baltakatei

If my workstation goes up in value in 4 years, something is seriously going.

It’s like taking someone’s tried and true Windows 7 machine and upgrading it to Windows 11.

Ah, the Mel Brooks guillotine.

Shut off their water lines, cut off their power, cancel trash collection, and close their roads. Failure to abide by the laws regulating infrastructure means they don’t deserve infrastructure.

What’s Digg?

Old couple in boat celebrate house burning from What About Bob

Student: “Hey, thanks for the Bash script! It didn’t know you could use the mapfile built-in to populate an array using standard input lines without a while loop. mapfile -t my_array < <(seq 1 10) is really handy!”

Vibe coding guru: “I have no idea what you’re talking about. That sounds like plumbing. You should let AI handle those details. Focus on the big picture.”

Why I wrote a somewhat bad shuffle utility so sometimes it doesn’t select a random song from my music library but sometimes picks the next neighboring song file for those album-specific messages from the artist.

The root of MAGA’s nostalgia for the 1950s is the effective US corporate tax rate being 40-50% rather than the 2010s’s 10-15%. Those higher taxes paid for healthcare, anti-trust enforcement which increased wages across the board, general public services. Instead, money that corporations would have spent on taxes goes into bribes for regulatory capture, helping depress wages and facilitate monopolistic mergers and acquisitions. Quick overview of historic tax rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States

Sounds like Aceh… Yep, it’s Aceh. They’ve been strongly Islamic for centuries. Their Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) was a pain-in-the-ass even for Suharto, Indonesia’s military dictator throughout the 1960s/1990s.

Imagine the chaos if all the FOSS maintainers collectively went on strike until their demands were met. They could demand so, so much despite being volunteers.

Those engineers should have formed a union and refused until they could collectively negotiate their pay. I can’t think of a more straightforward situation in which a union would be more appropriate.

Publicity to increase donations.

What about the Daniel Suarez Daemon, a decision tree designed to take over the world?

What are you going to do? Not use Microsoft Excel? It’s got Copilot now. I don’t see Libreoffice coming with AI. AI costs money!

Look at score. Find key. Press key. Repeat a bajillion times until it becomes too bothersome to slow down to look at your hands.

Damn. You really transcribed the whole article.

Does it act as a dumb monitor? Can all smart TV features be permanently disabled?

Theoretically, it’s possible for the user to authenticate their age without either the site or service knowing the user’s identity. Quick and dirty example:

There’s a thing called a ring signature that allows one to prove that one of a large number of people digitally signed something. Let’s say a million people all have private keys whose corresponding public keys are registered to a database after they flashed their state ID at a post office or something to prove they are ≥18 years of age. So, John Smith uses his private key plus all 1 million public keys to sign a statement that he sends to a server saying he’s ≥18. The server then takes all 1 million public keys plus the signed message John provided and verifies that his signature is among the 1 million but cannot calculate which exact public key belongs to John. The verification process requires all 1 million public keys as input; you cannot, for example, try an omit each public key one-by-one to see which causes the verification process to fail.

Currently, there is ongoing research on how to make compact ring signatures since they can be very large the more public keys are involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature

That said, even if you had scalable compact ring signature technology, I’d be more worried about advertiser deänonymization efforts once a user has logged in that check browser canvas size, IP address, user agent, font availability, etc. See https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Also, ring signatures for age verification don’t actually verify age, just that someone proved their age at some point in the past to the owner of the public key database; just like an adult can log into YouTube on behalf of their children and let the children go to town, John could give anyone access to his private key regardless of age.

“Hey, Uncle, can I use your age tokens to do my research homework? The rich kids all get to use the entire Internet because their uncles let them ride their age credentials. Thanks!”