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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 12th, 2023

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  • Science is not a belief, nor is it a fact. It’s a set of tools for building knowledge by methodically separating models that work from models that don’t. Facts can certainly fall out of scientific work, but it’s a mistake to pick up any scientific work and label it “Fact”. It’s a constant work in progress.

    Facts aren’t that difficult to define, the real problem is finding universally accepted sources to communicate facts. None of us are going to be able to critically examine every single claim made by every single scientific theory, journalist, blogger, podcast host, ChatGPT instance, preacher, prophet, etc. And did that politician mean to say the words that came out of their mouth, or did they actually misspeak and their real intention was something else?




  • No, I think?

    I don’t actually know what a “Tankie” is. I tend to try to steer away from labels; I consider them a form of intellectual laziness. People will use them to either try to gain a feeling of belonging by adopting a line of thinking shared by their peers, or they will use them to smear those who they have defined as “others” without consideration of why these “others” might hold opinions that they don’t. Labels and label-based thinking lead to tribalism and division.

    If you want to know what I think about something, ask with specifics. If you want to convince me of something, present an argument with reason and evidence, and be prepared for me to pick it apart and look for flaws. There is nothing I respect more than somebody who takes a comment I make and considers it, researches it and then comes back to me with a response, or presents me with a perspective that compels me to do the same. I find both depressingly rare.



  • For my personal life I use a password manager, like most people in this thread. For my master password I really want a secure password (LastPass really reinforced the value of that), so I use a passphrase that is then hashed using an algorithm I can do in my head, so it’s a long string of high entropy alphanumeric gibberish that I can remember easily.

    At work my IT dept seems to be stuck 10 years in the past, so they have now implemented a policy that our passwords must be at least 16 characters. They keep ignoring my suggestions to get some form of corporate password manager, so I have my work passwords stored in a text file that I’m not allowed to have any form of file encryption so it just sits there in my documents folder. It’s probably not going to be the source of our company getting penetrated, but I don’t consider it secure.

    I do like pass phrases because I find them easy to remember, but my current prime work one is really easy to make typos, so I now use the reveal password button more than I ever have before.