PhilipTheBucket @ PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social

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Joined

7 days ago

I won't say 100%, but they're generally pretty good. Big ones I can think of:

• They're going to apply every attack against Kamala Harris that they did against Biden
• Trump is going to be infinitely worse for the Palestinians even than Biden was

The first is a little bit qualified I guess. I was somewhat against replacing Biden for that reason (definitely before the debate), which was absolutely a mistake. But I think in retrospect, the way that they were able to blame Kamala Harris for Gaza and inflation and make it work was pretty spot-on to what I predicted.

The second one, people were furiously telling me how wrong I was, how impossible it would be for anyone to be worse than Biden, and in early days saying that Trump had achieved a cease-fire and it was just proof of how easy it would have been if only Biden had put some slight effort to it.

Am I the only one who likes looking at my old code? Generally I feel like it's alright.

Usually the first project when I'm learning how to use some new language or environment is super-shitty. I can tell it's very bad, usually I don't like interacting with it if I have to make changes, but it's still not overly painful. It's just bad code. And that one exception aside I generally like looking at my code.

Known top Democrats Eileen Filler-Corn, Abigail Spanberger, and Tim Kaine. I mean, there are plenty of rabidly pro-Israel top Democrats, but none of them are in this article.

The emphasis on "Zionism" is a little bit weird, too. I've seen Bernie Sanders be accused of being a "Zionist," because he doesn't want Israel to be destroyed. I mean, I guess that's... true? Maybe? "Zionist" seems like something you can apply to a huge number of pretty reasonable people by that definition. It seems like kind of a textbook way to start to throw mud at a massively pro-Palestinian person, and accuse him of being anti-Palestinian, through cleverly dishonest use of language.

I don't want Israel to be destroyed. Am I a Zionist?

Edit: I looked up a little more about it. This Palestinian state congressman, who is a Democratic committee chair, has been talking vigorously on social media about the evils of Israel's most recent "war" since October 2023. It only turned into an issue with this specific post, because the language means one thing to him, but a very different thing to some people who are reading it, and so they objected.

Please accept our apologies, hopefully we're able to get our shit together at some point but it's likely to be like this for a while and probably get substantially worse before it gets better.

This is pretty good, but you gotta make it a little more subtle. Open with something perfectly reasonable and then sort of work up to the bait.

Yeah. I feel like in a few years when literally nothing works or is maintainable, people are going to have a resurgent realization of the importance of reliability in software design, that just throwing bodies and lines of code at the problem builds up a shaky structure that just isn't workable anymore once it grows beyond a certain size.

We used to know that, and somehow we forgot.

This has been happening to dozens of people. Yes, even white people from white countries. Don't fucking come to the US right now. We're not even really safe inside with our genuine US passports and all, definitely don't go out of your way to subject yourself to it if you're literally the currently active entry in the little Martin Niemöller to-do list.

Supposedly it is from 1997. I have no idea, the whole blog is clearly bullshit, so who knows.

Also, this one's worth the read, too.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14651309/My-haunting-final-encounter-Virginia-Giuffre-looked-broken-paranoid-afraid-writes-DAPHNE-BARAK.html

"You did well. He had fun."

Yeah. I have no idea what the answer is, just describing the nature of the issue. I come from the days when you would maybe import like one library to do something special like .png reading or something, and you basically did all the rest yourself. The way programming gets done today is wild to me.

I sort of have a suspicion that there is some mathematical proof that, as soon as it becomes quick and easy to import an arbitrary number of dependencies into your project along with their dependencies, the size of the average project's dependencies starts to follow an exponential growth curve increasing every year, without limit.

I notice that this stuff didn't happen with package managers + autoconf/automake. It was only once it became super-trivial to do from the programmer side, that the growth curve started. I've literally had trivial projects pull in thousands of dependencies recursively, because it's easier to do that than to take literally one hour implementing a little modified-file watcher function or something.

Yes, how dare they invade a sovereign nation and have their state TV call for exterminating every single one of its population, and threaten people with nuclear weapons, because those countries committed the sin of maybe joining a defense alliance which would make it more difficult for them to do those things without getting their nose bloodied for it. Or, wait, that was fine. You were talking about the other guys? Yeah, those guys. I get it.

Russia had no choice, at the end of the day. It's from the "I didn't mean to break her arm but she said she was gonna call the cops on me and you know I can't have that shit" school of enlightened statecraft.

You may be right, but I don't think he's even as organized as that. I think he's just wandering around playing big boy and pooping on himself, as he usually does.

Yeah, exactly. If you read the Snowden leaks to learn the details of what some of their actual capabilities are (smuggling flawed keys into the DH exchange for most major web browsers for example), it makes this stuff look like kids in their basements fucking around.

I feel like they're pretty ahead of you. I doubt that anyone in Ukraine or EU is taking Trump's opinion on the "peace deal" or the war all that seriously. They can't just openly ignore him, just because the US is still providing a ton of weapons, but I would be very surprised if they're taking him seriously.

"They can't monetize our users' self-created content for ridiculously exploitative gains. Only we can monetize(*) our users' self-created content for ridiculous exploitative gains!"

(* Well, try to monetize, they haven't actually got it to work yet)

Reddit: Trust us we're GENIUSES bro, most popular web site in the world, we're so smart I swear

Also Reddit: Hey can we have more money, we lost it all again. This new plan's gonna work tho

Oooh... I get it. Yeah, there are people all over their media who are playing up the cynicism and making it sound cool. That's absolutely a big problem too. And yes, it makes them more cynical about everything (both the people who buy into it, and the people who don't, which is an impressive achievement.)

I cannot overstate how wonderful this is. Thank you.

That's not really what I'm talking about. Being trusting of "the establishment" certainly helps make Fox News's job easier, but I'm talking about people who had health insurance, good unions, qualified doctors, all that stuff, for all of their adult lives. It just leads you to generally be of this kind of boomer "firm eye contact and a handshake will get you far" mindset in life.

It's not fascist to like the system you're embedded within because it gave you a fair deal.

I feel like this is kind of the amateur-hour stuff. It's certainly dangerous, but in comparison to a lot of state-actor activities (or even committed-amateur activities), this kind of supply-chain attack is pretty blatant and easy to spot. Which doesn't mean it's easy to spot -- I just mean would be trivial to volunteer and contribute some minimal fixes and enhancements to some open source project, and then at one point smuggle in a zero-day that will basically never be detected unless someone detects the intrusion itself and then works backwards from there with a ton of time to spend on it.

If you've ever looked at the obfuscated C contest it should be obvious that this kind of thing can be made completely invisible if you know what you're doing. Some of the interactions and language features that lead to problems are basically impossible for a casual viewer to see, even if they're paying attention, and the attack surface is massive and the amount of attention that goes into checking it for weird subtle vulnerabilities is minuscule.