@kelvin0mql @pluralistic @lrosa
Having done my time in the urban legend mines of the early Internet, I regret that I am duty-bound to contest your folk etymology.
It's still a fun story, and legit to share as a cultural nugget, but it's not actually true.
It's been ten years, so a short story about the "gotofail" bug.
Someone came to me about a catastrophic vulnerability in Apple's TLS implementation.
I shit you not, they'd overheard someone at a bar drunkenly bragging about how they were going to sell it to a FVEY intelligence agency for six figures.
They didn't know exactly what it was, just some vague details and the key point is that it allowed use of the real certificate.
This was enough for me to find the bug (yay open source), which would go on to be known as "gotofail", and produce a working exploit in less than a day.
The details were anonymously back channelled to Apple, who released a fix.
@matthew_d_green posted on Twitter about it, concerned by the Apple's vague release notes.
I used a burner phone to share the details with him anonymously.
Then everyone forgot about the whole thing because heartbleed.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
@arstechnica I decided to restrict myself to ‘passive’ Reddit usage via web client not logged in.
The content on Reddit has gone downhill. More bots, less conversation. Some niche subreddits have gone from a small stream of usage to a post every few days.
The web experience, at least on mobile, is poor. Some subreddits (r/jonstewart as a recent one) just don’t work in iOS safari. Usually old.reddit.com is a workaround, but one that shouldn’t be necessary.
https://www.europesays.com/1032593/ 36-year-old German volunteer medic Diana Savita Wagner, in the Ukrainian Army, was killed in action on the eastern front, on January 31st, 2024. #RussiaUkraineWar #Ukraine #UkraineWar
Study: Germany is in recession simply because of the high level of sickness. Study author Claus Michelsen: The effect is significant. Conservatively estimated, the high sickness rate cost us 0.8 percentage points of growth last year.
I learned today that David Kahn (The Codebreakers, Seizing the Enigma, and more) passed away last week.
I believe that much of what we know about the cryptanalysis of the Enigma is public because he did the work of bringing it to light, and that's not reflected on his wikipedia page. (I'm not certain of that history, people who are please be encouraged to make it easier to find.)
Beat Big Tech: 3 Simple Empowerment Strategies! https://neat.tube/videos/watch/d2f1baf3-bb1e-46f7-80cc-04158d3e4a79
Rant about the web these days (get off my lawn)
It is wild to me how many relatively-simple websites just utterly break without cookies or without JavaScript. If you have a straightforward article page nobody should need either to read it. I'm not talking about paywalls here, or about complex interactive webapps. Just simple pages anyone should be able to read where the images don't work if you don't have JS turned on. Or nothing at all loads if they can't set a cookie. I don't know who's writing these frameworks which can't even produce basic text-and-pictures HTML without JS, but it feels negligent.
Whatever happened to progressive enhancement? To writing semantic HTML and using CSS to lay it out how you want, and JS only to do the things CSS can't? Even a friendly, usable CMS can spit out semantic HTML which works with your style sheets. What's the structural incentive I'm missing here?
I am so proud of you, Iowa!! A huge turnout, a big win! An outstanding chant!
"Cheers rang out down the hallway as a bill that would have legalized discrimination against trans and nonbinary Iowans failed to pass an Iowa House subcommittee Wednesday.
...Democratic Rep. Sami Scheetz (D-Cedar Rapids) and Republican Reps. Casey Thomson (R-Charles City) and John Wills (R-Spirit Lake) voted against the bill, while cheers and chants of 'Fuck you, J-Dog'—a reference to Rep. Jeff Shipley, who introduced the bill—rose from the hallway outside the committee room."
This passage from @debcha's "How Infrastructure works" is such a truth that often gets forgotten or ignored on the hunt for profit. It's a very familiar and recurring theme in resilience engineering texts and research. And it also rings true for me in this current trend of continuous layoffs that take more and more slack and capacity out of tech systems being maintained (in addition to the human cost) as remaining humans need to do more work in the same amount of time.
Very cool of Amazon to put unnecessary ads in their shows just so they can charge us more money to get rid of the ads that don't need to be there in the first place.
It's the digital equivalent of the Coca-Cola Company putting rocks into cans of soda and then introducing "New and improved Rock-Free Coke, only one dollar more than the rock-filled original!".
Yet again why sampling matters in determining what questions we answer for which group of people and not just "do we have a minimum N for the model to run" you are baking in much of what you can even learn in your initial decisions about WHO you collect data from, this is a critical part of research. Diverse & representative samples are not a nice thing to do or a "oh wow we're great look at us" thing to do they literally let us study the reality of the world
https://weatherishappening.network/@wordshaper/111850767039149750
And people are like "excuse me this is a very robust amount to be able to predict" and you're like "that's not it, the problem is that we're looking for gold" and people are like "nonsense, my garbage is extremely revelatory about my data (also garbage), and we're all trying to predict how to get more gold and that's what I've done" and you're like "but what if it doesn't matter because gold is nothing like garbage!" And people are like "Cat absolutely nobody wants to hear about methods"
I wrote down this idea and then I literally spent two hours helping a grad student who is trying to make a case for the importance of psychological affordances in how we design safer car interfaces because his advisor can't be bothered to know the research about people...I AM THE HOTLINE how did this happen
Theoretical physicist by training (PhD in quantum open systems/quantum information), University lecturer for a bit, and currently paying the bills as an engineer working in optical communication (implementation) and quantum communication (concepts), though still pursuing a little science on the side. I'm interested in physics and math, of course, but I enjoy learning about really any area of science, philosophy, and many other academic areas as well. My biggest other interest is hiking and generally being out in nature.