my_hat_stinks

But ‘cold’ and ‘heated’ are bad. People are weird about temperature.

It’s a little weirder than that.
https://lastplacecomics.com/lasso-man/

And some follow-up comics.
https://lastplacecomics.com/paint-bucket-man/
https://lastplacecomics.com/copy-and-paste/
https://lastplacecomics.com/lasso-man-4/

Your security is only as good as the weakest link, which is usually people. If your password policy encourages users to stick a note to their screen then your weakest link is anyone in the office deciding to take a selfie or joining a call with their camera on. Best practices balance security with what users are actually willing to do.

Good luck remembering them all, also change them all every 30 days, so here are my secrets.

Password expiry hasn’t been considered best practice for a long time (must be at least a decade now?) largely because of the other points you mentioned; it leads to weak easily memorable passwords written somewhere easily accessible. Even when it was considered good 30 days would have been an unusually short time.

Current advice is to change passwords whenever there’s a chance it’s been compromised, not on a schedule.

It might not necessarily be that the instances are stricter, it could also simply be that those instances are targeted more often by hate/trolls so interact with those instances more often. Admins are less likely to defederate from an instance they’ve never seen or heard of. I see a lot of obviously LGBT-related names in this list which likely get more hate than average.

It’s well outside my field so I’m definitely not qualified to answer that, but the trials seem to be building on this study so that might give more insight.

This probably isn’t going to be available to you then, though it is possible it paves the way for a tooth-replacement treatment. This article seems like bad science communication. The video, tweet, and website they link to all state that they’re researching congenital conditions, the inquiry form linked to on the website explicitly states in English they’re not considering people who lost their teeth later in life and specifically calls out articles like this one as misinformation.

We are currently receiving a large number of inquiries that differ from the purpose of this research, which is very troubling.
This research is a study of therapeutic drugs for people who are missing teeth due to congenital (from birth) diseases (diseases, etc.).
This research is not aimed at restoring teeth to people who have lost their teeth due to acquired causes, as some news and social networking sites have reported.Additionally, we are not currently recruiting candidates for　clinical trials (adult males).

If someone said they were concerned about their sugar intake would you tell them to just stop eating entirely? It’s possible to take steps towards privacy-friendly services without cutting yourself off from the modern world in the same way as you can cut back on sugar and still eat food.

You absolutely do not need to “burn all your devices” to improve your privacy, suggesting so is unhelpful at best.

There’s no point looking for logic. These people truly believe granting a licence restricts the rights of people who don’t agree to the licence, which is the exact opposite of what licenses do. It’s blatant misinformation but if you call them out on it (even by quoting their own link) they literally think you’re an astroturfer for AI, because that makes more sense to them than the fact they’re obviously wrong.

People already do, this comic is about a real thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

QR codes essentially just encode text, as long as you’re using a sensible QR code reader and check any URLs before opening them there’s minimal risk to scanning a QR code.

Blaming the people taking the loans is kind of absurd, for many it’s their only option if they want to continue their education. It’s not like they’re taking out loans they don’t need and burning the money.

“Legally-binding contract” is meaningless too, would you make the same argument against people who signed away their lives before slavery was abolished? Just because it’s legal now doesn’t mean it always will be, or that it must be enforced indefinitely.

You’re absolutely right that reducing tuition is the right move. Tuition is free where I am and some of the costs I see elsewhere are crazy. However, the options are not necessarily mutually exclusive; you can reduce tuition and help people that have already been shafted by the existing system.

There’s definitely some issues that jump out to me on first read.

1. I’m not sure about “indivisible”. An area should be able to self-govern if desired. More detail needed.
2. Awful. Removing people’s voting rights in general is bad, and something as nebulous as “a criminal offence” is incredibly easy to abuse. Are people no longer citizens if they steal a loaf of bread? Also, voting age here is 16/18.
4. No. Guns are incredibly rare where I am. I’d rather not have one, and I’d prefer not to risk getting shot every time some asshole on the street gets mad.
7. Limiting land to a single use is generally not a great idea. What if for instance you have too much agricultural land and not enough housing?
10. A central state-owned bank isn’t a bad idea, but abolishing all non-state banks is iffy. Should the government really have so much direct control over everyone’s finances?
12. Your salary should not be based on the amount of unprotected sex you have. That’s just silly. Other support should be available for those who need it.

“Too industrious” to be homeless sounds like nonsense victim-blaming to me. Homeless people aren’t all lazy, and lazy people definitely aren’t all homeless. It’s a societal failing, not a personal one.

If you can’t read a licence plate at 20 metres you can’t safely drive. Being able to read a licence plate at 20 metres does not make you a safe driver. The test still matters.

There’s no discount there, you’re just accepting their marketing bullshit. That sounds to me like the company is double-dipping by shoving ads in your face and making the product objectively worse, then charging even more for a “premium” model where the only difference is they haven’t intentionally downgraded it.

with extras like […] no lockscreen ads

What the fuck? Why is that an extra not just the default? It’s great that this product isn’t riddled with ads, but that’s like saying it’s great a burger is not made of human shit; it’s crazy that anyone would tolerate a shit-burger in the first place.

Maybe ads are normal in the e-reader space for some reason, but that’s just insane to me.

I’m not sure that’s a completely accurate analogy either. When you’re using a VPN people can still see that you are sending traffic through your tunnel, they just can’t tell what it is that you’re sending. It’s like looking through frosted glass; there’s definitely something moving in there but you can’t tell what.

I suppose the best way to describe it is you send a locked box to a trusted friend; everyone handling it can see the box but can’t tell what’s inside. Inside the box is a letter, your friend posts it so it looks like it came from them. Your friend then gets a reply, puts it in a locked box, and send it back to you. Nobody between you and your friend can snoop on your mail but anyone between your friend and the final destination can.

Being limited to only three options doesn’t sound very democratic but I suppose it’s better than a two party system. Instead of adding a self-destruct button, have you considered switching to a system which better represents the people?

I like the idea of splitting timelines if reverse time travel is possible, but it does have some consequences. The biggest one being that it means you can’t actually travel back in time. Time travel may even be relatively simple but as it has no effect on the primary timeline you will never be able to change the past as it appears there; travelling back in time simply creates an alternate reality. As far as the primary timeline inhabitants are concerned, you have either died or vanished (or maybe nothing appeared to happen at all) but you have not travelled in time. It also means it’s impossible to return to your original timeline as further reverse time travel will only create new alternate timelines, the closest you can get is a timeline that closely resembles your home one.

Another fun approach is that infinitely many alternate timelines already exist (think Many Worlds), travelling back in time simply means you spontaneously form in another world through quantum fluctuations or something equally hand-wavey. The thing I find interesting about this one is that it doesn’t necessarily involve time travel at all. You form with the memories of having travelled in time, sure, but you have just spontaneously formed through quantum fluctuations so it’s reasonable to assume your memories have too; it may have just been a randomly formed memory that didn’t actually happen. Since it’s just random fluctuations there’d also be infinitely many universes where you spontaneously pop into existence with no time travel memory, so I suppose in a way this never was time travel. The original timeline would be unaffected by this kind of travel as you can only move to universes where you have already spawned in.

The way I see it the only way to actually change the past in your current timeline arguably involves destroying the universe. You’d have a single timeline and each instance of reverse time travel cuts off your timeline’s future and links back to a previous point from which time can continue. You can visualise this timeline as a piece of string, time travel is a loop in that string. If you travel back in time by a year, everything you did in that past year is within that loop off to the side of the primary timeline; the loop starts and ends at the same point. Time travel would essentially delete your future and plonk you back onto the primary timeline. No need to worry about the grandfather paradox; you were born in a loop off to the side of real time so killing your grandfather doesn’t change that loop. It works around the bootstrap paradox for similar reasons; the information was created in some loop somewhere, even if it appears to have created itself on the prime line. It’s a nice thought experiment but the problem here is that if you travel back in time but fail to change the conditions which caused the time travel you may have just ended the universe in an infinite time loop.