Notices by Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social), page 3

I had noticed nested exceptions in #Python, but I didn't know how they worked until now. In Python 3, exceptions have a __context__ attribute, which is automatically set to the exception you're currently handling if you're handling one. You can set it explicitly using `raise new_exc from original_exc`.

Neat!

https://docs.python.org/3/library/exceptions.html

I was an early user of Quora. In fact, I became something of a minor celebrity in the early cryptocurrency space (I wrote Bitcoin's very first obituary according to 99bitcoins.com). As a result, I started getting anonymous requests to answer troll questions. I looked for a way to disable anonymous requests to answer questions, but I could only disable answer requests entirely. When I wrote to Quora support with a feature request, their reply was that they didn't want to allow that, because they wanted to maximize the amount of content. They were essentially admitting that they cared only about quantity, not quality.

I manually deleted all my answers and then my account. Everything Quora has done since then has been along the same lines: all they care about is growth. They've ALWAYS been garbage. They're zombies, shuffling along sucking the life out of the Internet.

So if ChatGPT kills Quora, I'll be celebrating. And you should be too.

If you didn't go through the Web's first two cycles of being useful and then becoming useless, maybe refrain from having an opinion about what #ChatGPT is going to do to the Web.

The Web was useful when there wasn't that much stuff on it and almost all the information came from people in universities. Then, as the commercial Internet grew, it became more and more useless. New search engines would help for a while, but it would rapidly sink back into uselessness.

Then Google came along and made the Web useful again. Again, it was temporary. The Web is garbage *today*. ChatGPT will be beating a dead horse. Maybe it will be the trigger for something that makes the Web useful again.

But honestly anytime someone frets over the ChatGPT-pocalypse, that means they think the garbage that exists today is actually useful. No. Today's Web needs to be burned to the ground.

The reason ChatGPT is such a threat isn't because of how advanced it is. It's because of how advanced *we* are not. We're barely better than robots. We sit around sifting through garbage information on the Internet, like a treasure hunter on the beach with a metal detector. Meanwhile, at every click we get shown a bunch of ads, tracked, and monetized.

Is that really something you want to protect?

Which raises an interesting question: how do you actually ensure people DO rotate critical secrets after a compromise of the company's official password manager?

The answer is: the company needs to have emergency access to everyone's vaults, and to keep regular snapshots to know what secrets were there at a given time. Then you can just scan for any critical secrets in the vault, same as scanning for them in your VCS repos.

"We got pwned because of the LastPass breach, but it's not our fault because we told everyone to rotate any critical secrets they had stored in LastPass."

The only thing that kept email from centralizing was that the main way to get free email was from your ISP, university, or some small freenet provider, and ISPs hadn't consolidated yet. AOL became huge pretty early on, but they charged money. But then the "free" email providers came along: Hotmail, Yahoo, and then the real behemoth, Gmail. And now Google owns email just like they own the web.

I wonder how many companies that use LastPass are telling their employees that they have to rotate any critical secrets stored in LastPass but not actually doing anything to follow up or enforce that and so nobody is going to do it because it's such a gigantic pain in the ass?

Watched a video from @notjustbikes that talked about how the area within walking distance of a transit stop is called its "walkshed" but that you couldn't call the area within biking distance a "bikeshed".

I've never heard the term "bike shed" used outside of tech, except rarely for an actual bike shed. Let's take it back and use it for this purpose.

"Using phone tower data, police were able to roughly triangulate who had been near the Liangma River the night of Nov. 27. They called in vigil attendees or visited their homes at night. Most participants were let go after a few hours of questioning, but the editor watched with a growing sense of dread as her friends were detained one by one."

Leave your phone at home.

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/11/1148251868/china-covid-lockdown-protests-arrests

We need a whole federated www where we can just kick people out who suck.

You know, like Google.

I think the need for this sort of thing is going to become a lot more apparent as LLMs cause the number of generally low-quality sites where it's not immediately obvious that they are of low quality skyrockets. Prepare for a huge explosion in the quantity of incorrect information being delivered with confidence.

Choices for watch faces that display numerical seconds on #BangleJS 2: super buggy (Anton Clock+ which ignores most of its settings and won't display the day of the week or the week of the year even when those are turned on) or barely readable (Simple Clock With Date, which uses an LCD font).

And, of course, if I use either of these, my battery life goes to shit, because it has to execute a bunch of JavaScript and font rendering code every second.

I'd tolerate not having seconds if there were ANY timer that was reasonably fast to set. But the touch screen on the watch is fairly terrible and often takes multiple swipes for a swipe to register. It also requires a separate calibration app which for whatever reason is not loaded by default to register touches in the right place.

It's the third smart watch I've owned, and I've never been happy enough with any of them to keep wearing them. I think smart watches just aren't for me. I think I'm going to replace the battery in my Chase Durer pilot's watch and start wearing that again.

The fact that it seems to be primarily people on known bad instances who have a problem with this tells me I must be on the right track.

Starting to wonder if "silence by default" is enough.

Some example responses to this post from other servers, all because someone on a server that associates with them (and which I am disappointed to discover retro.social did not already have blocked) replied to it.

From https://nightshift.social/users/Johnny5iveAlive :

https://nightshift.social/objects/6705ff85-fd7b-4f5b-996a-9b917884b812

@kkarhan I don't think having extremely low friction for creating and bootstrapping new instances makes any long-term difference to decentralization. To provide significant benefit, an instance has to be able to grow at least a little and stick around. If a little bit of additional pain at the beginning keeps someone from starting an instance, they were unlikely to make it in the long term anyway, and we're protecting their potential users and the Fediverse itself from the harm they would have caused.

Seems like all new instances should at least be silenced by default until they prove themselves to be good Fedizens. Yes, it will make it harder to bootstrap new instances. The admin can always go out and specifically request to be unsilenced. If they're known good actors, they will be successful. If they are not, then they should not be successful.

#Mastodon #FediMeta