@drwho@beehaw.org avatar

drwho

@[email protected]

Living 20 minutes into the future. Eccentric weirdo. Virtual Adept. Time traveler. Thelemite. Technomage. Hacker on main. APT 3319. Not human. 30% software and implants. H+ - 0.4 on the Berram-7 scale. Furry adjacent. Pan/poly. Burnout.

I try to post as sincerely as possible.

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drwho ,
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We're cleaning up our living room as crash space again for folks leaving red states.

drwho ,
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I lived and worked inside the DC beltway for ten years. They don't care. The stuff they worry about is so far removed from our everyday lives it doesn't even register.

We care about stuff like getting to work on time, covering rent, and not yelling "This is all bullshit!" during daily standup. They care about getting a position paper from a lobbyist summarized to read in the car on their way to a meeting (they tend to be one or two hundred papers in length and can serve as general anesthetic) and making sure that some other person on the same committee will vote the way they agreed ("You back my $foo, I'll back your $bar").

As a rule, if you have Money you can hire folks that do all of the drudgework for you. For example, a secretary fields all of the requests for meetings, looks at your calendar, comes up with a couple of possible time slots, and negotiates the time and place.

drwho ,
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The political machine does terrible things to people who are at least somewhat fundamentally good.

drwho ,
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Generally speaking, if the oligarchs don't think you'll be useful to them, you don't make it far enough up in the food chain to be considered a candidate. They don't play the game of "Maybe this person will do what I tell them once they're in office," they play of the game of "Only people I know will do what I say will get onto the ballot."

drwho ,
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Probably jet lagged, too. A lot of pre-prods are worked on during the flight home from a conference and after one gets home when they can't sleep.

drwho ,
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SpaceX's track record for orbital insertion definitely had something to do with that. When last I knew, N-G didn't have its own launch facilities (that might've changed in the last few years but I doubt it).

drwho ,
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Conventionally Point Nemo is the target.

drwho ,
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Longer - fifteen, closer to twenty years. It took this long for there to be one or two companies that they could be sure wouldn't just cut and run (especially given how cutthroat the aerospace industry is).

drwho ,
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They have had a plan for it, from the very beginning. Big-budget space projects like ISS don't get anywhere without a wrap-up plan. ISS is in LEO, and its mass contraindicates moving it into a graveyard orbit. Conventionally, stuff in LEO gets de-orbited; same thing happened with Skylab in '79.

Talking Tiananmen with a Chinese chatbot: Chinese developers hope to build the AI of the future. What, if anything, will it have to say about the past? ( chinamediaproject.org )

As China strives to surpass the United States with cutting-edge generative artificial intelligence, the leadership is keen to ensure technologies reach the public with the right political blind spots pre-engineered. Can Chinese AI hold its tongue on the issues most sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party?...

drwho ,
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"Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history."

drwho ,
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I'm in a similar situation these days. Things are too crazy these days for that kind of risk.

drwho ,
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Historically, playing by Chicago Rules when reacting has done pretty well. It's certainly worked pretty well for me.

drwho ,
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It's probably something easier to set up, like a couple of fuses in the package that, when a signal is applied to a particular set of pins, will blow and disable the chip.

drwho ,
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Is Lisa still running site security?

drwho ,
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If they could get away with it.

Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men ( www.researchgate.net )

Our results show that women's contributions tend to be accepted more often than men's [when their gender is hidden]. However, when a woman's gender is identifiable, they are rejected more often. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.

drwho ,
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It's worth trying.

drwho ,
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Ask Amazon why they picked a name that was the same as a small publishing company that had been around for years and sued them into a smoking crater in the ground.

drwho ,
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Isn't this just a personal website with a links page?

drwho ,
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It still strikes me as odd that anybody ever trusted a mega.

drwho ,
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Anybody have a VPN link into HK? It'd be easy to find out.

drwho ,
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That's a really good question, the article doesn't go into specifics.

Then the body’s own repair systems recognize the damaged DNA as foreign and get rid of it.

This is somewhat ambiguous. It could mean that human DNA polymerases see the damaged DNA, scroll backwards and forwards to the START and STOP codons, and break the bonds to snip out the bits of viral DNA. Then endogenous DNA ligases patch the ends together. It could mean that it affects DNA in the viral particles themselves (but from the context in the article I don't think this is the case). Or it could be the case that the process triggers apoptosis to eliminate the infected cells entirely; I don't think this is the case because then you have necrotic tissue all over the place, and given that we're talking about herpes viruses this means fragile skin in tender places... ouch. That's kind of like using thermite to roast a marshmallow: Fun but overkill and potentially hazardous.

drwho ,
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He's trying to turn Linux into Windows NT. And Microsoft hired him as a reward for doing so.

drwho ,
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Nobody is using all of sudo's features because those features are for different use cases. Case in point, LDAP support. At home, pretty much nobody uses it. But on the job, where there are tens to hundreds of machines that someone might need, and they're all hooked into LDAP for centralized authentication management, it makes sense to have that built into sudo. Same with Kerberos support - at home, forget it, but in a campus environment where Kerberos (and possibly AFS) are part of the network, it makes sense.

drwho ,
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Points 0 and 1: None of this is new. This goes back to 2011 or 2012.

Point 2: If someone gets hold of your phone and unlocks it (meaning, they can interact with it), they have access to your Signal messages on-board. This is why additional security measures (not using biometrics, encrypting your phone natively) are recommended. If your phone is off and someone dumps the data from it, they get encrypted data.

drwho ,
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Yeah, nah.

drwho ,
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They start with Mac clients because those devs use Macs.

drwho ,
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Thing is, Protonmail has been telling people this from the very beginning. It's like it gets rediscovered every year or so when somebody else gets busted.

drwho ,
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Out of my toolkit:

  • Audio and video? yt-dlp, hands down.
  • Files? The plugin DownThemAll for Firefox.
drwho ,
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If you're going self-hosted with your stuff, have you consider a bookmarking webapp like Shaarli? You can even export your bookmarks from your browser and import them.

drwho ,
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They laid off 2/3 of their QA team. No wonder.

drwho ,
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In a journalistic context, a ZKP can't prove veracity of the information.

Let's say you have a hoax that you want to pull on a journo. You cook up something that looks legit, like the blueprints for a super secret stealth fighter or something. You find a way to apply a ZKP to that file (let's say an elaborate cryptographic hash). You leak the file to the journo. They ask for you to iterate on the ZKP a few hundred thousand times (which is on the low side for a ZKP) - easy to do, because you came up with it.

But that doesn't mean the file's legit. That's a separate problem, and not one that is technological in nature.

drwho ,
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Some of the bigger publishers were okay with it for a month or so. It smelled like a setup then, still smells like a setup.

drwho ,
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Have you tried a rebalance? What's up over there?

drwho ,
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For non-profits (like 501(c)(3)'s) that's not unusual. Non-profits are more like specialized tools for the board of directors than like companies.

Source: First ten years of my career were at non-profits.

drwho ,
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Them's who has the gold, makes the rules.

drwho ,
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People don’t use turn signals, speed through residential neighborhoods, change lanes in the middle of intersections, it’s insane.

It's been like that since I was a kid in the 80's.

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