2025-11-18 22:30:31
#sqlite key value in 3 lines of sql
#sqlite key value in 3 lines of sql
TIL: Thorsten Kukuk works on no_new_privs/NoNewPrivs aka removing suid binaries from #openSUSE
Reading https://www.thkukuk.de/blog/no_new_privs/ I never realized how many such binaries exists.
I think we can actually prove that this constraint is the *only* constraint that can preserve freedom:
1. There will exist actors in a system who will wish to take advantage of others. Evolution drives survival and one strategy for increasing survival in an altruistic society is to become a parasite.
2. Expecting exploitative dynamics, a system needs to have a set of rules to manage exploitation.
3. If the set of rules is static it will lack the requisite variety necessary to manage the infinite possible behavior of humans so the system will fail.
4. If the system is dynamic then it must have a rule set about how it's own rules are updated. This would make the system recursive, which makes the system at least as complex as mathematics. Any system at least as complex as mathematics is necessarily either incomplete or inconsistent (Gödel's incompleteness theorem). If the system is incomplete, then constraints can be evaded which then allow a malicious agent to seize control of the system and update the rules for their own benefit. If constraints are incomplete, then a malicious agent can take advantage of others within the system.
5. Therefore, no social system can possibly protect freedom unless there exists a single metasystemic constraint (that the system must be optional) allowing for the system to be abandoned when compromised.
Oh, you might say, but this just means you have to infinitely abandon systems. Sure, but there's an evolutionary advantage to cooperation so there's evolutionary pressure to *not* be a malicious actor. So a malicious actor being able to compromise the whole system is likely to be a much more rare event. Compromising a system is a lot of work, so the first thing a malicious actor would want to do is preserve that work. They would want to lock you in. The most important objective to a malicious actor compromising a system would be to violate that metasystemic constraint, or all of their work goes out the window when everyone leaves.
And now you understand why borders exist, why fascists are obsessed with maintaining categories like gender, race, ethnicity, etc. This is why even Democrats like Newsom are on board with putting houseless people in concentration camps. And this is why the most important thing anarchists promote is the ability to choose not to be part of any of that.
HTTP API behaviour that makes me think you know what you're doing:
- 👍 respond with `201` (not `200`) on a successful resource creation request
HTTP API behaviour that makes me think you really *don’t* know what you're doing:
- 👎 respond with `201` if an object with a key that conflicts with this resource creation request already exists
(Spoiler: respond with `409`; or at least a non-successful status so I don't have to parse it out of the human-readable `…
If this file exists, please do NOT follow the widespread advice to overwrite it:
/usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf
Bug reports for the src and doc trees, and the wiki:
― <https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=291501>
― <
First Repair SPEC Café of 2026 on February 14th
Thanks to intense fundraising efforts, grants, and immense community support, we’ve been able to secure funding for 2026. We believe that it is the City’s responsibility to fund programs like Repair Cafés that align with their sustainability goals and that fundraising alone will not sustain the demand for Repair Cafés that exists.
📍Hastings Community Centre
📅 Saturday, February 14th
🕤 9:30am–1:30pm
Registration comin…
"What has not changed in 50 years is the fact we are still using centralized architectures, prone to government intrusion and privacy leaks. Maybe it is time to think about a “Post Cloud” era where information is distributed instead of centralized. Of course this raises questions of trust, cryptography, security and collaboration, but the technology to build such systems already exists. It is more of a question of policy and education than of technology."
I wonder how well the low-curiosity people incompetently running our mostly-idle government have understood the nature of who government helps the most.
HINT: If government help was mostly for the poor, we would not have both billionaires and homelessness.
Air traffic control is a state-socialist subsidy service. It exists to make commercial passenger and cargo airlines feasible, an unevenly-distributed benefit. Reducing capacity by 10% won't affect 90% of Americans.
…
💧 Ultrasonic device dramatically speeds harvesting of water from the air
#water…
In the 1950s, the Air Force realized that planes were crashing because cockpits didn’t actually fit the pilots’ bodies. Wrong size = danger!! They commissioned a researcher to develop a new, more correct set of standard dimensions for the seat, yoke, etc.
That researcher, Gilbert S. Daniels, came up with 10 body measurements that matter to cockpit size. He gathered measurements of several thousand pilots. And the number of people who were at the average for all ten measurements? Zero. Not a single one.
“Average” proved to be a statistical construct, not a thing that actually exists as a person.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
3/
The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol
To my eyes, this is an act of war by the US upon the nation of Venezuela. (Not to mention the blurring of GPS and the sinking of boats by the US.)
If indeed a state of war now exists (to borrow a phrase from FDR's speech to Congress after Pearl Harbor) then Venezuela could be anticipated to wage war against the US - endangering US people (including tourists) everywhere in the world.
El Cheato and Whiskey Pete are getting the US in Vietnam Part II.
"Trump says airs…
A question for musician friends here: does anyone know if an available tool already exists for this, or if I’m imagining a problem everyone else has quietly solved? (I should really make it myself, but am not in the mood to. So far when combining different EDOs or working out conversions I do it all manually each time, which obviously takes quite a while.)
What I’m looking for is a simple MIDI transformer that maps note numbers from one chosen EDO to another, using a fixed reference no…
bruh I tried migrating my bsky account to my own PDS but for some reason bsky app won't load my profile no matter what even tho querying the profile record directly using goat indicates that my profile still exists in my PDS, why is it not resolving correctly in the endpoint that bsky app view uses??? it's so baffling to me
in any case this is my current account for now https://bsky.app/profile/minot.dev since twatter decided to go straight to hell just when I wanted to be more active again
It's also worth noticing that, when viewed through this lens, a government shutdown with no possibility of resolution is not a mistake. It's the objective. They see everything the government does (outside of violence) as unnecessary.
Their government exists to protect markets by providing capitalists with death squads. Everything else can be disposed of. They don't want to *resolve* the shutdown. The shutdown is what winning looks like for them.