this pretty much sums it up. I thought trump would be incoherent, but some of the stuff out of his mouth was borderline surreal. Harris had completely tuned herself to ‘beat’ trump, and while it worked, it’s painfully clear that she doesn’t have a single original thought - nothing but platitudes, the same canned phrases about working families and small businesses, same tired defence of Israel.
last time I signed into my Microsoft 365 account for work I got two separate 2fa prompts and two captchas, it was like being in an episode of the crystal maze. the mere act of signing into something is now tedious and difficult
I run a small personal blog/portfolio website that doesn’t get more than a hundred or so human visits per day, but it gets hammered with bot traffic, not just malicious bots but tons of different search indexers and scrapers, many of which don’t respect robots.txt
after setting up cloudflare I noticed a very significant drop in malicious traffic and in bandwidth use, which also corresponded to less bandwidth and CPU usage for my VPS.
I know cloudflare has recently had a few bad customer service stories but for small and medium sized websites their service is invaluable
my own personal criticism of cloudflare is that, as a VPS user, I get hit by cloudflare challenges more. but now that they’ve moved to hcaptcha it’s not too bad
I work in computational biophysics. The field has been slowly chipping away at the structure and function of every protein for decades (it’s a solvable problem, it’s just going to take a lot of time and energy) and recently a bunch of clueless SF tech bros have bumbled their way into the field and declared that they’ve solved everything.
I love kde, I love the file picker, I love window management, I love dolphin, I love the panels, I love Kate, etc… but every time I have to switch to a new tty to restart kwin, part of my soul dies
when I think of other famous psychologists my mind goes to people like zimbardo or milgram, because of their attention grabbing studies. but they are not great examples because their work has big problems with ethics and replicability. after that, maybe pavlov or skinner? but their work is most famous for its less ethical uses. harlow? or a bunch of his contemporaries who got famous mostly for torturing monkeys? maybe piaget?
I only did psychology to a college level but I think a lot of 20th century psychologists are famous for the wrong reasons. Freud was full of crap but at least he didn’t torture any monkeys
The wording of the article here, ‘can’t rely on beliefs’ is doing a lot of work, first it frames legitimate concerns about climate change as ‘beliefs’, and second of all it implies that people are somehow dodging criminal damage charges based on their subjective feelings, which isn’t what’s happening at all. Instead, the UK government is stripping away a layer of legal protection for protestors which was established in the Criminal Damage Act of 1971 (for more info google ‘the consent defence’).
The UK has been drifting into authoritarianism for a long time, but in the last few years, the repeated attacks on people’s right to protest have become far more transparent. There is a high-ranking UK judge called Silas Reid who became famous for forbidding mentions of climate change in his courtroom, and recently threatened a jury with prosecution if they acquit a group of climate protestors.
It’s sad to see newspapers spin this into such neutral language. This is a brazen assault on human rights.
this is why i haven’t taken my kid to get his supposed ‘broken leg’ fixed. sorry kiddo but i have thoroughly inspected it and determined that the bone angles are within tolerance
in my opinion this is very straightforward. the people working directly on power, water and materials don’t have any control over how those things are used and often don’t/can’t know what they’re being used for. however, at some point, a decision is made - for example, someone at the company that makes the steel alloy decides to sell it to raytheon - and so whoever made that decision is responsible.
and yes, if you work on a weapon safety system, you are working on an essential part of that weapon and so are responsible for its use
i mean, i probably wouldn’t resent you for mopping the floors at BAE. but if you actually design or build the missiles, yes, that is unethical
a lot of people are using the example of ukraine to say ‘sometimes the missiles are for the greater good’, and while i would agree with that specific example, you don’t have control over where your missiles go. russian tank, yemeni refugee, etc
i also think saying ‘the parts will be made anyway’ is kind of a dodge, the question isn’t whether the parts will be made, it’s whether you will make them
I love XLR and mini-XLR. Durable connector, nice locking mechanism, satisfying click. Also very easy to wire yourself.
I’m probably not going to pay $10 a year with additional fees to have my music on a website unless a lot of people are already using it