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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Not American, or really knowledgeable about it but from the outside, I think this looks like ordinary politicking.

    IVF is a proxy war for abortion. Dems want the talking point that abortion bans hurt/block IVF. Republicans/Trump want to remove that talking point by saying they love IVF “we want more babies right?” and will support laws to protect it as a separate and unrelated issue to abortion.

    Dems put forward a bill that not only protects it but makes insurance companies pay for it. Trump is fine with that because it benefits him but Republicans in Congress get big money from insurance lobbyists and so they can’t vote for it. They also have fears that they’ll piss off their homophobic supporters by making them pay for something the gays might use (insurance costs will go up to help someone who isn’t me!").

    Republicans put forward another bill that protects IVF without hurting their insurance company buddies but the Dems block it. Republicans then have to vote against the IVF bill and the Dems can now say “see! They really don’t care about reproductive rights at all!”

    Feels a bit like nobody involved actually cares about IVF at all and just wants votes and lobbyist money.

    In case this take comes across too centrist: Republicans and Trump are really quite shit.






  • Yeah, that’s fair enough, though I’m not sure it’s very different from malicious instances creating normal user accounts?

    You can see when users from an instance are all suspiciously voting the same way at the same time regardless of whether they are usernames or IDs.

    There’s lots of legitimate users that only vote but never post so doing it based on that doesn’t seem very effective?

    The second problem is solved using public key cryptography, the same way that you can’t impersonate someone else’s username to post comments. Votes and comments are digitally signed (There would need to be a different public key for voting to maintain pseudonymity though).


  • How about pseudonymous as a compromise? Votes could be publicly federated but tied to some uuid instead of the username. That way you still have the same anti spam ability (can see that a user upvoted these things from this instance at this time) but can’t tie it directly to comments or actual user accounts without some extra osint.

    It might be theoretically possible to correlate the uuids with an account’s activity and dox the user in some cases, especially with some instances having a single user, but it would be very difficult or impossible to do on larger instances and would add an extra layer. Single user instances would be kind of impossible to make totally private anyway because they can be identified by instance.


  • I’d add to this to say that redis as a key-value store often sits alongside a relational database like postgres etc. to act as a cache for it.

    Basically, requests to be sent to the relational db (like postgres) get turned into a key and the results stored as a value in redis. Then when the same request comes through again, it can pull the results quickly out of the key-value store without having to search postgres by running a long SQL query again. There’s a few different caching strategies to keep things up to date or have the cached data expire regularly, etc. but that’s the gist of it.

    Important to note that not all applications need something like that and not all queries would even benefit from it (postgres is pretty fast and can even do that kind of thing itself) but if there’s a lot of users running the same slow query over and over, caching the results can help immensely.



  • Best is very subjective.

    .world is a good general purpose instance for just about anything. I think it has the biggest population at the moment, so communities there are likely to get at least some engagement.

    For “general discussion” it doesn’t really matter. The instances are federated so you’ll likely get general discussion in comments from lots of people from lots of instances anyway, wherever your community is based.

    Some people get almost nationalistic about their chosen instances or have grudges against people from certain other instances. There’s sometimes inter-instance politics with some servers defederating with others or threatening to for various reasons. It’s kinda fun to watch in a popcorn drama kind of way. For the most part, the instance doesn’t matter.


  • That’s pretty cool!

    Although that’s probably what op is actually asking for, I don’t think it’s a modem. It’s a router with an access point.

    It does have SFP for a fibre connection and pcie and USB for you to potentially add a modem or whatever else you want.

    I’m guessing OP is just looking for a wifi router? Otherwise we’d need to know what kind of modem they’re looking for, like Cellular? VDSL? HFC? Satellite? It depends on the internet connection. Different parts of the world need very different kit.




  • They’ve almost certainly considered doing that but I suspect it’s a legal thing. Saying “Trump is a rapist” can be seen as claiming that “Trump was convicted of rape” which is not true so it gives them space to sue over a knowingly false defamatory statement (whether he’d win or not, it would be expensive and might halt the ads while it was being litigated)

    Saying “Trump was found liable in a civil sexual assault case” doesn’t have as snappy a ring to it and leaves Republicans saying bullshit like “well if he was really a rapist he’d be in jail/it’s just corrupt civil court judges trying to make him look bad.”

    But saying “look at this silly footage showing that Trump is a numpty. What a silly crazy clown man” is depressingly more effective at making swing voters not want to vote for him. “Trump is evil” works for people who know he’s evil but “Trump is a fool” works better for people who are willing to believe that the “evil” stuff might be overblown lies from his opponents’ smear campaigns.


  • They’re not files, it’s just leaking other people’s conversations through a history bug. Accidentally putting person A’s “can you help me write my research paper/IT ticket/script” conversation into person B’s chat history.

    Super shitty but not an uncommon kind of bug. Often either a nasty caching issue or screwing up identities for people sharing IPs or similar.

    It’s bad but it’s “some programmer makes understandable mistake” bad not “evil company steals private information without consent and sends it to others for profit” kind of bad.



  • Yeah, that’s what they’re for. Having multiple accounts separated and not interfering with each other. So you can have eg. three different tabs of Gmail open or office or whatever in the same window with different accounts logged in. Each tab with a different colour. Great for separating work stuff from personal stuff or isolating bank logins etc.

    Sounds like the same thing as you’re describing in chrome (though I haven’t tried the chrome implementation)