There's an interesting phenomenon in tech where centralization leads to failures being correlated, correlated failures are more likely to be talked about in the media, and that leads to a psychological perception of centralization leading to higher failure rates.

Case in point, CrowdStrike. Let's say we have a hundred small AV vendors instead of just one, and all of them experience one critical failure every five years. This is much worse than CrowdStrike. your chances of experiencing a failure as a customer of any of these vendors are much higher. Yet, if a failure happens, no media organization is going to care, because it's only going to affect a handful of companies at most. Your hospital's computers will go down a lot more often on average, but you don't visit your hospital that often. Because it's just your own hospital that is affected on a given day, you probably won't even know. No media organization is going to care and write scandalous news stories about how their AV vendor is mismanaged and putting their patients at risk.

Same applies to AWS or even Mastodon. Your instance may go down twice as often as X and for twice as long, but you probably won't even notice most of these outages. If X goes down, though, it goes down for everyone, the media write about it, and you know that it went down even though you otherwise wouldn't even notice.

This creates a weird perception and bias against centralized services in people's minds.

"Getting banned for posting obvious rage bait to a public forum has a chilling effect on discussions"

Yes, it should.

"But what if I post obvious rage bait to a forum without really knowing!"

How about you don't post obvious rage bait first?

Starting now, the #curl website offers changelog listings per-release. curl.se/ch/ always shows the latest release.

Old links still work of course and the old "all changes in a single page" will remain.

Everybody in a UBI study could spend it all on drugs & I would still support UBI.

Stop asking virtue of the poor which you don’t of the rich.

Einstweiliger Rechtsschutz gegen #Tracking-Cookies erfolgreich. #Microsoft verliert in zweiter Instanz. § 25 TTDSG/TDDDG zeigt Zähne. Glückwunsch an meine coolen Kolleg:innen bei Spirit Legal. Dieses Urteil ist ein Meilenstein.
#TeamDatenschutz #PrivacyLitigation

rsw.beck.de/aktuell/daily/meld…

Sensitive content Click to open/close

#BVerfG #Rechtsstaat #Demokratie #noAfD

Zwei Aspekte scheinen mir bei dem Projekt zur Absicherung der #Unabhängigkeit des BVerfG besonders bemerkenswert:

- die demokratischen Kräfte haben sich in einer sehr komplexen Problematik auf sachliche Kompromisse geeinigt + treten gemeinsam dafür ein

- alle haben darauf verzichtet, "Pakete" mit Themen zu schnüren, die nix damit zu tun haben.

So geht Demokratie.

Hier die Zusammenfassung der geplanten Regelungen :

lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/b…

So wollen Ampel und Union das BVerfG stärker schützen

Das BVerfG soll vor politischen Kräften geschützt werden, die lieber ohne seine Kontrolle regieren wollen. Eine zentrale Regelung wird nicht abgesichert.

^{Legal Tribune Online}

Here’s what parenting can look like.

When I told my dad I was trans, my dad’s response was, “Oh! I can send you jewelry now!” (He was retired and made jewelry as a hobby).

Two days latter, I had a letter in the mail addressed to Joelle, the first time “Joelle” ever got mail, with a necklace in it. Later he made me this one. He told me, “I hope I got the colors right, I looked it up online.”

You don’t have to mourn a child transitioning. You can be the first to do so many affirming things.

That thing transphobes do, where something trips in their brains and they end up doing nothing but obsessing about trans women, while probably in a darkened room with no clean underwear surrounded by empty pot noodles and bags of their own urine.

There is a pop-psychology concept amongst tech geeks of a "basilisk". This is something that, once you become aware of it, it breaks you. You cannot come back once you have experienced the basilisk. It's a one way ticket to, usually, madness, or perhaps total system shutdown. It's generalised from the idea from antiquity of the basilisk as a creature that turns you to stone.

There's a fun story called Blit - linked here, infinityplus.co.uk/stories/bli… about a visual basilisk. Another example is something called Roko's Basilisk which is basically Pascal's wager for atheists who spend too long in Silicon Valley (it's stupid, but some of the terrible people with more money than sense, like Musk and Thiel, actually appear to believe it, and are therefore broken by it, and I reiterate, it's really, really stupid).

Anyway, in the latter case, Roko's Basilisk breaks you by becoming aware of it, BUT, here's the thing: it only works on certain people. They have to be susceptible, and in the case of Roko, the susceptibility lies around a particular weak spot in the ability of otherwise intelligent people to think critically and realise, "this is fucking stupid".

But, here's the thing, TO THOSE WHO ARE SUSCEPTIBLE, I've realised that trans women are a basilisk.

Look at people like Graham Lineman, J K Rowling, and a load of less famous people who have ended up in the same state. They all reached a point where SOMETHING relating to the fact that trans women exist tripped them into some downward doom spiral that has basically pushed their brain into a self-reinforcing state of insanity that they can't recover from.

There are probably several psychology PhDs for the taking on the subject of this.

But it seems I, and many women like me, are basilisks. This is a public post. Some of the people hate reading it have already passed the trigger condition. If you're one of them, you should probably empty some of those bags of your own wee and eat a fresh vegetable, if you can. Good luck!

My name is Sarah, and I am a basilisk. Fear me.

24px? 44px ? Wait, 48dp on Android, hu? What is the size of an accessible button exactly?
Well, it depends (haha). @eric clarifies a lot of miss conceptions around the minimum WCAG-conformant interactive element size.

Short answer:
- For 2.5.5 (AA), your target must be 24px, you can use padding (extend the size) or margin (add spacing) to achieve it. This doesn’t apply to link in blocks of text.
- Same for 2.5.8 (AAA) except you need to achieve 44px.

• Free (36%, 8 votes)
• Open (27%, 6 votes)
• Net (31%, 7 votes)
• DragonFly (4%, 1 vote)
• Other (0%, 0 votes)

New rule for software design discussions: if your argument for a design includes the words "the unix philosophy", your design is automatically rejected, with no appeal available.

If you mean a specific design goal, say what you mean. "The unix philosophy" has half a dozen definitions, unix never followed any of them religiously at all times, and has become shorthand for "I like this and don't feel like unpacking why".

#curl 8.9.0 is out: daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/07/24…

2 CVEs fixed
11 changes
260 bugfixes

by 80 contributors, out of which 47 authored commits

in 63 days since the previous release

Buenos días desde la Administración Pública.

Lo entiendo. Hay a quien el verano le supera. Yo voy al trabajo con ganas, como si me hubiera chutado algo (100% sin drogas). Mi calidad de vida aumentaría exponencialmente en un clima subtropical.

Hanna sat down with Henry from @techlore for an in-depth talk about #privacy, #encryption, and #email!

You can watch the full interview here 👉 youtu.be/0wgpuiIoG_g