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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • A few from my list:

    • Darknet Diaries - Interviews with interesting people around hacking and cybersecurity. This includes a lot of the actual criminals themselves and you get to hear their motivations and how they did what they did. Really neat for understanding the minds of folks who do bad things.
    • FiveThirtyEight Politics - This one is good for staying abreast of US politics, polling. While the political bias of the hosts is pretty obvious, this is less punditry and more about the numbers.
    • Risky Business with Nate Silver Maria Konnikova - A neat podcast covering risk, poker and politics. Just a good listen for thinking about risk and probabilities in life.
    • The Lawfare Podcast - Lawyers talking about the law, and how it shapes and is shaped by whats in the news. Great for getting a legalistic view of the world.



  • How do you mandate lower grocery prices in that?

    You don’t. Price controls don’t work and usually backfire in the long run.
    Instead, you modify the incentives which exist around prices via taxation. As a simplified example, if you want to prioritize lower prices on staples such as milk, vegetables or beef, then businesses which can show that their margins on those products are within a defined range pay 1% less on corporate taxes. The numbers and ranges would need to be discovered via both study and experimentation. But, by tying a savings for those business to their behavior, said behavior can be influenced. The prices can then be further manipulated lower in the logistical chain, either by direct subsidy or via similar manipulation of incentives to growers and distributors.

    We live in capitalism.

    Yes, but functional capitalism requires regulation to prevent monopolies, collusion and other activities which distort markets. And there are plenty of areas where capitalism fails and government (read:socialism) needs to step in to provide something which society needs, but for which the incentives do not exist to provide it in an efficient manner. Or for which the efficient providing of that thing creates moral hazards. There is a reason we don’t privatize the military.



  • This is going to suck for a lot of people. I’m all for encryption. If any of the laptops, in the business I work for, lack encryption, I’m going to throw a fit. But, for home use the situation is not the same. I’d argue that the risk of device theft leading to critical data compromise is pretty low and the risk of the user needing someone to perform offline data recovery for that user is much higher. And the number of users who will actually have the key saved in a location they can get to it, and provide to the data recovery tech, can probably be counted without taking off my shoes.

    This is dumb. It’s yet another case of Microsoft picking a default for users which helps Microsoft but isn’t good for users.


  • Honor is a social construct which is used to promote “pro-social” behavior. It can be useful in the absence of or in concert with other systems of social control (e.g. laws, religion). Of course, “pro-social” is very much a construct of what the creating society considers to be positive. This can include acting in ways which we, in our current social constructs, would consider “anti-social”. Honor ends up getting idolized in media because it often includes an element of self-discipline and self-sacrifice and is usually associated with warrior cultures. Though, it also tends to be conservative and resist changing as social mores change. This has led to some famous consequences as honor based systems tried to cling to social constructs which were no longer tenable. For example, the Satsuma Rebellion saw the existing feudal class seek to maintain it’s grip on power in then face of a changing society.

    Ultimately, any system of honor would need to be taught to new adherents. It’s no different from a religion or legal system in that regard. No one comes out of the womb fully indoctrinated to a system of honor. So no, it isn’t really self-explanatory. Like any social construct, you would need to define the system and how it interacts with the society in which is was created. Otherwise, it’s just naming a system for social control and hoping no one notices that it’s a hollow shell.


  • The Holocaust was unique in the industrialization of genocide. The Nazi party organized the state around the process, using industrial technology to track, move and kill millions of people in an efficient manner. It was also very well documented and was publicized in a way, which made people really aware of what was occurring. As horrible as genocide is, at any scale, most are fairly limited in geography and organization. The Nazis showed us just how bad things can be, if we bend the resources of a modern, industrial state, to those ends. So, I’d tend to disagree with Walz’s thesis that the Holocaust wasn’t unique. Though, I would still agree that it should be taught in context with other genocides which have happened and which are happening today. It can become an example of just how bad a genocide can become. But, the goal should be to teach students about the causes, and processes of genocides. So that, we hopefully will try to stop them from occurring.

    That said, that the modern Israeli State uses the horrible things, which happened to Jews in the early 20th century, to justify doing similarly horrible things to Palestinians today, is downright atrocious. It cheapens the horrors faced by Jews at the hands of the Nazis.


  • I’d suggest reading up on parasomnia. It’s a class of disorders including sleep terrors, sleepwalking, nightmare disorder, sleep-related eating disorder, sleep paralysis and others. For my own issues (Night Terrors) I have found that I can largely manage them through lifestyle choices: get enough sleep regularly, don’t stay up too late, don’t drink caffeine in the afternoon/evening, manage stress, keep the sleeping room cool. Finding your own triggers can be useful for managing further episode.


  • Have you considered just beige boxing a server yourself? My home server is a mini-ITX board from Asus running a Core i5, 32GB of RAM and a stack of SATA HDDs all stuffed in a smaller case. Nothing fancy, just hardware picked to fulfill my needs.

    Limiting yourself to bespoke systems means limiting yourself to what someone else wanted to build. The main downside to building it yourself is ensuring hardware comparability with the OS/software you want to run. If you are willing to take that on, you can tailor your server to just what you want.




  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlIs Software Political?
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    10 days ago

    Software is not political, it’s just code executing on a machine and doesn’t care what you believe.
    There is a lot of politics surrounding software.

    Politics is the tool we use, as a society, to decide how we’re going to run said society. There will be areas of politics where different factions will adopt different attitudes about different bits of software. So, some software will be politicized. But, the software itself is only political in so far as we are having political discussions around it, the software itself doesn’t care.



  • I use Dark Reader on my work laptop was well. We had a conference call with a vendor and I was sharing my screen while talking with their team about our usage of their product and one of them stopped me and asked about the UI looking strange. I said, “oh ya, I use Dark Reader because you don’t have a native dark mode. You do lose points for that.” They had a native dark mode a couple months later.

    I’ve come to the conclusion that UI designers hate their customers’ retinas.


  • Assuming your instance has it, use the “block” feature on communities. I like to browse the “all” version of lemmy.world; but ya, it’s a lot of memes and stuff I don’t care to engage with. So, I’ll open a new tab to that community and hit the “block community” button. That community no longer shows up.

    You can also block specific users. I use this on a lot of the re-post bots. Similar procedure, open the user’s profile and “Block User”.

    It makes browsing “all” far more enjoyable.