No I know you’re being genuine.

So this is going to sound really weird, because I think you’re talking about the experience of debating troll farm accounts - understandably really frustrating - but I’m talking about the people, the voters, the weird family members you can’t talk about politics with any longer. (I have some of those - they’re in rural Illinois while I’m in blue-dot Omaha, I love them very much, and I absolutely hate that we can’t talk politics any more.)

But I think you need to give them more sympathy. (The IRL humans, not the online trolls.) The worst of them grew up in a system where they only see minorities as risks, because (a) brains look for patterns, for free, factory firmware, and (b) they don’t realize evil people set things up long ago so that minorities had things on Hard Mode. And maybe (c) fighting against your factory defaults takes work and practice.

Like, because TLOU is back on TV I’ll share something uncomfortable. S01E03 was really uncomfortable for me to watch. I was a nerdy kid, teased for being gay in high school when I was not and am not gay. So I have some homophobia I haven’t gotten rid of yet. I’m trying. But I still look away whenever men kiss. My wife doesn’t love that part about me, but she still loves me.

Do you give up on me because my journey isn’t complete there? Am I to be hated because I look away, lumped in with the people who vote against gay rights? Clearly not. Mostly because I’m clearly making an effort.

Some people who voted for Trump don’t wear red hats. They were on the fence and they went one way and not the other. And I promise they’re not the people you’re tired of debating. They deserve your positive thoughts. Don’t let the troll farms steal those thoughts. Please.

Yes you will make it easier for kiwifarms to create an ALPR network if you GPL it. Also social change activists, news stations, “news” stations, nosy neighbors, overseas companies interested in obtaining intelligence on US citizens, people who hate racing on public roads, neighborhood watch, people who want to make ALPR bans functionally impossible by making them indistinguishable from dashcams, people who want to make rich people sweat by tracking their movements.

If you don’t GPL it, you’ll demonstrate that a small team can create an ALPR system, so, they might think, why not give it a try?

“Character Cosplays” is the second item in the lowest tier, and includes like hand-bra photos and images that are clearly the first couple images leading into a strip tease.

It’s a sort of emotional bait and switch. “Come support me, there’s nsfw comics.” “Ooh I love those, my wife loves those, I’m in.” “Whoops, actually there’s also these risqué photos. Maybe your wife will be ok with it, maybe not. You can choose to have the conversation if you want. But now I’ve handed you a problem, unless you want to just immediately unsubscribe. In which case I still keep the money but you get nothing. Thanks for your support!”

I would say it’s important not to conflate privacy with secrecy. If you have a domain with your name on it (e.g. my mspencer.net) but create email aliases for every situation, sites won’t be automatically correlating your addresses with each other. How do they know which addresses are yours and which aren’t? More importantly, if you self host, emails are encrypted in flight and live on your own hardware at rest, so nobody external to any conversation will be snooping on message contents.

I’m sure legally it has no effect, but I have postfix configured to refuse emails with “updated terms” and “updated our terms” in the body. If I still haven’t been notified that a site’s terms have been updated to allow some new horribleness, they can’t claim they made me aware, huh? I guess they’ll just have to send me paper mail if it’s so important to them.

(You could do that too, if you self host postfix / dovecot / roundcube / opendkim and use greylist and RBLs for anti-spam. It’s been effortless for me, after an admittedly grueling initial setup process taking several days to learn and fail with.)

They would enforce the rules of their payment card network. Once they’re aware of a violation they take action. If they become aware of a series of violations they take further action to ensure the merchant complies in the future.

I couldn’t find the clip, but first thing that came to mind was the StarTalk Live with Buzz Aldrin and John Hodgman.

Hodgman: “maybe they’ll find H 2 2 2 2 O!”

Edit: crap, I have to call myself out. I failed to read completely, thought the screenshotted poster accidentally changed one part of the comparison, instead of deliberately changing both parts. If the original was molecules in a cubic inch of water vs stars in the observable universe, I read this post as atoms in a molecule vs stars in the observable universe.

Apologies, I discovered I was a fool and was excited to share my discovery.

I host my own for mspencer dot net, used this 15-ish step walkthrough from linuxbabe dot com. Only maybe three instances of spam in two years, gmail and outlook receive my messages just fine, etc. (Successful spammers were using legitimate services, and those services took action when notified. Greylist delays emails by a few minutes but it’s extremely effective against most spammers because they never come back to retry messages after a few minutes, while legitimate senders will.) I don’t know if I would accept blanket advice against self hosting.

Fundamentally if your mail server can see the addressee, it can see the content. SMTPS encrypts both in the same channel. So at the point where you accept messages and store them in a mailbox, the messages have to be readable.

Encrypting them at rest isn’t something I currently do, but if you’re going to later serve those messages to an email client that expects to receive clear text, your server needs both the keys and the messages. They can be stored in different places.

Most of your needs could be met with full disk encryption on the box hosting Dovecot. If you’re worried about being compelled to decrypt, there’s always the deck of cards trick: The pass phrase for full disk encryption consists of a memorized portion plus the letters and numbers of the top N cards in this deck of cards you keep by the server. If someone were to shuffle that deck of cards, and the server were powered down, the encrypted volume would be impossible to recover.

I’m eager to learn what other Dovecot tricks people can recommend to improve security.

I use a USB BD-R burner and disks for this. I don’t have a solution for Bad USB protection though unfortunately.

I think I was in favor of this four months ago. https://programming.dev/comment/8513741

Oh. That’s why they do that. Ok good to know.

Hey no botting!

NEW

Start early in the commit history, see if you can understand the general shapes and concepts the project was using at the start.

Then sort of binary-search your way forward in different sized jumps and see how quickly you can get to present day without sacrificing your sanity. Completely at least.

When I last had to job hunt (2016) - I just jinxed it didn’t I? - I was complimented by interviewers for separately listing “Classroom experience” and “Professional experience”

I think you get a lot of points for a resume that says “I may or may not be the best fit for you, and that’s ok. Here’s accurate information, so you can make that determination for yourself. I trust you.”