tuckerm

1. “Old web” things were replaced by VC-backed apps because the apps had a better user experience, not just because big tech conspired to kill the old web. People wanted to use social media instead of RSS feeds because social media is easier to use than RSS feeds. Ditto for Discord replacing IRC. People here sometimes act like IRC declined because of a bigtech conspiracy against it. IRC declined because you had to message a freaking bot once a month to keep your nickname.
2. Wayland and systemd solve a lot of problems and are overall a step in the right direction.

It feels really cool to use a purely mechanical one, haha. Like you’re a chemist in the 16th century figuring out pressure for the first time.

Calipers. I bought a cheapo pair (this one) because it was convenient for measuring the parts on a mechanical watch that I was modding. Now I use them all the time around the house for finding the size of nuts, bolts, rope thickness, etc.

Arguably a classic bad game!

Knowing Javascript is super useful. You’ll get a lot of people recommending other languages, mainly because Javascript has its quirks that will bother you eventually. Those are valid criticisms of Javascript. But it is useful because of how universally available it is. Web apps get hate for being slower than native apps, but it is nice being able to put a browser-based project together, knowing that basically every computer on earth will be able to run it.

I think your general idea is correct. You’ll probably also find that, once you know one language, you’ll end up picking up others much more quickly.

I’ve always thought that it’s easier to learn something if you are somehow drawn towards that thing. So if you find Javascript appealing, go for it. Don’t bother trying to learn the “perfect” or “best” programming language; there isn’t one anyway.

The Exorcist bears some (much?) responsibility for kicking off the Satanic panic.

Many war photos could work for this question, too. The first one that comes to mind for me is “The Terror of War,” often called “Napalm Girl,” from the Vietnam War.

Ditto Tales from the Crypt, except for me it was just The Cryptkeeper himself. I don’t remember any of the specific stories; my cousin and I would watch them when we were 5-6 years old. We weren’t old enough to even understand what was happening, but I definitely remember the skeleton announcer being really scary.

I didn’t watch the show again until about 25 years later, and was surprised to find that the skeleton announcer was actually supposed to be funny. :D

Huh. I have version 1.2.8.1.

Nice. FreshRSS is the only PHP application I have running. I decided to just take it down this morning.

It’s displaying fine for me, I think I was just scrolling quickly on my phone and didn’t notice that the https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/ link in the body was different from the linked article. I saw a blockquote in the post body, and figured that the URL beneath the quote was a link to the article.

Useful link, thanks.

Mobile Waterfox passes.

This is no different from how it is already, though. If a user posts a CSAM link, your server immediately visits that link to scrape it, and you suddenly have that content on your server.

Of course, if you have a blocklist of forbidden sites, then your server will know not to scrape that site. And the same thing applies if we allow servers to send pre-scraped metadata. If the incoming message is for a blocked URL, just drop the message and don’t save any part of it.

The only new threat here is for a malicious server operator to modify outgoing messages to include CSAM metadata on a harmless link. However, that possibility already exists with any other content posted on the fediverse. If a malicious server is modifying its own outgoing messages, the only fix is to defederate from it.

Allowing servers to forward pre-scraped metadata to other servers does not introduce any new threats that do not already exist.

I’m a fan of the second one. My thought is, if you trust a server enough to accept messages from it, then you should also trust it enough to let it scrape the page title, article image, etc. for you, too.