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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I think you’re describing an important step of online mental hygiene. The reality is that humans have not evolved with the daily emotional bandwidth necessary for one to handle a planet’s worth of grief responsibly and without inuring oneself to others’ suffering.

    I’ve seen people criticize this as head-in-sand, that you should remain available to amplify voices and causes in online discourse (especially theirs). I see that criticism as unthoughtful, bordering on unkind, and a critical problem with how we do online advocacy.

    (Aside: “conflict” appears twice in keyword list, which has no effect now but can cause unexpected behavior later)



  • I’ve been checking out the localhost tracking vulnerability and there’s something I can’t work out: it’s not even a terribly obscure or convoluted exploit, especially Yandex’s implementation that’s been chugging for more than 8 years over basic HTTP. It’s just a glaring sandboxing workaround that’s been exclusive to this OS for more than a decade.

    No matter how many ways I look at it, I haven’t come up with a reasonable explanation for how it was ignored, by demonstrably capable engineers, unless Google itself had use for it in the first place. And that fits a pattern of selective competence in information security that they just can’t seem to quit.

    In short it’s the data collection backdoors they leave themselves that defeat the otherwise top-tier security of their consumer offerings, and it’s why I’ll probably never trust anything they’ve touched until I’ve taken it apart and put it back together again.

    So no, you probably shouldn’t use it. Trusting the privacy or security claims of any adtech company will always be a mistake.










  • I would say it’s absolutely normal and quite common to feel out of place, or like you don’t belong, and what fills in the blank of what’s on the other side is mostly arbitrary.

    What’s more, having grown up in many countries and hearing something like this from other young people, I would say it’s not just normal in Germany, or even the West. It’s normal everywhere.

    I think the easiest way to gain a fuller perspective of cultures you’re curious about is to live among them, and while now might not be the best time to visit the US, I think you can gain exposure to lots of new global cultures just by spending time in one of the many world cities, the closest of which is Berlin. From there, many others are just a train away.

    Long short, it’s normal to wonder where you fit, and it’s a question you must answer yourself, but the tried-and-true method to figuring it out is to go and find new parts of yourself in these places. You just might find that, by the end, not only can you belong anywhere you choose, but those places also belong to you.