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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • project 2025 likely ends with trump and the magats. Because it is almost entirely based upon the idea of a POTUS who actively has no idea how government works and doesn’t want to do anything other than get headlines.

    Because under a romney or a cheney? They don’t need project 2025 because steps will already be taken. Just like they have been since reagan with the bushes gradually eroding away democracy.

    And… the reality is that it is inevitable that republicans will gain power again. Because The Left will pretty rapidly be at each other’s throats once trump is gone (just note all the Bernie Or Bust crew who still can’t shut the fuck up about the most important event in the past 8 years…). And people will lose interest in voting because they didn’t get exactly what they want.

    The hope is that Kamala actually acts and works to restore those checks and balances so that four years of a republican is four years of a mess for Democrats to clean up and not the first four years of Gilead.


  • Its unclear how many “moderate republicans” will vote for her. In large part because it is unclear how many “moderate republicans” there actually are and it is worth remembering that folk like liz cheney and romney largely voted in lockstep with trump and the magats outside of MAYBE one or two issues that personally impact them. And it isn’t like any of the “former Republican leaders” have particularly strong support bases considering they lost to the magats years ago.

    The reality is that this is just part of the republican party trying to prepare for a post-trump election. trump supported candidates consistently lost downballot and the primaries for this election were a shitshow. maga/tea party republicans die with trump so they are making sure they can go back to reagan/bush style “We are the party of decorum and church rights. You need to meet us in the middle and let us kill just a few trans folk per day”



  • No. There is every reason to “defend yourself”. The key is to actually be aware of what research and efforts are out there and minimizing your risk profile any time you are dealing with a black box.

    I mean, it is known that people can pick locks. Do you plug your ears every time you hear someone talk about how doors can be compromised? Or do you give up on everything and remove every single deadbolt in your home?

    Or… do you do a bit of research and figure out what you can do to make your home harder to break into. Whether it is sturdier screws, a reinforced doorjam, or other methods?


  • I can’t speak to monero specifically

    But:

    • Why aren’t they catching more criminals? They are. They just are finding alternate sources of evidence. Dick Wolf shows love to talk about how cops need to protect themselves from any poison fruit and blah blah blah. The reality is that they immediately go to the poison fruit and use that to make a plausible excuse for why they investigated something else that can confirm information they got from the illegal source. If you’ve ever wondered why they would think to investigate a random unrelated company that ends up being the smoking gun…
    • Why didn’t anyone claim the bounty? Because the CIA and the like don’t want people to know they compromised it?

    Back in my pure research days it was always fun to guess what the latest “big thing” was actually about. It was especially fun when you would be looking for funding opportunities and see really weird stuff that made no sense for the org sponsoring it but would have made perfect sense for a different 3LA.

    It was ALSO real fun to totally never notice when certain funding opportunities dried up and then there was a big push in the news about how we need to outlaw technology those opportunities totally didn’t already compromise.

    Like, for the better part of a decade The Big Thing was graph analysis techniques. And the number of kids who had no idea they were basically writing algorithms to process social media (especially twitter) was downright sad. And the people who DID realize what their work was geared toward? They applied for jobs where they got paid a lot more to do exactly that without needing to pretend it is actually about data storage technologies or optimizing cell tower load.

    And… let’s just say that most of those algorithms ALSO apply toward cryptocurrencies and transaction logs (since they had great applications for bank transactions…) and even doing a number on tumblers and so forth.


  • While I agree this definitely feels like more of a threat than an action, it IS worth understanding the many times that tor nodes have been compromised. Exit nodes are a well documented mess (and have many of the same vulnerabilities normal VPNs do) but eavesdropping and traffic analysis are also probabilities based upon how much of the network any given org has access to.

    If that NGO was doing hinky stuff or just doing a sloppy job? Those cops might actually have a LOT of actionable data that just needs a bit of processing.


    Which is why it is always important to understand what your risks and benefits from a privacy related tool are. People often think “I’ll just put everything through a vpn/tor” which DRASTICALLY increases their risk profiles. But they also don’t understand how tor works well enough to even know what it gives them over a traditional vpn (as opposed to “Dark Web” stuff which is a different mess).



  • Doesn’t really change much.

    You NEVER connect to sensitive resources via wifi. Different orgs and levels have different rules about whether a device capable of wifi can even be in the same room, but the key is to not connect it to the secure network. This is commonly referred to as “an airgap”. And if you are wondering how different ships can communicate with each other and The US? Don’t ask questions!

    For less sensitive resources? YOLO that shit. But it is also incredibly trivial to set up a security model where users cannot connect to arbitrary networks.

    So StinkyNet would, presumably, only be usable by personal devices. Which should have absolutely nothing sensitive on them to begin with. And if anything on any of the ship’s sensitive networks was even able to connect to StinkyNet then… the Navy done fucked up.

    Which… might explain the rapid action to punish those who violated policy.


  • And if there is not immense amounts of “do not have a fucking fitbit” levels of warnings and policies, that is a problem for the US Navy itself. Because a lot of those will also cache data and send the last N days once they get back to shore.

    Again, unless they were ACTUALLY doing sensitive stuff (rather than just “sensitive by default” to protect Leadership™ from having to think and make decisions) then we are looking at the same problem the russians have in Ukraine.

    Otherwise? It is a policy violation, not a security violation, in and of itself. What people then share on social media is on them.


    And a friendly reminder: Policy is made to minimize the risk of a security issue and you should follow it (if only because you are paid to). But it is VERY important to understand what you are actually protecting yourself from so that you understand if policy is even doing anything. Otherwise you get complete insanity as more and more bureaucrats and Leaders™ add bullshit so they can get a bonus for being “security minded”.



  • Part of it is that purity tests are at an all time high. In large part because we are constantly inundated with Content to reinforce our world views (or the world view of the Influencer we glommed on to) constantly. So anything different is not just cognitive dissonance: it is an attack on our very core and a lie. So if someone does something we wouldn’t do? They are the evilest of evil people and are knowingly hurting whoever we care about.

    But the other aspect? The internet is a great place to meet people with different life experiences. And in a lot of cases (particularly with certain politicians), we and the people we love have been directly harmed by them. All that steven universe bullshit about needing to love everyone and always finding the good goes out the window when you are increasingly watching organizations try to murder you for embracing who you are and to enslave people and turn them into breeding stock.

    And the last aspect is that lemmy has a really bad infestation of tankies. Tankies who, useful idiots or intentional, tend to actively argue for destabilizing The West and increasing conflicts. So advocating for terrorism and murder helps with that.






  • Depends on the system

    The “Yo dog, a tidal wave is hitting right now. That is why it looks like it is super duper low tide.” alert? Yeah, you’ll get that. Whether that is time to meaningfully act or not depends.

    But most regions have additional services you can and should sign up for that will give the early warnings. So “Seismic activity detected a mile or three off shore or however tidal waves work. We are monitoring the situation” is a good indicator of “maybe today is not the day I go to the beach”. And “We are no longer monitoring the situation. Please proceed as normal” is a sign that maybe you do want to go for swimmies after all.

    Same with other disasters. I live in a region that has a lot of wildfires. We tend to get the early warnings and even the “We might say to evacuate in a few days” through a different service. We get the “Get the fuck out of town immediately” alerts through the normal emergency alert system.


  • The issue is: What is right and what is wrong?

    "mondegreen"s are so ubiquitous that there are multiple websites dedicated to it. Is it “wrong” to tell someone that the song where Jimi Hendrix talked about kissing a guy is Purple Haze? And even pointing out where in the song that happens has value.

    In general, I would prefer it if all AI Search Engines provided references. Even a top two or three pages. But that gets messy when said reference is telling someone they misunderstood a movie plot or whatever. “The movie where Anthony Hopkins pays Brad Pitt for eternal life using his daughter is Meet Joe Black. Also you completely missed the point of that movie” is a surefired way to make customers incredibly angry because we live in bubbles where everything we do or say (or what influencers do or say and we pretend we agree with…) is reinforced, truth or not.

    And while it deeply annoys me when I am trying to figure out how to do something in Gitlab CI or whatever and get complete nonsense based on a single feature proposal from five years ago? That… isn’t much better than asking for help in a message board where people are going to just ignore the prompt and say whatever they Believe.

    In a lot of ways, the backlash against the LLMs reminds me a lot of when people get angry at self checkout lines. People have this memory of a time that never was where cashiers were amazingly quick baggers and NEVER had to ask for help to figure out if something was an Anaheim or Poblano pepper or have trouble scanning something or so forth. Same with this idea of when search (for anything non-trivial) was super duper easy and perfect and how everyone always got exactly the answer they wanted when they posted on a message board rather than complete nonsense (if they weren’t outright berated for not searching for a post from ten years ago that is irrelevant).


  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.ziptoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    21 days ago

    Sorry, did I miss something? Boeing took over the FAA?

    JESUS GOD DAMNED CHRIST!!! WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!! Now THAT is news.

    It has nothing to do with “trying to solve this problem” and pretending it does is just an obnoxious strawman. The issue is coming into a completely unrelated thread to spew some idiocy because your favorite influencer does the same. It is engagement farming for absolutely zero reason.

    The ONLY mention of Boeing in that article was that they were being considered for a fallback. Which also includes misinformation about NASA deeming it unsafe (as opposed to not as safe/unnecessarily risky when there are safer options). Which… is an FAA and NASA decision. Because you can bet spacex would gladly fly their rockets if they were allowed to as well.


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    21 days ago

    Sorry, what?

    Boeing is willing to pay for spacex not being perfect? And we should put astronauts on known safety risks because Challenger and Columbia weren’t enough for you?

    Look, I get it. Everyone is influencer-pilled. But this isn’t even reddit: it is fricking lemmy. So how about trying to respond to topics and discussions rather than just non-existent karma and engagement farming with non sequitors?


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    21 days ago

    There are (or at least were) actually competent engineers at spacex. While we can’t rule out overengineering to an obscene degree, the amount of propulsion is going to be very limited. Basically enough to make minor adjustments and then one last burn to “safely” land.

    Which is basically comparable to wind carrying a conventional booster off course. Yes, it is possible but it is mitigated by landing in an ocean and not doing this on windy days.

    No, The issue is that there was a failure. Doesn’t matter when or where it happens. Something that was supposed to work didn’t and we need to understand that before we have yet another Challenger.

    Let’s put it this way (yay metaphors, these never leave to pedantism and derailment): You just got home from driving to the local fun fair. You close your door and your mirror falls off. It happened AFTER you drove and AFTER you turned off the engine but… are you going to go on any road trips before figuring out what the hell happened?