zataomm
1yr ago
I guess I want to speak up for the people who think that Fetterman really wasn’t that bad. For the most part, it was clear what he was trying to say, even though he didn’t express himself fluently and seemed like a nervous middle schooler giving a presentation, or Like he was doing a Chris Farley impression, for the old are millennials among us. He had a lot of canned talking points, of course, because that’s just how debates work nowadays, no actual debating involved.
Unfortunately, in this day and age its always necessary to declare one’s affiliations along with one’s objective judgments of situation, so I need to express my own view by saying my dream would be to vote for a Republican candidate who is actually good, not that phony Mehmet Oz. We know Federman’s excuse, what is Oz’s excuse for not saying anything interesting during the entire debate?
zataomm
1yr ago
Hoping early Monday isn't too late for a small-scale question, so here goes:
In the wake of a friend falling victim to a phishing scam in which they were convinced to send a screenshot of a link to a password reset page (indeed, head-slappingly bad), I'm currently being dragged in real life for my hot take, two-part opinion that
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This scam was facilitated by the common advice that you should NEVER follow links because they could be from a hacker and then you will get hacked! and
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This advice isn't actually very good, in the sense that nothing bad can really happen to you just from following some random link.
As a web developer I know something about how the web works, but obviously I don't know everything, so I'm curious if someone else can come up with a really bad outcome achievable just by clicking on a link. Could you, say, send an API request to a bank from within your webpage, and then read the response and cookies from the host page? I'm thinking this would be blocked by both browser and site technology. This has to be what CORS is for, right? Not just to annoy me while I'm developing?
Anyway, like I said, suggestions welcome.
zataomm
1yr ago
Aren't your question parameters too wide? If someone has a perfect (presumably zero day) exploit
I suppose so. If somehow Chrome granted a page access to the entire filesystem, obviously that would be very bad. But you're probably protected against such an exploit because come on, are you really going to be the first person they target with this attack? Although I retract this skepticism if you are actually a billionaire.
So okay, are they any known ways that a site could extract important private information about a user just by visiting a site (and, let's say, scrolling)?
zataomm
1yr ago
I seem to recall an alert from a while back whereby if your password manager autofills login info, that could make you vulnerable, if you visit a site that embeds a bank's login page within an <iframe>, the parent site would be able to read the relevant DOM elements. Requires a specific browser setup, obviously, but would this still work? Are there exploits that cannot be circumvented by visiting unknown sites in Incognito mode, as I do from time to time when I am curious about a suspicious link?
zataomm
1yr ago
Gotta admit I'm not about to read all that API documentation for window.showOpenFilePicker() but it looks like the user has to have a lot more specific interaction, i.e. choosing files on local disk, in order for the site to have access. So you wouldn't be able to get access just using some generic popup.
zataomm
1yr ago
Thanks for this, I hadn't heard of Exploit Kits before. That said, the vulnerability seems to come from the used-to-be-common experience where a browser would open an Adobe plugin or whatever, something which is uncommon-to-nonexistent nowadays. In the Wikipedia article the first source they site explaining what Exploit Kits are is an article from 2013!
I did ask for what's possible in the worst case scenario, so fair enough, but I'm still wondering if there are exploits that use a (modern) browser alone, without relying on opening other software. I guess this is another stupid question, but do browser plugins even exist anymore? I can't remember the last time I saw a page with a plug-in.
I guess it's kind of funny that after I have been complaining for years about Twitter's bullshit justification for banning Trump under the "incitement to violence" standard, the new management goes and suspends Kanye West because, according to Elon Musk's tweet, "he again violated our rule against incitement to violence." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598543670990495744
Maybe yishan (formerly of Reddit) was right that when you run a social media platform, there are certain bans that you just have to enact to keep your service alive, even though there are no objective rules you can apply to justify these bans.
[EDIT: Just noticed this was already discussed below. Sorry.]
[EDIT 2: I deleted in <10 minutes but there had already been some replies. No good options based on my past choices so I think least-bad is to undelete. Sorry for chaos.]
zataomm
1yr ago
Yeah I find it amazing that the exact same principle ("incitement to violence") that they used to ban Trump based on flimsy logic is now being applied to Ye with a similarly flimsy connection between his tweets and "violence".
zataomm
1yr ago
old black women
For the record, Rosa Parks was born in 1913, and so was 42 years old at the time of her protest in 1955, although she does look older in her mug shot.
zataomm
1yr ago
This dialog is kind of funny in its over-the-topness but do you really not understand that the black people and white people have very different hair? Try a google image search for "black men's hairstyles"
zataomm
1yr ago
who caused the Great Chinese Famine
PRC, Mao in particular.
Well that is a misleading answer.
Mao had its flaws but the general direction of china made sense, they suffered from the century of humiliation, something that isn't taught in schools because of racism.
For anyone stumbling upon this thread and not sure what to believe, this is a case where the conventional wisdom is correct, Mao was a terrible leader and his misguided policies were responsible for the deaths of 30 million people from 1960-1962. You can say it was ignorance, not malice, that caused Mao's error, but the fact is that if he didn't know any better it is because he didn't want to know any better.
zataomm
1yr ago
For reference, Scott also referred to this issue in You Are Still Crying Wolf. To wit:
Stop responding to everyone who worries about Wall Street or globalism or the elite with “I THINK YOU MEAN JEWS. BECAUSE JEWS ARE THE ELITES. ALL ELITES AND GLOBALISTS ARE JEWS. IF YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT THE ELITE, IT’S DEFINITELY JEWS YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED ABOUT. IF YOU FEEL SCREWED BY WALL STREET, THEN THE PEOPLE WHO SCREWED YOU WERE THE JEWS. IT’S THE JEWS WHO ARE DOING ALL THIS, MAKE SURE TO REMEMBER THAT. DEFINITELY TRANSLATE YOUR HATRED TOWARDS A VAGUE ESTABLISHMENT INTO HATRED OF JEWS, BECAUSE THEY’RE TOTALLY THE ONES YOU’RE THINKING OF.” This means you, Vox. Someday those three or four people who still believe the media are going to read this stuff and immediately join the Nazi Party, and nobody will be able to blame them.
Stop saying that being against crime is a dog whistle for racism. Have you ever met a crime victim? They don’t like crime. I work with people from a poor area, and a lot of them have been raped, or permanently disabled, or had people close to them murdered. You know what these people have in common? They don’t like crime When you say “the only reason someone could talk about law and order is that they secretly hate black people, because, y’know, all criminals are black”, not only are you an idiot, you’re a racist. Also, I judge you for not having read the polls saying that nonwhites are way more concerned about crime than white people are.
zataomm
1yr ago
In any legal system, the ability to effectively apply laws hinges on our capacity to establish clear definitions for the concepts and situations they govern. If someone is to be prosecuted for murder, it's necessary to define what constitutes "murder" - this is referred to as the "elements" of the crime. Quickly googling, in murder, we have: 1. Criminal Act (killing a human), 2. Criminal Intent (purposely, knowingly), 3. Harm (death).
To take another case, if a law declares that certain considerations apply to "married" people, criteria must be set to determine under what conditions two (or more?) people can be considered 'married'.
However, the boring process of defining and categorizing has been thrown into turmoil as we deal with gender identity. I recently encountered an article by a trans writer who strongly objected to the idea that "other people" should be able to "decide" whether a person who self-identifies as trans is "really" trans. The author seemed to believe that denying someone's self-identified gender is offensive in a metaphysical sense, as it amounts to denying the existence of the trans person.
It's fine to not want trans people to feel wrongly identified, but this issue becomes legally significant when there are laws that apply differently to "men" and "women." Concretely, a person convicted of murder may be sent to a different prison, depending on whether that person is categorized as a "man" or a "woman". In these situations, clear definitions and categorizations become necessary to uphold the law. I don't think it serves anyone's interest to simply apply the slogan "trans women are women" in such a case; it seems a perfectly reasonable compromise to apply a hierarchy of cases. An example hierarchy might be:
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anyone who self-identifies as a woman can be referred to as "she"
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almost anyone who self-idenfifies as a woman can use the ladies' restroom
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a basic evaluation should be applied to a self-identified woman before she is allowed to play on a woman's sports team
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a strict evaluation should apply to a self-identified woman to determine whether she goes to a women-only prison
I'm happy to argue about how strict we ought to be in a given situation, but I'm not happy to accept that there should be no hierarchy of situations at all. We can't take a shortcut on considering the potential harm caused by a false positive vs. a false negative by simply declaring that we will always affirm the dignity of trans people. Furthermore, any system that attempts to identify people as a belonging to "category X" will inevitably produce false positives and false negatives. It is unrealistic and untenable to demand that the false negative rate must be zero (i.e. we must never incorrectly say that a trans woman is not really a woman), especially when being categorized as X has legal ramifications.
I guess this all seems pretty basic, but I don't know that I've seen anyone state the "different situations, different criteria" case, and the alternative seems to be that people are tarred as "transphobes" for suggesting that someone who self-identifies as a trans woman should not be treated as a woman in some specific situation.
Haven't heard this one before. Excellent.
Announcer: Surely one death by drowning is one too many?
Mitchell: That's a ridiculous thing to say.
"Everyone has to die, and in a balanced, fair, and democratic society, some of them should drown."
zataomm
11mo ago
Am I the only one who is unable to investigate that idea further because the phrase “grabby aliens” sounds so stupid it actually makes me mad every time I see it mentioned? Probably yes.
Anybody still check this out on Monday?
What's a good country and/or city just outside of the Schengen area to spend a month or two? Currently looking at Belgrade, Tirana, or somewhere in Montenegro. Cheapness is a very important consideration in this case.
zataomm
11mo ago
There seems to be some currency weirdness in Albania, like you can't bring Albanian hard currency out of the country? Do you happen to know whether the exchange rate at ATMs is fair or do you have to bring a bunch of Euros/Dollars and exchange them on the street?
zataomm
10mo ago
the far left are just rich college educated people who live the values they preach
I'm confused... do you mean to say they don't live the values they preach, i.e. they preach leftism, but live like conservatives?
zataomm
10mo ago
Why not? The attack he is responding to was the opener to Kagan’s dissent
zataomm
9mo ago
Thanks for the link. As others have noted, it's extremely long, but its length does help address this feeling of unease many of us experience when observing or engaging with "culture war"-related topics in the modern online space. You wake up one day and everyone is saying something that is obviously false. I'm not sure whether it's helpful or harmful to my case to throw in examples here, but what comes to mind for me are Larry Summers on female representation, Covington Catholic, Kyle Rittenhouse, Trump's "very fine people on both sides", Florida's curriculum on slavery...
Apparently the "stages of grief" don't have as solid a scientific backing as we might hope, but even so, something like those stages are what I have gone through many times in the past few years as these cases have become hot.
Denial - it's just a misunderstanding, after the initial controversy people will look at the full context and realize there was nothing to get so worked up about
Anger - Partisans are inflaming the issue for their own benefit
Bargaining - If my friends and family would just watch this video, they'd see that the media portrayal has been all wrong. I'll just send them the link...
Depression - This is where I usually end up, because none of the above makes any difference.
So I really identified with your experience as an extended example of the "Bargaining" phase I've gone through myself. To be honest, there have been an embarrasing number of occasions on which I insisted on sitting down with someone and showing them a video or reading them an article that unequivocally establishes "the truth", in contrast to the media narrative. At those times, I would have been glad to pay people to watch these videos, because how could they watch the video and still disagree?
I can't say I've had 0% success in these endeavours; I think on occasion I've convinced people that the situation is more nuanced than they were led to believe. But I don't think I've every had anyone really understand my desperation to make them understand, get why these matters are so upsetting to me. So I quite appreciated your essay, not just because we agree on the matter at hand, but because I know how it feels to be so sure you are right but still need someone else to validate that belief.
The Washington Post reports: Florida schools drop AP Psychology after state says it violates the law, a good example of the media getting as close to lying as you can get while still remaining in not-quite-lying territory.
As far as I know, this all started last Thursday, when the College Board issued a statement regarding its AP Psychology course and Florida law. In this statement, the College Board wrote: "The state has said districts are free to teach AP Psychology only if it excludes any mention of [content on sexual orientation and gender identity]."
Citation (desperately) needed! Contrary to what the College Board says, I have been unable to find any source on the internet prior to the College Board's statement corroborating their claim about what the Florida department of education requires. The Washington Post claims that the statement was based on a "conference call" between the board of education and school superintendents, but again, I have found no stories where the reporter interviews someone involved in the call in order to confirm the College Board's characterization of what was said.
On the contrary, on Friday, the day after the College Board published its statement, the director of the Florida Department of Education wrote a letter to the school superintendants, clarifying that
In fact, the Department believes that AP Psychology can be taught in its entirety in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate and the course remains listed in our course catalog
As far as I know, this letter is the only official statement from the Florida Department of Education regarding the application of the Parental Rights in Education ("Don't Say Gay") law to the teaching of AP Psychology. And yet a google search of "ap psychology Florida" returns headline after headline of major news outlets reporting the College Board's interpretation of this law as if Florida had gone out and "banned" the teaching of AP Psychology in its schools.
Without knowing anything about the conference call (because no reporter bothered to check), I have to caveat that maybe Florida did suggest that some parts of AP Psychology could not be taught, only to backtrack after being called out by the College Board. But for me, it seems like a dishonest characterization of the law intended to make Florida and DeSantis look bad.
EDIT:
Okay, having done a bit more research by going back to read the College Board's previous statements on this matter, I have to admit that my characterization was mistaken. In particular, in their June statement on the AP Psychology course, they reference correspondence from the Florida Department of Education Office of Articulation (what a name!), asking the College Board to affirm that their AP Psychology course conforms to the new Florida law. Still not a "ban," but definitely the College Board is not engaged in the unprovoked attack on Florida that I was imagining. There was definitely some provocation.
I do still think this is more about grandstanding by the College Board than a straightforward application of the law, but I was wrong in thinking that the College Board was one-sidedly attacking the Florida Department of Education.
Look carefully at the language the state is using: “the Department believes that AP Psychology can be taught in its entirety in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate.”
This very much seems to be a scissor statement within this discussion. My reading of that portion of the letter was, "Look, the College Board is freaking out because we have this law in Florida saying that course content needs to be age and developmentally appropriate, so I just want to assure you that, as I see it, AP Psychology can be taught, in it entirety, in a way that is developmentally and age appropriate. Just don't go crazy and show the kids hardcore porn in class or make them affirm that we are all born as trans homosexuals or whatever." In the Washington Post article and others, that line is taken to be an implicit threat, "Hey superintendents, you'd better make sure you keep your course content appropriate, or else [makes throat cutting motion]."
It's not a true scissor because I can understand how the other side would read it as more menacing, but that wasn't my interpretation at all.
Not sure what ETFs you are holding but only down 10% would be an amazing performance this year.
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