Skip Navigation

tatterdemalion

@ tatterdemalion @programming.dev

Posts
22
Comments
1096
Joined
3 yr. ago

Professional software engineer, musician, gamer, stoic, democratic socialist

  • read bread

    Jump

  • Even if you study, you might end up like him.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • Definitely not from my parents. I had to teach myself in college and have been doing the same til now. Following recipes obviously helps, but also taking classes or watching YouTube is great for the more subtle points as well as making sure you've covered the basics.

  • 99% of adults over 40 have shoulder "abnormalities" on an MRI, study finds

    Jump

  • I want to know if it's correlated with handedness.

  • You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

    Jump

  • Or if you have like $5/mo to spend on a VPS, self-host vaultwarden. It's compatible with the bitwarden apps and browser plugins.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • The vendor/site does not need to know a name.

    The idea is that people already trust the government with their identifying info. So what the government can do is issue, for example, an opaque "age ID" that is only to be used with an "over 18?" service hosted by the government. Then anyone visiting a website with age-restrictions would provide their age ID, which tells the site nothing about the user. The site checks the "over 18?" service. At no point do arbitrary websites need to collect identifying info.

    Now obviously as I've described it, there are multiple problems:

    1. People could easily publish their age ID for anyone to use.
    2. If people aren't careful (they aren't) then they will give too much identifying info away to sites anyway, and then those sites could correlate the age ID with their identity.

    One solution is to make the age ID into a "one time password" (OTP). Much like an authenticator app, you could have an app provided by the government which generates a new random OTP on request, and it would expire in a minute or so. Then users provide that instead of a constant age ID. Like before, the site checks the "over 18?" service using the OTP.

    It's still not perfect, but you'll never solve the "adult buying beer for kids" trick without counterproductive measures. There are probably some additional tricks to make it better, but I don't want to get too far into it.

    EDIT: One more point. Having this "over 18?" service is itself a privacy risk, because it relies heavily on your trust in the government not to conspire with the sites you are visiting or to just log info about all of the age-restricted sites you visit. There are apparently solutions to this problem involving zero-knowledge proofs, but I don't know quite enough to explain that entirely here.

    EDIT2: I got curious and did a little more reading. The zero-knowledge proof idea kinda fails to prevent credential sharing, unless you rely on some kind of hardware cryptographic vault thing. I'm not sure if that ends up being strictly better than the service idea.

    Another way you might prevent the govt from logging all of the age-restricted sites you visit is to put the service behind something like Tor to make the requesting site anonymous. But this still doesn't prevent the govt from just knowing that you visited some age-restricted site at a specific time. Still not ideal.

  • Avocado toast is out. Rotisserie chicken is in.

    Jump

  • I've started buying the frozen ramen (raw noodles) at my local asian market :)

  • Avocado toast is out. Rotisserie chicken is in.

    Jump

  • Instant ramen is more expensive than rotisserie chicken right now.

  • Cannot load a second page?

    Jump

  • Doesn't happen to me on the web app.

  • Rage for the machine?

    Jump

  • This is not a shitpost, this is absolute gold.

  • Our duty

    Jump

  • Why I don't think AGI is imminent

    Jump

  • I think you're misunderstanding the incompleteness theorems.

    Gödel’s incompleteness theorems also apply to universe and consciousness

    Sure, if you assume the universe can be described by a computable formal system. Godel's theorems apply only to computable formal systems.

    To briefly summarize Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, it states that a formal system cannot describe everything.

    That's a gross oversimplification. It really says that (1) there are true statements about formal system S which cannot be proven within S and (2) S cannot prove its own consistency.

    This means that a Turing Machine will never be able to simulate our universe or replicate consciousness, and thus to replicate a human brain.

    You've previously assumed that the universe is a computable formal system. But all computable formal systems can be modeled as a Turing machine. This is a contradiction.

    However, it could be feasible with Quantum Computer that are not based on formal system.

    How would a quantum computer even work if it weren't described by a formal system?

  • All US Social Security numbers may need to be changed following a massive breach that is already being investigated as a national threat

    Jump

  • SSNs are supposed to be secret? Then why does every financial institution request it?

  • OOP at home:

    Jump

  • I have used OOP design patterns many times, but that doesn't mean I use inheritance a lot. I almost always reach for interfaces instead.

  • OOP at home:

    Jump

  • It was actually typed. Python had type annotations at the time.

    I only wrote C++ very early in my career so I don't remember much, but I'm sure I at least tried some inheritance in toy games I would write. All of that code was trash though by my standards today.

  • OOP at home:

    Jump

  • Some legacy Python code that already used inheritance. I had to extend it, and it was pretty infeasible to refactor the whole thing to not use inheritance. Not sure if I technically regretted that decision, but it was definitely painful, since Python inheritance makes it really hard to follow program control flow.

  • OOP at home:

    Jump

  • No because those are different things.

  • OOP at home:

    Jump

  • In over ten years of professional programming, I have never used inheritance without regretting it.

  • ‘Bloodbath’ at the Washington Post as Jeff Bezos lays off roughly one-third of staff

    Jump

  • Isn't that exactly what the Associated Press is?

  • "Age 10" with DSC06964.JPG

    Jump

  • In base 18!