Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

"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."

🏆

Science is political. Politics affects who does science, what kind of science we do, and who benefits from it. Just because you may have the privilege to be able to ignore politics in science, doesn't mean that it isn't there.

Scientists worry that admitting science is political means that the public will not trust science.

But just because something is political doesn’t mean that you can’t trust it.

We can build trust in science through accountability, transparency, and accessible communication.

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 🤣

This is like the second- or third-pettiest take I have about AI, I'll warrant, but can we just collectively and as a society fuck right off with the idea of "open source AI"? The ideas of "source" and "binaries" don't neatly map onto LLM weights, but to the extent that they do, weights look a lot more like binaries than anything else.

At the very least, open source should in principle be reproducible, but without training data, there's no hope of reproducing LLM weights.

When I couldn’t find the positive terminal on the battery, I was nonplussed

"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

lotta comments like “but amazon dot us dot gov is a bad idea”

yeah. it is. and that’s not what i’m suggesting. but you think it is, because “nationalize” implies seizure by a westphalian nation-state characterized by regressive constructs like borders and state diktat. you read me wrong because english itself is barbaric, full of awful thorny words that could mean something worthy if not for the rivers of blood they’ve been steeped in.

i’ve been reading a lot about plurinationalism, and indigenous restoration through communalism — a sort of “communism of the americas” chiefly bent on transforming a neocolonial basis — but i’m left hurting for words. nation means the wrong things; state means the wrong things; even community approaches mere taxonomy. so you misunderstand me, because there is no simple way to impart faith in utopia.

the world government i have in mind, would not look like a unified structure at all, much less anything characterized by borders. but we don’t have words for that. the more words i use, the less you’re inclined to consider it a government at all, and even i only call it that because it is the superstructure through which the work of governance is done. how can i tell you what it looks like when, not only do i lack language, but such designs are not mine to dictate?

[RSS] Instead of putting a hash in the Portable Executable timestamp field, why not create a separate field for the hash?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240815-00/?p=110131

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

Schöne Grüße vom #reloadfestival

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.