Our News Team @ 11 with host Snot Flickerman

  • 4 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • The audit details and whitepaper details are far beyond my capabilities to understand. Can anyone with knowledge of the field tell us about the findings? If you would be so kind, please and thank you.

    Good on them for getting an audit and making the code publicly auditable, but I really would like to hear an opinion from some folks who are more involved in cryptography on whether this is Discord being genuine and doing the right thing, or is it Discord trying to use Public Relations and weasel words to make it seem like they’re doing the right thing.

    It’s just hard to trust a private company’s motives sometimes, but that doesn’t mean they’re not capable of doing the right thing. Thanks to anyone who can give some input on this.


  • So much yes on the typing, The number of young people who don’t even own a laptop and do all homework/correspondence on their phone is too damn high. (Which coincidentally, is tied to how they don’t understand file systems/path)

    That’s not to shun the use of phones or that form factor, and maybe this is just the old fogey in me, but phone interfaces are so limited and you have to jump through so many hoops to do what amount to keyboard shortcuts on a PC. (Yes I know some young people can be quite quick and accurate with them… thus old fogey)

    It’s rather more about how long it ends up taking them because they’re shunning a device that is aimed at streamlining such processes, instead of a device that is aimed at being a phone, with a computer slapped on for funsies.



  • hand out USB drives/cheap SSDs

    learning some “real” programming

    1. Handing out drives has to go hand-in-hand with education about how “you shouldn’t just plug in any drive that someone hands you or you find on the street.” That’s basic security consciousness at this point. You might point them towards the Open Source schematics for this USB Firewall: https://globotron.nz/products/usg-v1-0-hardware-usb-firewall

    2. Don’t start with “real” programming. Start with scripting. A place where you can get the feel of the ideas of programming while starting somewhere more basic. Linux scripting and Powershell scripting are both good places to start. You still get programming fundamentals (what is a loop, what’s an if-else statement, etc) without jumping into confusing versioning or where to get updates (should I let Windows update Python, or do I want to update it with pip? You have to choose one or things get fucky with them overwriting each other).

    3. When I mean more basic I mean literally things like SYNTAX and PATH are way more important for students to be understanding before they start programming. Syntax and path (relative and absolute), in my opinion, are easier to learn when you’re learning them on the OS you’re using. That means “real programming” is obfuscating things like syntax and path, and students need to understand these core concepts before they move on to "real programming.* EDIT: Like seriously, students need to understand what the fuck a delimiter is and why it is!



  • Have you ever worked in a corporation or in government? Even moreso, have you ever worked at a secured facility of any type?

    You don’t just get to install whatever the fuck you want on machines, you know? They have to go through a process, and since this is a government organization, if the law doesn’t allow them to install something like that on a thin client, it’s kind of pointless to reference.

    I’ve worked a shitty corporate job where I basically had no power and I had to get approval from a couple different teams for something like Microsoft PowerToys, which is free and made by Microsoft.




  • Does Libre Office run on Swintec typewriters?

    Because the issue is they’re not even allowed a PC, the budget only allows typewriters.

    They even point out in the article that a new Swintec technically costs more than a new, crummy laptop.

    They’re promoting new legislation to allow the libraries to allow modern equipment and not just typewriters.

    Further, since it’s a Correctional Facility library, there’s gonna be strict controls and even if they wanted Libre Office instead of Microsoft Office they would have to put in a formal request for it and then have various security teams deciding whether it was safe to use or not, even though it is technically free. I mean, that goes for pretty much any government job or corporate job, too. They don’t usually let people install whatever they want on government or corporate networks.






  • But the Lord came down to see the city OS and the tower app the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking programming the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

    So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city OS. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

    This message brought to you by TempleOS





  • I don’t know, that mindset is so foreign to me. If someone was overestimating how long it would take because they were simply trying to be conservative and not run into unexpected cost overruns, I would commend them. I’ve always considered it more prudent to expect something to take longer so you know the kind of budget you need up front instead of lying to yourself about it. It costs a lot more (in terms of lost time and productivity) to have to swing a new budget mid-project because it turns out you’ve burned through the planned budget and you’re only 2/3 the way done with the project.

    So, screw your manager, you’re doing the right thing, in my eyes. I guess that’s why I’m not in charge of anything.