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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • How ks the drill baby drill crowd going to compete against mini stars in a can?

    Nu-Cu-Lar Bad? That’s…about as far as they’ll make it. To be fair, that might be as far as they need to. It’s all the oil companies will approve of them learning, at least.

    Of course, it sounds like the big problem of how to remove more power from it than you spend keeping it reacting remains an issue, presuming they can continue to extend reaction lifetimes to be functionally unlimited.





  • I wasn’t suggesting it as “font list and you’re done”. I was using it as an example because it’s one where I’m apparently really unusual.

    I would think you’d basically want to spoof all known fingerprinting metrics to be whatever is the most common and doesn’t break compatibility with the actual setup too much. Randomizing them seems way more likely to break a ton of sites, but inconsistently, which seems like a bad solution.

    I mean hypothetically you could also set up exceptions for specific sites that need different answers for specific fields, essentially telling the site whatever it wants to hear to work but that’s going to be a lot of ongoing work.


  • The crazy part about fingerprinting is that if you block the fingerprint data, they use that block to fingerprint you. That’s why the main strategy is to “blend in”.

    So, essentially the best way to actually resist fingerprinting would be to spoof the results to look more common - for example when I checked amiunique.org one of the most unique elements was my font list. But for 99% of sites you could spoof a font list that has the most common fonts (which you have) and no others and that would make you “blend in” without harming functionality. Barring a handful of specific sites that rely on having a special font, that might need to be set as exceptions.





  • No, the opposite; it’s a classic example showing that correlation doesn’t necessitate causation.

    Right, but ice cream sales and shark attacks have a shared cause, and it’s the weather. Humans both get in the ocean where they are shark-accessible more often and also buy more ice cream when it’s hot out.

    Basically causation is X->Y. But there are other relationships between X and Y, and in the case of ice cream sales and shark attacks it’s W->X and W->Y (one doesn’t cause the other, but they are caused by the same thing). It’s also possible for two things to correlate without any connection whatsoever, because sometimes things just happen to move in the same directions at the same times for a while.

    People have trouble dealing with that, and much magical thinking arises from X and Y happening together being believed to necessarily mean X and Y are connected in some fashion because humans are very good at building patterns even when they don’t exist.

    That’s literally where the vaccines cause autism thing started from - kids start showing clear signs of autism at about the same age they get several vaccines. The guy who originally proposed it with a deeply flawed study was only specifically claiming it was the combined MMR and not all vaccines generically and produced his study in an attempt to sell a separate MMR series that could be spaced out (rather than being one shot with all three) which would allegedly prevent the effect, because he would directly profit from his vaccine series being used instead of the combined MMR.


  • …it would be if in your analogy GMail blocks Yahoo because they don’t like the politics of their CEO, Outlook blocks both GMail and Yahoo to create a safe space, and you left Protonmail out of the list entirely because almost everyone else is blocking them for not banning users who email the wrong kind of porn to each other.

    It’s not a big deal until you realize the notion that they all talk to each other is mostly a lie and all the big ones block dozens of instances each. Hell, the threads on the larger instances about whether or not Threads and Truth Social should be defederated if they ever enable federation were some of the highest activity topics on Lemmy for a bit. So was people cheering about Burggit shutting down their lemmy server.



  • North Carolina. There was a requirement to post notices in 3 major newspapers running for 4 weeks.

    This sounds like one of those very old requirements no one has ever bothered to remove - like once upon a time this would be a genuinely useful requirement to keep everyone in the region on the same page as to who people are, prevent county or city records from losing who you are, etc.

    And something about appearing before a judge who could reject the change for any reason they wanted, including reasons like “I don’t like what color shirt you are wearing today”.

    So, like everything else in or adjacent to family court complete with judges that are tyrannical despots over their tiny fiefdoms, who are fully allowed to apply whatever prejudices they might have unchecked for any reason or no reason at all?

    There were a lot of other requirements too, like background checks, fingerprints, character witnesses, etc.

    More very old-school requirement to ensure you aren’t trying to create a new identity to escape previous legal entanglements. Perfectly reasonable for an era before easily searchable digital records, less necessary now.


  • And then when women decide to protest this by not getting married there will be an economic bill that will be passed that states unmarried women will be taxed at a higher rate - and they will use the excuse that we need to shore up the “traditional family” to fight against all this “God-less liberal brainwashing”.

    Historically, when countries do this kind of thing it’s more often targeted at unmarried men. The English have done it, the Ottomans did, even ancient Rome did at one point (though Rome taxed both men and women for being celibate or childless, but men were subject to the tax for a wider span of ages). A bunch more places around the world have at various times either tax unmarried and/or childless men or flirted with the idea - it’s a shockingly long list. Most of them didn’t do the same to unmarried women, or if they did the tax applied to women for fewer years or was higher for men. Most of those have been dead for decades at this point, in large part because they’re not effective at getting people to breed.

    In the US, Missouri briefly taxed unmarried men, before replacing it with a poll tax the next year. Montana did as well, though it got struck down by their courts (not because of gender inequality but because of phrasing in the state constitution that was interpreted to prohibit that kind of tax). New York, Connecticut, Wyoming, New Jersey, Delaware, Georgia, Minnesota, and California all flirted with the idea of taxing bachelors but never passed it. Michigan proposed a bachelor tax 9 different times but never managed to pass it.

    I don’t know of any cases where unmarried or childless women were subject to a punitive tax but unmarried or childless men weren’t (or even cases where it was seriously proposed), barring a few cases where the age ranges were different, typically with the tax applying to women starting at an earlier starting age but for men to a later final age (for example women 20-50 vs men 25-60 by the Romans, or women 20-45 vs men 25-50 by the Soviets). I’d be curious when, how often or to what extent that has ever happened.



  • and the stuff about apple seeds being dangerously poisonous is just some bullshit

    The short version being that apple seeds are in fact poisonous, but you’d have to eat much more of them than you’d find in a single apple, and you’d have to break or crush the seeds in the process to release the poison. The dose makes the poison and all.


  • SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned.

    Not even that. If you were born before 2014 or so and you’re from somewhere relatively populous theres a pretty good chance there’s more than one living human with your SSN right now. SSN were never meant to be unique, the pairing of SSN and name was meant to be unique but no one really checked for that for most of the history of the program so it really wasn’t either. The combination of SSN, name and age/birthdate should actually be unique though because of how they were assigned even back in the day.