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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • For me, it’s helpful to remember what the underlying reality is.

    Skewed for population and colored on a red-blue scale to reflect vote mix.

    When those votes are counted, the resulting electoral votes align to those votes, which results in maps like what you showed. When strategists tune their messages to target demographics they can divide (e.g., rural vs. urban), they’re playing a game of inches and shades on this map of purple goo, and that’s still the reality behind the ultimate electoral vote, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

    Keep voting, everyone!

    edits: So much autocorrect.





  • Small event that may only have been exciting to me.

    I’m casually into amateur astronomy and stargazing. I like to count satellites if I’m outside on summer evenings, maybe haul the telescope out if some night is particularly clear. But I really don’t get out very often. Emphasis on “casual.”

    We moved to our current house some years ago and were just enjoying the nice, big backyard for one of the first times, sitting in some folding chairs fully reclined to look straight up at the sky. Whenever we do that, which is maybe once every several years, even then it’s always too cold, too hot, too many mosquitos, etc., so this was rare and nice.

    Right above our heads, right where we were both looking, an Iridium flare swept across us. I’d heard of those satellites reflecting “flares” being particularly spectacular, and I’d thought about trying to get in the path of a predicted one someday, but I don’t think I really thought I’d ever really make the effort or have any luck if I did. Not expecting it and seeing it happen, I couldn’t decide if I was dreaming. I hopped on heavens-above.com right afterwards and, although I didn’t see that flare predicted, it confirmed an Iridium pass had coincided with the sighting, so I’m convinced.

    So, something spectacular and somewhat scarce that many people wouldn’t notice and many would either find boring or think was a UFO was something we got lucky to accidentally see together right in our backyard.



  • If they control the domain, they can see all incoming mail delivery attempts to sniff for addresses that were used. They’d still have to know the domain of the email address for the login they were attacking, which might not be super useful if they’re going after a certain login. But, going the other direction would be more fruitful: buy a domain, dump all incoming mail into a catch-all box, and start looking for bank alert emails or other periodic/promo emails. You might find services that just use email addresses for a login name, or ones that have a “forgot username” feature that only uses email for recovery. Multi-factor auth spread across multiple services (email, SMS, authenticator codes…) would help mitigate significantly by making them also have to take over a phone number or get an old device. Not impossible, but then you’re making them work harder for it, and when good account recovery services heavily mask the available targets, it makes it harder to know what else to acquire (e.g., a specific phone number) even if they get as far as full email domain control.





  • I always wondered about that name. It seemed deliberate, but I didn’t know what he was going for. TIL

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slartibartfast

    Douglas Adams wrote … that he wanted Slartibartfast’s name to sound very rude, but still actually be broadcastable. He therefore started with the name “Phartiphukborlz”…

    “One thing I don’t think I explained in the script book was that I was also teasing the typist, Geoffrey [Perkins]'s secretary, because … she’d be typing out this long and extraordinary name which would be quite an effort to type and right at the beginning he says ‘My name is not important, and I’m not going to tell you what it is’. I was just being mean to Geoffrey’s secretary.”