yourcelf
Joined 16 years ago
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Nov 15
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/cfd; my proof: https://keybase.io/cfd/sigs/pjDpoX5NcGL3szArhWB-bGQ6Zq2aMysQsXQoabSaGw8 ]
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Comment · 2 years ago
It may be a bit more zoomed out than what you're looking for if you're specifically looking at philosophical treatments of the practice of engineering, but Andrew Feenberg's "Questioning Technology" is excellent introduction to the philosophy of technology, particularly exploring the interplay between technological constraint and political/economic/social drivers of its development.
"Philosophy of Technology" in general is a pretty rich field with a long history, and you might find more references in it than in engineering specifically.
Comment · 5 years ago
`django-environ` makes a fairly simple effort[1] to strip starting/ending quotes off of literals. This will set the value of MY_VAR to the string `foo` (with doublequotes removed) in django-environ:
MY_VAR="foo"
Bash, of course, requires quotes if the variable contains any special bash characters (for example, literal JSON with curly brackets), but its quote handling is much more complex. django-environ doesn't interpret bash code; it just does simple quote chomping.
There's no reliable .env syntax you can use that works in all 3 of django-environ, Docker, and bash; and any variable that should start and end with quotes that are not stripped off can't be expressed in a way that both Docker and django-environ will read in the same way.
This may seem like a nit-picking edge case, but it's indicative of the design philosophy in django-environ of trying to be "helpful", but in ways which lead to subtle confusion. The way it guesses the path to your `.env` file is another example.
[1] https://github.com/joke2k/django-environ/blob/main/environ/e...
Comment · 5 years ago
While we started off using `django-environ` to help manage environment-based/12-factor settings, we've moved away from it in favor of django-classy-settings.
The biggest knock against django-environ is that it does not treat the `.env` syntax the same as Docker or bash -- meaning that the same environment file can't be reliably used to provide variables for both the container and Django.
django-classy-settings has been a joy to use, and its code is really simple and readable (~150 lines).
Comment · 6 years ago
Radio Gaga: A Mixtape for the End of Humanity, by Stefani Bulsara.
An off-kilter, hilarious, inventive, and cutting apocalyptic sci fi novel about pop music. Writing style is like Douglas Adams meets Tom Robbins, through the lens of Top 40 radio and tabloids.
Comment · 8 years ago
A problem we've run into with Radar is that it only kicks in when you attempt to create a charge, and not when you attach a card to a customer.
This means that if your business model involves "try before you buy" or usage-based billing, you'd better be sure to make an initial charge, otherwise the customer might incur costs before Radar decides to block the charges.
Even if you do require an initial charge, if you allow customers to change their credit card between recurring charges, the new card could be extra risky and "fly under the Radar" until the first charge attempt.
Are there any plans to offer fraud risk and blocking when attaching a card to a customer, or will still be limited to just blocking charges? With Stripe's new emphasis on recurring billing, it seems like this would be important.
We currently see Radar as a liability for us. It might block the occasional fraud and avoid a chargeback, but it also allows customers to incur costs with dodgy cards before we know they're dodgy, and then blocks charges outright before we know.
Comment · 9 years ago
Status in Ubuntu: https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/cve/2017/CVE-2...
Comment · 10 years ago
Indeed -- the demographics of Montana in particular are overwhelmingly white[1]. As of the 2010 census, 89.4% white, 6.3% native (many of whom live in one of the seven reservations Montana has, rather than the "star" towns of Billings, Bozeman, and Missoula), and less than a percent each for any other races. The state also has only just over a million people total, so there are about 4 times as many white people in New York City as there are in the whole state of Montana.
This isn't to excuse the white-washy-ness of the video (e.g. lots of cowboys, no Indians), but just to say that the problem is at least a couple of levels out from just this video.
Comment · 10 years ago
The TextSecure protocol is now named the "Signal Protocol"; it's developed by Open Whisper Systems. It is the protocol used by the Signal app on Android and iPhone, and as of this week, also used by WhatsApp.
Here is an older post where the authors of the protocol explain why not OTR: https://whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/
The main takeaway: text messaging, unlike traditional instant messaging, is primarily asynchronous with long-lived sessions, where traditional instant messaging is primarily synchronous with short-lived sessions.
Comment · 11 years ago
See also "Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11454870-plotto
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/19/146941343/plotto-an-algebra-bo...
Comment · 11 years ago
It's even worse if the sound is going through a digital (VOIP / cell phone) system. Most modern codecs for voice are using some form of Linear Predictive Coding[1] (e.g. ACELPC) which is basically modeling sound as a resonator at the bottom of a tube with a filter bank (sortof like your voice box). With voice, this is a reasonably good approximation, and the codecs are aggressively tuned to be efficient at that. But if full-band music gets piped through it will sound roughly like that music is being produced by a flapping plosive at the bottom of a long tube.
Comment · 12 years ago
If you'd like MIT students who were impacted by the administration's callous lack of support, consider:
- the MBTA "hackers", 2008: http://www.openmediaboston.org/content/mbta-suit-against-mit...
- Star Simpson, 2007: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/city_region/breaking_news/2...
- Ryan McKinley's "Government Information Awareness", 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Information_Awarene...
- Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, 2002, XBox hacker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Huang
- Ladyada, 2002: http://www.ladyada.net/pub/research.html
- David LaMacchia, 1994: http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/WAREZ/LAMACCHI.HTM
And these are only a few cases that made headlines; there are many additional controversies handled more quietly. The point remains that the MIT General Counsel's office exists to protect the institute, not the students, even while MIT's culture rewards innovative, boundary-pushing work.
The point at issue here is that MIT needs a legal support structure for such students commensurate with its encouragement of the work.