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2 hours agoDeist is IIRC some number of gods probably existed and set the world into motion but do not play a role in day to day life.
Dark Arc
Hiker, software engineer (primarily C++, Java, and Python), Minecraft modder, hunter (of the Hunt Showdown variety), biker, adoptive Akronite, and general doer of assorted things.
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023
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21·3 hours agoMaybe, but also maybe not. A test that’s targeted specifically at “do you understand how the government functions” is actually quite different from a lot of other tests and less likely to be subjective.
Like, if there was a question, what part of the government writes laws:
- Congress
- The President
- The Supreme Court
if you get that wrong, you probably shouldn’t be voting.
152·23 hours agoCalling RCS an industry standard is a bit… Questionable. Still, I’m happy to see Apple finally implementing it so there’s a good cross vendor texting implementation.
I wonder how this scales to large voice rooms.
Yeah… Even as a third party, I definitely have not been enjoying the smell when I’ve bumped into it. I don’t think it should be a criminal offense, but I hope we can move past “I need to light a thing on fire and just screw up the air for everyone in my vicinity.”
That’s really not even close to the optimistic scenario. It’s arguably not even in the pessimistic scenario if you’re not just in the “make stuff up club.”
We’re talking at most half a meter of rise by 2050, at most 2 meters by 2100, at most 4 meters by 2150. The intermediate projection is a third of a meter by 2050. The optimistic projection (which we’re not going to hit) is 3/20th of a meter.
Climate change is real. The risk of famine is real. The risk of global conflict is real. The risk of trying storms is real. However, “doomsday everybody dies” is not really on any serious projections. The worst case is “a lot of people in a lot of poor nations die and rich nations have more wars and more immigration.”
1·3 days agodeleted by creator
While technically true, bridge is ultimately an IMAP server you run yourself … and they do have good reasons for this design.
There are Ukrainian and Russian ties… AFAIK it’s used heavily on both sides of the conflict. The founder had some commentary as to why the stance they’ve taken is the stance they’ve taken.
His mother is also from Ukraine herself:
… and Pavel is a French / UAE citizen (as additionally demonstrated by the French government holding him for questioning). The “Telegram is a Russian puppet” arguments are fairly weak.
Their crypto is still AES it’s just the stuff around it that’s home brewed… And even then telegram has been around 10+ years now with no known breaches via the encryption.
That argument was a lot stronger years ago.
For my grandfather… The issue wasn’t the shows, but he specifically wants a few news programs and will not under any circumstances go without them.
This was a problem for even going to Internet based streaming options because he just will not accept anything without those shows for more than a few months.
Meanwhile he also complains he doesn’t have enough to watch and says he can’t afford it (he can, he just doesn’t like what it cost)… But those dang news channels… and just his outlook on TV in general.
IIRC telegram does as well
Even more so, FBI wants to know where the money grandma gave to get her pictures back from the ransomware went.
All this money tracking stuff AFAIK was originally more about organized crime than tax revenue.
I didn’t feel particularly safer in Europe… About the same… Watch your wallet, don’t go down dark alleys alone, etc.
Some things definitely felt more grandiose, but on average things felt like they could be in an American city if not for their vintage.
Public transportation was definitely the biggest difference I observed, trains in Germany were an all but fantastic experience.
I was surprised how heavy German food was and how much smoking folks in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria do. It seemed elevated compared to the average US city.
So most dorms don’t want you using your own routers because a bunch of student routers causes A LOT of inference.
You should probably reach out not to the dorm folks but the university networking folks as they’re the ones that will ultimately make the decision on whether or not to turn things off/disconnect you.
A cheap networking switch would probably be okay by them to get some more wired connections in your dorm room (routers aren’t really a great way to do that).
As a secondary concern, using a router will cause a double NAT for all your connected devices (universities don’t operate in the way ISPs do). That could cause some weird networking shenanigans, particularly for anything peer-to-peer like online games.
A fact I struggle with on an almost daily basis…
True, though presumably users in those places would be stuck with the “less trustworthy” instances (and ideally, would be able to get their local laws changed to make themselves more trust worthy).
It’s definitely not perfectly moral… but little in the world is and maybe it’s sufficient pragmatic.
Yeah, BlueSky has this concept of user moderation lists. It’s effectively like subscribing to a adblock filter. There might be some things blocked by patterns (e.g., you could have one that blocks anything that involves spiders) and there might be others that block specific accounts (e.g., you could have one that blocks users that are known to cause problems, are prone to vulgar language, etc).
I think the problem with credibility scores in general though, is it’s sort of like a “social score” from black mirror. Real people can get caught in the net of “you look like a bot” and similarly different algorithms could be designed to game the system by gaming the metrics to look like they’re not a bot (possibly even more so than some of the real people).
This is kind of what lead me down the route of bringing things back into the physical world. Like, once you have things going back through the normal systems … you arguably do lose some level of anonymity but you also gain back some guarantees of humanity.
It doesn’t need to be the level of “you’ve got a government ID and you’re verified to be exactly you with no other accounts” … just “hey, some number of people in the real world, that are subject to the respective nation’s laws, had to have come into contact with a real piece of mail.”
Maybe that just turns into the world’s slowest UDP network in existence. However, I think it has a real chance of making it easier to detect real people (i.e., folks that have a small number of overlapping addresses). The virtual mailbox the other person gave has 3,000 addresses… if you assume 5 people per mailing address is normal that’s 15,000 bots total before things start getting fishy if you’ve evenly distributed all of those addresses. If you’ve got 3,000 accounts at the same address, that’s very fishy. Addresses also change a lot less frequently than IP addresses, so a physical address ban is a much more strict deterrent.
Hm… I’m not sure if this is enough to defeat the strategy.
It looks like even with that service, you have to sign up for Form 1583.
Even if they’re willing in incur the cost, there’s a real paper trail pointing back to a real person or organization. In other words, the bot operator can be identified.
As you note, this is yet another additional cost. So, you’d have say … $2-3 for the card + an address for the account. If you require every unique address to have no more than 1 account … that’s $13 per bot plus a paper trail to set everything up.
That certainly wouldn’t stop every bot out there … but the chances of a large scale bot farms operating seem like they would be significantly deterred, no?
Just did a refresher per your request… We did not ever to my knowledge use civics tests. We used literacy tests and what made them particularly offensive was they had various exemptions for white people or simplified variants for white people.
I am very icy to the idea of tests in general due to the effects having a “test” to vote could have. However, having a very low bar test of some sort administered without exceptions … it might make sense.
We don’t let people drive whose eyes fail a safety test. Maybe we shouldn’t let people vote if they don’t even have a surface level understanding of what they’re voting for.
I’m not saying do it, but maybe we shouldn’t totally write it off because of some bad behavior without any safeguards to prevent bad behavior.