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359
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I heard that Twitter originally added verification because they were getting sued over imposters, so they added verification to delegitimize imposters and thus give less reason for others to sue them.

    Now Musk is getting rid of verification en masse, so the original reason for the lawsuits will return.

    Here's how to play it if you're a business who loses your Twitter verification:

    1. Allow yourself to lose verification.
    2. Make a backroom deal with some random person, have that person make a fake account for your business and buy verification. Have the person post some bad things under their fake and verified account.
    3. Sue Twitter since they have verified the fake account and removed verification of the real account, and are thus committing libel.
  • A few months ago I had a 7 year old question of mine closed as a duplicate of a 5 year old question. Just another sign that StackOverflow mods are hard at work.

  • I've had in my mind a political cartoon; two panels:

    The first panel is The Free Market Ideal. Dozens of carts and woodend stands selling fresh fruit, food, hand made goods, etc. There's lots of energetic people moving about and talking and haggling with merchants over prices and comparing prices and looking at all their choices.

    The second panel is The Free Market Reality. A bunch of tired people standing in line for one of two computer terminals.

    The truths portrayed is that there is no bargaining with the monopolies that dominate our markets, their processes are automated. This is not a market of equals, the people are tired and manipulated. As for choice, sometimes you can choose between 2 or 3 companies, sometimes there's only 1 option.

    The things that happen in a healthy free market are not happening.

  • if they’re going to push for this tracking approach I guess it’ll be back to fix Firefox again

    If they will? They will. They are.

    Time to follow through on your words. I expect a reply written using Firefox.

  • This r/place is a great visualization of the damage done to Reddit. Previous r/places have been much more interesting and vibrant. The current canvas has large portions covered with boring flags and overall there's just less going on, much less depth and variety. A great confirmation that Reddit has indeed changed, and a great visualization of how it has changed.

  • Mostly right, but a bit misleading.

    Almost every internet connection you make creates new keys. The miracle of encryption is that two people can stand in a room filled with cryptography experts and yell numbers at each other, and those two people are able to establish a secret between them that nobody else in the room can know, even though everyone else in the room has heard the conversation from the very beginning. Once you share a secret, you expand upon the secret to share more information.

  • And what are the consequences of "strikes"? Will you delete my Google account, including my email, and also screw up my Android phone and my kids Chromebook?

    It's scary to realize that Google has me by the balls here. They can screw me in so many ways, and screw my family members as well. I'd rather have my bank credentials stolen than my email credentials, at least I can get real customer service from the bank, I can even go to a physical location and speak face-to-face with someone who can help me. Google wont give me customer support, and my email account is the closest thing to an identity I have for most businesses I interact with.

    It takes a lot of work to avoid Google. Yes, there are alternatives, but in D&D terms, avoiding Google is like a -2 to all stats for your entire life, and not something we can expect the general population to do.

    All this shows the need for anti-trust enforcement. The same company is controlling too much. Bust 'em up!

  • Which is fine. If they wanted to learn Rust and wrote inefficient code, good for them. I appreciate their efforts. Rust can certainly be beaten into shape and perform well enough in the end.

  • I've actually seen this type of code produced by a human-being who was trying to write good code. It was one of the students in my introduction to programming class in university, we had to write a function that squared a number or something, and he had written hundreds of lines of if-statements. Sometimes you just use what you know to complete an assignment I guess 🤷

  • The auto-formatting story is half baked I think. As far as I know most language have a formatter that goes only one way, which is an improvement over having no formatter at all.

    What we're missing is good tools to go from the standard format to a personalized format. For example, I was working on JavaScript recently and the team was using prettier with 2 space indentation. I found that somewhat hard to work with because of some minor vision issues, it was becoming a bit of an accessibility issue for me, but I was already viewed as a bit of a troublemaker at the company and pushing everyone to change their style wasn't going to help me any.

    I tried to find a tool that would reformat the code for me without altering the repository but couldn't find an easy solution.

    So we have formatters that go from "everyone's personal style" to a standard style. But our tools for going the other direction, from standard style to "my personal style" are lacking. (Hoping to be proved wrong on this point.)

  • Still easier than understanding JavaScript's equality operator