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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • I just want to say, Mamdani is excellent. But I feel like he’s getting a lot of undue credit when the candidates he endorsed are just great people. For example, Brad Lander was a similarly-strong candidate for NYC mayor who was arrested by ICE for attempting to prevent them from detaining someone. When Mamdani won the Primary for Mayor everyone kinda just knew Brad had a future somewhere else.

    Mamdani deserves some credit for endorsing good people, and using his brand to boost them, but it seems like the accomplishments of those he endorsed are getting overshadowed in articles and headlines by what seems like an attempt to turn real progressive momentum into “Mamdani’s little club.”

    Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Mamdani, or even him being the face of the movement. It just seems like there are people in power trying to undermine him and the movement by making him the face of it.






  • Almost certainly not. All you would really need to do to stop this is limit who can submit pull requests to verified devs. Things go back to the way they were during the clunkier, before times when everyone used Subversion, when there were more hoops to jump through to contribute code. Make it so you need an existing contributor to “mentor” first-time contributors (making sure they aren’t an AI, are writing competent code that follows project standards, etc.) before giving access to submit dozens of pull requests.




  • Not particularly proud of all this, but as an autistic millenial kid who had access to the internet in the late '90s early 2000s I’ve got a relevant story.

    If you wanted to look at boobs on the internet in the era of waiting a minute for images to load, Playboy was an easy way to avoid some of the more hardcore and kink porn on the internet. You could be pretty sure that regardless of what site you were on, Playboy content would actually contain boobs, and you wouldn’t waste 2 minutes slowly loading a picure of a dude in a gimp mask getting pegged through the bars of a pet cage (not trying to yuck anyone’s yum, but when you’re a dumb teen with absent parents looking for boobs, it wasn’t what I was after). Eventually Playboy content started to be considered “too vanilla” by the majority of porn users at the time, but I still liked vanilla and kinda let my Autism go crazy on occasion over the years to download and organize offline copies of a bunch of photosets.

    Time passes, I get a bit older and become a young adult, the internet gets faster, at some point I revisit the porn archival hyperfixation, and foolishly write a script to scrape and download photosets straight from Playboy’s paid member-only site.

    Obviously one of their web admins notices that my account is a huge chunk of their monthly traffic, and I get an email from their customer service basically saying their admins noticed unusual activity on my account, and to explain myself or face a ban. I made up some excuse that worked on the customer service agent and they let me off with a warning.

    But the next day I got an email from the admin that said he knew what I had done, and that the answer I gave the customer service rep was a lie, and if he ever caught me again he’d send the police after me for possession of CSAM. I replied that the only images I had were from their site, how is that CSAM, and if there is CSAM they would be in more trouble for distributing/selling access to it. He wrote back and said yeah, we’re a company, the rules don’t apply the same as individuals, and that if I kept arguing with him he’d ban me anyway.

    So, yeah, I deleted everything I had downloaded and decided that hyperfixation wasn’t worth it.








  • One big downside to ham radio (as someone with my license) is that you can’t use encryption. Which is fine for some use cases, but does limit the usefulness in the “government shut down the internet” kind of scenario.

    Which, I suppose if you’re already using back-channels to circumvent some broader government censorship, maybe abiding by FCC rules isn’t a priority anymore, but IMO this is an area where large mesh networks of “consumer” devices with encryption very much still has value.