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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • My boxer mix gets her wires crossed sometimes and quietly growls at me when she’s excited, like when she can tell by my change of clothes that we’re about to go for a walk. Sometimes it startles strangers but it’s hard to be scared when her tail is wagging. The best part is when the vibration of her own growl tickles her throat and sinuses enough that she makes herself sneeze.







  • The current thinking as I understand it is expiry policies make most types of accounts less secure because users just cycle through the same predictable pattern of adding increasing numbers of exclamation points or incrementing the last digit at each required password change, and if you require new passwords to be too substantially dissimilar from x number of previous ones then users can’t remember them at all. Policies that make people use minimally complex passwords because they have too many to remember and don’t understand how password managers work inevitably increase password reuse between services and devices which does the opposite of improving security. Especially with MFA enforced, which I’ve been known to do as aggressively as I can get away with, there’s just no sense in requiring regular password resets – as long as the password remains complex, unique, and uncompromised. I’m not a network security expert but I am responsible for managing these sorts of things in my role and that’s the rationale I use for the group policies in a typical customer’s environment.




  • All the men on my mom’s side of the family have been bald for as long as I can remember so I knew I was doomed when my hair started thinning in my early twenties. Now that I’ve been shaving it for years, I don’t miss it one bit. It’s so much less of a hassle than keeping it clean and straight and cut neatly.

    It’s just hair. You can either own it or wear a hat while you wait a few months until it grows back – and then be grateful that it still does.



  • While I fully support the spirit of this idea, the problem here has little to do with a lack of storage redundancy and everything to do with the bandwidth limitations of a nonprofit company vs a malicious nation state that would seek to deny access to this sort of resource. Basically, given enough bandwidth, you either become resilient to most of these attacks or you become capable of performing them yourself on anyone with a slower connection than you.

    I think the Internet Archive would be better served by direct donations, although I’d also love to see a complete torrent posted that gets updated regularly for anyone with the storage and bandwidth necessary to grab and then re-seed it. The web content alone is nearly a trillion pages, though, so that’s not going to be a long list of volunteers.





  • I took LSD, DMT, and weed one night several years ago. This was near the end of my experimentation phase with psychedelics before I finally came to my senses and chilled out so we’re talking heroic-level dosing, too. While peaking on something like 880μg, I smoked some weed to intentionally send the acid into overdrive and then took a couple big hits off a DMT vape.

    Instant ego death.

    At first I was just in awe of what I was seeing and experiencing, but soon I realized that I could no longer talk or even think linguistically. Language completely fails at some point when you’re that far gone but I was too far gone to remember that fact, let alone comprehend it enough for it to calm me down. I didn’t even know what I was, let alone who. I had a sense that I was a being of some sort who had once been able to communicate but I didn’t understand why I couldn’t anymore. Panic set in. Part of me was still dimly aware that I had taken something or at least done something to myself, even if I didn’t understand it was the cause of what was basically a temporary psychotic break, so I came to the conclusion that I had erased my brain like a hard drive that doesn’t even have an operating system anymore and that I would have to re-learn everything from scratch.

    When I came down enough to find (and be able to use) my phone, I called a friend to come meet me at 3am (true bro) so that the re-education could begin immediately. By the time he got there, though, I realized that I couldn’t have wiped my memory since I remembered my friend and that I was, in fact, a fucking idiot. We had a good laugh and I decided to take it easy with the drugs after that.