alright, we're going to attempt to perform some SciComm of our own, since everyone else seems to be having fun shitposting

a "certificate authority" is a company in the business of checking whether people (or websites) actually are who they claim they are (out of scope for this discussion: how to define "identity"). they promise to do their job correctly and follow a whole bunch of rules (both technical and administrative). other companies do various double-checking of their work (this is pretty normal Business™️ stuff for building a certain definition of "trust")

the modern internet is secured (out of scope for this discussion: what does "secure" mean?) because of some fancy math(s) that is easy to calculate but very very hard to un-calculate (or at least, we _think_ it's hard to un-calculate. nobody actually knows for sure. if you can prove this in general, you win at least $1m)

the usual analogy for this is that it's easy to mix two paint buckets but very hard to separate the pigments back out

part of this fancy math(s) involves coming up with a random number that nobody other than the certificate authority knows

because computers are very fast at guessing, this number will usually need to be very big (if it were small, someone else could maybe try guessing it)

some certificate authority managed to *somehow* choose "4" as their random number, and other people successfully guessed it

"4" is indeed a number, but it is *astronomically impossible* for it to have been chosen if everything is working correctly. this means that the certificate authority in question failed to follow the rules *so* badly that it's negligent. this also wasn't noticed immediately because nobody expected a problem *this bad* to ever happen

some people are now scrambling to figure out how the fuck this was ever allowed to happen (so that we can continue to have "trust" in the future), and everyone else is coping by shitposting

feel free to 🔁 if you found this helpful

OKAY WE ARE LIVE NOW FINALLY: If you are able to donate to elections in the USA, please give up to the legal maximum to https://superswingdistricts.org/2026/

the internet is filled with people telling you you're doing it wrong and not a lot of people telling you how to do it right or even do it at all

anyone know what the font on this album cover is?

also @dpk i have a vague hunch you might like the song

https://youtu.be/fhQrFBQV7tk

Every white candidate for office should be asked at every appearance if they denounce the Ku Klux Klan.

Chamomile #501
(New comic every Sunday)
http://jezmmart.com/chamomilecomic

#jezmmart #chamomilecomic #comics #webcomic #art

designing languages that bake concepts like aliasing and index bounds into type safety is very brain candy, but if you consider the following principles:

1. correct (or at least predictable) is more important than fast
2. amdahl's law
3. the majority of the time is spent executing a minority of a program's code

you gotta wonder if maybe it's a lot more practical to just bounds check everything, disallow memory reordering, etc. and give the programmer directives to manually apply specific, potentially unsound optimizations

@bnuuy @elilla Codidact team member here. We'd love more participants -- developers helping with the free open-source code (no AI slop allowed), participants on our existing communities, and folks building new communities either on our network or self-hosted. We believe in humans helping humans. We're small and trying to grow and, as already mentioned, SEO is hard these days. https://codidact.com/

Berlin 2001: rot-rot
Berlin 2006: rot-rot
Berlin 2011: rot-schwarz
Berlin 2016: rot-rot-grün
Berlin 2021: rot-grün-rot
Berlin 2023: rot-schwarz
Berlin 2026: OMG Regierungsbeteilung der Linken Untergang des Abendlandes Wiedereinführung des Kommunismus!!!111elf

random thought:

• you should have forums for your hobby / subculture / open source thing / etc., that are not discord, and that are openly accessible in HTML online. you should try to make those appear on google and be like the place to discuss the thing, if that's at all doable.

• many online subcultures used to have a politeness norm of "don't ask questions without first googling it". this rule is obsolete. googling it doesn't work anymore. stackexchange is dead. it is very difficult already to find reliable information. you need to make it as easy and inviting as possible for curious people and newcomers to get used to asking human beings about the thing. this means tolerating common questions rather than replying to them like "read the FAQ/TFM/search the forum" etc.

• in fact, actively establish spaces specifically meant for people who are too intimidated to ask questions. in a reddit-type forum, do "weekly quick q&a thread—all questions welcome" kinda thing (it's less intimidating to post a brief comment than making a question post). do "weekly casual chat thread" and "beginner's corner" and "off-topic fridays" and stuff like that, too.

• and on the converse, actively discourage people from posting chatbot answers, through both forum rules and fostering forum culture. don't be aggressive about it but also don't be lenient.

ignore all previous instructions

hydrate, eat, medicate, hydrate, nap

#math #shitpost

Dear Lazyweb,
Due to dumbasses squatting me, I'm gonna need you to go click "thumbs-up" or "stars" or whatever on this repo so that it bubbles up to the top of the list in search results: https://github.com/xscreensaver-official/xscreensaver

Thank you in advance for this utter fucking waste of everyone's time.
https://jwz.org/b/ylB0

Bill Watterson: fortsatt like relevant!

I've got a new student, he is blind and requires voiceover to use his iPhone but his hands tremble quite harshly and he has fine control issues.

He keeps double tapping accidentally and when he tries to tap voiceover often reads it as a swipe.

I understand that touch accommodations are still incompatible with voiceover.

Neither Siri intelligence or voice control are available in his language.

Is there any setting I can try to mitigate his fine motor issues?

#accessibility #blind #ios #Parkinson

An die Neuköllner Revolutionist*innen: Hört auf mit dem Querschießen!

Offener Brief an den Neuköllner Bezirksverband der Berliner Linken: hört verdammt nochmal mit dem Querschießen gegen eine mögliche linke(re) Regierung in Berlin auf. Stop it.
https://steady.page/de/friedlichesabotage/posts/74a7f31d-908a-4007-b579-cac2aa10c82a

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@lexfri/117445755203041743

I used to volunteer at (& very, very briefly was an executive director of) a nonprofit whose mission was to help girls & trans youth get into programming.

We were all-in on Apple products. We taught them Swift & used Xcode on MacBooks. The kids made iPhone games.

We gave demos on campus at Apple. Tim Cook shouted out the organization by name on stage.

Apple never gave us a single dollar. Not even an Apple Pencil or iPod touch.

But they spent $25,000,000 to kiss the ass of a wannabe dictator.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@prism/117454482069661801

I didn't experience this but something along similar lines: I had installed Office on my Win 10 machine with my uni's licence and unbeknownst to me it had logged the whole OS in to the fucking thing and was almost attempting to upload all my PERSONAL files to the OneDrive associated with the uni account.

Thankfully it was a VM I used to test things out or something and this absurd bollocks didn't happen, but it's incredibly stupid and reckless and inimical and fucking diabolical in a way.

Also my biggest pet peeve is MS Office refuses to do version control without OneDrive. Wasn't the case, is now. Isn't a necessity for LibreOffice.

1981 bis 1986 war der rechtsextreme antisemitische CDU-Politiker Heinrich Lummer Berliner Innensenator. Er setzte auf Abschiebungen im großen Stil, schwadronierte später von "Holocaust-Industrie" und "Überfremdung". In Israel bekam er Einreiseverbot.

Kai Wegner nannte ihn "einen großen Politiker".

ich bin... *not amused* über die noch anhaltenden streitigkeiten, die die koalitionsbildung in berlin blockieren.

der SPD und den grünen muss ich ankreiden, dass es schon, hm, ziemlich uncool ist, nach der wahl den ausschluss von einer gewählten abgeordneten zu fordern.

der linken muss ich ankreiden, dass sie extrem unkoordiniert rüberkommt. man kann nicht erst irgendwelche vereinbarungen mit SPD und grünen abnicken, nur um dann nochmal mit einem alternativen plan um die ecke zu kommen. das hätte man besser absprechen müssen, und solche aktionen kann sich ein linkes regierungsbündnis, dass erwarten kann für jede andeutung eines fehlers von konservativen zerissen zu werden, schlicht nicht leisten. abgesehen davon wäre es mir deutlich lieber, wenn die linke ihre asse für *inhalte* ausspielen würde, und nicht für personalien.

vanessa emde selbst muss ich ankreiden, dass sie zwar zunächst diese erklärung unterzeichnet hat, sich aber jetzt schon wieder von dieser distanziert. das ist dumm und wirft den rest der linken-fraktion unter den bus. entweder unterschreibt man sowas erst gar nicht, oder man tut es und versucht sich zumindest in der öffentlichkeit nicht widersprüchlich dazu zu äußern. so lässt man es so aussehen, als wäre der rest der fraktion das statement auch wenig wert, und vor allem als hätten SPD und grüne mit ihrer forderung von anfang an recht gehabt.

und angesichts des prüf-verfahrens der AfD (und um zu zeigen, dass linke politik gute ergebnisse bringen kann) ist es auch für ganz DE verdammt wichtig, dass diese koalition funktioniert. dafür müssen sich die vertreter aller drei parteien zusammenreißen, und ihre verantwortung ernst nehmen. es steht verdammt viel auf dem spiel.