cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).

    The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:

    I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey

    (there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog…)





  • They have to know who the message needs to go to, granted. But they don’t have to know who the message comes from, hence why the sealed sender technique works. The recipient verifies the message via the keys that are exchanged if they have been communicating with that correspondent before or else it is a new message request.

    So I don’t see how they can build social graphs if they don’t know who the sender if all messages are, they can only plot recipients which is not enough.

    1. You need to identify yourself to receive your messages, and you send and receive messages from the same IP address, and there are typically not many if any other Signal users sharing the same IP address. So, the cryptography of “sealed sender” is just for show - the metadata privacy remains dependent on them keeping their promise not to correlate your receiving identity with the identities of the people you’re sending to. If you assume that they’ll keep that promise, then the sealed sender cryptography provides no benefit; if they don’t keep the promise, sealed sender doesn’t really help. They outsource the keeping of their promises to Amazon, btw (a major intelligence contractor).

    2. Just in case sealed sender was actually making it inconvenient for the server to know who is talking to who… Signal silently falls back to “unsealed sender” messages if server returns 401 when trying to send “sealed sender” messages, which the server actually does sometimes. As the current lead dev of Signal-for-Android explains: “Sealed sender is not a guarantee, but rather a best-effort sort of thing” so “I don’t think notifying the user of a unsealed send fallback is necessary”.

    Given the above, don’t you think the fact that they’ve actually gone to the trouble of building sealed sender at all, which causes many people to espouse the belief you just did (that their cryptographic design renders them incapable of learning the social graph, not to mention learning which edges in the graph are most active, and when) puts them rather squarely in doth protest too much territory? 🤔






  • yes, when the month is written non-numerically (and the year is written with four digits) there is no ambiguity.

    but, the three formats in OP’s post are all about writing things numerically.

    In some contexts, writing out the full month name can be clearer (at least for speakers of the language you’re writing in), but it takes more (and a variable amount of) space and the strings cannot be sorted without first parsing them into date objects.

    Anywhere you want or need to write a date numerically, ISO-8601 is obviously much better and should always be used (except in the many cases where the stupid formats are required by custom or law).






  • Probably that’s when it does online connection?

    since the help says it is downloading “partial language files” automatically, and the button never changes from “Download” to “Remove” if you don’t click Download, logically it must sometimes need to download more of a language which you have previous downloaded a “partial language file” of.

    i am curious if the choice of which parts of the “language file” (aka model) it is downloading really does not reveal anything about the text you’re translating; i suspect it most likely does reveal something about the input text to the server… but i’m not motivated enough to research it further at the moment.


  • Wow, thanks for the about:translations tip - I was wondering how to do that!

    Besides “Translate page” there is also a “Translate selection” option in the right-click menu so you can translate part of a page.

    However, unless you download languages in the “Translation” section of Firefox preferences, it doesn’t actually always work while offline:

    screenshot of Firefox Translation preferences showing downloadable languages

    As you pointed out, the help page explicitly says there is “no privacy risk of sending text to third parties for analysis because translation happens on your device, not externally”, but, after I translate something in a new language I haven’t before, it still doesn’t appear as downloaded (eg having a “Remove” button instead of a “Download” button) in the preferences.

    The FAQ has a question Why do I need to install languages? with this answer:

    Installing languages enables Firefox to perform translations locally within your browser, prioritizing your privacy and security. As you translate, Firefox downloads partial language files as you need them. To pre-install complete languages yourself, access the language settings in Firefox Settings, General panel, in the Language and Appearance section under Translations.

    I wonder what the difference between the “partial” language files and the full download is, and if that is really not leaking any information about the text being translated. In doing a few experiments just now, I certainly can’t translate to new languages while offline, but after I’ve translated one paragraph in a language I do seem to be able to translate subsequent paragraphs while offline. 🤔

    Anyway, it probably is a good idea to click “Download” on all the languages you want to be able to translate.




  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoFediverse@lemmy.worldSuggested uncensored/open Pixelfed server?
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    25 days ago

    What you want is not an “uncensored” server, but rather a server that is moderated in a way that you find acceptable.

    There is no such thing as an “uncensored/open” server. Or, when there is, it can’t last long. Every open server needs to delete some things, because if they don’t, their disk will soon be full of spam and CSAM and then the server will go away. Some servers claiming to be “uncensored” might allow nearly everything besides those two categories, but they tend to quickly become nazi bars.

    Sorry i don’t have any specific suggestion, but of the 61 servers listed here hopefully there is one with a moderation policy that is to your liking.