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Comment ...There's a Trending Page? (Score 1) 12

I thought that's what the front page was. It keeps wasting space with things I'm not interested in, or actively dislike.

New Video from The Primagen!
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NotAIHonestly Gets Rare Interview with The Primagen!
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FrierenFan04 Reacts to !AIH's Interview with Primagen!
<smashes keyboard>

Comment Re: The economy is struggling (Score 1) 235

A recent visit to my local county head office is enough to tell me the government is drastically over staffed, with rare exception. In researching some real estate issues, after doing everything I could via the internet and being bounced around on the phone with zero success, I had to take a trip down to the county office--a modest size county, far from the biggest in my state. I witnessed dozens of workers idling away doing nothing productive, even visibly playing on their phones while directing visitors from one office to the next, and even from one building to the next, giving conflicting instructions and taking no accountability to the obvious dysfunction.

Given stories I've heard from friends and family who worked in the government, I can extrapolate the average federal government department is vastly less accountable and infinitely more wasteful. Undoubtedly many thousands of times over, just due to being that much less visible.

Comment Re:Publicity (Score 1) 137

Garbage.

70-90 year old "science" is valid?!?!

70 years ago smoking was promoted as being healthy, plastics were a wonder product with no hazards, seat belts weren't required in cars, electronic circuits wouldn't get much smaller, there were only a handful of computers, satellites didn't exist.

" anthropogenic climate change" is a theory, not a fact. It's also very, very, very shaky because it's based on cherry-piking data. It's quite easy to "disprove" a theory which is based on accurate data from an incredibly small fraction of time. Every claim of temperature that's more than about 100 years old is an extrapolated guess. For that matter, the records of "accurate" measuring devices are very inconsistent because they don't account for plenty of changes around the measuring devices.

Comment Re:Nobody understand what this is (Score 4, Informative) 21

This is how I've come to understand it. I welcome any and all corrections.

Passkeys are a cryptographic key stored in a Secure Element. This is usually a private key inside a small cryptographic engine. You feed it some plaintext along with the key ID, and it encrypts it using that key. The outer software then decrypts the ciphertext using the public key. If the decrypted text matches the original plaintext, then that proves you're holding a valid private key, and authentication proceeds.

The private key can be written to and erased from the Secure Element, but never read back out. All it can do is perform operations using the secret key to prove that it is indeed holding the correct secret key.

On phones, the Secure Element is in the hardware of your handset. On PCs, this is most often the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip. In both cases, the platform will ask for your PC's/phone's password/fingerprint/whatever before forwarding the request to the Secure Element.

Yubikeys can also serve as a Secure Element for Passkeys; the private key is stored in the Yubikey itself. Further, the Yubikey's stored credentials may be further protected with a PIN, so even if someone steals your Yubikey, they'll still need to know the PIN before it will accept and perform authentication checks. You get eight tries with the PIN; after that, it bricks itself.

The latest series 5 Yubikeys can store up to 100 Passkeys, and Passkeys may be individually deleted when no longer needed. Older series 5 Yubikeys can store only 25 Passkeys, and can only be deleted by erasing all of them.

Theoretically, you can have multiple Passkeys for a given account (one for everyday access; others as emergency backups). Not all sites support creating these, however.

Comment Re: There's nothing audacious about it (Score 1) 122

Liberals / leftists really aren't the ones who want open borders; at least even if those interests do coincide with other interests, their option really does not matter much:
It has long been and continues to be big corporate interests, and billionaire / globalist class who actually own those corporations who want and benefit from open borders more so than anyone else.
Nobody remembers that in the 80s and 90s, and even into the early 2000s it was the democrats beating the anti-immigration drums, as it was the labor unions who correctly surmised that illegal immigration artificially suppresses wages, and the democrats often go where the labor unions lead them. During those times the democrats blamed the Koch brothers and the rest of their sort who had influence in the Republican Party for keeping the borders open.
The reality is they both were responsible, just for different reasons.
Now that the demographic shift caused by those policies is hitting stride (2nd and 3rd generation immigrants from those times are becoming voters), and they align overwhelmingly with the democrat party, that party now wants unlimited immigration. It just so happens they are now on the side of the oligarchs on this one issue; they want to suppress wages across the board and bringing in more laborers does just that.
And people are SHOCKED the labor unions and laborers in general (even Latinos whose families came in in the 60s and prior) are moving away from the democrat party, and cozying up to the republican party. I am not. It is entirely predictable.

Comment Thirty Fucking Years Late (Score 1, Informative) 91

Congratulations, you feckless imbeciles. You've "innovated" general software package management a mere three $(GOD)-damned decades after Redhat and Debian did it.

While you're at it, why don't you "invent" a tiling window manager that can be driven entirely from the keyboard... Oh, wait...

Honestly... Why is anyone still voluntarily giving money to these chowderheads?

Comment Re: If you're not familiar... (Score 1) 337

Kind of the same story for my HS science / maths teacher. We were all shooting the breeze one day after a test, talking about our futures and pay and stuff; and one of the other kids mentioned that he'd in no way want to be a teacher as they were chronically underpaid. Teach perked up and joined the conversation, as a 20 year veteran he was making 70k and had a solid two months a year off, a good pension and benefits. He was not in a place as expensive as SF.
Now he did say the first few years of his career were lean, but the key was continuing education and getting various certifications and the corresponding pay bumps which came along with it. He took several vacations a year, had a boat and an RV and a nice house and just finished sending his last kid to college. He told us himself that the idea teachers were poorly paid was a myth and explained he wouldn't have done anything different for a career. Kind of changed our minds about things. This was in 1999.

Comment Re: Low Hanging Fruit (Score 1) 72

A new shiny thing after cryptocurrency wound up as a commodity traded like so many others, and not the civilization-changing invention envisioned.

AI looks like it'll be hampered by power generation and delivery (or rather the lack thereof).

On the upside, there'll be ungodly amounts of money spent upgrading and expanding the power grid.

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