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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Depends on jurisdiction, but in a fair number it would be “menacing”.

    A person is guilty of menacing when by some movement of body or any instrument the person intentionally places another person in fear of imminent physical injury.

    That’s Delaware’s, but different states do it differently, and some out that classification under stalking.

    Following someone around intentionally and knowingly causing them fear of injury is illegal. Why on earth would you even for a moment think you’re allowed to do that? It’s like thinking guns are legal so you can point your gun at someone on the street.




  • Totally. And the staff is also pretty reasonable about how it’s ultimately just a fun way to get food you might not have thought of.
    I usually tell them I hate sour cream and they’ll let me know if I should get something else, which is technically against the “rules”, but it’s also just pizza that I’m paying for and not a national secret or anything.


  • They do ask you to let them know if you have any allergies, and they do tell you what everything is when they give it to you. You’re not at risk for eating something you can’t. You’d have to not tell them when they ask, and then ignore them when they told you the ingredients.


  • I get people wanting to defend the “traditional” preparation of a food, because otherwise you get into weird philosophical “burrito of Theseus” issues, but… You can just slap “non-traditional” on it and then carry on and enjoy the food. If you feel really strongly or it’s really out there, call it a fucked up ____ inspired whatever.

    One of the best pizzas I ever had was at a pizza place near me that has a “trust us” pizza, where you don’t know what it is, but it’s new and definitely worth the cost (they’re not giving you a plain cheese pizza). It was like a strawberry and anduille pizza with a seasoned sweet white sauce. It was weirdly good.


  • You can vote from overseas in whatever location was your last permanent US residence.
    People in DC get to vote for president because a special law was passed giving them electoral votes.

    People in Puerto Rico have a US permeant residence that doesn’t let them vote for president, so they can’t legally vote from a different jurisdiction.
    One of the proposals that’s come up occasionally is to make a similar law for Puerto Rico as we did for DC, but there’s never enough consensus on any plan to go forward, up until relatively recently.


  • For the most part it’s not useful, at least not the way people use it most of the time.
    It’s an engine for producing text that’s most like the text it’s seen before, or for telling you what text it’s seen before is most like the text you just gave it.

    When it comes to having a conversation, it can passibly engage in small talk, or present itself as having just skimmed the Wikipedia article on some topic.
    This is kinda nifty and I’ve actually recently found it useful for giving me literally any insignificant mental stimulation to keep me awake while feeding a baby in the middle of the night.

    Using it to replace thinking or interaction gives you a substandard result.
    Using it as a language interface to something else can give better results.

    I’ve seen it used as an interface to a set of data collection interfaces, where all it needed to know how to do was tell the user what things they could ask about, and then convert their responses into inputs for the API, and show them the resulting chart. Since it wasn’t doing anything to actually interpret the data, it never came across as “wrong”.


  • if you technically pull people out of poverty by outsourcing to the lowest paying, least labor regulated parts of the world, is the fact that extreme poverty went away in those areas even a good thing?

    Yes. Your prospects of a healthy life increase when going from not being able to provide for yourself to being barely able to provide for yourself by working in fantastically poor conditions.

    If a sweatshop didn’t provide more worker value than extreme poverty, people just wouldn’t work there.

    The bare minimum of improvements is still an improvement, and that we should strive for better than the bare minimum doesn’t make the bare minimum worthless to the people who got it.



  • Depends on the vendor for the specifics. In general, they don’t protect against an attacker who has gained persistent privileged access to the machine, only against theft.
    Since the key either can’t leave the tpm or is useless without it (some tpms have one key that it can never return, and will generate a new key and return it encrypted with it’s internal key. This means you get protection but don’t need to worry about storage on the chip), the attacker needs to remain undetected on the server as long as they want to use it, which is difficult for anyone less sophisticated than an advanced persistent threat.

    The Apple system, to its credit, does a degree of user and application validation to use the keys. Generally good for security, but it makes it so if you want to share a key between users you probably won’t be using the secure enclave.

    Most of the trust checks end up being the tpm proving itself to the remote service that’s checking the service. For example, when you use your phones biometrics to log into a website, part of that handshake is the tpm on the phone proving that it’s made by a company to a spec validated by the standards to be secure in the way it’s claiming.


  • Package signing is used to make sure you only get packages from sources you trust.
    Every Linux distro does it and it’s why if you add a new source for packages you get asked to accept a key signature.

    For a long time, the keys used for signing were just files on disk, and you protected them by protecting the server they were on, but they were technically able to be stolen and used to sign malicious packages.

    Some advanced in chip design and cost reductions later, we now have what is often called a “secure enclave”, “trusted platform module”, or a general provider for a non-exportable key.
    It’s a little chip that holds or manages a cryptographic key such that it can’t (or is exceptionally difficult) to get the signing key off the chip or extract it, making it nearly impossible to steal the key without actually physically stealing the server, which is much easier to prevent by putting it in a room with doors, and impossible to do without detection, making a forged package vastly less likely.

    There are services that exist that provide the infrastructure needed to do this, but they cost money and it takes time and money to build it into your system in a way that’s reliable and doesn’t lock you to a vendor if you ever need to switch for whatever reason.

    So I believe this is valve picking up the bill to move archs package infrastructure security up to the top tier.
    It was fine before, but that upgrade is expensive for a volunteer and donation based project and cheap for a high profile company that might legitimately be worried about their use of arch on physical hardware increasing the threat interest.


  • So, you’re correct that active emergencies take priority.

    That being said, in essentially every place that has 911, both numbers connect to the same place and the only real difference is pick-up order and default response.
    It’s the emergency number not simply because it’s only for emergencies but because it’s the number that’s the same everywhere that you need to know in the event of an emergency.

    It should be used in any situation where it should be dealt with by someone now, and that someone isn’t you. Finding a serious crime has occurred is an emergency, even if the perpetrator is gone and the situation is stable.
    A dead person, particularly a potential murder, generally needs to be handled quickly.

    It’s also usually better to err on the side of 911, just in case it is an emergency that really needs the fancy features 911 often gives, like location lookups.


  • It’s particularly annoying because those are all AI. AI is the blanket term for the entire category of systems that are man made and exhibit some aspect of intelligence.

    So the marketing term isn’t wrong, but referring to everything by it’s most general category is error prone and makes people who know or work with the differences particularly frustrated.
    It’s easier to say “I made a little AI that learned how I like my tea”, but then people think of something that writes full sentences and tells me to put dogs in my tea. “I made a little machine learning based optimization engine that learned how I like my tea” conveys it much less well.


  • It’s also thought but not confirmed to be used for parallel construction. If the information is collected through illegal or inadmissible means, the NSA can inform the relevant agency that they have reason to believe that the individual is doing “illegal activity in question” and relevant details. The agency, now knowing the conclusion, can use legal means to gather the needed evidence for something they otherwise would never have even looked at.
    The NSA isn’t supposed to monitor anything on US soil that doesn’t involve both terrorism connections and communication with foreign parties, but due to “reasons” they regularly collect a lot of stuff that isn’t that, and they’ll (likely) inform the DEA.

    It’s a preposterous violation of the 4th amendment, but it’s also nearly impossible to prove.



  • While that’s definitely a factor in global food trends, I don’t see that impacting the US price of food as drastically as companies thinking they can get away with raising prices.

    My reasoning is the web of tarrifs and subsidies that the US uses to stabilize domestic markets, prop up farmers, and generally ensure the US is the key grain player. Shortly after the war started the US and Canada also saw a better than average harvest of the grains that Ukraine typically exports.

    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU02120301 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCU3112113112111 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIUFDSL

    The domestic prices paid for wheat and flour both started to fall shortly after the Ukraine invasion, while food prices maintained a rocketing trajectory without much if any changes, with only a slight decrease in the rate of increase about a year after.

    While protectionist US food policies are chock full of horrible problems, in this case they should have insulated people from radical changes in the availability and price of wheat.
    That consumer prices have risen despite falling costs paid to producers is a big indicator that the cost increases are due to something else in the US.

    None of this applies to countries that are dependent on grain imports who have to rely on the global markets instead of adjusting export profitability to stabilize things.


  • I think concerns about China in specific are overblown.
    That being said, what we’ve learned about the topic from US tracking programs (slight chuckle at China having scope or abilities beyond anyone else in that regard) is that all information can be fed into what is essentially a statistical model of interests, behaviors, expressed opinions, and contacts.
    From that, you can determine a few things that are specifically “useful”.

    The first useful thing is the ability to tell if someone’s behavior has changed in an unexpected way. If someone starts talking to someone new via text message and they “shouldn’t” know each other (no common acquaintances, never at the same place at the same time, no shared interests) you have an anomaly that can be processed further.

    The next useful thing is once you have this model of expected behavior you can start modeling stuff like “A talked to B, B to C and then C changed behavior. A talked to D and D talked to E, and E changed behavior”, and more or less direct chains.
    This effectively tells you that A is influencing the behaviors of C and D. By tracking how influence (and money and stuff) flows through a network of people, you can extrapolate things like leadership, communication pathways, and material support pipelines. If you’re the US, you can then send a seal team to shoot someone.

    If you’re, supposedly, anyone doing this you can more selectively target people for influence based on the reach that it’ll have, use your models to target them better, and generally improve the quality of your attempted influence.

    I personally have my doubts it’s being used that way because it’s just as effective and far cheaper to hire a public opinion research group to pay a significant sample of people $5 to figure out how to make better propaganda, and then like 75¢ each to get Facebook to target the right people.
    It’s really only valuable if you eventually care about an individual. Most unfortunate privacy violations are aggregates.

    Even if it’s not directly actionable or a threat, you should still be wary about letting your browsing habits leak because the information can much more plausibly be used for phishing purposes.
    If you just bought some clown outfits and get an email about your clown plants being held at customs you’re a lot more likely to click to figure out what’s going on.


  • Well, given the people talking about it I’m not sure I’d agree that no one was asking or talking about finding something not chromium based.

    A lot of people don’t like having a monoculture, Google driving the entire cadence for new feature development for the web, or having a privacy focused browser whose process is to try to delete the tracking from a not privacy focused browser.