• 13 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 17th, 2023

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  • Because email federation is inherent to everyone’s understanding of how that service works. And perhaps more importantly, email “instances” are run by corporations. Laymen are not signing up on a “server” or “instance,” they’re signing up for Google, Apple, or Microsoft - the service they get aligns to a company that provides it. Nearly every single service that anyone has ever signed up for online has followed the same essential process: go to fixed url, create id and password, gain access.

    It’s easy to underestimate, especially in communities like this, how enigmatic the entire infrastructure of the internet is to the general population. Think of those videos where people are asked what “the cloud” is: they pause and ponder and then guess “satellites?” because they’ve never even wondered about it. I’m guessing that for many people, something like Twitter is just something that lives in their app store that they can choose to “enable” on their phone by installing it.

    People know that software is “made up of code,” but they don’t understand what that means. The idea that an “application” is a collection of services run by code, that there are app servers and web servers, that there are backends and frontends, is completely unknown to (I’d guess) a significant majority of people. And if someone doesn’t understand that, it’s honestly near impossible to understand what anything in the fediverse is.

    And most importantly: this is not any user’s fault. IT and the Internet developed so quickly, and it was made so seamlessly accessible by corporations who at first just wanted their services to be adopted, and then wanted everything even more deliberately opaque so those users were more likely to feel locked in and dependent while the services themselves tail-spun in degradation.

    We need more, and more accessible, and friendlier, tech literacy in general. The complexity of our world is running away from us (“I have a foreboding [of a time…] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues” - Carl Sagan) and we simply can’t deeply understand many of the things that directly impact us. But because of its ubiquity, IT may be the best chance people have of getting better at understanding.





  • So…to my untrained ears this sounds kind of dumb.

    cybersecurity has always been about protecting computer systems more generally from any sort of misuse, no matter how the adversary might access them.

    And misuse is defined the system’s owner, who in this case has given explicit permission to Musk. The whole article is predicated on the idea that Elon Musk…lied or put on a disguise or something. By any currently known measure, he’s allowed to be doing everything he’s doing because that’s what the current, duly-elected administration told him to do.

    There was an image on the front page today of the everything-is-fine dog sitting among the flames saying “they can’t do this it’s illegal.” That seems apt for this article. America elected a fascist, and that fascist is openly tearing down all the informal rules and norms that we’ve always treated like laws.

    Pretending like there’s a legal issue with a lot of what’s been happening is a distraction and waste of time that Democrats appear to be perfectly comfortable using as air cover to not exercise what little power they might have. I feel confident it will lead nowhere, and unless the people with power and influence who pretend to care figure out how to actually accomplish anything, we will just keep sinking.














  • There is some absolutely hilarious material in here, were it instead fictional.

    First-term state Rep. Roger Wilder, R-Denham Springs, who sponsored the child labor measure and owns Smoothie King franchises across the Deep South, said he filed the bill in part because children want to work without having to take lunch breaks.

    “I keep trying to give them lunch breaks but they insist on doing what’s in the best interest my pocket lining!”

    And my favorite, also from Roger Wilder:

    “The wording is ‘We’re here to harm children.’ Give me a break," he said. "These are young adults.”

    Could you imagine the delivery of this line, with just the right amount of pause after “give me a break” and the right expression to the camera if this were said on something like Parks and Rec?












  • I’m a…moderate soulslike fan, not a huge devotee by any stretch, but this trailer strikes me as really bland. The soulslike gameplay style has become so rote that showcasing a series of short combat clips is essentially advertising that you’ve made an arguably cheap-looking copy of a >decade-old formula. In my opinion, if these games want to capture customers’ attention (mine at least), they should be evidencing: (1) compelling level design, (2) tight mechanical tuning, (3) unique boss encounters, and (4) cool creature designs. Plus anything else that’s a core differentiator. At best, Enotria got maybe halfway there on the fourth point in this trailer, and that’s it.

    Great song though.