Phillip Winn @pwinn@social.cleverlibre.org

I finally put up the holiday tree on Saturday, so it's starting to seem a bit more like the holiday season.

Not too much, just a bit.

The artificial tree is pre-trimmed with lights and even artificial pine cones and berries, and it looks so good just out of the box that all we've added to it is the traditional star on top. We have traditionally bought one new ornament each every year, and we'll do that again this year, but those will likely be the only four ornaments on the tree, other than the topper.

I don't think there's any "right way" to celebrate holidays, although I suppose there are plenty of wrong ways. Don't be hateful, be kind. Be gracious to others, and accept with gratitude when others are gracious to you. Be gracious to yourself. Beyond that, you can light candles or cut down a tree or pull a tabletop artificial mini-tree out of a box, and decorate your living space however you wish, and if it works for you, I think that's all that matters.

Whether you mark Christmas or Hanukkah or Festivus or some other event this time of year, I hope you can take a moment to be grateful for having survived another year on this planet.

#blog #christmas #holidays

@dave That's devious. I bet they justify it by sating they're using "open" as a verb, but with every link and every click, it's not-so-subtly pushing the adjectival form. Horrible!

@atomicpoet @bobjonkman @shelenn possible and reasonable, but not at all what’s happening, unfortunately.

@atomicpoet the fact that servers ended up on the fediblock list for expressing interest in UFoI is the best case I can imagine for something like the UFoI. It’s guilt by association with someone guilty of guilt by association at worst, and it continues even in this thread.

This nonsense seems antithetical to what the fediverse claims to be. It boggles my mind that people rush to blocking entire instances at the instance level rather than any of several less severe options, and to do so based on hearsay and half-truths is icing on the cake.

Reading this makes me want to give up on the fediverse and go back to all of the people I’ve brought on board and suggest they give up too. Very disappointing.

@MNNHNewsEnglish these @ufoi posts are making me giggle!

Wow! https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/12/apple-advances-user-security-with-powerful-new-data-protections/

iMessage Contact Key Verification brings over a feature from Signal, and will still require *some* measure of trust in Apple, but seems like like a step forward. Given Apple, I’m sure most of the time people will use the prompt to learn when their family and friends upgrade their iPhone.

Security Keys sound great, and I want one now. Wait, they’re only $29 from Yubico? Wow!

End-to-End Encryption for iCloud Backup is huge, and while I want to say “about time,” the second-best time to plant a tree is today, so I’m glad it’s here now.

#nerdery #blog #apple #security

@orenh Good question triggering thoughts for me.

It can definitely be abused, but I'd say that the prime use case for method overloading is to make similar things work the same way, regardless of their strict type. That is, if what makes a Foobar object different from a Barfoo is not relevant to something they both can do or have done to them, why create methods like setValueForTypeFoobar(Foobar obj) and setValueForTypeBarfoo(Barfoo obj) which are essentially identical when you can create setValue(Foobar obj) and setValue(Barfoo obj)?

The other, related, use case is about focusing on the API contract and having things that are *conceptually* the same but *implementationally* different use the same name. Like having an add() method that when called like: int a = 3; a.add(4); will result in a being equal to 7, but when called like String a = "abc"; a.add("def"); will result in a being "abcdef".

In both cases, I think the emphasis is on the API contract, rather than the maintaining developer mental workload. It's probably a net win given examples like I've mentioned here, but I've definitely seen code in which people tried *way* too hard to make something use an existing method signature when they shouldn't have!

@yisraeldov @freemo @louis Rather than being premature optimization, this is late in coming. You might not be aware of this, but in the absence of a central authority, self-moderating instances have joined together to build domain blocklists that are shared widely and based on nothing more than the say-so of one or two people.

While mastodon does have plenty of tools we can use to block content that we don't want to see, many instance admins choose to really aggressively block entire instances without any due process or evidence or opportunity for counter-evidence. I've seen QOTO described as having "no moderation at all," something I know to be factually false. I've seen entire instances blocked because of the actions of one non-admin user, which is the right of any server admin, but doesn't bode well for federation. I've seen entire instances blocked *not* because of something anyone said or did, but because the instances were insufficiently aggressive in promising to seek out and block other bad instances. It's mind-boggling, and scary for anyone thinking about running an instance of their own.

Primarily at this point, the UFoI is about a guarantee of due process, which is currently lacking in the fediverse. It might not cause the super-aggressive blockers to change their approach, but it will at least guarantee that smaller instances won't be completely isolated from everyone on the whim of someone at a big server having a grumpy day.

If mastodon were as safe and friendly as you say it is, the UFoI wouldn't exist, and the hashtag for BlackMastodon wouldn't be filled with people saying that they're seeing worse treatment on Mastodon than the bird site. I'm glad your personal experience has been positive, but that is not the case for everyone.