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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • No, this is actually a dichotomy. First Past the Post mathematically trends towards a two candidate system as its stable state. This isn’t some psychological bullshit, it’s math. The way our system works you never vote for the thing you like; you vote against the thing you don’t. Doing anything else is literally handing the election to the side you don’t like. It’s called the Spoiler Effect and it happens basically everywhere in the US where FPtP is used.

    The place you vote for who you want is in the primaries (or their equivalent in your state), not elections. If you’re not participating in those, you get no say in who gets run and bitching about it does nothing. Hell, even then you barely get any say since, as far as I’m aware, both the DNC and RNC actually select their candidate based on a vote of some inner circle bigwigs, not the actual results of any of the state-by-state pageant shows.



  • The short version is that the creators of this API are doing something more secure than what the client wants to do.

    A reasonable analogy would be trying to access a building locked by a biometric scanner vs. a guard looking for a piece of paper with a password on it. In the first case, only people entered into the scanner can get in (this is the cookie scenario). In the second case, anyone with a piece of paper with the right password on it will be let in (this is the Bearer token scenario).

    More technical version: the API is made more secure because the “HttpOnly” cookie - which, basically, means the cookie’s contents can’t be read with JavaScript in the browser - is used to hold the credentials the server is looking for.

    By allowing a third party to access the application, this means you have to allow methods that can be set “client-side” (e.g. via JavaScript in a browser). The most common method is in the “Authorization” HTTP Header - headers are metadata sent along with a request, they include things like the page you’re coming from and cookies associated with the domain. A “Bearer” token is one of the methods specified by the “Authorization” header. It’s usually implemented via passing the authorization credentials prefixed with the word “Bearer” (hence the name) and, often, are static, password-like text.

    Basically, because this header has to be settable by a script, that means an attacker/hacker could possibly inject malicious code to steal the tokens because they must, at some point, be accessible.




  • In this thread, everyone getting caught up on the first toot and not the second where he clarifies his point.

    If you step past the initial investment of buying a house, the analogy makes perfect sense. When you rent an apartment, your landlord (the provider) takes care of all the maintenance; you just live there and you get what you get. When you own a home, you take care of all of the maintenance, but you get to set the place up however you like. This isn’t that different from a lot of FOSS out there.


  • This misunderstands the premise. You cannot intuit someone’s subjective experience of reality because it is impossible for you to experience their experience of reality. You have only what they’re able to explain to you.

    To come at this from the other direction, if a friend says to you “I’m having a good day” and does not appear obviously distressed, how could you judge the relative goodness of their day or if it was actually good at all?


  • I would fully expect Linux content on any community dedicated to technology (i.e. programmerhumor); the rest is totally understandable. Though, I have to agree with @CarbonIceDragon, I really don’t see as much Linux content as you seem to - granted I use kbin, not lemmy.

    I’ve read that Lemmy is a bit more personally curated than kbin, is it possible you’ve just accidentally built yourself a Linux bubble?


  • I won’t lie. I mostly don’t engage with content I see here. I didn’t do that when I was on Reddit either and mostly for the same reason: I don’t really have much to say and, even when I do have an opinion, I don’t usually want to engage in what’s often a protracted debate about something that will probably just end up being frustrating.

    That’s not to say I haven’t had positive experiences on the Fediverse - I’ve had more here than anywhere else - I’m just not particularly motivated most of the time.



  • Parade raining time: https://feddit.de/comment/3373323

    1. I believe flags are sorted alphabetically by how they are internally represented. All flags are a combination of two special letter-symbols. For the UK flag, these two symbols are “GB”, therefore the UK flag should be much earlier.
    2. 🇺🇸 (Flag of the USA [code: US]) ≠ 🇺🇲 (Flag of the US Outlying Islands [code: UM])

    Yes, the first US flag, which most people pick, is actually the flag of the US Outlying Islands. Whenever you see someone use the US flag emoji, check whether they accidentally used the " wrong" one.



  • My (limited) understanding of ActivityPub is that it functions on a publish-subscribe model. If you and I both ran instances and federated with each other, every time a message was posted to my instance I’d send a message to you and vice-versa. Now, let’s say a new person comes along with their own instance and they want to federate with us, but they have 1000x more users than we do. If we federate with this new instance, we now both have to handle 1000x more traffic.

    This is effectively a Denial Of Service attack.

    Threads currently (supposedly) has 70 million users. If only 0.001% of those users are interacting with federated content every second, that’s still 1000 messages every second. Smaller instances are likely not configured or tuned to handle this level of traffic on top of their existing traffic.