Nick @internic@qoto.org

This morning for no obvious reason, I remembered the Fuel Rats.

Elite:Dangerous is an MMO space sim game, with a big galaxy in which you fly a spaceship doing stuff. Spaceships need fuel, which you buy at stations, or if you have a fuel scoop you can skim the surface of certain stars to get usable fuel.

Space is big though, and it's quite possible to run yourself low on fuel in a way that you can no longer warp to any inhabited system to refuel. At which point you're screwed.

My god, someone implemented tic tac toe in a single (looped) call to printf: https://github.com/carlini/printf-tac-toe

it’s fascinating watching the latest migration to Bluesky and how much instant network rebuilding is facilitated by “starter packs” and also how much of the dynamics involves people who had accounts, then left, then tried again, left, and are now back again…

it may well stick this time as critical mass is reached, but it seems to me that the same meta-tools that make moving easy can, in principle, make moving elsewhere easy too and we might never see network stability like Twitter or FB again

Trump has vowed to deport millions of immigrants and jail his political enemies. Conservative groups who helped elect him want more restrictions on abortion and a crackdown on protest.

All of that requires surveillance. We put together a guide to protect yourself. https://www.wired.com/story/the-wired-guide-to-protecting-yourself-from-government-surveillance/

The Internet Archive donation page, with its subscription and various payment options, is back and functioning. If you wanted to help but avoid Paypal, this is the time.

https://archive.org/donate

Absolute shots fired.

From: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360319924043957

#Science #Academia #PeerReview #Research

This is fucked up, Suunto. I have years of diving data in this app, which I now can’t access without giving up the privacy of my health & location data. This is coerced consent & it’s bullshit.

I will be replacing my dive computer immediately & will never recommend a Suunto product again.

#scuba #privacy

A malicious #Python package named 'fabrice' has been present in the Python Package Index (#PyPI) since 2021, stealing Amazon Web Services credentials from unsuspecting developers. #CyberSecurity #infosec
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malicious-pypi-package-with-37-000-downloads-steals-aws-keys/

It's also possible to think "maybe our comparisons shouldn't always be to sites that have a ~65/35 gender usage bias* hot damn" but that will never be a thing people listen to idk

*x/twitter has a male engagement dominance problem that matches REDDIT, that's wild

The U.S. healthcare system is increasingly dependent on immigrant physicians (especially in rural and underserved areas) but it’s becoming harder for aspiring doctors to qualify to work and settle in the U.S.
https://theconversation.com/america-is-increasingly-dependent-on-foreign-doctors-but-their-path-to-immigration-is-getting-harder-229980
#health #immigration

21% of the total US population voted for Trump - not really more than when he lost in 2020. But fewer people voted against him this time, so our crappy system put him in charge.

We can't expect he'll surround himself with people who will restrain him. The Senate and probably the House will be controlled by people under his thumb. The Supreme Court, three of whose members he appointed, has already announced he'll have wide powers to act without being legally liable. He's lining up a cabinet full of billionaires.

My worries are not for my family. We planned ahead and are ready to move to Scotland. My worries are for the US, Ukraine, democracy worldwide, and the biosphere.

We need to organize to resist Trump's bad ideas and criminality. Unfortunately I am not good at politics. So, just a couple of thoughts:

The Democratic Party needs to figure out what it's doing wrong. Many Americans are desperate. 50% live paycheck to paycheck all the time. 25% have negative net worth: they owe more than they own. If Democrats don't take this seriously, people will keep voting for demagogues.

I wish there were a serious constituency for constitutional change: abolishing the electoral college, introducing ranked choice voting, banning campaign contributions and other forms of pay-to-play politics, etc. I don't see how these changes have a chance in the current environment. How can we improve the overall framework when politics devolves to a culture war, a battle between two dominant parties, a plutocracy - or actually all of the above? How could a new party devoted to true reform gain power? Time for me to study more history.

TIL that in Mastodon search, you can use has:image, has:video and has:audio.

more weird terminal stuff: line editing

As it had gone from the internet, I've posted The Beasts Who Fought For Fairyland Until the Very End--And Further Still, a story I wrote 8 years ago to help explain the 2016 election to children.

It's not really just for children.

It's up for free on both my Patreon & Substack. Folks have reached out to say it helped them then. I hope it helps now. It's heartbreaking that it needed no updating.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/115615893

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/the-beasts-who-fought-for-fairyland

Been away for a while but maybe gonna try to give mastodon a fair shake again. So uh... here's some recent illustration work as an ice re-breaker....

#illustration #art #drawing #procreate #europe

FDA proposes ditching common decongestant for being completely useless
Last year, FDA advisors unanimously voted that oral phenylephrine is ineffective.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/11/fda-proposes-ditching-common-decongestant-for-being-completely-useless/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Where are you finding hope today? Today, my class discussed public goods with network effects — goods that don't exclude people and that benefit everyone as more people access them. One of those things is education.

When my mother was born in the 1940s, around 70% of Americans over 25 didn't have a high school education. Now over 90% have finished high school.

That's an extraordinary expansion in human capability in a very short time period.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/cps-historical-time-series.html

sharp uptick in death threats today so just a lil reminder to maybe consider your words when interacting w your fave progressives, lol

I don't mind getting hired to scare people, because a) it's not very hard and b) it does drive home some very important points that don't get talked about enough. Like how most breaches start with social engineering of one form or another.

But I'm not interested in speaking about how great technology is, because it mostly sucks, and or the implementation of it is completely fumbled. And I'm deeply suspicious of any kind of effort to say that everything's just fine, no need to panic, etc. Fucking panic already.

E.g., the past couple of years have clearly shown that the code powering a ton of the endpoint security hardware out there today is complete cruft, meaning a significant share of the user base is constantly subject to zero-day attacks.

It's kind of like virtual currencies. If I thought for a minute that they were on balance doing more good than massive harm, I wouldn't mind saying so. I'd put current AI efforts in that bucket as well.

Post-Quantum Cryptography in OpenPGP - an IETF draft

#openpgp #pgp #postquantum

🔗 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-openpgp-pqc/