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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: October 23rd, 2023

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  • There’s a mile of difference between saying “consumers need to get comfortable not owning their games” and “we want consumers to get comfortable not owning their games (but using subscription services instead)”.

    The former statement is extremely arrogant. The latter is just obvious. And it’s reasonable even if you or I personally don’t want to get our games on a subscription model - millions of people get their music through Spotify and it suits them just fine even though other people don’t want that. So it’s a way of straw-manning the people pushing subscriptions so you can hate them.





  • But clearly, if we add up all the infinite fractions between 0 and 1, they would add up to 1.

    0.9 and 0.8 are in that set, so they would add up to at least 1.7. In fact if you give me any positive number I can give you a (finite!) set of (distinct) fractions less than 1 which sum to more than that number. In other words, the sum is infinite.







  • An overarching principle of security is that of minimum privilege: everything (every process, every person) should have the minimum privileges it needs to do what it does, and where possible, that privilege should be explicitly granted temporarily and then dropped.

    This means that any issue: a security breach or a mistake can’t access or break anything except whatever the component or person who had the issue could access or break, and that that access is minimal.

    Suppose that you hit a page which exploits the https://www.hkcert.org/security-bulletin/mozilla-firefox-remote-code-execution-vulnerability_20230913 vulnerability in Firefox, or one like it, allowing remote code execution. If Firefox is running as root, the remote attacker now completely controls that machine. If you have SSH keys to other servers on there, they are all compromised. Your personal data could be encrypted for ransom. Anything that server manages, such as a TV or smart home equipment, could be manipulated arbitrarily, and possibly destroyed.

    The same is true for any piece of software you use, because this is a general principle. Most distributions I believe don’t let you ssh in as root for that reason.

    In short: don’t log in to anything as root; log in as a regular user and use sudo to temporarily perform administrator actions.

    P.S. your description of the situation shows you don’t know the nature of vulnerabilities and security - if you’re running servers then this is something you should learn more about in short order.




  • No-one actually dislikes stuff because it’s lazy. You know what’s lazy? Writing a story in your damn native language - everyone should only write stories in a language they can’t speak. And featuring human beings? Too easy to relate to their emotions - lazy! Feature only animals after having done the necessary research to present their emotions fairly.

    When people say lazy as a criticism they usually mean “boring” or “unoriginal” (a “lazy trope” is one that’s been repeated too often) or just “bad” and lazy seems like a more objective way of expressing their dislike.

    So don’t be lazy - say what you mean.



  • I mean yes it’s a bit under-nuanced to describe any language as “easy” or “hard”. The single biggest influence is whether you’re already familiar with a similar language. English is going to be much easier if you already know German; Japanese will be much easier if you already know Okinawan. And as you say, written and spoke language can be quite different.

    That said, I don’t think it is the case that all of the different factors trade off against one another perfectly. I would expect them to trade off against one another to an extent though, because I would imagine there are forces which cause overly complex languages to become simpler, and more simple languages to become more complex. (One aspect of complexity comes through redundancy, such as requiring agreement between inflections of words when the inflection only conveys information already imparted from the rest of the sentence. But extra redundancy can aid in understanding because the listener generally doesn’t hear everything perfectly)

    But yeah, some languages just have incredibly complicated and picky grammar, whilst others have relatively simple grammar. As an English speaker, Japanese grammar has lots of unfamiliar features but could still be simpler than Finnish, which also has lots of unfamiliar grammar but which is very complex.