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re: challenging protocol design problem, mathematical?, help wanted :boost_requested: 

@virtulis For the hash thing I have a specific concern: wouldn't this be a problem for *partial* partitions? If node C partitions from node A but not from node B, then node B might have a dfiferent idea about what node C's last mutation was, even though it was a legitimate partition, right?

This could presumably be solved by sharing a *log* of hashes but that seems like it would get pretty bandwidth-intensive pretty quickly.

For the vector clock scenario: that seems like a possibly viable avenue to explore with some modifications (like enforcing sequential submission of mutations from any given server, though that rules out mesh routing of mutations as a resilience improvement), but it does seem pretty complex to implement in a scenario where the set of participants can change significantly over time, and in this scenario it's actually credible that one might burn a node on a single backdating event 😐

If teachers and staff at a school have too many students and classes there isn’t time for such meetings or work. This is just one of the stark differences well-funded and underfunded schools. But when the underfunded schools have poorer academic outcomes & more discipline problems the students and parents are blamed “you just can’t teach those kinds of kids”

I assure you I could and I have. And it’s possible to burn your self up doing so making more time than properly exists in a day to do it.

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One of the biggest differences between a school with sufficient staff and those without is the time and focus I am able to devote to each student. I have enough time to have meetings where all of the teachers of each student are present and we can discuss not just the disruptive or exceptional students but all students. We can puzzle together if a student is becoming depressed or socially isolated. We can find ways to help students to connect to the material they study. 1/

challenging protocol design problem, mathematical?, help wanted :boost_requested: 

I have a difficult protocol design problem that I need some suggestions for to explore. Please read the requirements carefully because they are very specific, and leave the "it's impossible" comments at the door, because I *know* that this is a seemingly impossible problem already.

(The problem description is also intentionally generalized and reduced down to its core mathematical problem, to avoid unintentional assumptions.)

I have a distributed protocol. The different parties involved mutually distrust each other. They can each contribute mutations to a shared state log, based on some unspecified authorization algorithm which allows for revoking access of other parties. The parties eventually converge onto an identical view of the state, though temporary partitions may occur.

The problem is that a genuine partition followed by a delayed delivery of mutations, seems indistinguishable from a malicious attempt at subverting an access revocation through backdating of mutations.

In both cases, one or more mutations are received which are dated to a timestamp that was potentially a long time ago, and that may be working off an old version of the state.

There is (currently) no shared clock, and there is a small but non-zero span of time between the most recent accepted mutation from a revoked party, and the actual revocation of their access.

How do I prevent backdating, without losing resilience to partitions?

I'm not necessarily looking for full-blown solutions (though those would be welcome!), but even just pointers on relevant research would be welcome, as long as it is research that accounts for all the properties here: untrusted parties, no shared clock, exploitable timespan before revocation.

As I am getting older, I have come to the conclusion that the trick is not to stop #procrastinating - which would require more willpower than I have to spare - but to procrastinate in a way that will benefit _one_ of my longer-term goals, even if it's not the one I ought to work towards right now.

@azonenberg (What complaints about Electron usually overlook is that Electron doesn't actually use any meaningfully large amount of resources, and the resource use of Electron applications likely has much more to do with the background of the developers working on them than with the tech stack)

@azonenberg The first step would be to verify whether an application rewritten in a 'native framework' by, crucially, the same kind of developer, *would* actually be more efficient.

I think you're going to find some very interesting results there.

@0xabad1dea When I was at $ISP tech support in 1998, we had an all-staff email asking us to go to the break room to scream, because although we could mute our own phone mics it was picked up by others.

tangent about eugenics, re: Ableism \\ Gatekeeping Autism 

@matty A related problem exists for the "curing autism" research, by the way. I know that there are some autistic folks who would actually want this; but any kind of research into it in the current political/social environment is ethically irresponsible, because *in practice* it's going to be used for eugenics practices and not for opt-in treatment, simply because the agency of autistic folks is too often not recognized.

personal, long, about formal diagnoses, re: Ableism \\ Gatekeeping Autism 

@matty There's one part I can actually comment on here, and that's the "why some Autistic hates it as to get diagnose as Autistic". My perspective of that is someone who was formally diagnosed as a kid, for a very long time could not accept the diagnosis, and then much later in my life I ended up essentially self-diagnosing *afterwards*.

The issue when you get diagnosed eg. as a kid is that it is usually not by your own choice, nor do you control the circumstances; most of the time, the diagnosis is made on request of a parent, with the intention to find 'evidence' that there is something 'wrong' with you. They may not phrase it like that, but that's often the underlying drive.

The result is that the diagnosis then gets weaponized against you, long before you've had any chance to understand yourself and how you work and what you need, and with absolutely no genuine support being provided. It's just used to "other" you, to place you out of home, to socially isolate you, to try and "treat" (ie. remove) it, and generally only serves the interests of your parents, school, and so on, and not those of yourself.

Basically, being diagnosed as autistic without your consent or agency over the process, more often than not, only makes life *worse* for you. This has been my experience and I've heard the same thing from many others who have gone through the same thing.

This is different if you have already had time to learn how your brain works, and come to accept who you are, and what you need. Then a formal diagnosis can actually *help* you, because by that point you understand how it can be used to find accommodations, and you know when and how to tell people to fuck off if they try to weaponize it against you.

(There are exceptions, of course. Some parents really do the research and genuinely intend to support their kids, and to use the diagnosis as a tool for doing so. These cases seem to be rare, from what I've seen.)

re: bluesky, kind of rambling off 

@eniko I'm seeing the same thing in the other direction in various parts of fedi as well, honestly. Here the comments range from "don't complain about Bluesky, it's fine" to "Bluesky must die at any cost". A part of those comments definitely cross into "toxic and unnecessarily hostile", and at times are also racist, unfortunately.

I'm kind of somewhere inbetween; I am not hoping for Bluesky to fail, so much as I am *expecting* it to fail (because it chooses short-term impressions over long-term sustainability, and eventually the runway will run out, as it always does), and I'm hoping that enough people will realize this and have a chance to find better options before things are actually on fire.

Whether fedi is that better option, I'm honestly not sure. On paper, yes, it is, but in practice there's this big elephant in the room (no pun intended) that's called Mastodon and its horrible governance around things like moderation features. That's fine for a subset of people but definitely not for everyone.

You know what’s not talked about enough …

Mourning a friendship that doesn’t exist anymore.

Mourning for people who are still alive but are no longer apart of your life.

Mourning over memories.

Mourning over relationships/friendships that just aren’t the same.

Mourning over parts of your story that are no longer talked about or brought up because the people in those memories have taken different paths.

It’s really sad and such a strange feeling to experience.

Anyway. If you’re struggling with this, and thought you were alone … I’m here to say you’re not. It’s real and it sucks.

Dingen die PostNL in 2024 op hun site hebben staan die mijn hoofd doen ontploffen 

@jos70 @smveerman Alvast een waarschuwing vooraf, het gaat je tijd waarschijnlijk niet waard zijn, en nagenoeg alles rondom cryptocurrency en NFTs wordt bewust moeilijker gemaakt dan het is zodat je niet doorhebt dat je eigenlijk gewoon gebakken lucht koopt.

By the way, I hope this didn't need to be said, but never buy "backlinks", doesn't matter from where. It means you're paying for a spammer's linkfarm. Even if they look legit on the outside.

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boost this pls

trans people who changed their legal gender and name in Netherlands (especially if you're not a Dutch citizen but still an EU citizen): can you outline the procedure for me? i am familiar with the vague basics but i want to know everything step by step and especially the cost of it

i know i cannot pursue it yet but i need to put my brain to rest about that: if it matters i am also interested in changing my last name besides my given one so if theres a different path for it let me know

(i know changing the gender marker to X is a bit more complicated but my case is F to M change)

#queer #transgender #netherlands

Oh hey, I ran across one of those companies that runs a shitty linkfarm for spamming search engines, unsurprisingly they call themselves a "SEO" company, seem deeply embedded in the SEO community, and are talking about ChatGPT/"AI" use for SEO

Native/fluent speakers of languages other than English: please send me an idiomatic translation of the following phrase, and a list of words (excluding stopwords) that you would expect a correct stemming process to result in: :boost_requested:

"Can you believe that? Unbelievable!"

(I'm integrating various stemming libraries into an anti-capitalist search engine project and would like to verify that it works correctly for as many languages as possible, at least on a basic level!)

(Note: the bloom filter has nothing to do with 'scaling' in this case, and everything with reducing memory requirements, preventing unnecessary requests, and a secret third goal of the project that is not public yet)

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Things done for my search engine project today:
- Improved duplicate indexing prevention both in terms of history size and memory use, through the use of a bloom filter
- Added robots.txt support
- Improved performance measuring
- Added detection of corporate websites
- Added language detection and stemming of varying quality for some 25 languages - please let me know if you know of any good language-specific stemmers!

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