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Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Learning to drive as part of high school is a super American thing that is really indicative of your attitudes towards driving and car ownership

  • True randomness is really really hard to do in software; bigger CPUs often have hardware random number generators that exploit some sort of quantum or otherwise non-determanistic phenomena, but in software the best you can do is pseudo-random. These are algorithms that generate a sequence of randomly distributed numbers, but in a deterministic way - from a given starting state, it will always generate the same sequence of numbers. Good algorithms are designed to make it hard to infer the starting state just by observing the sequence (if you can do that, you can run the algorithm in parallel and predict the next number), but that's an active area of research.

    At a guess, the calculator was programmed to initialise the random number generator from something that it is hard for the user to control (milliseconds since power on would be a good one) the first time you used it, but maybe TI got lazy and just initialised it to a constant value

  • Idk, maybe fundamental policy statements - "the holocaust was real", "first strike use of nuclear weapons is abhorrent, inhumane, and we will never advocate for it". If you want to be part of our organisation and have our support, you sign on in support of our fundamental position and if you go against that in public we'll kick you out, pull our financial support, and run someone else against you next election

  • I'd be super surprised if this was western intelligence. Stuxnet escaping Natanz was an accident, and there is no way that an operation like this would get approved by the NSAs Vulnerabilities Equities Process.

    My money would be MSS or GRU. Outside chance this is North Korean, but doesn't really feel like their MO

  • It's a really wicked problem to be sure. There is work underway in a bunch of places around different approaches to this; take a look at SBoM (software bill-of-materials) and reproducible builds. Doesn't totally address the trust issue (the malicious xz releases had good gpg signatures from a trusted contributor), but makes it easier to spot binary tampering.

  • That's not how the US electoral system works. If the vote turns out 49%/48%/3%, then the guy with 49% wins. Unless your 3rd party is polling in the mid forties (and is therefore not a 3rd party) all you are doing is vote splitting

  • This is exactly the sort of nonsense that my suggestion is designed to avoid.

    If all you know about Hitler is that he was in charge of Germany during the second world war, they lost, a bunch of people died, but their uniforms looked cool (Hugo Boss, looks sharp) and people called him "Fuhrer" (German sounds so badass) then yeah, this kind of thing doesn't seem so off.

    I want my representatives - whatever their affiliation - to have stood in front of the pile of children's shoes and the mass graves and the charred ruins. I want them to have stared at the abyss, felt the horror and the despair and the inhumanity and the evil and truly understood the weight of the responsibility they have to ensure we learn from our history.

  • Same boat- AMAB, and no dysphoria with that at all, but yeah, a little jealous of women's fashion options.

    It's taken me until my mid thirties, but things I've come to realise:

    • There are a bunch more options for women - entire categories of garments that aren't socially applicable for men to wear - but a lot of that comes from a much wider variance in body shape for women. There are plenty of things that just don't work if you aren't a size 12 B-cup with a conventional body shape. A cropped top is just as off limits if you are a woman with a bit of a tummy or D+ cup breasts as it is for men
    • There are options for men, but they aren't always as obvious, and often end up looking more formal - try different shoes, different coloured belts layering things (open shirt over a t-shirt etc)
    • Most men (and I'm super guilty of this) don't get a haircut as often as they should. There is a whole world of options and styles, try some out, find one you like from a barber you have a rapport with, go regularly to keep it looking good
  • If I was on the governing committee of a major political party, I'd be funding trips to places like Hiroshima and Auschwitz for members of our party that are running for office for the first time, not for the photo op, but so that maybe they can get some fucking perspective and not say batshit stupid things that make us look like a bunch of genocidal racists.

    Idk, just a thought. Assuming that "genocidal racists" isn't a significant voting demographic that you are trying to appeal to.

  • The reason openssh links liblzma in the first place is to enable a systemd feature, so naturally "systemd bad, it's proximity to a security issue is yet more proof that a pile of shell scripts in a trenchcoat is a superior init system" etc

  • Yeah, I saw the western version age... 12? Intrusive thoughts for weeks. Dude electrocuting himself in a bathtub was what did it for me for some reason

  • Excluding any dark pattern shenanigans from Frito Lay, the probable answer is that IT systems for large companies are a massive iceberg/rats nest.

    The website you see is probably half a dozen different systems wearing a trenchcoat - the news section is probably a different piece of software to the "our products" section and a different piece again to the "contact us". It's not inconceivable that this site might be pulling data from 4 different backends and pushing analytics and behaviour data to 10 different systems run by 4 different companies and actually genuinely have to spend a few seconds querying different places to figure out if you've opted out anywhere

  • Also,

    Arch is the most stable

    Are you high?

  • I think the conclusion is that as a population of people grows the average behaviour stays pretty much fine, but the extremes of the bell curve become more apparent

  • I'm really sorry that you've had that, that's crappy. I hope you can find people to give you the love and support you deserve

  • Yeah, not even slightly true. Know a few people who work support for a major piece of financials software. Company has a written procedure for dealing with death threats that gets exercised multiple times per year

  • Your mum/mom is the key female figure in your life; a person you go to for love and comfort, who supports you and encourages you and pushes you to be a better person.

    Your mother is the person who gave birth to you.

    These are not always the same person. Everyone has a mother, some people have more than one mum, some people don't have a mum at all.

  • This is the way. I have a Brother B&W laser printer/scanner combo because I fairly regularly need to print/sign/scan/email forms for various things, but if I need something colour or really.good quality the local print shop is the way to go