Notices by Tilde Lowengrimm (tilde@infosec.town)

@ryanc Would you like another Pixelbook?

It's so common to treat the state's records as The Truth. Your name is what the state says it is. Your identity is what the state decides. Utter nonsense. I understand that the state has some useful interest in knowing its people, but when the state's records do not match reality, it is not reality which has something to fix. When the state does not recognize your gender, the state has simply chosen to have bad records. When the state does not recognize as citizens people who have spent their lives in its communities, it is the state which lacks documentation, not the person.

Which is not to say that you should ignore the state or its demands! The state has incredible power and it would be a substantial error (or very high-impact choice) not to recognize this and do what you can to avoid the state's ire. My partner and I registered our decade+ of marriage with the state because of the value that document might have in preventing us from being parted in future. I am registering my name because I believe that doing so will help more people to use it correctly.

But these are choices made based on practical grounds. My partner & I were married the day we made solemn promises to each other. My name changed the moment I asked people to use the new one. The state's word may be law because it holds power, but that doesn't make it the truth.

It brings me untold joy that so many of my friends use chosen names whether they're cis or trans and whether they decide to inform the state or not. I just think it's a beautiful norm to treat your given name as a temporary gift which you can change as you get to know yourself better — and change again as you continue to grow. It's one of my favorite pieces of queer culture.

@ryanc I freaking love this. Something fun to find at the end of a new SSH connection.

@ryanc I feel like the colors should be the other way around.

@lzg Are you okay?

So cool when messages from one side of my house to the other have to traverse us-east-1 first. What an utterly bizarre world.

Absolutely free product idea for anyone who wants it: fluorescent glow in the dark retainers & nightguards. You're welcome.

@kaoudis 100% only exclusively for freaking out your partner.

Coffee is pretty great, which is why I normally have like 3-5 of them per day. So obviously on Sunday I decided to switch to decaf for a week, just to prove I can. It sucks; I do not recommend this.

@ryanc They know. You're famous!

@ryanc Shocking hypocrisy for you to maintain any static binaries of any kind.

I know that those little "library" take-a-book/leave-a-book hutches on people's porches in bougie neighborhoods like mine turn out to be a bit of a moral hazard because they create the impression of library availability without materially supporting the fundamental mission of libraries (and therefore sap actual libraries of support). But I'm a sucker, I love the æsthetic, and they're a lot of fun to browse when I'm out and about. Plus, I try to pre-order new books to support my favorite authors, but I don't really want a ton of paper books in my house — a few, yes, but I mostly prefer audiobooks and ebooks. Those "library" boxes are an easy way to give away those pre-ordered books which don't deserve a permanent place on my shelves once the electronic & audio editions are available.

I have a lot of public-domain books, audiobooks, and other media that I love to share with my housemates, neighbors, and friends. I think it would be really neat to have a sign out front which sort of looks like one of those library boxes, but actually tells people how to access my virtual library either locally on their phones or later on their computers at home.

The number one way I've tried to share things so far has been a shared folder on a NAS which I make available via Tailscale. Which absolutely works for the total nerds who comprise a large fraction of my friends, but not so much for the people who'd have a harder time locating their own copies. (To be clear: I have spent a lot of time searching for copies of esoteric documents, cleaning up bad formatting and metadata, and generally managing my personal media archive. There isn't an online directory which reasonably matches mine.) And it absolutely doesn't work for anonymous access by any neighbor who wanders by and sees a QR code or types in a link.

I'd like to share things in a straightforward way which is more accessible to less-technical folks. I would prefer not to use a commercial hosting service because I don't want to deal with them being pro-active copyright overzealots — I have absolutely zero confidence in their ability to understand that some books are actually in the public domain or appropriately-licensed, and I have no interest in spending time arguing with their support people. And besides, I have wonderful gigabit fiber at home, so why not be the archivist I want to see in the world and share things from a box of hard-drives in the basement? Plus, local copies make it easier to share with anyone walking past, regardless of their cellular connection.

I am sure that I am not the first person to want to host a collection of books and so on which they make available to others? What tools should I look at for sharing things locally on my network, remotely to friends, and easily to any anonymous person who walks by?

Capitalism interprets resilience as inefficiency and tries to erode it. Capitalism will not stop until every aspect of society is so "just-in-time" that an unexpected stiff breeze causes widespread shortages.

It is wild to me how many relatively-simple websites just utterly break without cookies or without JavaScript. If you have a straightforward article page nobody should need either to read it. I'm not talking about paywalls here, or about complex interactive webapps. Just simple pages anyone should be able to read where the images don't work if you don't have JS turned on. Or nothing at all loads if they can't set a cookie. I don't know who's writing these frameworks which can't even produce basic text-and-pictures HTML without JS, but it feels negligent.

Whatever happened to progressive enhancement? To writing semantic HTML and using CSS to lay it out how you want, and JS only to do the things CSS can't? Even a friendly, usable CMS can spit out semantic HTML which works with your style sheets. What's the structural incentive I'm missing here?

In Dungeons & Dragons, the Sending spell can convey exactly 25 words. In reality, linguists are unable to precisely pin down what a word is. Sending is one of only a few long-distance magical communication methods in the worlds of D&D, and this makes it an important tool in the hands of those who run large organizations, kingdoms, or empires.

This implies that mystical linguists in D&D worlds are out there pushing the technological boundaries of what constitutes a "word", experimenting with different hyphenation techniques, and assembling new compound languages like the fabled "Hypergerman", which are particularly amenable to compounding. All to improve the efficiency of Sending, and eke out a little more information from each scarce spell slot. How much additional information can you add if you start experimenting with tones?

I'm just imagining the æther-messengers of the Imperial Bureaucratic Service constructing Sendings with all the comprehensibility of a dialup modem sound, and blasting out whole paragraphs of information to someone on the other end who has Keen Mind and has to spend an hour with a diabolical grammar and particle reference translating this data-pulse back into the trade tongue.

@theauracle Was Madoff pro-genocide? I feel like this guy's grift is basically his second best trait (after his ineffectiveness)?

Unless you have a DRM-free file in an open format on your own hard drive, these assholes can do whatever the heck they want.

What're you going to do, sue them? Their terms probably require arbitration and forbid class actions suits. And even if you sued and won, you'd probably end up with a check for four dollars and thirteen cents. You're definitely not getting those movies back.

It drives me up the wall how hard it is to actually buy digital creations so that you actually own them. A few places make this possible — Libro.fm for audiobooks, AK Press & No Starch for text. There's not a lot for movies and television, in part because of intense consolidation.

The truth is that the only way to really own a movie is to buy it on a disk and rip it. And much streaming TV doesn't even offer that option. You've seen how many incredible streaming shows have been memory-holed in the last year. Right now, the only way for people to watch those shows involves a tricorn hat and a cutlass.

Truly, the only way to preserve access to culture is archiving lots of copies. Centralization has done so much work to push reasonable archival activities into the margins, by making archival both technically challenging and legally uncertain. And we live in an era of the most impressive information preservation & duplication technology ever made! You can carry all of Wikipedia, thousands of books, hundreds of audiobooks, and movies and TV shows on a tiny SD card.

There's no reason that all the most important works of our culture shouldn't be massively replicated and available everywhere. You shouldn't need Internet access to read a book or watch a show. All of that should be available offline on all your devices. Just like the books on your shelf, but better and lighter-weight and easier to use. mastodon.social/@gamingonlinux/111507402238224111

"Fortune favors the bold." is a common misconception. What you're actually seeing there is survivorship bias. Most adventurers don't survive the first goblin, but nobody tells stories about them.