Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

  • 4 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m saying you should do your own research

    This is the calling card slogan of someone who’s bought into reality rejection…

    The educated world is built on a web of trust whereupon subject matter experts must necessarily yield to others when something is outside of their realm of expertise. I am a planetary scientist and geophysicist and spent nearly a decade studying. I am constantly learning things in my own field, and by no means do I have a full grasp on every detail. But I can call out BS when someone talks about orbital mechanics or earthquakes or whatever. I do not, however, know anything about the digestive tract of my cat and yield to the veterinarian who has spent their whole life becoming an expert on these sorts of things. I don’t argue with the vet that I’ve done my own research (watched a few youtube videos) and thus am qualified to disagree with them. Because objectively I know less than them on that subject and no cursory review will solve my ignorance.

    When rating the bias of news organizations, what qualifications do you have so that you can do your own research? Do you have fundamental knowledge of the journalistic process? Is the media source covering a topic you are a subject matter expert in? Or are you just lashing out because it doesn’t vibe with your worldview?



  • So, federated network advantages here: you can always modify your instance’s hosting code to patch this out, at least for the users on your instance.

    What you cannot do is prevent other federated instances from publishing the votes submitted to content on their instance. But if you’re accessing that content through your local instance, they can modify the upvote button to pop up a dialog saying something like: “The instance that hosts this content has elected to make usernames visible for upvote/downvote. Would you still like to vote?”

    Personally: In many ways I don’t mind. I’m on the internet with my real name. I don’t mind being accountable for my behaviour online. I might be a little more cautious about upvoting something controversial or NSFW, but largely it wouldn’t change my behaviour.















  • Do they also control email? As in all email servers that are “federated” with one another? Conspiracy thinking is dangerous. Maybe I work for “the feds”? Maybe you do and you’ve already been subverted against your own conscious wishes and this is a honeypot you’re posting?

    At some point you have to trust something or someone or you end up in the trust-equivalent of solipsism.

    I recommend this old paper from the early days of compsci – Ken Thompson: https://fermatslibrary.com/s/reflections-on-trusting-trust

    The moral is obvious. You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.)

    Take this and abstract. Eventually you’ll either need to be a wholly offline hermit, or accept that there is risk of subversion at every level and that risk must be tolerated in order to use the tech.