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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 29th, 2023

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  • again, that’s a choice you made… you can make your own clothes out of linen and the tools to do it are more available to you because they’re not hand crafted, but you choose not to because you want to save time

    heck, you can buy a shirt that’s 5x the price that will last but you choose the cheap shirt so you can have 5 of them

    this is the same argument that we don’t build the coliseum any more and therefor we’re not as good at making concrete as ancient romans… modern society is built on engineering, and engineering doesn’t build things that lasts 2000 years that’s true, but that’s not what engineering is for

    engineering isn’t about building bridges that don’t fall down: engineering is about building bridges that barely stand up so you can have more of them

    the same goes with clothes… modern clothes aren’t made to last your entire life because they’d cost 5x more… people don’t actually want a shirt from their 20s when they’re 70 - people don’t even really want a shirt from their 20s when they’re 30! they want 5 shirts in their 20s and 5 more in their 30s, and they want to be unique and personal and they want to spend no time to acquire them





  • do you want to explain why not?

    the self harm rate for trans people is relatively huge, so the mental health toll on them is clearly enormous… just because they’ve only recently felt strong enough to start fighting for their rights doesn’t mean trans people started to exist recently… trans people have always existed, and just lived in anguish and shut up about it because they didn’t have the collective words to describe their experience

    nobody is saying they’re comparable - the experience of black people in america is completely different to the experience of trans people

    but let’s not say that either is worse than the other: both have suffered hugely for long periods of history, and both continue to suffer



  • i’ll give it a crack

    in australia, we have various credentials provided by the government to attest to a persons fitness to work with children (i’ll just refer to these in bulk from now on as WWCC: working with children checks). there are many of these - one per state for individuals, plus teacher’s accreditations per state, and a few more. they’re ongoing certifications, so can be revoked if anything happens

    it’s a legal requirement for businesses who engage in activities involving kids to ensure anyone they employ - including volunteers - is appropriately vetted

    needless to say, this gets quite complex for national organisations!

    i was the engineering lead for a startup that organisations could add their workforce into the system, with the credentials, and the system checked periodically to check that everyone’s credentials are valid, about to expire, etc and notify people if something goes awry

    of course, that doesn’t need blockchain BUT

    in cases of child sexual abuse, things tend to only come out after 30+ years on average (according to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse). organisations need to be able to prove that they were doing everything they possibly could to protect the kids under their care. 30 years on that’s no small task! our company might not even exist in 30 years!

    along with our automated checks, we also published an event to the eth blockchain: a hash of the card details as an index (ie if you know the card details, you can look up all instances of validation), and a hash that proves the check took place

    what’s that hash? well, i won’t get too into the weeds but essentially we push a payload to IPFS which contains:

    • a link to a kind of “template” of an HTTP archive for a typical request to the validation service
    • a diff that allows you to reconstruct the HTTP archive of this instance of the request given the original template
    • various pieces of the HTTPS handshake with the validation service that allow you to essentially validate after the fact that the content of the HTTP archive was exactly what the validation service sent at the time - HTTPS is essentially signed information after all, so we have a chunk of HTML attesting to the validity of a card that’s been signed by the government! cryptographic proof - not just “take my word for it”

    we also published a page on IPFS that allows people to enter card details and load all this information and produce all the technical details to prove what happened (we also had plans for some kind of hardware pack with pinned versions of things because browsers and technology change)

    you might be able to do this by relying on the date header that the server sends, but to be really sure, writing the hashes to the blockchain proves that the event given happened at a very specific time and date

    blockchain shouldn’t be big and flashy: it’s a very niche use-case, but for those niches there’s really nothing like it





  • i’d have said that’s less important than TLS or something on your ATM, a VLAN for ATMs that can only access specific services, and all ports not on a VLAN just disabled

    really you just want to stop traffic from being sniffed (stolen credentials) and spoofed (“correct - dispense $10000”), and then to make sure it and nothing adjacent to it can access less robust services… beyond that, you just have to assume nothing. the services that an ATM connects to should be robust enough that they do all the validation - the ATM is pretty dumb (kinda in the same way as your browser on your computer: it gets no decision making to access your bank; just is input and output)

    MAC addresses are easy to spoof, and physical security is pretty difficult on something like an ATM that’s publicly accessible… plugging into a switch should honestly be a nothing burger… having it publicly accessible - even on the same VLAN as an ATM - shouldn’t be a problem other than defence in depth


  • First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

    Because I was not a socialist.

    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

    Because I was not a trade unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

    Because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

    is banning porn games on the same level?

    no… not even a little, but i think it’s pertinent… these groups keep pushing harder and harder and it won’t stop. it’ll eventually reach you as a person; not just your interests



  • i’d imagine the company would make 2, 4, 6, 10 drink dispensing machines… having commodity hardware makes it super cheap to just have different shells and a power bus that you bolt electronics and mechanics onto in discrete parts

    heck each individual controller could read an RFID tag embedded in the syrup and update its display automatically just from the inserted cartridge which would be PITA to do on a single machine

    adding all the sensors for each, a display out for each… it’s really just way simpler to duplicate the hardware… honestly, good engineering


  • SUBJECT: USCIS Implementation Plan of Executive Order 14160 - Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship

    Background

    On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14160, Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship. See 90 Fed. Reg. 8449 (2025) (E.O.). The E.O. provides that the following categories of individuals will no longer be considered to be born “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore will no longer be U.S. citizens at birth:

    1. children whose “mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth”; and

    2. children whose “mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”

    Currently, a preliminary injunction is in place, preventing the Government from implementing the E.O See Barbara v. Trump, No. 2025 DNH 079P, 2025 WL 1904338 (D.N.H. July 10, 2025). However, the Government is preparing to implement the E.O. in the event that it is permitted to go into effect.’ OCC provides this memorandum to address legal questions relevant to the implementation of the E.O Specifically, this memorandum will address:

    1. the meaning of “unlawfully present”.

    2. the meaning of “presence” that is “lawful but temporary” and which immigration statuses or other types of lawful presence may fall into that category, and

    3. whether children born in the United States to a person whose presence is “lawful but temporary” would have lawful immigration status,





  • i tend to agree for mass-adopted currency, but mass currency is only 1 use case for blockchain

    things like bank to bank transfers (think a replacement to swift: with semi trusted entities like a big group of banks, the proof functions can be both extremely efficient and fast whilst remaining scalable and distributed so nobody has control… of course this would be a private network, but every bank involved can audit and sign off on transactions)

    blockchain at its core is an immutable log between untrusted parties… it can be used to prove a particular thing happened at a particular point, in situations where people don’t even trust governments etc to maintain accurate records

    it’s too big and cumbersome to be used by everyone in the world for payment, but it’s a good facilitator of some niche things that most people won’t have any idea about

    the technology is solid; it’s just very limited, and the most “profitable” and marketable uses are also the most ill-suited