xeno's Paradox debate with him?

(One thing I find fascinating about that paradox is that it really was a head-scratcher for mathematicians for millenia. We are now operating in a post-Xeno world, but it required some real gymnastics to get there. IIUC, Newton cracked the code with limits---"Maybe the paradox is real, maybe it isn't. Doesn't matter. Give me an arbitrarily tight limit and I will prove the equation still holds true, so you'll never find a tightness where the equation breaks, so the paradox is irrelevant now let's go predict some planetary motion" was actually kinda clever as hell.)

(p.s: I wonder what the ancient Greek colloquialism for "Debate me coward" was?)

mark, 23 days ago

@cstross @Lazarou It'll be interesting to find out what happened to the landing gear.

I can't decide if I'm hoping more for something mundane ("The service tech left their sandwich in the joint") or something novel ("Oh, now we have to account for this kind of metal fatigue?! Why do you hate the universe being predictable, O uncaring gods?!")

mark, 23 days ago

@Lazarou Yes. This is not an era of massive confidence in the office of President.

mark, 23 days ago

@Lazarou I suspect they don't have any particular plan that can improve it.

There are several factors against improvement:

1. All metrics (that aren't "American isolationism and racism") during the Biden administration are objectively better (and the ones that aren't would not have been better under Trump; for example, there's no reason to believe Trump wouldn't toady up to Netanyahu. He is known to respect strongmen). Voters don't care. Voters want solutions, not incremental improvement. And "solutions" look a lot more like "Getting my way right now" than "Figuring out how to co-pilot a country with people who want the opposite of what I want."

2. For as risky as running Biden is, they know that running someone else is historically riskier. Parties, at their core, have to exhibit strength of conviction or they aren't parties. Failing to back the guy currently running the executive sends the signal that maybe they shouldn't have backed him four years ago. I personally think that's dumb but it is the X-factor in all of this---Americans generally expect the party to back a try for a two-term President instead of a one-term followed by someone else entirely.

3. For as awful as he polls, he polls better than the other candidates the Dems think they can field. Ultimately, a President isn't decided just on the people in his party; he also has to pull votes from people in the other party. So the Dems are always going to field someone closer to conservative viewpoints than left-wingers would choose.

There are some problems parties are the wrong tool to solve.

All of that having been said: I do share your concern that their calculus is off and they really aren't thinking about how many young people are checked out. But that's the devil they don't know, so they'd be rolling some huge dice to make a guess at what that demographic wants (their signal on them is weak because they don't engage as much in traditional political channels so they aren't showing up on the signal pathways the Dems can see most easily). And if those dice come up wrong, we get a fascist. Dems can generally be trusted to make the play they perceive to be safest; they don't like rolling dice.

I think the real issue is that Biden is a terrible choice but I also can't suggest a better choice. Not one I seriously think more than half of American electors (not voters; states distort "one person, one vote") might vote for.

mark, 23 days ago

@alexanderhay @Lazarou I was honestly impressed by the administration's decision to build a humanitarian aid pier. That is a very clever hack to get around the political roadblock: it delivers concrete aid and, most importantly, it puts American skin in the game---both Israel and Hamas know that if they harm or kill one American soldier, the wrath of an unhinged God will come down on them and their families. They know how an angry America reacts.

Because that's the thing---Biden isn't a dictator. He can't just wave a wand and end the crisis, both because that's not really feasible (without killing a lot of people) and because he's actually legally barred from doing so (Congress makes the laws, and ages ago they made an awful one that the US is required to offer aid to Israel somewhat detached from what Israel is doing). And ultimately the American people are still torn on their opinion of the entire crisis. But they'll be a lot less torn if an American soldier catches a Skysniper or Qassam to the face.

Now, am I happy I am impressed by this? Fuck no. It's a half-measure. It's not the path a courageous country invested in its own convictions of freedom and peace should take. But that's the thing about Americans... We're cowards mostly. Not willing to risk skin in our convictions. And our Congress is way too divided to act with purpose, instead embroiled mostly in the art of doing as much nothing as possible to keep their (deeply-divided, gerrymandered) seats.

Prior to World War I, Woodrow Wilson knew the war was going badly for our allies. But Congress enacted neutrality laws that, ostensibly, tied his hands. In response, he used old anti-piracy law to arm trade ships by executive order, which ratcheted up the temperature of US involvement in the overseas conflict and was in obvious defiance of Congress's intent. He also positioned the navy so that if we entered the war it would be ready to go... Again in defiance of Congress. They were ratcheting up to impeach him in response.

... They didn't get the chance because the Germans responded by loosening the rules of engagement and sinking US ships with submarines, and we ended up in the war. Public opinion turned overnight.

That's the kind of bastard, awful, half-measure, weak-wristed action that makes for a good President in an era when Americans don't know what they want. Biden's actually quite good at it. Most Americans don't see it because they aren't scholars of their own history.

mark, 23 days ago

@alexanderhay @Lazarou One thing that interests me is how much we gloss over pre-colonial English History, which is also relevant to the US because politically speaking, it's our history.

We threw out some key political elements, but retained huge swaths of the existing English system as infrastructure (including the entire common law system), And I wish more Americans understood how their government is grounded on those norms and precedents every bit as much as the laws passed by Congress and the Constitution itself.

mark, 25 days ago

@TheConversationUS @philosophy Which is fine, but they have no right to claim exclusive control of the moon.

mark, 23 days ago

@futurebird I'm not sure we'll find one because I'm not sure that Java is fluent. 😉

mark, 30 days ago

@robryk It may be just personal preference, but it seems an odd place to draw the line of trust at "I trust this other node to tell me what posts its users made and the images they uploaded but not the link previews it generated and cached."

mark, 8 days ago

@skykiss This is so ahistorical it borders on conspiracy theory.

• There is a grand total of one currently-sitting Judge who even heard Bush v. Gore. There's no "they" here. It's an entirely different Court.
• The United States has never delayed seating a President. They had only a few weeks until the inauguration deadline. Failure to decide Bush v. Gore could have jeopardized that timeline, and that shit matters. You want to see a democracy go to hell? Delay sitting its new Executive by one day and see how long until people start crying "It's a dictatorship!" In contrast, we're still months out from the Presidential elections. Speed is not of the essence right now. Thoroughness is.