OkayPhysicist

Can someone more cyber-pilled than me explain what the actual risk with Git hashes being susceptible to collision attacks is? Obviously accidental collisions are problematic, but to my understanding the probability of that is still approximately zero.

Best I can tell, all a forced collision would do is let someone who already has control of a repo modify the history in a far from plausibly deniable way. Which in practical terms, they already could do simply by replacing the whole thing, because who's out here using git hashes as a security tool? Every pinning I've ever seen has been to tags (which can be modified at will), or hashes of the actual payload (which doesn't need to be the same as what git uses).

You are probably grossly overestimating the cost of custom-made clothing if you're hesitant about it while working in tech. Especially if you're buying Turkish. Have you seen the Lira lately? As an American, it's like a 2-3x buying power difference.

Another option is just paying for a laundry service. It's really not that expensive (think <$20 a week, in one of the highest cost of living areas in the world), and your clothes end up looking much better than the alternatives. I got into it because I fucking loathe folding clothing.

You would be very surprised at how well a good summer suit can breathe. If you tell your tailor that you need a suit that you can wear outside in the summer, they absolutely will point in the right direction with regards to material and fit.

Only if you're exceptionally lazy with it. Sure, everybody's got to have a black suit for winter weddings and funerals, but you've got a lot more freedom with your summer suit. Whole range of shirt colors, neckwear is a whole world of fashion choices, etc.

To be clear to anyone reading this, that is a verbatim quote from the man's own FAQ. Wild.

Decent professors distinguish between "using stuff we haven't taught yet" and "trivializing the assignment by using stuff that wasn't intended". If the assignment in an Algorithms course is to implement a square root function, calling "sqrt(x)" is obviously inappropriate. Structuring their solution using a do while() loop rather than while() loop is not.

This isn't the 90% case. At least half of CS students come in with at least a basic proficiency in programming. It's a big enough portion of the class that not boring them into ignoring the actual Computer Science parts while getting the other half up to speed is the defining issue of lower-division CS courses.

GP was describing the platonic ideal of why we have universities instead of just textbooks, so I'd venture a guess that you're the one with a biased perspective here. Sure, some students cheat, and the appropriate penalty is throwing them out of the program. But pursuing that end to the point that you forbid students from engaging in normal collaborative learning is nuts.

As you point out, there are plenty of students who flat-out copy each other. Filtering out those students does plenty to enrich the remaining students, you don't need to go on witch hunts to find ever-more subtle cheating.

Are you so graybeard that structured programming was interesting enough to be part of the focus of a C course? Because I can see in that context requiring the use of appropriate control flow structures. Nowadays, I can't imagine in what context students would be so eager to reach for GOTO that they don't preferentially use other control structures.

I had a CS professor who worked like this. We had assignments and tests, and they did have grades, but your overall grade in the course ultimately boiled down to convincing him that you understood the course material. As someone who excelled at the material, but could be a bit hit-or-miss on bothering to complete assignments, I loved it. Students who were used to optimizing their efforts and obsessing over each point hated it. It didn't come up in that course, but the issue with such a grading scheme is that sometimes students and professors really don't see eye-to-eye. Most of the time it's the professor's fault, holding some sort of prejudice. A grading scheme like I described would be disastrous for such students.

That's not roleplaying, that's the basics of how you handle stuff like this. For lower-division level technical assignments, there's only so much free expression to extract signal from with regards to copying per assignment. Any individual assignment could likely be appealed as coincidence. If the same students turn in 2 more assignments that are suspiciously similar to the same other students, then you can have a pretty iron-clad argument for cheating.

Students cheating at lower-division university level courses is almost entirely a symptom of the students being poorly suited for the course material. Students who are interested and capable, but overwhelmed with the amount of work tend to just turn in incomplete assignments, or not turn in work at all. Encouraging the cheaters to drop while they can still get "dropped" rather than an "incomplete" or "F" is in everyone's best interest, as it provides an opportunity to consider a pivot to something that interests them more.

IMO, the overreaction by the professor was seeking further penalty for students who already dropped the course, or who would do so when confronted with their misbehavior. A student who cheats in CS is not necessarily a student who will cheat at chemistry, or business, or journalism. If they've already dropped out of CS, there's little benefit to be gained by pursuing the matter further.

I strongly believe A/B testing users without their knowledge and enthusiastic consent is unethical. If you don't have enough confidence in your changes to make them carte blanche, then don't make them at all. Users don't want their shit changing all the time.

The risk absolutely has gone away. Vaccination, acquired immunity, and the general drop in the number of effected people have plummeted COVID cases down to below the noise floor on risk analysis. If you go out and get sick, chances are it's just the flu, just like was true every year before the pandemic.

If you are letting fear of disease get in the way of living a healthy and fulfilling life today, that's an unhealthy trauma response.

There's a pretty strong observation bias when it comes to college drinking. The social gatherings of basically anybody who does drink ends up involving drinking, which pushes out the non-drinkers, until you end up with two completely distinct social circles. To add to the effect, alcohol is wildly useful in socializing with strangers, so the non-drinkers know far fewer people.

Thus, if you ask someone who does drink they'll probably say "everybody drinks, except for a few people", and if you ask someone who doesn't, they'll assume most people don't, except for the minority of people getting loudly drunk in public. That was true even where I was at school, where polling found that 70% of the student body was drinking on the weekends.

I'm pretty sure the causality is backwards. People aren't drinking less because they hear people saying it's poison, people are more willing to tolerate people calling it poison because they're drinking less. People have preached about the evils of drinking to excess as far back as we have records of people discussing stuff. It just got ignored, because it's a crucial social lubricant, and thus everybody imbibes anyway. With the rise of addictive social media and gaming, we've seen a decrease in socialization in meatspace, and that's where people drink. If you're missing out on the positive aspects of alcohol anyway, then it's a lot easier to listen to people talking about the negative aspects. And then those voices get amplified to justify not doing the thing you weren't doing anyway.

And that's what the beer is for. Your ancestors figured this out thousands of years ago: alcohol makes socializing easier, and more enjoyable.

There's a compelling argument that civilization itself is a bunch of scaffolding around beer making. Human social lives have been shaped by alcohol since before agriculture. Conflating having a few drinks with substance abuse is like saying eating lunch is an eating disorder.

Society being healthier is a good thing, but not at the cost of human socialization.

It is a generational thing, but IMO you've got the wrong root cause. Discussion of the dangers of drinking stems from people choosing not to drink, and people are choosing not to drink because they are attending the kinds of social gatherings that are lubricated by alcohol less.

As such, I'm hesitant to point to the decline in alcohol sales as a public health win. If people were drinking less simply because they were choosing to drink less, that's probably a public health win. If people are drinking less because their social lives have evaporated, that's probably really bad.

You're confusing SoCal and the Central Valley here. Southern California (LA, San Diego, the Mojave Desert) doesn't have enough water. The Central Valley, fed by the Sacramento River from the Sierras and Cascades, and then extended south with canals, has plenty of water for agriculture. In fact, it was quite prone to flooding before we engineered the water shed.

All of which is irrelevant to the wine conversation, because the relatively dry climate is exactly what makes the Napa and Livermore valleys some of the best in the world to grow grapes. You've got good soil, dry summers allowing for control over how much water the grapes get that make them grow more flavorful, and very few frosts. The fact that the region gets almost all of their rainfall during the winter also helps avoid the grapes going to mold.

Huh? We've got the best farmland in the US, possibly the world. It'd be a terrible shame not to take advantage of it.

> Calling a named individual an "absolute scumbag" in this context is fine grounds as any for a lawsuit.

Based on your misunderstandings of US defamation laws, and the fact that you jumped to stabbing over shooting, it sounds like you've been steeping too much in eurotrash defamation rules. Here in America, truth and opinion are both perfect defenses against defamation lawsuits. My comment consisted only of true facts (the man donated to support prop 8), and the opinions that follow from those facts (the man is a scumbag). You can only sue someone for lying about you, and for public figures like a CEO, you need to prove they were lying on purpose.

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The US has been prepping for a showdown with China over Taiwan for quite a while now. It's the primary focus of US military strategy, and considering a when, not if. When we're sinking their ships (and them ours), shooting down satellites won't even register as an escalation.

Because anybody near-peer to the US at this point has the capability to shoot down satellites, and anything launched on a classified satellite launch is a prime target.

The thing I find fascinating about the root beer thing is that I don't recall root beer being an acquired taste. Like, I remember cola being a acquired taste, and Dr. Pepper being an acquired taste, but root beer, best I can recall, I enjoyed right off the bat. Same with most North Americans I know. And yeah, my overseas cousins find the stuff foul.

From your list of purposes about freedom of expression, you're missing "the ability to criticize powerful individuals". If you cannot prove, in a court of law, that your statements are 100% true, you can absolutely lose your shirt in a defamation suit in the UK. It's so egregious that the US had to pass a law specifically shielding American free speech from the UK's libel laws. (to their credit, in 2013 they improved their laws substantially, such that you can no longer be found liable for provably true statements)

In the US, in contrast, you can say pretty much anything, as long as it plausibly enough true that the plaintiff can't prove you don't believe it. "Donald Trump is a child rapist" is an example of speech that would not be protected in UK courts. Sure, I can point at all his visits to Epstein's Island, and his running child pageant shows, and complaints made against him to establish that it's not unreasonable to believe it, but I cannot prove in a court of law that he did it. So in the UK, he would win a defamation suit against me. On the flip side, here in the States that is quite safe to say in a public forum. It's quite difficult to prove a negative, and even if they passed that bar, they would then need to prove to a court that I did not believe that statement.

That's not necessarily evidence of undemocratic processes. One of the big downsides of democracy is that it gives the absolute knuckledraggers the same vote as anybody else. It seems to me like the UK has the same problem as the US: they have a revealed preference for autocratic policies, because no one gets excited about the government apparently doing nothing.

The Dems have never called themselves leftist. They are quite eager to point out that they are the Neoliberal party: “We’re capitalist, and that’s just the way it is,” - Nancy Pelosi.

Unfortunately, when you've got 2 choices, one being "Let's round up the pinkos" and the other being "Nothing will fundamentally change", the actual Leftists have to choose the lesser of two evils.

That is a perfectly workable definition of socialism. Literally textbook. I would expect any red-blooded Leftist to agree with the statement "The means of production belong in the hands of the proletariat", or they're just fucking posers.

Please, Mister or Missues Vanguard of Leftist Vocabulary, enlighten us on what "Socialism" really means.