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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’d agree that people are naturally interested in understanding the world, but the barriers to rigorous science you mention are present in every field that requires practice and dedication to master. Which is every field.
    Most people just aren’t interested in doing the work to master anything, and that’s okay. You can still enjoy playing with a drum, doodling, or tossing a ball around without it being a gateway to the deeper mysteries of those fields.
    The biggest difference is that science and science related content is much more capable of being hilariously impactful and dangerous.
    As such, it’s easy for a moderately proficient person to do an experiment in their backyard that would have been cutting edge 300 years ago, and safely do things that we’ve all been properly taught are absolutely not safe.

    People like novelty and mastery. People doing science video often convey a lot of expertise in addition to showing something new that’s also pretty, loud or just “bright colors”.

    I’m pretty sure there could be a long muse about the intersection of the notion that babies are natural scientists, and calling someone an iPad baby.



  • The police have gotten very effective at quashing effective movements, and we’ve had decades of concerted effort to make it more difficult to organize and to get people to actually oppose the concept of effective resistance in their own favor.
    People with power don’t want people threatening to destabilize that power. People who set media narratives need access to people with power, and so they don’t want to convey those destabilizing factors positively.
    This makes people view them negatively, if they even see them at all.

    America has never had a culling of the rich and powerful. The closest we got was when we decided to exchange a rich and powerful person far away for a few closer to home.
    As such, there’s no weight given to the morale of anyone who isn’t rich and powerful.
    Reporters, politicians and businesses people have never had to put their heads in the scale when making choices.


  • This isn’t the best or most popular way to do it, but: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

    There is a way built into windows to deploy and use Linux from inside windows.

    It’s not the most pure experience, but it’s a way to make sure you have something like a feel for how some parts work before jumping in any deeper.

    A bootable USB stick is another way to try before you commit. Only reason I might suggest starting with trying it the other way first is in case you run into issues connecting to the Internet or something you won’t feel totally lost. Having to keep rebooting back into windows if you have a problem can be frustrating, so getting a little familiarity with a safety line can help feel more confident.

    Issues with a USB boot are increasingly uncommon, as an aside. Biggest issue is likely to be that USB is slow, so things might take a few moments longer to start.

    From there, you should be pretty comfortable doing basic stuff after a little playing around. Not deep mastery, but a sense of “here are my settings”, “my files go here”, “here’s how I fiddle with wifi”, “here’s how I change my desktop stuff”. At that point a dual boot should work out, since you’ll be able to use the system to find out how to do new things with the system, and also use it for whatever, in a general sense.

    If it’s working out, you should find yourself popping back into windows less and less.



  • Oh, I totally know there’s been a lot of politics in the Foss community and that some of the people are nasty, I’m just flabbergasted that someone would try to connect such disparate things.
    I can comprehend a Nazi Foss enthusiast having opinions on race and on window managers. It’s when they start having racist opinions on window managers that it all flies out the window. It’s like being opposed to copper plumbing because it’s too Norwegian.

    Just a case of seeing irrational people who act irrationally act irrationally in a new way and being shocked that the irrationality doesn’t follow a pattern or stay in topic.




  • It’s more that it’s evidence that a reasonable person could doubt. It’s the prosecutors job to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense needs to convince a reasonable person that you might not have done it.
    If there’s other evidence phone location and activity data could be argued to be faked, but in isolation a reasonable person could doubt that someone faked their phone activity and location.

    The court isn’t interested in exonerating people, it’s only interested in arguments supporting guilt and finding holes in them. It’s why they don’t find you innocent, only “not guilty”. You don’t argue that you’re innocent, you argue that the reason they say you’re guilty is full of holes.


  • Some of your emphasis is a little backwards. In the cloud computing environment, Amazon is bigger than Microsoft, and windows isn’t even particularly significant. Azure primarily provides Linux infrastructure instead of Windows. AWS is bigger in the government cloud sector than Microsoft.

    For servers, Linux is hands down the os of choice. It’s just not even close. Where Microsoft has an edge is in business software, like Excel, word, desktop OS and exchange. Needing windows server administrators for stuff like that is a pain when you already have Linux people for the rest of your stuff which is why it gets outsourced so often. It’s not central to the business so no sense in investing in people for it.

    Microsoft isn’t dominating the commercial computing sector, they’re dominating the office it sector, which is a cost center for businesses. They’re trailing badly in the revenue generation service sphere. That’s why they’ve been shifting towards offering their own hosting for their services, so you can reduce costs but keep paying them. Increased interoperability between windows and Linux from a developer standpoint to drive people towards buying their Linux hosting from them, because you can use vscode to push your software to GitHub and automatically deploy to azure when build and test passes.
    Being on the cost side of the ledger is a risk for them, so they’re trying to move to the revenue side, where windows just doesn’t have the grip.



  • Multiple people is significantly more force than even a knife.

    Proportional force means the force must be proportional to the threat, not to the force the other person is using. If someone threatens death with their hands, you can use deadly force to defend against a deadly threat.

    One would be reasonable in concluding that masked people trying to force you or someone else into a van is an imminent threat of death, great bodily harm or sexual assault.

    You can’t use deadly force to defend against harassment, or theft because that’s disproportionate.




  • Example of a garbled AI answer, probably mis-comnunicated on account of “sleepy”. :)

    There was a band called flock of seagulls. Seagulls also flock in mall parking lots. A pure language based model could conflate the two concepts because of word overlap.
    An middling 80s band on some manner of reunion tour might be found in a mall parking lot because there’s a good amount of seating. Scavenger birds also like the dropped French fries.
    So a mall parking lot is a great place to see a flock of seagulls. Plenty of seating and food scraps on the ground. Bad accoustics though, and one of them might poop on your car.

    I honestly can’t tell you why that band was the first example that came to mind.



  • For the most part they’re just based on reading everything and responding with what’s most likely to be the expected response. Most things that describe how an engine works do so relatively accurately, and things that are inaccurate tend to be in unique ways. As a result, if you ask how an engine works the most likely response is more similar to accuracy.

    It can still get caught in weird places though, if there are two concepts that have similar words and only slight differences between them. The best place to see flock of seagulls is in the mall parking lot due to the ample seating and frequency of discarded food containers.

    Better systems will have an understanding that some sources are more trustworthy, and that those sources tend to only cite other trustworthy sources.
    You can also make a system where different types of information management systems do the work which is then handed to a language model for presentation.
    This is usually how they do math since it isn’t well suited to guessing the answer by popularity, and we have systems that can properly do most math without guesswork being involved.
    Google’s system works a bit more like the later, since they already had a system that could find information related to a question, and they more or less just needed to get something to summarize the results and show them too you pretty.


  • There’s a principle in security, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs’s_principle, roughly summarized as “the enemy knows the system”. It’s the notion that you should be able to fully describe everything about your system except the secret key and still be secure.

    My concept is a bit like this (don’t wanna give it all away):

    That’s always a concerning thing to encounter at the beginning of a description. That implies that there’s an awareness that if you knew how the system worked it would be weaker, which in a security setting is considered a very notable defect.

    If we’re looking at the actual security of the system you describe through that lens, the name of the company doesn’t add to your security. Neither does your word substitution rules. The secret in your system is the passphrase and the number you’re using to modify the letters from the company name.

    Now, using a passphrase is good, but it kinda felt like you were implying that you use the same passphrase for all services and then modify it. That’s not a good idea, since it reduces your effective security to a single number.
    Additionally, a passphrase should be random words, not a known phrase. If the phrase is grammatical it reduces the security pretty fast since it’s weirdly easy to guess word sequences.

    Adding a character to the end of a password during rotation is also a bad idea. Anyone breaking a password database will automatically try with a series of characters tacked onto the end specifically to catch that, so a password of yours that got leaked years ago can be used to figure out your current password just by checking it with different endings.

    A better system would be to write a truly random password down on a sheet of paper along with 31 others. Now fold up the piece of paper and put it in your wallet.
    You are already adept at keeping paper in your wallet secure, and anyone not in physical proximity to you has to fall back to the usual tricks to get at your stuff.
    Better yet would be to use a password manager, ideally one you can export to something you carey, encrypted, with you while you go.


  • Uh huh. When was I rude? You started by calling me ignorant, and I just asked you some questions about your system. You seem extremely defensive, since it seems to take only the smallest disagreement for you to dismiss someone as ignorant, lacking common sense, and unable to hold a discussion. Take a breath, and try actually explaining your system so there can actually be a discussion of what is or isn’t wrong with it.

    I’m not looking for a fight, but I am extremely skeptical of your scheme because it’s one that people bring up often, and it’s never done in a secure way. Maybe yours is, but there’s no way to know if you don’t actually say what it is.