Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 462 Posts
- 933 Comments
see also previous thread in this community on this topic from a month ago
Yeah, but at least it has the OG Zealand.
in the nether region
16·5 days agoima keep it real with u chief
Mailbox.org lets you keep your own private key.
Every email provider lets you keep your own private key if you do encryption using the interoperable OpenPGP standard using software running on your own computer. Many email providers will recommend that you do exactly that, and will helpfully instruct you about how to do so (eg, the more reputable options in this thread such as migadu.com, mailbox.org, posteo.de, and even fastmail.com all have instructions for how to use some implementation of pgp to encrypt your email).
Meanwhile any company selling non-standard “email encryption” (eg, proton and tuta) which is not compatible with pgp (or, in the corporate world, s/mime, which is also a standard…) is firmly in the snake oil business and should be distrusted and boycotted regardless of which shitty youtubers they’re sponsoring this week.
1·15 days agoCompanies now block older browser versions
Now? This has been happening since the dawn of the web. At least the screenshot you pasted represents all of the big three rendering engines - it used to be common to see “Internet Explorer version XYZ required”, sometimes with javascript to prevent you from using the site with any other browser (even if in some cases it would actually work fine if you simply spoofed your user agent string).
I have used kinda retro devices to surf the web at times
Most websites became HTTPS-only sometime after the snowden disclosures in 2013.
Over time old versions of TLS have been deprecated and eventually support for them is dropped from browsers and web servers alike. So, a browser from even 15 years ago literally cannot connect to most webservers today.
Planned obsolescence is terrible but it’s a minor factor here: it’s actually dangerous to use even (especially?) a slightly-out-of-date web browser because every new release fixes vulnerabilities which can be exploited to run malicious code on your computer. The planned obsolescence which prevents people from being able to have an up-to-date browser comes mostly from proprietary operating system vendors; to have up-to-date software while continuing to use somewhat older computers you need to use free/libre software.
22·17 days agoAI;DR - i literally could not bear to finish reading this slop, and went to find something human-written to confirm if any of it is based in reality. It is, but I wouldn’t assume any details in the slop summary are accurate.
From what i skimmed I think the sole real-world source on the topic which this “article” (if you can call it that) cites is this abstract for a seminar that happened in 2022. An 88-page report from 2019 (San Joaquin Kit Fox Response to the Topaz Solar Farms) has far more information as well as pictures of the foxes and one of the dens the researchers built for them:
don’t threaten me with a good time
32·17 days agoAs others have said it is a huge amount of work to maintain a fork of such a complicated piece of software.
Especially around security: web browsers constantly process potentially-malicious data, which gives them a large attack surface. Every browser regularly has new vulnerabilities discovered which must be fixed. Hard forking a browser means that, even ignoring any bugs in the new code the fork has added, every time a bug is discovered and fixed in the code they forked from someone needs to analyze the upstream’s fix and port it to the fork. The more they diverge, the more work this is. Failing to do this work lets any malicious website exploit the bugs and install malware on users’ computers.
'Suspicious given the elections going on'
😭
yep. (see my other comment in this thread)
another screenshot of a tweet, no link, no alt text, smh my head.
imo science memes should link the science!
Here is the paper from April which this tweet is actually referring to: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/293/2069/20252994/481340/The-phonology-of-sperm-whale-coda-vowels
Unsurprisingly the tweet’s characterization of the research as finding whale language “structurally comparable to Chinese” is an exaggeration; they are actually saying it is similar to tonal languages and then using Mandarin as one example of a tonal language.
here are the two paragraphs which actually mention Chinese
Human vowels consist of a sequence of glottal pulses produced by vocal folds. Whale codas consist of a sequence of clicks produced by vibrating phonic lips, which play a role similar to the human vocal folds [15]. In human languages, the frequency of glottal pulses corresponds to pitch—closely spaced glottal pulses give rise to a higher pitch, while more widely spaced pulses give rise to a lower pitch. In linguistics, tone refers to pitch as recruited to express linguistic meaning. Many languages use tone to distinguish between different words. For example, in Mandarin Chinese, the following four words differ only in their tonal contour, while having the same consonants and vowels [21]: high and level tone ma ‘mother’, rising tone má ‘hemp’, falling-rising tone ma ‘horse’ and falling tone mà ‘scold’. The coda types can therefore be compared to human tone: ‘regular’ coda types can be compared to level tones, codas with ‘increasing’ ICIs to falling tones and codas with ‘decreasing’ ICIs to rising tones. (However, our analogy has a limit: while in human languages, different tones can be associated with different meanings, the meanings conveyed by sperm whale codas have not been established.) In figure 1, the ‘F0’ (fundamental frequency) of each coda is represented with a blue line.
Beguš et al. [15] show that different coda vowel qualities can be instantiated on the same coda types and propose that coda type and coda quality are orthogonal [15]. This points to another parallelism between the sperm whale communication system and human language, as tone and vowel quality are often similarly orthogonal. For example, in Mandarin Chinese, the falling–rising tone may appear on any vowel, e.g. ma ‘horse’, ma ‘rice’ and ma ‘smear’. Orthogonality, in this case, is used to describe the independent mechanisms of production between the traditional timing or source features and the vocalic or filter features. In other words, the rate of vocal fold or phonic lip vibration can be independent of the shape of the resonant body (the vocal tract or the distal air sac), and both vowel types surface on several traditional coda types. However, while the production can be independent, there can still exist distributional patterns, where a vowel quality is more frequent on certain tones or some coda vowels are more common on certain traditional coda types. Our paper builds on Beguš et al.’s [15] findings and reveals further complexities within the system of sperm whale vocalizations.
Here is an article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/15/sperm-whales-alphabet-vocalizations-similar-humans …which also links this other fascinating news from the same lab from back in March https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/27/scientists-film-whale-giving-birth-other-whales-help-her (“This is the first evidence of birth assistance in non-primates”)
finally here https://xcancel.com/kuso_otoko/status/2062224294835540161 is the tweet this post is a screenshot of, where you can find people in the replies already making the predictable “met them at a very Chinese time in their life”, “that’s why japan hates them”, etc jokes.
note
i’m definitely not working in China’s Cetacean Ops and trying to prevent the western world from finding out that whale speak is just super slowed down Mandarin, i swear
8·21 days agoOne shot rewriting the whole test suite
tridge’s blog post makes it clear that this was not “one-shotted” at all.
You should read the whole thread
I regret reading it; I’ll assume in good faith that it wasn’t LLM generated but it is ironically as confidently wrong as if it were.
It almost (and should have) lost me when it started by quote-agreeing with someone else saying “rsync was basically done until the maintainer discovered vibecoding” - no, pay attention, it was not “basically done”, there were/are a mountain of CVEs!
But then this got my interest:
This does not “translate tests into pytest” or a unit testing framework, it writes its own testing framework where tests are whole python scripts that redefine basic test functions in every script. Surely there would be a single way to “run rsync and get the results” - nope, well, there is, but then every test file will randomly redefine its own _run_and_capture function.
tridge says he has used pytest on other projects and had good reasons not to use it here; I’m inclined to believe him.
But the notion of every test defining its own way to invoke rsync sounded like a valid criticism, and an easy one to verify, so I checked: It turns out that there is in fact a common
run_rsyncfunction which is used by the majority of the tests. One test defines its own_run_and_capturefunction (which differs in that it writes the output to a file, for reasons I didn’t investigate), and it looks like a few others invoke rsync other ways, but the majority of them use the common function.So, that rambling thread’s sole concrete criticism of rsync’s new python tests turns out to be false.
4·22 days agoMamdani signed an “executive order”
the tweet this post is a screenshot of: https://xcancel.com/EmbaCubaUS/status/2060376971247337849
the vaccine it is about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racotumomab (trade name Vaxira)
The 2021 paper OSRM-CCTV: Open-source CCTV-aware routing and navigation system for privacy, anonymity and safety says they published source code at https://github.com/Fuziih but I don’t see it there now (though there is a related project called cctv-exposure).
The final published version of the paper seems to be paywalled; it’s probably on scihub but there is also a preprint of it here on arxiv.
https://github.com/FNBIP/ghost-route (just 3 commits, from February this year) says it is inspired by the paper and “extended to a production-grade multi-mode threat routing system”. It’s a node app you run locally (there doesn’t appear to be a public instance currently) which would be nice if it could work offline but unfortunately “Offline mode with pre-downloaded OSM tiles” is still on the roadmap and it currently lists “A Mapbox GL JS token (free tier works)” as a requirement (which is probably why there isn’t a public instance - someone would need to pay mapbox if they wanted to run it for other people).
I have not tried it; if anyone reading this has or does please post here about how it works!
getting into the territory of Sony’s famous patent “System for converting television commercials into interactive networked video games”