Spyke

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Hey could we defederate with exploding-heads.com/

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Read up on the Paradox of Tolerance, please. "We must be better than them" is a call for total tolerance, which will inevitably lead to the disappearance of tolerance, and that cannot be allowed to happen. It is simply impossible to have a community where transphobes and trans people coexist happily together, and I'll choose the side that's not trying to hurt others (trans people, in case that wasn't clear) every day.

linux

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Used Windows today since months

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Windows: "Time for updates! Stop everything you're doing and please wait...please wait...please wait...please wait..."

How am I hearing about this all the time, but it has never happened for me? Every windows update for me so far has always gone the same, unintrusive way - when it's time to shut down the PC in the evening, I notice there's an "Install Updates and Shutdown" option next to the normal "shutdown" option, which I use if I'm not in a terrible hurry right now. Takes a little longer to shut down, next boot will also take a little longer, but that's it. I've literally never had these unwelcome interruptions I hear so frequently about.

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Why does Play Store prompt me to update Bitwarden?

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It's a way to verify that an app, or any package of data really, actually comes from the source you're expecting it to.

It's based on some clever math, but basically, an app developer has two very large numbers that share a certain mathematical relationship, but if you only know one of them, it's extremely hard to calculate the other one. One of those numbers (the private key) they keep securely to themselves, the other number (the public key) they publish permanently for everyone to see.

Now when the releases an app or an update to it, they put both the app and their private key into a special formula, which produces a new big number, called the "signature". Then, they publish both the app and the signature to the play store.

Now, when your app store sees an update of the app, it won't just blindly trust it, but first check that it's actually legit, so that it doesn't accidentally install a virus or something. To do that, it downloads the app and the signature, and puts them into another special function, together with the public key that was used to sign the version of the app that you currently have installed. Now the clever part is, because of the special mathematical relationship between the public key and the private key, this function can check whether the signature was in fact produced by combining the app with the private key of the developer, without actually having to know that private key. This way, it can now be sure that this app update is actually coming from the original developer - unless they have been compromised and their private key leaked.

So, technically, saying "it has the same signature" is not quite correct. The signature changes with every update. The thing that's the same and allows to install the update is the key being used to generate the signature.


This I very close to how (asymmetrically) encrypted messaging works, btw. If you have a key pair like above, you can encrypt a message with one of the keys in a way that it's only decryptable with the other one. This way you can have people send you encrypted messages without anyone else knowing the encryption key, not even the sender of the message.

news

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California Passes Bill Requiring New Cars To Beep At You When You're Speeding

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I agree with your first point, but the latter two:

—GPS data that could be stored and extracted from the dealership and sold or given to the government, insurance companies, and law enforcement. —GPS data that could be sent in real time if the car has a cellular connection or hijacks the cellular connection in your phone when you connect it to the car.

Why do you think this is more likely to happen with this new regulation, when most modern cars already have a functioning GPS module for navigation and cellular connection for software updates?

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I love it when I have to scream at a computer

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I understand it as an attempt to get very basic, manual syntax highlighting. If all you have is white text on black background, then I do see the value of making keywords easy to spot by putting them in all caps. And this probably made sense back when SQL was first developed, but it's 2023, any dev / data scientist not using a tool that gives you syntax highlighting seriously needs to get with the times

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Elon Musk Stormed Into the Tesla Office Furious That Autopilot Tried to Kill Him

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The described problem wasn't that the car didn't see the lines, it was the car steering into oncoming traffic when it couldn't see the lines. Lidar could potentially very well help with that, by giving the car a better model of the surroundings letting it better reconstruct the intended road path even when the lines are faded, and also see oncoming traffic better and avoid it.

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Meta can rage farm Mastodon without controlling it

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This feels very close to the paradox of tolerance, honestly. To achieve maximum tolerance, you can not tolerate those who are intolerant themselves, or they will destroy you from within. I think something similar applies here. To achieve a maximally open system, be open by default, but only to those who actually share the goal to keep the system as open as possible, and defend vigorously against those who don't.

memes

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Who'll be next?

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No one can tell me Apple's curation is worth a 30% cut.

I mean, it obviously is, otherwise companies wouldn't be paying it. The difference is that in the case of the distribution platform, it's worth it not because it would add any value to the game itself, but because of the monopoly of the platform, which provides value to nobody but the platform.

world

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South Korea has jailed a man for using AI to create sexual images of children in a first for country's courts

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Tf are you talking about, unless being gay involves raping men, being pedo also doesn't involve raping children. Even as a cishet non-pedo you will often encounter situations where acting on some attraction you feel would be anywhere from morally questionable to straight up illegal, and most of us manage to deal with that just fine. Of course that's going to be tougher for someone whose entire experience consists of that, rather than just part of it, but nothing about being pedo forces you to become a child-raping piece of shit.

Of course psychiatric care is important, but the point the other commenter was making is that it's currently impossible to change anyone's attraction, so it's not a pathology that can be "cured" in this way. Any psychiatric care currently has to be aimed at helping people deal with being pedo without acting on it and also not developing any other psychological afflictions because of suppressing their attraction. Trying to "cure" the attraction itself would indeed be akin to gay conversion therapy: there's no scientific evidence it works, and it's going to do more harm than good.

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Anon has an asexual gf

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If you label a relationship as platonic, that usually serves to make it explicit that there's no romance or sex going on, yes.

When talking about attraction though, we're in the context of the split attraction model (look that up if you're interested), and there, platonic attraction is treated not as the opposite of sexual attraction, but as its own axis for basically saying "how much do I want this person to be my friend", without saying anything about how much you're sexually attracted to the person.

If you want to properly reconcile the terms, think about it like this - a sexual/romantic relationship is one where the sexual/romantic attraction between the partners is the strongest force, whereas a platonic relationship is one where their platonic attraction is the strongest force.

I personally actually have a hard time seeing platonic and romantic attraction as separate axes, for me, romantic attraction just feels like an extension, a stronger form of platonic attraction.