tilde

BasicAppleGuy, 8 days ago to random

Personalized Pencil Pro

mhoye, 7 days ago to random

Tired: This meeting could have been an email.

Wired: This startup could have been a spreadsheet.

tilde, 13 days ago to random

You can tell that Deep Space Nine is dark & gritty Star Trek out on the boundaries of the Federation's control where imperfect people have to make imperfect choices in imperfect situations. It's because they don't have a conference room. The conference room is the beating heart of a Starfleet crew. It's where everyone goes to respectfully share different perspectives and talk through challenging problems before agreeing on a mutually-acceptable solution which makes use of all their diverse skills. And DS9 doesn't have one! Because it was made by the Cardassians who don't do things that way!

annaleen, 14 days ago to DnD

AGAB = All Gnolls Are Bastards #dnd

grimalkina, 17 days ago to random

Pointed to this paper from a column on it: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4464593

Folks in dev psych and elsewhere often talk about girls being underconfident. But how rarely we frame in terms of boys' overconfidence.

"Across a range of countries, contexts, and domains, men have been found to exhibit higher degrees of confidence in their ability than women (Kay and Shipman, 2014). This phenomenon has been particularly salient in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)."

tilde, 17 days ago to random

You are in a maze of twisty turny Google Admin Console pages, all alike. Exits are in the sidebar, the top bar, the banner, and the support overlay.

tilde, 19 days ago to random

Public services are better, fairer, and cheaper than privatization.

Public services are notionally paid for by taxes (though sovereign states have considerable leeway to invent debt). Taxes can be progressive: a billionaire should pay more in tax than someone who works for a living. Privatized services have inequitable pricing. The power bill or the groceries or your prescriptions might have the same price in principle, but a fixed price represents a lot more of some people's earnings than others. Public services are fairly priced, and reduce barriers & friction by reducing the need to charge at the point of service.

The ostensible argument for privatization is that private enterprise is more efficient: that it can offer services at a lower sticker price. Even if that's true (and it often is not), where does that price improvement come from? Does it come from cutting wages and benefits by outsourcing labor? It just moves the cost around by creating externalities like underpaid workers who now need food and healthcare assistance, and who burn out. When PG&E defers maintenance and equipment upgrades (while paying executives handsomely) are they actually saving money? I bet anyone would rather pay electric rates or taxes which cover the cost of maintenance rather than letting the utility start forest fires and killing hundreds.

The truth is that private enterprise isn't more efficient. It's just motivated by profit rather than public good. Privatized services are regressive priced, making them inequitable. They have to deal with the considerable overhead of charging money, which makes them less efficient and harder to use. The costs they cut are often heart of what the service used to offer. Or they just externalize those costs and society pays them either way, but now with capitalists taking a cut of what they destroy.

tilde, 23 days ago to random

What the heck is "default opt-in"? Is this corporate consent-subversion talk for "opt-out"? Just say "opt-out". mastodon.social/

RE: mastodon.social/users/arstechnica/statuses/112457773374003138

tilde, 25 days ago to random

For being a pet story, this story is weirdly relatable? mas.to/

RE: mas.to/users/kissane/statuses/112442637073844205

tilde, 28 days ago to random

Reading Scatter, Adapt, and Remember back to back with Four Lost Cities, @annaleen comes off as something of a luxury travel writer whose destinations just happen not to exist any more. It's as if they started with an obsessive need to understand how cities and societies fall apart… and so naturally went on a wold tour of climate scientists, historians, and archeological sites. The books are just kinda an inevitable side effect which occur naturally when a science (fact & fiction) writer and journalist tracks down a thought which they simply cannot get out of their head any other way.

tilde, 1 month ago to random

Michelle Yeoh can do literally any role she wants. But if she brings anything like the same energy that she brought in Discovery, I think she'll be an absolute superstar in a Blade Runner show. variety.com/2024/tv/news/michelle-yeoh-blade-runner-2049-sequel-series-amazon-1235993492/

lzg, 1 month ago to random

aaahhhh! the awards for Tech Trivia turned out amazing! Designed by Hannah Diaz. I'll see some of you there tomorrow evening!

tilde, 1 month ago to random

"We abolished the inheritance of political power; why, then, should we not abolish the inheritance of economic power, too?"

insidestory.org.au/the-case-for-banning-billionaires/

tilde, 1 month ago to random

You either die an insider threat or live to become an outside agitator

tilde, 1 month ago to random

A solid argument that the term "antisemitism" has had its time, and we make life easier and more straightforward by using terms like "anti-Jewish hate".

Original on Twitter: twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1786500008742687217
Thread compiled off-site for those without an account any more (good work): threadreaderapp.com/thread/1786500008742687217.html

And some bonus reading on the history of the term: academic.oup.com/ahr/article/123/4/1139/5114731

tilde, 1 month ago to random

In the 90s — so the story goes — the APA noticed that they were basically only diagnosing boys with ADHD, so they checked, and, yep, girls get it too, it just looks different because ✨reasons✨. So they invented the inattentive subtype for ADHD to make sure girls got diagnosed too. And anyway it is so strangely validating not only to finally have a formal ADHD Diagnosis, but also to specifically have Girl ADHD™, because yes, obviously, correct.

tilde, 1 month ago to random

My security friends keep asking me what it is that we actually do at Red Queen Dynamics. I just sent this pretty-concise explanation privately. I think it's a reasonably good summary for folks who aren't elbow-deep in this every day of the week.

Security and compliance are difficult. It's hard to understand because it's so convoluted, it's hard to know if you're doing the right thing, and often compliance especially is a big short-term push to get the thing done. We're trying to be an executive functioning prosthesis for this, taking away a bunch of the garbage work like unending spreadsheet checklists, and also the mental overhead of not knowing the right thing to do.

So we made a little app which contains all (most of) our knowledge about security and also maps that to a bajillion compliance frameworks like NIST's cybersecurity for SMB, the defense industrial base's CMMC, and the CIS controls, as well as a bunch of the underwriting checklists for cybersecurity insurance providers. We know that password managers, automatic updates, and phishing-resistant auth are important. Our clients know that they need (ex) CMMC self-attestation and cyber insurance. And we've built this kinda deduplicated knowledge graph of all of that.

We send a question or two a week to everyone in an organization. And those questions are mostly written by me and are human-readable. We ask some calibration questions to know who's who at the org and then send the right people the right questions to get a more-or-less comprehensive human-level understanding of the org's security/compliance posture.

Most people at the org just do this two-minute task a week, and the app compiles all that info, digesting it for their technical leaders or their MSP or whatever. It spits out insights for them like "You said you wanted to get cyber insurance, and here are the three things you can do to get guaranteed good rates and expedited processing." (with the knowledge that they are actually complying with the terms of the policy!), or "You said you wanted to be CMMC compliant, and you still need to make this technical change to get there.", or "You've reached compliance with CIS v8 IGA, would you like to print of a serious-looking PDF self-attestation document to show someone?", or "You said your business has a high ransomware risk, but your backups aren't really ready for that. Here's what to ask your MSP for." or whatnot.

In a nutshell, we've built something which takes like 60-80% of the general-purpose security/compliance expertise of someone like me or @Tarah (or the people who ask me this question), and we make it available to small businesses who absolutely could not afford a couple of hours of our consulting rates. And! We encourage small, consistent, incremental long-term improvement rather than rushed/hurried compliance cram-sessions.

And (mandatory self-promotion 😬) you can sign up today at signup.dynah.net/ or learn more at redqueendynamics.com

BlackAzizAnansi, 1 month ago to random

Legal question: If a private college calls out cops to get rid of protesters and the major intervenes and tells the cops to stand down, would the school have a cause of action against the city if something happens?

tilde, 1 month ago to random

The greatest power fantasy of D&D is that getting a full night of rest will leave you fully healed and refreshed.