Necessity is the mother of invention. Laziness is the father.

While it was kinda lame for Mozilla to add it with it already opted-in the way they did

That’s really the rub here. Reading the technical explainer on the project, it’s a pretty good idea. The problem is that they came down on the side of “more data” versus respecting their users:

Having this enabled for more people ensures that there are more people contributing to aggregates, which in turn improves utility. Having this on by default both demands stronger privacy protections — primarily smaller epsilon values and more noise — but it also enables those stronger protections, because there are more people participating. In effect, people are hiding in a larger crowd.

In short, they pulled a “trust us, bro” and turned an experimental tracking system on by default. They fully deserve to be taken to task over this.

Are there seriously no lemmy users on a Mac?

Artist are probably still on Reddit to access the larger user base.

Widespread IPv6 adoption is right there with the year of the Linux desktop. It’s a good idea, it’s always Coming Soon™ and it’s probably never going to actually happen. People are stubborn and thanks to things like NAT and CGNAT, the main reason to switch is gone. Sure, address exhaustion may still happen. And not having to fiddle with things like NAT (and fuck CGNAT) would be nice. But, until the cost of keeping IPv4 far outweighs the cost of everything running IPv6 (despite nearly everything doing it now), IPv4 will just keep shambling on, like a zombie in a bad horror flick.

One idea to always go back to is:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

• Carl Sagan

This can be tough to evaluate sometimes, but it’s a good general idea.

Does the claim sit outside the natural world as currently understood by scientific theory?
If yes, then there’s going to need to be a lot of evidence. If not, the level of evidence is lower.

Does the claim involve a low probability event?
If yes, then more evidence is needed of that event.

Does the claimant have a stake in the claim?
For example, does the person get money, fame or other stuff by getting people to believe the claim? If so, more evidence should be required.

What type of evidence would you expect to see, if the claim were correct?
When things exist, they tend to leave evidence of their existence. Bones, ruins, written records, etc. If someone says something exists, or used to exist, but they should have archeological/anthropological evidence to back it up.

Sure, it’s always going to be a bit subjective as to what requires proof. And for a lot of low stakes things, there’s no point in going after it. If someone claims to be from Pitcairn, then what’s the point of questioning it? Just say, “huh, cool” and move on. If someone is trying to convince you that an historical figure existed, and that should effect how you see the world, maybe ask for as bit more evidence.

Yup, this right here from the blogspam:

he not only failed to challenge the core of Covid ideology—that other human beings are pathogenic so we need to restrict our freedoms and isolate

It was pretty well demonstrated that COVID was spread via airborne particles and the best way to limit exposure and spread was to keep people away from each other. Unfortunately, people are selfish and don’t understand risk well. So, actual enforcement was necessary.

And this guy gets funnier.:

As a final and devastating blow to the traditional understanding of market mechanisms, advertising itself became corporatized and allied with state power. This should have been obvious long before big advertisers attempted to bankrupt Elon Musk’s platform X precisely because it allows some measure of free speech.

Free speech and freedom of association goes both ways, bucko. When X decided to give platform to Nazis, advertisers are free to say, “ya, fuck you” to that platform. And that shows up again in:

Similarly, Tucker Carlson’s show at Fox was the most highly rated news show in the US, and yet faced a brutal advertising boycott that led to its cancellation.

Turns out advertisers don’t want to be associated with Russian assets. Ironically, that’s a case of the free market working the way libertarians claim. Someone does something bad and the market punishes them for it. Unlike the major failure of markets which was stage 4 smog alerts in the '70’s because no one gave a fuck about air quality. So, the EPA was created to actually deal with a “tragedy of the commons” problem which the “free market” would have continued to ignore.

This is not how markets are supposed to work but it was all unfolding before our eyes: big corporations and especially pharma were no longer responding to market forces but instead were currying favor with their new benefactors within the structure of state power.

No actually, it is. The advertising boycotts weren’t about “state power”, it was about companies responding to their potential customers. When major market segments are basically saying, “we don’t want to associate with Nazis”, companies respond. Again, that’s actually libertarian ideals in action.

…while Koch-backed FastGrants cooperated with crypto-scam FTX to fund the designed-to-fail debunking of Ivermectin as a therapeutic alternative.

And, we’re back to the “pants on head” , anti-science idiocy. It’s funny that this guy seems pretty well read on history and economics, but is falling for all of the anti-vax crap, hard.

It should go without saying that lockdown is the opposite of libertarianism, regardless of the excuse. Infectious disease has been around since the beginning of time. Are these libertarians just now coming to terms with this?

Or maybe, they have actually read a history book on the Black Death and were hoping to avoid repeating the joys of cities running out of places to put dead bodies and just shoving them in empty buildings.

Honestly, if one’s libertarianism cannot manage to oppose decisively a global lockdown of billions of people in the name of infectious disease control, complete with track-and-trace and censorship, even though the disease had a 99-plus percent survival rate, what possible good is it?

I was always terrible with knots growing up. My father spent far too much time trying to teach me a basic trucker’s hitch and sadly never got to see me really “get it”. Then, when my own son was in Cub Scouts and supposed to learn some basic knots, something just clicked in my mind and I took an interest. The bowline was the gateway knot for me and learning that led me to finally apply myself to the trucker’s hitch. Just such a useful pair for tying up a load. I can understand why my father really wanted me to learn it.

Now, I keep a length of paracord on my desk and will fiddle with it, practicing knots whenever I’m doing something that leaves my hands free. And ya, having a basic set of knots down is just damned handy.

NextCloud running in docker on my server. I can then sync folders from both my desktop and phone.

I took up indoor rock climbing a couple years ago, partly because I have a similarly sedentary job and hate most forms of exercise. I can certainly understand the draw. I go 2-3 times a week and have stuck with it for so long because it forces me to get out of my head, but also doesn’t require dealing with strangers as much. It’s just a clam, focused activity which also happens to work my body.

Unfortunately, as a hobby, rock climbing is going to work your hands and arms. I would say that, as I have gotten better, I do a better job of using body position to prevent having to hang by my hands. But, just the other day, my foot slipped and I was hanging on by my fingertips for a couple seconds. And harder climbs may require you to engage your hands more. Though again, body position and technique counts for a lot.

Best advice I can give is: talk to your doctor. They will know more about how your condition will be affected by climbing and what your options are. Certainly more than random idiots on the other side of the internet.

Game: Quest for Glory I: So you want to be a Hero
Book: Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
TV Show: Babylon 5
Movie: Spaceballs

All fairly old, but still some of all time favorites.

But they pinky promised that only the “good guys” would use the “front doors”. /s

I’ll add Kingdom Come: Deliverance to the list. Great story, fun (if challenging to learn) gameplay and really amazing environments.

What do you do to feel like you’re part of everyone else and in a way cope with some of the pressures of life around you?

I stopped giving a fuck about everyone else. I do what makes me, my wife or my kids happy. The rest of the world can go stuff a sock in it. Sure, I like to keep up on news and politics and will go read related sites when I have time and energy. I also listen to several podcasts and follow several Youtube channels. But, those are all things I do because I want to do them. If I’m not feeling like doing one of those things, I don’t. I also work and so have to keep up on the aspects of life related to that; but, I don’t pretend to be interested in things just to make coworkers happy. I am employed to do a job, they are employed to do a job. Sometimes we do a job together and I focus on the work at hand. And yes, I do socialize a bit with my coworkers as we have some shared hobbies and interests. But, if they start going off about basketball, I let them say their peace and then move on. It’s not my cup of tea and I feel no need to engage with it.

One of the most important secrets to life is learning to set boundaries. Don’t let other peoples’ wants become your needs. Be who you are because it’s who you want to be. If other people can’t deal with that, then they can go put their problems somewhere uncomfortable for them.

Soon to be “air delivered” by Israel to civilians in Gaza.

There may also be a (very weak) reason around bounds checking and avoiding buffer overflows. By rejecting anything longer that 20 characters, the developer can be sure that there will be nothing longer sent to the back end code. While they should still be doing bounds checking in the rest of the code, if the team making the UI is not the same as the team making the back end code, the UI team may see it as a reasonable restriction to prevent a screw up, further down the stack, from being exploited. Again, it’s a very weak argument, but I can see such an argument being made in a large organization with lots of teams who don’t talk to each other. Or worse yet, different contractors standing up the front end and back end.

I don’t know how anyone makes it without a password manager at this point.

Password reuse. Password reuse everywhere.

Perhaps a bit on the campy side, the opening theme song of the original Highlander was always one of my favorites:
Princes of the Universe by Queen.

Also not mentioned in the article at all: the polling error.
While a 4% shift could be significant, I’d also bet that the error bars of the two polls overlap.

A few from my list:

• Darknet Diaries - Interviews with interesting people around hacking and cybersecurity. This includes a lot of the actual criminals themselves and you get to hear their motivations and how they did what they did. Really neat for understanding the minds of folks who do bad things.
• FiveThirtyEight Politics - This one is good for staying abreast of US politics, polling. While the political bias of the hosts is pretty obvious, this is less punditry and more about the numbers.
• Risky Business with Nate Silver Maria Konnikova - A neat podcast covering risk, poker and politics. Just a good listen for thinking about risk and probabilities in life.
• The Lawfare Podcast - Lawyers talking about the law, and how it shapes and is shaped by whats in the news. Great for getting a legalistic view of the world.

Sears Super Pong