dreadgoat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

I got this bug on desktop, running chrome, with no VPN.

This was, as most things like this are, just a pure dumb fuck-up by some guy putting things on prod without properly testing and staging. No need to put on any more tin foil hats than we already have, the incompetence is plenty reason enough to point and laugh.

The determining question for whether or not it’s the same is this: Are you the physical matter of your brain, or the electricity running through it? In the first case, sleep isn’t death. In the second case, it is. I would argue that you’re closer to the electricity than the brain matter, since an unpowered brain is how we define death.

But REALLY it ultimately doesn’t matter, if you think about it. An exact clone of you created after any kind of destruction of consciousness is no different than the original you had the destruction never occurred. We just intuitively really do not like that idea.

You don’t need a distant science fiction MacGuffin for this. Every night you lay down and “die” for 8 hours or so, then your consciousness turns back on and you simply trust that it wasn’t altered too much in the interim. We know very well that the way we think can change from one day to the other, so who’s to say you’re really the same person?

I’m a bloodsucking corpo dev and honestly my read of this was very sympathetic to the FOSS dev.

Pretty much all of my FOSS contributions have been to software that I’ve integrated into my for-profit projects. I will find a nice helpful tool, see it doesn’t have all the flexibility or functionality that I need, I’ll improve it, write tests, submit a PR, and do my best to fulfill the requests of the maintainer.

INEVITABLY I will start getting messages from MY COMPETITORS saying “hey we saw you added this feature to this tool, that’s great but doesn’t quite integrate with our software, can u plz fix?” It’s comical. Like, I’m already leveling the playing field by making my improvements to the FOSS tool freely available to you, and now you want to pay me zero dollars to improve your competing product? This happens all the time, it’s a funny nuisance to me, and I expect a massive headache for popular maintainers. Nobody is under any obligation to help you with integration problems - you can ask, but you aren’t entitled. Fix it yourself, adhere to the maintainer’s standards, and put it out for everyone to benefit from.

I agree that most species surviving mass extinction events were just lucky, but I think that also says something special about the ones that survived MULTIPLE events (ants), or those that effectively re evolved into existence after extinction events (crabs)

I think that’s been narrowed down to about 2 million years. But that got cut short by a mass extinction event, so it’s hard to say how long they would have lasted otherwise.

Also what’s the definition of “passing?” The dinos we are talking about are extinct, they didn’t “pass” for long. A+ creatures things like alligators, ants, and crabs. On average a given species survives around a million years before going extinct. How long do you have to exist before you’re considered a successful species?

Excuse me but you are interrupting my dopamine flow. Your response appears to be neither a meme, rage bait, justice boner, nor even a pun. I hope you learn from this experience and do better.

Disclaimer that I am completely talking out of my ass and speculating, but I have a personal theory.

COVID has been around long enough to have two interesting effects.

1. Almost everyone has gotten it by now. Some of us got it really bad, and/or acquired long-term secondary conditions. Some of this likely caused impaired cognitive function.
2. Kids had their school schedules totally fucked up for years, and those kids are now the young teens on the internet. Young teens on the internet are already by default a disruptive demographic, but now add the effect of years of desocialization and missed education.

One of my favorite Redditisms was picking out incredibly obvious sarcasm with massive downvotes. Bonus points if replied to with a huge angry essay.

And due to the voting patterns, I learned to be suspicious of my own comments that were highly upvoted. I started to see it as a bad smell. My best work was the controversial stuff.

Xfce is a great example of how solving a problem in the best way results in low adoption.

People tend toward extremes. There is something in particular they really want, and they will gravitate toward the product that gives them the most of that thing.
I want total control over configuration: KDE Plasma
I want maximum performance: LXDE
I want something that looks good and I don’t want to think about it: GNOME/Cinnamon

Xfce isn’t on this list! It’s not the best at anything. But it’s pretty good at everything. It’s an overall best (in my opinion) but because it’s not beautiful, nor lightning fast, nor incredibly flexible, nobody will ever take it as their first choice. And the majority of people make a first choice and then never change, as whatever they start with is probably good enough for them. I’ve tried all of the DE’s listed above, but I’m the crazy guy: that’s a lot of work and churn! Any and all of them work well enough, why bother installing 5 separate environments?

If you want to develop something and have people adopt it, then your goal is to have a killer sexy feature at the expense of all else, rather than to be satisfactory in every metric.

used for things it wasn’t created for

I think Python gets a point here, as it is very good at doing what it was created for.
Javascript even sucks at its stated goal.

I think this one is pretty confined to my region (southwestern USA) but we use Otto as the moniker of a generic stupid person too, but probably for a different reason: Otto is Oblivious to the Obvious

1. Area 51 - a real USAF research facility where cutting edge aircraft were tested in the mid 20th century. People in the area truly did see Unidentified Flying Objects, in the sense that they saw aircraft the likes of which they had until then believed were impossible.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar who single-handedly reinvigorated the UFO conspiracy theories long after Area 51 had concluded most of its Cold War era secret tests.

Gandalf isn’t a superhero because he’s more like an angel. He played a part in the creation of the world, and is entirely inhuman. He’s a primordial spirit masquerading in a corporeal form.

Luke Skywalker is much closer to a superhero because he’s a mortal man who was inadvertently blessed with incredibly rare powers and chooses to use them for good.

The Johnston & Murphy XC4 line has become my go-to. They are not cheap, and the selection is limited, but the construction and versatility can’t be beat.

I’ve had my oldest pair for over 4 years, with no functional degradation at all, and minimal signs of wear (minor creasing in the leather, hardly worth mentioning). They’re casual and comfortable enough for everyday wear, and stylish enough for business events. Easily the best value in a shoe I’ve ever gotten.

Ada has been fairly aggressive in shaping her community on blahaj, so I think we’ll see some splintering soon.

Logically there are two positions one can hold as a public LGBT (or any marginalized group) community:
Either we are first and foremost a safe space for our members, and will moderate aggressively to keep it that way
or
We are first and foremost the public face of this community, serving as a place for us to stage the culture war for our own safety and acceptance

Both of these are cool and make sense, but blahaj kind of fell accidentally into the second role due to the massive popularity of 196, while Ada really seems to want to cultivate the safe space instead. I’m sure the community is split, but time will tell just how deeply.

My unqualified prediction is that blahaj will intentionally obscure itself, get out of the limelight and try to focus itself more as a community of internal discussion and camaraderie for LGBT folks, and those who are unhappy with that will attempt to build a new 196 on an instance that is less curated.

Looking at each piece in isolation it’s hard to see the real world value. You have to put it all together. Let’s do the airline ticket example.

Real world today, the information involved in purchasing a ticket is controlled by three parties: The customer, the airline, and the financial institute (assuming you didn’t walk up and pay cash). Anybody involved here screw up or be malicious. You lost your ticket. The airline had a database malfunction. The bank/creditor improperly recorded the transaction. All parties are aware of these potential failures, so there are contingencies in place in case of a missing ticket, a ticket that can’t be found the system, a bad or missing financial transaction. But these backup plans also open the door to fraud, so there need to be even more plans on top of the backups: How to verify the integrity of a seemingly real ticket, protocol for re-verifying a financial event, etc.

It’s simple because it’s familiar, but it’s really ridiculously complicated and error prone.

Let’s introduce NFTs and blockchain.
You buy the airline ticket and the following things happen:
The bank performs the transaction and records it to the blockchain, which is decentralized and owned by no one, so it is verified by all parties before anything else happens. Bank errors are now impossible.
You and the airline perform a mutual authentication, which generates an NFT proving existence of the ticket and attaches it to your identity. From your perspective, this would be unlocking your phone and clicking “approve.”

Now you approach the airport kiosk and there’s a problem.
Airline has no record of purchase - well, the blockchain does, so it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
Airline can’t match your ticket to their database - You show them your NFTicket, which their system verifies is a valid, unspoofable, immutable ticket for what you say it is. Again, it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
Conversely, you say you have a ticket for today, they say it’s for tomorrow. You inspect the ticket, it is in fact for tomorrow. You fucked up, no further argument.

The only way any of this goes wrong is one of the following:
Multiple forms of your identification are stolen - phone, password, biometrics. Obviously a lot harder than nabbing a CC number.
Multiple parties lose their records at the same time. Possible but unlikely.
State-level villains sabotage the entire system. Possible, sure, but this is an apocalypse-level event and probably an act of war.

It’s effectively impossible for someone to steal or fake a ticket or transaction in this system, and because of that, anybody who has receipts is automatically proven right and you don’t need to jump through any more hoops or threaten to sue anybody. It’s complex behind the scenes but it makes life for businesses and consumers braindead simple. There are so many layers of trust in action that no individual party can reasonably claim something did or did not happen just because THEY messed up.

It’s not the cryptocurrency itself that prevents fraud, it’s the surrounding technologies such as blockchains and NFTs.

Using NFT to own the address to a PNG is hilariously stupid and worthless, but what it’s actually great for is receipts. If I buy a donut and get an NFT proving that I now own the donut (along with metadata about where and when I purchased the donut) and months later I am on trial for murder, I can prove to the court with absolute mathematical certainty that I couldn’t have killed anyone at that time because I was eating a donut halfway across town.

Using blockchain similarly is great for proving your transaction history. Maybe I somehow faked that NFT about the donut? Well, I couldn’t have, because it was months ago and blockchain history is cryptographically impossible to spoof.

These are obviously contrived examples, but when applied at scale it becomes an extremely powerful way to verify truth. Yes, I did in fact buy those tickets, here’s my NFT, now let me on the plane. No, I did not spend $3000 on knock-off accessories, here is my blockchain. The odds of someone being able to fake these is extremely low.

But, again, this will never come into practice, at least not in the near future. As @beefcat pointed out, implementing these systems would be expensive for the established financial institutions, and would present new challenges for them to create new processes for handling. An awful lot of work to create something that is stronger and safer when there is little motivation for them to do so.

Technology rarely advances for reasons that benefit the majority. It advances to make a few people rich, kill people very efficiently, or to increase profit margins on porn sales (see item 1, I guess).

If you think about the really good applications of things like crypto, NFTs, blockchain, etc., you quickly realize that they are things that aren’t marketable or profitable for the entities that would need to implement them. If all the banks and credit companies bought into something like blockchain or NFTs, then transaction fraud and identity theft would disappear overnight… but what would THEY get out of it? The only way it’s ever going to happen is with coordinated government mandates, and nobody running for office has the faintest idea of what crypto tech is other than “dumb way for the nouveau riche to waste their money”