Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

whenever i play basically any open world game i think about how tiny their towns are, like a town of less than ten buildings and i'm like that's not a real society, there are so many buildings in a city. and i kind of want to know how small a comfortably self-sufficient social unit CAN be. like i guess subsistence farming is a thing but what do societies look like that are a step up in scale from The Humble Yeoman Farmer

Stumbled upon an excellent resource on Google Sites: "Why our family is covid cautious"

https://sites.google.com/view/why-we-are-covid-cautious/home

#covid #covid19 #SARSCoV2 #pandemic #PublicHealth #CovidIsNotOver

"So if you are a family member of ours that has been critical of our cautiousness, rest assured that we will willingly relax our precautions if you can provide evidence that we should. Hurry up."

🏆

If you want to know whether someone is a genuine security expert, ask yourself: *whose* security are they arguing for?

If the answer isn't "the most vulnerable and disadvantaged party involved in the system", then you're not talking to a security expert, you're talking to a defense contractor.

That point where you have put so many things one after the other on Kleinanzeigen (to sell before moving house) that Kleinanzeigen shows you a Captcha because it thinks you're some kind of bot 🤣

"10 years of Dear ImGui" by @ocornut is great. And a lot of great wisdom that is generally applicable outside of imgui. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/7892

how does one learn about decompiling? any good books on the subject?

Please stop using "blindness" as a lazy synonym for "ignorance" in your writing. If there’s one thing about Blind folks: we survive and thrive by being perceptive, observing patterns and responding to cues. Not only is this use of "blindness" rude — it's uninformed. Mistaken. Obtuse. Naive. Counterfactual. There you go — five better ways to say "ignorant" than "Blind"

@aeva one of my coworkers got a winrar license as a white elephant gift

he reported the email to security when he got it before the gift reveal event

ticket closed with reason "i have it in good confidence that this was a white elephant gift, not a phishing email"

#poll Have you ever paid for software when it was optional to do so?

EDIT: If you only occasionally pay for software when it is optional, please reply with what sorts of software you typically do and don't pay for.

The part where many people tend to expect the software to already be relatively mature and high impact to give support leaves an open question of how new development is meant to be funded, since it takes a lot of work to get there. I suppose that's where stuff like grants come in. It's a shame society is set up so the general population is coerced into being a cheap labor source for the whims of the wealthy, or we'd probably have a lot more high impact R&D happening outside of corporations.

Not a lot of mention of funding libraries, middleware, and critical infrastructure though. I guess most folks just assume that's someone else's problem

It seems like applications that people interact with directly have the best shot at being funded through a pay-what-you-want or donation based model. Within that, games have a bit of an advantage over regular applications by more commonly having an end date to their development without being considered "abandoned".

Lots of people also unsurprisingly strongly prefer one-off donations or payments instead of recurring ones to support long term development, but are also often vocal about how they are entitled to updates and improvements long term. That seems to imply that "growth" is the unsaid expectation of how a project should be funded long term.

I think it is probably safe to call it here. The overwhelming majority of you support the development of software you use to varying degrees of "sometimes", which is pretty cool.

From the replies to this thread, I gather it's relatively common for people to only support projects that are already relatively mature and popular, which is an interesting chicken and egg problem. Also you don't get anything if you don't ask, but it works better if the asking doesn't feel extractive. Not surprising

Jesus christ, we really need an actual proper community-run browser project.

"Mozilla this week said it has acquired ad metrics firm Anonym [...] Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base, many ardent ad-blockers among them, will oppose Anonym, a spokesperson for the Firefox house told The Register advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone, though there's still room for improvement."

Source: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_betting_privacy/

#security #gender

"It's good that I don't know what's going on, because that way I can't bias the results" - quote from a lab member that both reassures and scares me