Deimos's recent activity

  1. Comment on The tyranny of the mask? in ~health.coronavirus

    Deimos
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Okay, so what does "markedly different" actually mean for that aspect of this study specifically? It doesn't necessarily mean there might have been no effect, it could just mean it might be lower...

    In GRADE "low certainty" means "The true effect might be markedly different from the estimated effect"

    Okay, so what does "markedly different" actually mean for that aspect of this study specifically? It doesn't necessarily mean there might have been no effect, it could just mean it might be lower than the range they gave. What's the exact margin of error on their mask result?

    1 vote

  2. Comment on Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition - PC features trailer in ~games

    Deimos
    Link
    The previously-vague release date was also revealed as August 7, and the game is up for pre-purchase on Steam and Epic with a $50 USD price.

    The previously-vague release date was also revealed as August 7, and the game is up for pre-purchase on Steam and Epic with a $50 USD price.

    5 votes

  4. Comment on Anti-algorithmic music: how Bandcamp is helping artists beat the odds in ~music

    Deimos
    (edited )
    Link
    Today's another Friday where Bandcamp is waiving their fee from purchases through the platform so that artists receive the full amount from anything you buy: Today, Support Artists Impacted By the...

    Today's another Friday where Bandcamp is waiving their fee from purchases through the platform so that artists receive the full amount from anything you buy: Today, Support Artists Impacted By the Covid-19 Pandemic

    This is the fourth day they've done this, but they haven't announced yet if they're going to do it again next month, so this might be the last one. As of the time I'm posting, there's a little less than 13 hours left before it ends, exact countdown here.

    13 votes

  6. Comment on Should titles that use personal pronouns be changed to use the subject's name instead? in ~tildes

    Deimos
    Link
    My personal opinion is that it's better to change and write it from an "outside perspective". They're writing the title for what makes sense in context: hosted on their blog, so it's obvious who...

    My personal opinion is that it's better to change and write it from an "outside perspective". They're writing the title for what makes sense in context: hosted on their blog, so it's obvious who "we" refers to. Tildes is a different context, and it's not obvious here.

    The general guideline I try to follow when writing titles is to think about it like I'm bookmarking the link and want to be able to find it again in the future and/or remember what the link is about, based on the title alone. So if I wanted to be able to find that post about Sourcehut's monitoring, it would definitely need to have "Sourcehut" in the title.

    19 votes

  7. Comment on 'This is no joke': Californian man died of coronavirus day after saying he regretted attending a party in ~health.coronavirus

    Deimos
    Link Parent
    Still going for now - the latest one's always linked in the ~health.coronavirus sidebar, under "Recurring scheduled topics" (right under the button to post a new topic).

    Still going for now - the latest one's always linked in the ~health.coronavirus sidebar, under "Recurring scheduled topics" (right under the button to post a new topic).

    1 vote

  8. Comment on "Knull is Coming" - Marvel missing the fact that fantasy names can be words in other languages in ~misc

    Deimos
    Link Parent
    I remember seeing this site a while back too: http://wordsafety.com/ I'm not sure if it's still being updated and it's not comprehensive (it says it has about 3000 words from 19 languages), but it...

    I remember seeing this site a while back too: http://wordsafety.com/

    I'm not sure if it's still being updated and it's not comprehensive (it says it has about 3000 words from 19 languages), but it works for this one anyway - typing in "knull" gives:

    “knulla”
    Swedish: to fuck
    Possible phonetic match, worth checking.
    8.7 million native speakers

    2 votes

  9. Comment on Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of June 29 in ~health.coronavirus

    Deimos
    (edited )
    Link
    Florida's Miami-Dade county is now instituting a 10 PM - 6 AM curfew "until further notice", as well as rolling back the reopening of entertainment venues, and instituting some stricter mask...

    Florida's Miami-Dade county is now instituting a 10 PM - 6 AM curfew "until further notice", as well as rolling back the reopening of entertainment venues, and instituting some stricter mask requirements.

    On Tuesday, Florida's governor said they wouldn't "go back" on reopening, so having the most populous county in the state do exactly that three days later is really mixed messages.

    4 votes

  10. Comment on 'This is no joke': Californian man died of coronavirus day after saying he regretted attending a party in ~health.coronavirus

  11. Comment on LinkedIn iOS app is copying the contents of the clipboard on every keystroke in ~tech

    Deimos
    Link
    The concerns about apps accessing the clipboard constantly seem pretty overblown to me. A few developers have talked about it, explaining that it was one of the only ways to implement certain...

    The concerns about apps accessing the clipboard constantly seem pretty overblown to me. A few developers have talked about it, explaining that it was one of the only ways to implement certain features before. For example, here's the explanation from the developer of the iOS Reddit app "Apollo":

    Hey! I make Apollo for Reddit and a few people asked me about this and if Apollo does anything with the clipboard so I wanted to answer.

    Since iOS doesn't have a mechanism to open URLs in a specific third party app Apollo has a feature where if you open the app with a Reddit URL on your clipboard it'll offer to open that URL in Apollo, I think I copied this from Instapaper awhile ago.

    This does cause a potentially creepy looking notification with Apollo sometimes, but just wanted to explain why/what it's doing. It's literally just like "Hey iOS, is there a URL on the clipboard? Oh there is, is it a Reddit one? Okay cool let me ask them if they want to open it." Obviously at no point does anything else happen like it leaving the device or anything. It'll show this banner even if there's not a Reddit URL because it needs to check the URL to see if it's a Reddit URL in the first place. Schrodinger's Reddit URL.

    But the clipboard API (prior to iOS 14) was very open, as someone else said, what if medical records were on your clipboard as text? Well in Apollo's case, that doesn't qualify it as a URL, so it wouldn't even "look". (And even for URLs, it doesn't store a list of them even on the device, it just opens it if you ask to, and then saves the most recent URL so it won't keep repeatedly prompting you if you say no.)

    But that doesn't mean other apps couldn't be! They could be doing some Creepy Shit™ so I think this API change is good. It means I'll have to be more clear with Apollo doing this, and I've already had a few Apple engineers reach out with ways, but I think it's a very good change for user security.

    EDIT: Hell, here's the (pretty simple) code directly from Apollo if anyone's curious: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/f1f9187d8ad6d3e9bc3328dfb0bc6f71

    I don't think there's much to be concerned about overall unless there's some proof of it actually doing something scary with the clipboard contents. For example, if someone examined the LinkedIn app's network traffic and confirmed that it was sending the clipboard contents somewhere, that would obviously be a problem. But it looking at the clipboard repeatedly doesn't really mean much beyond that the app has a feature that can use clipboard contents for something, and it wants to know if the feature should be triggered.

    11 votes

  12. Comment on Tildes Issue Log - June 2020 in ~tildes

    Deimos
    Link Parent
    It wouldn't be too hard to set something like that up, but I wonder if we could just do something more "direct". For example, I've thought that it might be interesting to have something like...

    @Deimos, how difficult would it be to configure a recurring topic to pull the Markdown source of a wiki page and create the topic from that?

    It wouldn't be too hard to set something like that up, but I wonder if we could just do something more "direct".

    For example, I've thought that it might be interesting to have something like ~tildes.changelog that automatically creates a new topic whenever there's a new commit to the site repo. That would allow people to follow and discuss Tildes updates on the site itself, even when they're not significant enough for a ~tildes.official post. I think it would probably be too granular to be shown to everyone by default though, since a lot of it isn't very interesting, and it could be annoying to have a lot of topics when there's more active development happening. So I think we might need some better ability to discover/follow groups before something like that could work well.

    We could also look at doing something that's scheduled but doesn't need a wiki page or anything involved, like something that just creates a list of commits over the last month/week. It would probably still need some manual editing, but a lot of it could probably be handled automatically.

    5 votes

  16. Comment on Fortnightly Programming Q&A Thread in ~comp

    Deimos
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    If GitHub itself removes it, you mean? Yes, all forks should be removed in that case, since GitHub is saying they don't want to host the code, so the forks wouldn't be allowed either. If the...

    If GitHub itself removes it, you mean? Yes, all forks should be removed in that case, since GitHub is saying they don't want to host the code, so the forks wouldn't be allowed either.

    If the original owner just deletes the repository or destroys it in some other way like force-pushing over the commit history it won't also delete/break forks though, so that's what you're protecting against.

    2 votes

  17. Comment on Hyper Scape - Gameplay overview trailer in ~games

  20. Comment on Kongregate is no longer accepting new games, will shut down almost all of their chat/forums in three weeks, and is laying off employees in ~games

    Deimos
    Link Parent
    Gamasutra received a statement from them with some more info, and the article also includes some thoughts about why this seems to be happening: COVID-19 and pivot towards game development lead to...

    Gamasutra received a statement from them with some more info, and the article also includes some thoughts about why this seems to be happening: COVID-19 and pivot towards game development lead to layoffs at Kongregate

    2 votes