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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • They probably have to recite a standard company line, gritting their teeth as you both know it’s bullshit.

    I don’t envy customer service reps. Most of them probably didn’t apply for the job because they love Microsoft or enjoy the prospect of fielding frustrated customers’ calls.






  • You’ll have to be more precise on the definition of God. There are quite a lot of them.

    The existence of an abstract concept is provable by thinking of it. If there exists an idea that you call God, then a God exists. However, that proves nothing about its properties beyond its mere existence as an idea, including whether it pertains to any real thing. Likewise, all attributes you ascribe to that idea become part of the idea, but do not automatically prove anything about reality.

    Thus, the question whether there is an idea called God is trivially answered by asking it at all, but has little bearing on anything at all.

    What makes ideas useful is that they group properties, and what makes them real is that there exists an actual thing having all those properties.

    Thus, the question whether a real thing exists depends on the properties of that thing, so let’s tackle one:

    Do I believe that there can be an omnipotent entity? No. The typical argument here is “Can God create a rock so heavy, They cannot lift it anymore?” Either answer contradicts the premise of omnipotence, unless that entity can create logical contradictions, in which case all argument and reasoning is moot anyway.

    In particular, do I believe that some variation of the Abrahamic God exists? No, or at least none of those I’m aware of. That doesn’t mean I’m not open to being shown otherwise.

    However, the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient and all-loving God runs decidedly counter to the existence of suffering, even if we ignore (or exclude) the contradiction about omnipotence.


  • That sounds like a blockchain with signature verification against a previously established and acknowledged set of keys as consensus mechanism. Pretty reasonable, as far as use cases go.

    However, it doesn’t solve the issue of disagreements and community splitting. If one part of the mod team decides to add another mod, but the rest doesn’t, what’s to prevent that part from splitting off and continuing their own version of the moderation chain? How is abuse of power handled? And in case of a split, how are community members informed?

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s a poor idea, I’m just saying that it won’t solve the issues of community splits, and I’m not sure anything ever can.






  • I can’t comment on the general trend, but this specific one seems a bit too circumstantial to be of use for a serious spying effort. You’d have to have the spyware running parallel to the apps usong passwords you want to steal in a specific way.

    The risk exists, which is bad enough for stochastic reasons (eventually, someone will get lucky and manage to grab something sensitive, and since the potential damage from that is incalculable, the impact axis alone drives this into firm "you need to get that fix out asap), but probably irrelevant in terms of consistency, which would be what you’d need to actually monitor anyone.

    If you manage to grab enough info to crack some financial access data, you can steal money. If you can take over some legit online account or obtain some email-password combo, you can sell it. But if you want to monitor what people are doing in otherwise private systems, you need some way to either check on demand or log their actions and periodically send them to your server.

    It would be far more reliable to have injection backdoors to allow you access by virtue of forcing a credential check to come up valid than to hope for the lucky grab of credentials the user might change at an arbitrary moment in time.


  • I sorta do? My employer has been making commitments to improving things, and I’m involved in one of those projects, but they’re a very slow ship to turn and I can’t say I 100% stand behind what they’re generally doing.

    I joined out of a mix of necessity, opportunism and the chance to develop new skills, and grew to like the specific job I’m doing. I didn’t have many choices for private reasons, but needed the money when I signed up, so in a way the money was good enough to compromise on ethics.

    I got a permanent position now, and again, I stuck for personal reasons, to improve my future prospects and because I like the job, but for all the security a permanent position offers, I’m still planning to start looking for different opportunities when circumstances allow, unless the internal culture makes some masive progress in the next two years.

    In the medium run? Not sure. I’d like to think I’d compromise money over ideology, but I also know that I tend to be selfish and really good at mental gymnastics to justify decisions. I would probably not sign on with Exxon, so there’s definitely the severity of opposition to account for, but there isn’t any clear line that I’d swear my life on. On the other hand, if the money was enough to support political causes that I feel (or tell myself) would weigh up the toll on my conscience, I might fold.

    In the long run, I hope to get to a point where I can answer that with a firm “No”. Maybe once life stabilises, I’ll grow firmer in my convictions. Maybe once the question of pay shifts from covering necessities to the amount of luxury I can afford, the exact number will lose meaning. Maybe I’ll find a place that I both support fully and earn enough at that any more would feel obscene anyway.

    So basically, it comes down to the factors of

    1. How strongly do I oppose the company?
    2. How much money, compared to what I need to live, and compared to what I need to support a pleasant lifestyle?
    3. Where am I on the scale from nihilism to idealism at the given point in time?



  • I googled about lemmy, found a blog post to introduce the whole concept, they linked an instance recommendation thing based on (if I understood correctly) the uptime, (de)federation and user count of the instance, and I just clicked one of the suggestions. So many posts claimed that it doesn’t make a great difference that I eventually decided to toss my overoptimisation habit and take what was suggested to me.

    But I’m still learning my way around here, who knows if this will stay my forever home.



  • You mean the magazine would pay people to write a story people would want to read… only to make money for the magazine? Like, they’re doing it for profit, and not out of the goodness of their hearts? Next you’re going to tell me my grocer is only selling me food to generate revenue.

    There’s a difference between “just marketing” and “buy this stuff, but also, turns out Lebanon has quite some distance to go in terms of human rights in general and gender equality in particular”. Companies can’t have morals, because they’re not a natural person, but the humans working for them can, and it’s not unthinkable for this story to be both: An expression of moral frustration on part of the journalist that also happens to be profitable for their employer.