Notices by Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)

I just love horizontal videos made into vertical videos with huge black bars. The tech industry is so clever.

@aral @blogdiva Hah, I'd missed that you said secret key. I seem to recall that was the original idea behind emoji-based codes, though they also look cool.

I ran a script over https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/16.0/emoji-sequences.txt and only got 1185 that don't require 2 codepoints, so you're right. I did test with one codepoint sequence and confirmed it only uses a single character of my Mastodon character limit, so I may still publish an implementation just for fun.

@aral @blogdiva Damn, only 2321 in total even including those that require multiple code points. I don't even remember why I thought there were more than that.

Base 921 encodes 256 bits in 26 emojis...

@aral @blogdiva Hmm. If we assume bigint math is available, we could use 3184 of the emoji and encode your public key with only 22 emoji :D

@aral @blogdiva Encoding as emoji is funny, because the UTF8 ends up being 4x as many bytes as the original key, so 128 in this case, but because social media limits the number of characters and not the number of UTF8 bytes, it uses only 32 bytes of your character limit, less than hex or base64 would even though both of those would use less space in the database, in RAM, and on the wire.

@foone Why would you even be using a browser still? All the text will just be LLM-generated.

@thomholwerda Good idea. I have no mutuals there, so I guess I'll do the same.

@brhfl You mean, if your instance hosts Nazis?

* Read the instance's stated policies and see if hate speech is explicitly prohibited. If it's not, time to move.
* Read the local timeline.
* Follow your admins/moderators and see what they have to say.

What they think of the Fediblock hashtag can be a good litmus test. If they dismiss it, time to move.

@thomholwerda

Peak late stage capitalism: jewelry leasing targeted at people with no credit.

@aral @taki @senj Perhaps he wants to lose so Trump can "finish the job" and take the blame while the Democrats tsk tsk at him and the Republicans.

@LambdaCalculus Their whole front page is full of that sort of stuff.

@ajroach42

@TCatInReality "You're only allowed to speak if the cops can understand what you're saying" sounds super reasonable to me.

@aral

So much for Biden making the slightest attempt to redeem himself.

Capitalism is outsourced dictatorship. Even when it nominally exists within a democracy, the democratic core is guaranteed to get subverted and shrink until only the dictatorship remains, with the "democratic" part continuing to exist only for show.

I'm really not sure how to feel about WEI. On the one hand, it's DRM, and all DRM is bad. On the other, maybe it will finally present an opportunity to stop pretending YouTube is a viable way to share videos.

But there is another way it could go: if anyone can come up with "good enough" and "lightweight enough" DRM that most people will just allow it and get on with their lives, it would be Google. And it could become REALLY INCONVENIENT to avoid it. Computing freedom could be about to take a huge step backward, like it did with the jump to mobile, which was pretty much a death blow.

It doesn't matter if you have a general purpose computer on your lap if a huge fraction of what you do runs in a tamper-proof, surveillance-ridden VM controlled by someone else.

Sure, we can continue to do things outside of it, just like we don't have to use Android or iOS to do anything. But how many people reading this don't carry an Android or iOS device everywhere with them, or even use an open source Android distro? The web landscape is horrible enough already, with even Microsoft not able to maintain a viable browser (and after watching Liz's tribulations with Safari I'd say Apple can't either). And now Google wants to make fully open source browser implementations completely impossible. And I suspect they will be successful, because people just don't care.

I read somewhere that it's not an "official" Google proposal because it's on an employee's Github page, but isn't that the way Google has always manipulated web standards? As far as I know that's just how the W3C works, with proposals coming from individuals rather than corporations.

I don't expect Mozilla to be any help here. Firefox doesn't even provide a way to turn off the banner that appears on the top of your screen prompting you to enable DRM on pages that include DRM content. I had to add a snippet to user.js to get rid of it.

And believe me, the odds of Firefox not supporting this are basically zero. Mozilla is how Google pretends Chrome has competition, and if suddenly Firefox can't render a significant fraction of web sites, it gets a lot harder to continue pretending. I wouldn't be surprised if Google pays them to implement it, like they pay them to make Google the default browser today.

We had a class that had a couple of class properties (using a third party classproperty decorator) that would raise TypeError if it was fetched on the base class, because it tried to index into an attribute that is None by default. You weren't supposed to do that anyway, so we didn't have a check for it. But MagicMock now fetches all attributes on any class you are trying to mock in order to check if they're async closures. It uses getattr with a default of None, but getattr only expects AttributeError from properties, so it passed up the TypeError instead of returning the default value, which made the class un-mockable.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but "strong AI" refers to a set of beliefs about AI, not to artificial superintelligence.

Can anyone recommend a good drawing tablet that'll work on a Mac? Primarily for remote whiteboard work. Is Wacom still the go-to brand?