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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • I think that at the bare minumum, the PORN<->GOV connection must not occur. How about this (simplified):

    • USER visits porn site
    • PORN site encrypts random nonce + “is this user 18?” with GOV pubkey
    • PORN forwards that to USER
    • USER forwards that to GOV, together with something authenticating themselves (need to have GOV account)
    • GOV knows user is requesting, but not what for
    • GOV checks: is user 18?, concats answer with random nonce from PORN, hashes that with known algo, signs the entire thing with its private signing key
    • GOV returns that to USER
    • USER forwards that to PORN
    • PORN is able to verify that whoever made the request to visit PORN is verified as older than 18 by singing key holder / GOV, by checking certificate chain, and gets freshness guarantee from random nonce
    • but PORN does not know anything about the user

    There’s probably glaring issues with this, this is just from the top of my head to solve the problem of “GOV should know nothing”.


  • Not sure. How about this (simplified):

    • USER visits porn site
    • PORN site encrypts random nonce + “is this user 18?” with GOV pubkey
    • PORN forwards that to USER
    • USER forwards that to GOV, together with something authenticating themselves (need to have GOV account)
    • GOV knows user is requesting, but not what for
    • GOV checks: is user 18?, concats answer with random nonce from PORN, hashes that with known algo, signs the entire thing with its private signing key
    • GOV returns that to USER
    • USER forwards that to PORN
    • PORN is able to verify that whoever made the request to visit PORN is verified as older than 18 by singing key holder / GOV, by checking certificate chain, and gets freshness guarantee from random nonce
    • but PORN does not know anything about the user

    There’s probably glaring issues with this, this is just from the top of my head to solve the problem of “GOV should know nothing”.





  • Neovim, because I wanted something that would not just disappear.

    I never really got along with VSCode, opting for Atom instead. Microsoft bought GitHub, which owned Atom, and promptly discontinued it.

    Nvim has such an active community (and no “owner”) that I’m certain that this won’t happen again. At the same time, the plugin system is so flexible that I’m also certain that I will never miss out on any shiny new features.

    Over the years, my config has matured, and is mine. The thought of going back to an editor, any editor, less flexible in its configuration than nvim is just… an absolute “no”.

    It’s a steep learning curve, but well worth it.





  • I dream of a pure information protocol. Kinda like RSS, but… More.

    • allow any piece of information (news article, DM, sensor reading,…) to be wrapped in a standard format
    • subscribe to any number of source directly or indirectly (e.g. through a self-hosted relay server)
    • allow networks to define default data sources (e.g. get sensor data from machines as soon as you are connected to corporate networks
    • make the data declare what UI elements are required,
    • but allow clients to display them however the fuck they want
    • allow user to assign priorities statically or programmatically to any source, and to filter, sort, categorize based on it

    Essentially: I want “the feed” from universes like The Expanse



  • Iain M. Banks’ Culture.

    I’m deathly afraid of the day some big studio manages to buy the rights and produce a Hollywood version of the Culture. Mostly because it is very easy to flip through the Wikipedia entries and then take the superficial aesthetic of the Culture and misunderstand or ignore the rest.

    For an example on how easy it is to do this: I remember vividly when the German translations of the later books came out, and they all had some variation of

    The Culture is the galaxy-spanning empire of mankind. Unbeknownst to its citizens however, their supposedly benevolent machine gods are about to dispense with the needs for humans at all"

    in the blurb. Someone scanned the wiki page until they read something about “superhuman AI” or the like, then went “ah, got it, I’ve seen Terminator”.

    In a similar vein, I cannot imagine that Hollywood would portray the Culture as an unquestionably good Utopia. They’d not be able to resist to paint the luxury gay space communists as “…with a dark secret / actually dystopian /…” tones.



  • Sadly, we won’t see a second season, because some “fans” on the internet got mad that women, people of color and - very shocking - queer people exist in the Star Wars universe.

    It sucks that these people exist, for many reasons. One of these reasons (surely not the worst one, but the one I want to focus on) is that it muddies all criticism of a project. Your comment implied that this was the sole, or main, reason that The Acolyte was canceled, so I want to jump in here to say:

    Having more women, people of color, and queer characters was the only refreshing thing about The Acolyte, and I wish more Star Wars projects took notice. Other than that though, the show is an utter disaster. It was incompetently written and directed, its story and characters make no sense, and the effects can be jarring.

    Characters either have no defined motivations, or their motivations flip flop at the drop of a hat. Scenes dealing with the Jedi order and the republic fuck with established lore and do lasting damage to the Jedi order (not in the sense that they are shown as morally gray, but in that they are utterly incompetent and seemingly don’t remember the appearance of the Sith during living memory, for example).

    Speaking of which, yes, the show tries to portray Jedi/Sith as a gray area, but

    a) that has been done to death at this point, seriously, every other SW project tries to do a “ooooh but maybe Jedi not completely good!”, and b) The Acolyte is probably the most incompetent version of that I have seen (so far!).

    I hope I have demonstrated that this show can be critiqued bar any bigotry, and I think it should be acknowledged that that, together with the giant sum of money it ate, are the reasons it got canceled - I am sure Disney also does not like the bigotry, but sadly, they get that with every project, even those that do not get canceled…

    In any case, there is no comparison to Andor to be made, SMH.