Rocket propulsion, the greatest scam in the universe. Want to speed up? Buy fuel to get your speed. Want to slow down? There's no refund, and in fact, you have to pay twice for even more fuel. Momentum exchange tethers provide refundable speeds by saving everyone's energy into a credit union for speed loans, but it's suppressed by the Big Rockets.

people say that paying the ransom to (ransomware) criminals should be illegal because it rewards extoring people. that logic seems sound!

why does this logic not apply to the refunds that your bank will (sometimes, has a legal obligation to) pay you if you got scammed?

n.b.: one could make a reasonable argument that visa/mc chargebacks are fine, because the merchant is liable. but if you got scammed into transferring money, a UK bank will just materialize 85k GBP for you. how does this create a good set of incentives

@whitequark I am excited for https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/running-macos-in-a-virtual-machine-on-apple-silicon but I don’t know anyone building with it yet

if apple wanted us to build applications for their platform they'd give us a first-party way to run macOS VMs that isn't misery-inducing

this includes windows 11

i would genuinely rather use windows than macos if i had no choice but those two OSes (as my daily)

reverse engineering
neutral engineering
drive engineering
first/second/third gear engineering
sport mode engineering

if the support is anything less than unbelievably helpful i'm fucking refunding it

using this software makes me want to stab myself in the eye with a rusty fork

time from attempting to deal with Parallels to opening a ticket because it is catastrophically broken: idk under a hour I guess

comedy gold

You gotta hand it to AI*, it's really lowered the barrier to executing on any gamedev idea that pops into someone's head and in so doing is illustrating magnificently why game ideas are considered absolutely worthless

*Ok you really don't but it's part of the gag

The first existential question asked by an uplift with a human-hybrid brain organoid was by an orange shorthair cat named “Peaches” who in 2034 asked, “What color am I?”

After being told “Orange”.

Peaches replied, “Splendid”.

Love me some CAD kernel code:

NL_INDEX *mu, *mv, i, j, k, l, nf, mf, rf, sf, ng, mg, rg, sg, nh, mh, rh, sh, nfr, nfs, ngr, ngs, mfx, mfy, mgx, mgy, af, ag, bf, bg, mxfb, myfb, mxgb, mygb, ixfr, iyfs, ixgr, iygs, iu, jv, mlf, mlg, mi, ih, jh, kf, lf, kg, lg, kh, lh;

that statement saying "actually, dumping hundreds of brute-forced proofs does not help with the practice and advancement of mathematics" is exactly the line software devs should take, but programmer pop culture has always valued short term convenience over most other concerns, so here we are

If you actually read the “Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them.” post going around, you’ll find a transparent attempt to clumsily string together a conspiracy.

The post is predicated on the idea that a feature of WebAuthn called “attestation”, which is only used in high-assurance and usually corporate scenarios, and usually with physical hardware security keys, will be leveraged to hurt people, somehow.

The post posits that a website like X will bait and switch users: first, you get a passkey. Then, later, scary “attested” passkeys! This simply isn’t possible to do because attestation isn’t supported on the web for mass market, consumer authentication.

Attestation for passkeys (software-based, syncable credentials) is antithetical to their mass market goals, and would freeze out independent, non-corporate-backed credential managers. It’s an explicit non-goal of the designers of passkeys, who work together in a forum anyone can join.

And trust me, websites and apps like banks repeatedly asked for attestation at the beginning of the industry’s passkey journey. The platforms, browsers, and credential management apps have held firm that the goal of passkeys is reducing phishing and **not** some kind of trusted computing scheme. (And I will note: over my dead body!)

Besides the theory of the case being fundamentally wrong, there are several things that make the post disqualifying in terms of arguing something useful or important in the realm of security, privacy, and user authentication:

1. Intentionally presenting things that are complicated as inherently suspicious. (Delivering security by design can be complicated, yes!)

2. Describing TOTP as a “great solution” for adding security to a password-based account. When the most common threat model on the web is phishing (a word the post never mentions!), TOTP hardly buys you _anything_. TOTP is phishable.

3. Seeming to be unbothered by how many logical leaps are being taken without actually understanding the topic being discussed.

There are bad things happening in tech and untrustworthy people and companies do exist, but they’re largely in the AI space, not the “let’s stop people we love from getting compromised through phishing” space.

apparently failover failed to fail over. over

codeberg is down, post ponies

My last day at Apple will be October 19th. I am searching for a new role looking forward.

I read some post about how Mastodon consists primarily of German-speaking creatures talking in English. I'm gonna do a poll, need to test that. Boosts highy appreciated!

So, do you speak German?