lexandstuff

Before SSL certs were as ubiquitous as they are now, we used to warn about the danger of curl to bash for unsecured URLs, as it's a vector for a DNS spoofing attack.

Now that nearly all URLs are HTTPS with valid certificates, the remaining risk seems to be that the host could be intentionally or unintentionally doing something destructive.

Sure it would be great to review the code of every install script before you run it, but as you allude to, it isn't practical.

Maybe something like ChatGPT could help us here?

I'm not observing this at all. Most of my Millennial family and friends are on Instagram, regularly posting Stories about their family or travel. Many 30-year-olds+ are as hooked on short-form content (TikTok, YouTube shorts, Reels etc.) as the younger generation, but the latter are more likely to contribute rather than passively consume.

Messenger apps are very popular, with WhatsApp still being the number one choice.

I don't know anyone outside of tech who regularly posts on Twitter. Most ignore it completely.

Unbelievable. George appears to have deluded himself into thinking he was an order of magnitude smarter than all his predecessors at Twitter. It's incredible what social media popularity can do to a person's ego.

I'll bet Musk wishes he didn't haphazardly fire so much of Twitter's talent. He could use the help right now.

I find the tabs on the Explore page return errors about 20% of the time. Also, yesterday Trending was offline for an hour or so, and random keywords like Telegram were blocked and then unblocked [1]. It's about as broken as you'd expect for a company that just lost ~70% of its headcount.

[1] https://twitter.com/kingslyj/status/1601933093006610433

Yes. Rereading it, I think my prompt wasn't quite correct. I should have said: "write a letter to dispute" instead of "requesting to dispute."

Although it went through 2 layers of bureaucracy, so it may be correct if you consider I was requesting the Regulatory Admin pass the dispute to the Appeals Officer.

In Australia, the majority of drug deals are organised on Wickr. It's so popular amongst criminals, drill rappers mention it in their bars [1]

This is going to be a huge loss (or gain if you're in law enforcement, I guess).

[1] https://genius.com/17161424

You mean Cattle, not Pets is the general mantra, right? Or have things changed a lot since I was last doing Ops?

It seems almost inevitable it will go the way of Tumblr, Friendster, Hi5, Bebo, MySpace, Orkut, Google+ and soon Facebook.

Social networks don't have a particularly long life expectancy.

The metaverse is already here. Roblox has 24 million daily active users. The question really is: can Meta get in on some of that action?

I trialled it. I found that most of the code it wrote was wrong so I didn't bother paying for a subscription. It was like pairing with a super enthusiastic developer that is eager to write code at every opportunity but doesn't understand what we're doing.

Sounds like an insane inconvenience. Sorry, what was the point of doing all this again? Just to prove you can?

I'm the opposite. I find it very difficult to communicate with someone who doesn't turn on video. It's tough to gauge whether the other person understands what I'm saying or if we're still connected as I talk. I can never get in the flow.

I never liked phone calls and always preferred face-to-face communication, maybe that's related.

Conditional statements are even harder to remember. How many square brackets do I need? 1 or 2? Do I use == or -eq? Where does the semicolon go again?

I've been to plenty of conferences, and I agree with you. A talk seems a poor way to consume information compared to a blog or a video. Combine that with seeing multiple talks on the same day, you basically retain nothing.

The best you can do is note which talks seemed interesting and then do more research on the topic later on.

People say they're good for networking, but I find it has the same problem: you end up meeting a firehose of people for moments at a time, and it becomes near impossible to remember which to follow up.

Fast.ai [1] would still be my course of choice, especially for a strong programmer.

After completing that, I think Kaggle competitions are a great way to master your skills.

[1] https://course.fast.ai

Texas had 1,586 books banned from high school libraries [1] in the last year. Is that the kind of "woke crusade" you're referring to?

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/04/07/us/b...

Great. Another popup to dismiss!

Some people are willing to give product feedback others aren't (like me). Recognise the latter quickly and don't bother them.

If you do this, please please please include an unsubscribe option on the email that doesn't require a login to "manage email preferences".

As a user, I do not want to receive an email like this at all, but I will forgive one if I can permanently opt-out with a single-click.

I agree.

People have forgotten that Google searches for tech stuff 10 years ago used to exclusively returns results from sites like Experts Exchange with solutions behind paywalls. I'm glad Google did something about that. And, of course, thankful that sites like Stack Overflow came along.

So you'd like Dropbox to "protect your data" by deleting it?

I'd rather see my family photos leaked to hackers than see them purged from existence forever because I forgot to log in enough.

Seems surprising that it would cause 24+ hours of downtime. My guess is they're recovering data from backup.

Yes, but Roblox has managed to capture a younger audience (6-13ish). There's lots of money to be made in every other age group

Melbourne has been in lock down for over 200 days. Sydney is not that far behind.

Massive amounts of people are unable to work, and a lot of us haven't seen our interstate family in almost 2 years.

A few months before Covid started, 180,000 km2 of Australia was burned to the ground, enshrouding our capital and major cities in smoke, making breathing outdoors almost impossible, causing a mass shortage of P2 masks. Many people died. Many more lost their houses.

What sort of additional hardships do you want to prescribe for Australians exactly?

Preach. This is what chasing 100% test coverage looks like.

Interesting. I predict the exact opposite: birth rates will decline dramatically. I'm not alone in that prediction. According to this article, birth rates have already started to decline in the US: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/11/covid-19-...

Don't want to create a new thread for this, but my suggested title is: "Moderate adolescent cannabis use may have adverse effects on cognitive functioning"

Yes. I would recommend the fast.ai course linked above. It covers all the essentials of deep learning and some classical machine learning. You'll have enough breadth of knowledge to know which areas you'd like to explore in more depth and all the skills you need to build practical projects.

2 decades old now. Wiley and Dizzee Rascal have tracks dating back to the year 2000.

Getting a vote instead of a bullet to the head seems like a pretty significant upgrade to me.