rimu

Vision is the most vital step in the policy process. If we don’t know where we want to go, it makes little difference that we make great progress. Yet vision is not only missing almost entirely from policy discussions; it is missing from our whole culture. We talk about our fears, frustrations, and doubts endlessly, but we talk only rarely and with embarrassment about our dreams. Environmentalists have been especially ineffective in creating any shared vision of the world they are working toward — a sustainable world in which people live within nature in a way that meets human needs while not degrading natural systems. Hardly anyone can imagine that world, especially not as a world they’d actively like to live in. The process of building a responsible vision of a sustainable world is not a rational one. It comes from values, not logic. Envisioning is a skill that can be developed, like any other human skill. This paper indicates how.

A common need in web applications is to create a form that allows the user to enter a list of items, with the number of items not known in advance. This is a pattern often used when entering user information, specifically for phone numbers or addresses, but has a lot of other uses as well.

Implementing this with Flask is surprisingly tricky, as it requires a combination of back and front end techniques working together.

What do we need to change about how we operate, now that the political environment is darkening?

The overall goals would be to safeguard user identities, ensure communication privacy, and protect against censorship and state surveillance.

User Anonymity and Privacy

• End-to-end encryption: Encrypt all user communications, private messages, and sensitive data
• Anonymous accounts: Allow users to create accounts without requiring personally identifiable information (PII), such as email or phone numbers. How can we balance this with the need to combat spam?
• Tor and VPN Integration: Ensure compatibility with privacy tools like Tor, and provide guidance on using VPNs.

Data Storage

• Remove or minimize data collection, including IP addresses, geolocation, and device information. No web server logs.
• Ephemeral content: auto-deleting posts, messages, etc after a set period.
• Instance chooser that flags which instances are in unsafe countries.
• Defederate from instances in unsafe countries?

Communities

• Private communities - currently all are public
• Communities where every post is encrypted
• Approval process to join some communities
• Better opsec around instance owners, admins and moderators

What else?

>>> from kenobi import KenobiDB  

>>> db = KenobiDB('example.db')  

>>> db.insert({'name': 'Yoda', 'lightsaber': 'green'})  
True  

>>> db.search('lightsaber', 'green')  
[{'name': 'Yoda', 'lightsaber': 'green'}]  

!upstateny@piefed.social

Researchers have detected organic compounds and minerals necessary for life in unprecedented samples collected from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, adding evidence to the idea that asteroids likely delivered the building blocks of life to our planet early in its history.

The samples are also providing a window into understanding what kind of chemical and biological processes were already underway as space rocks chaotically ricocheted around during the early days of the solar system.

Watch the video, it's lovely

Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, ousted board member of BlueSky, and grifter extraordinaire to the tune of a $5.6B net worth, is giving a keynote at FOSDEM.

Dorsey and his colleagues want to get us up to speed on what Block is working on these days. Allow me to give you a preview: in addition to posting $5B in revenue and a 21% increase in YoY profit in 2024, Jack Dorsey laid off 1,000 employees, ordering them not to publicly discuss board member Jay-Z’s contemporary sexual assault allegations on their way out, and announced a new bitcoin mining ASIC in collaboration with Core Scientific, who presumably installed them into their new 100MW Muskogee, OK bitcoin mining installation, proudly served by the Muskogee Generating Station fossil fuel power plant and its 11 million tons of annual CO2 emissions and an estimated 62 excess deaths in the local area due to pollution associated with the power plant. Nice.

Amazon has joined the slew of companies rolling back its DEI efforts in apparent celebration of Donald Trump’s “anti-woke” agenda. The changes specifically target LGBTQ+ people, with the section on LGBTQ+ rights being completely removed from its Positions page.

Source https://med-mastodon.com/@luckytran/113796085255452817