We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history. And that willingness to take on the hard things, even when not universally accepted, is exactly what the internet needs today.

But you’re not doing the hard things. You’re doing the easy thing. Capitulation to surveillance capitalism is the easy thing.

If automation really is the boon to society that we think it is, then buying out the displaced workers is a no-brainer. If, on the other hand, it’s really just a boon for the bourgeoisie, then fuck their automation. Automation will be liberatory or it will be bullshit.

Dover: it’s either a breeze or completely inscrutable.

Holy shit that’s fuckin’ awesome XD

“Could you please rebase over main first?”

Perhaps I should rephrase. They attack Mozilla (and users of Firefox) infinitely more than Google (and users of various Google products). I heard it said after Mozilla introduced their opt-out privacy-respecting ad tracking that users should “move to a more privacy-friendly browser like Google Chrome”.

One of those entities claims to be on the side of users. When it constantly throws those same users under the bus anyway, it isn’t surprising that it gets more hate than the entity that removed “don’t be evil” from its motto.

Tell them you’re a liberal? You’re practically a Nazi collaborator!

It’s not our fault that fascists bleed when liberals get scratched.

Similarly, I find a fair number of Rust crates (that I want to use) have virtually no doc or inline examples, and use weird metaprogramming that I can’t wrap my head around.

Is it really a true rust crate if it doesn’t contain at least one inscrutable macro?

Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn’t budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.

ESRI is in the position that Microsoft and Adobe want to be in, a de-facto monopoly.

Well shit I didn’t expect this to be relevant again so quickly

“in the highest exalted way”

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=8g4d-rnhuSg

Once you’ve eliminated the cause for NATO, then dissolving NATO will make sense.

The cause for NATO was eliminated. NATO didn’t dissolve. It grew. Spoiler alert: there are no good guys in a war between imperialists.

I’d say there are three pieces, each feeding into the next.

1. A Culture Favouring Novelty Over Replication - There are no Nobel prizes for replicating findings. There is no Fields medal for roundly and soundly refuting the findings of a paper. There is no reputation to be built in dedicating oneself to replication efforts. All incentives push towards novel, novel, novel.
2. Funding Follows Culture - Nobody wants to pay twice for a result (much less thrice) especially if there’s a chance that you’ll expose the result as Actually Wrong on the second or third go.
3. Publish or Perish - Scientists have material needs – both personally and for their actual work – acquired through funding. That funding demands the publishing of novelty. If your results aren’t novel, then they won’t get published (not anywhere that matters, anyway). And if you don’t get published (where it matters), then you don’t get funded. And if you don’t get funded, you perish. And so the circle of scientific life is complete.

At every step, the incentives involved in the production of science are, ironically, rewarding un-scientific behaviour and ignoring – if not outright punishing – actual science. Until replication is seen as an equal to novelty, this regime will persist.

IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS. CONFESS THAT YOU ARE A BOT.

What kind of type signature would prove the first block of any directory in an ext4 filesystem image isn’t a hole?

I don’t know if the type system proves it’s not a hole, but the type system certainly seems to force consumers to contend with the possibility by surfacing the outcomes at the type system level. That’s what the Either is doing in the example’s return type, is it not?

fn get_or_create_inode(
    &self,
    ino: Ino
) -> Result<Either<ARef<Inode<T>>, inode::New<T>>>

LOL it’s actually even lower if you look at Schedule J. Her base compensation is only 115,057. It’s bonus and incentive comp (76,172) that brings it up.

191,229 USD

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840/202342569349300244/full

Strictly speaking, you can download it directly from their website, but IIRC, the build will still default to trying to use Google Play Services, and only fall back to a different service if Google Play Services is not on the device. Signal really, really wants to give Google insight into who is messaging who.

Yeah, Signal is more than encrypted messaging it’s a metadata harvesting platform. It collects phone numbers of its users, which can be used to identify people making it a data collection tool that resides on a central server in the US. By cross-referencing these identities with data from other companies like Google or Meta, the government can create a comprehensive picture of people’s connections and affiliations.

This allows identifying people of interest and building detailed graphs of their relationships. Signal may seem like an innocuous messaging app on the surface, but it cold easily play a crucial role in government data collection efforts.

Strictly speaking, the social graph harvesting portion would be under the Google umbrella, as, IIRC, Signal relies on Google Play Services for delivering messages to recipients. Signal’s sealed sender and “allow sealed sender from anyone” options go part way to addressing this problem, but last I checked, neither of those options are enabled by default.

However, sealed sender on its own isn’t helpful for preventing build-up of social graphs. Under normal circumstances, Google Play Services knows the IP address of the sending and receiving device, regardless of whether or not sealed sender is enabled. And we already know, thanks to Snowden, that the feds have been vacuuming up all of Google’s data for over a decade now. Under normal circumstances, Google/the feds/the NSA can make very educated guesses about who is talking to who.

In order to avoid a build-up of social graphs, you need both the sealed sender feature and an anonymity overlay network, to make the IP addresses gathered not be tied back to the endpoints. You can do this. There is the Orbot app for Android which you can install, and have it route Signal app traffic through the Tor network, meaning that Google Play Services will see a sealed sender envelope emanating from the Tor Network, and have no (easy) way of linking that envelope back to a particular sender device.

Under this regime, the most Google/the feds/the NSA can accumulate is that different users receive messages from unknown people at particular times (and if you’re willing to sacrifice low latency with something like the I2P network, then even the particular times go away). If Signal were to go all in on having client-side spam protection, then that too would add a layer of plausible deniability to recipients; any particular message received could well be spam. Hell, spam practically becomes a feature of the network at that point, muddying the social graph waters further.

That Signal has

1. Not made sealed sender and “allow sealed sender from anyone” the default, and
2. Not incorporated anonymizing overlay routing via tor (or some other network like I2P) into the app itself, and
3. Is still in operation in the heart of the U.S. empire

tells me that the Feds/the NSA are content with the current status quo. They get to know the vast, vast majority of who is talking (privately) to who, in practically real time, along with copious details on the endpoint devices, should they deem tailored access operations/TAO a necessary addition to their surveillance to fully compromise the endpoints and get message info as well as metadata. And the handful of people that jump through the hoops of

1. Enabling sealed sender
2. Enabling “allow sealed sender from anyone”
3. Routing app traffic over an anonymizing overlay network (and ideally having their recipients also do so)

can instead be marked for more intensive human intelligence operations as needed.

Finally, the requirement of a phone number makes the Fed’s/the NSA’s job much easier for getting an initial “fix” on recipients that they catch via attempts to surveil the anonymizing overlay network (as we know the NSA tries to). If they get even one envelope, they know which phone company to go knocking on to get info on where that number is, who it belongs to, etc.

This too can be subverted by getting burner SIMs, but that is a difficult task. A task that could be obviated if Signal instead allowed anonymous sign-ups to its network.

That Signal has pushed back hard on every attempt to remove the need for a phone number tells me that they have already been told by the Feds/the NSA that that is a red line, and that, should they drop that requirement, Signal’s days of being a cushy non-profit for petite bourgeois San Francisco cypherpunks would quickly come to an end.

Comrade ✊

Idaho Department of Correction director Josh Tewalt determined the execution could not happen because the medical team could not establish an IV line.

Using language like “the medical team” is disingenuous. Actual healthcare professionals would be violating their oaths if they were to participate in lethal injections like this. Sometimes states can find healthcare professionals willing to take on the job despite their oaths, but typically, it’s corrections officers that get tasked with trying to cosplay as healthcare professionals in these scenarios.