• 2 Posts
  • 35 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 15th, 2019

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  • I’ve had a good experience with 1Password, but I would absolutely look at the others if I was starting from scratch now.

    One I wouldn’t recommend is LessPass. It is kind of clever, but it relies on doing a hash of a set of values (master key + site + username + counter) and then producing a password from the hash based on some password specifications. Neat, but that’s a lot to remember.


  • In high school, I noticed that our home directories were school ID # + first few letters of last name. The ID numbers were vaguely in alphabetical order, I forget if by first or last name. While the contents were hidden by permissions, I figured out the school ID # of a classmate who had a near school ID # just from the directory name. That was a bit problematic because teachers would use them to post grades in an pseudo-anonymized fashion, the lunchroom used them for accounts, and who knows what else.

    I didn’t mess with anything, but I did say something to the my tech teacher. She knew I was a sweet kid with a knack for tech and some extra curiosity. She passed me off to the school system administrator, who happened to be a family friend. We talked it over, he asked me not to share my discovery, and that was that. It’s been a good twenty years since then so hopefully they’re switched to a way of provisioning home directories that doesn’t spew PII everywhere.







  • I won’t say Bernie supporters weren’t a factor, but the prospect of “buttery males” was an easily measurable factor. Trump was having a really rough few weeks running up to the election. He had a piss poor debate showing, the Access Hollywood tape, and sexual assault allegations all coming together against him. Even with Russia laundering their hack of John Podesta’s emails through Wikileaks and Wikileaks working working with the Trump campaign to drip out the hacks, Trump was well behind. It was hard to see anything with Bernie supporters because that played out over the entire campaign. Meanwhile, the Comey letter had an immediate effect over mere days.

    Clinton was giving paid speeches to wall street

    Note that Clinton’s speeches were from well before the campaign. When I looked at the transcripts when they got released as part of the Russian hacking, I could see why she didn’t want them released. There were parts where she was being more frank about certain subjects than politicians usually are. It was easy cherry pickings from there. And as much as the paid speech circuit has its detractors, I’d rather see former or dormant politicians giving empty platitudes to rooms full of bankers than lobbying their former colleagues.

    she was saying keep things the way they were

    At the very beginning of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, she did a tour of the nation and just listened to people’s problems and concerns. From there, she drew up a platform. She has a history of doing this sort of thing like when she was a senator in New York, where she tackled loss of jobs in upstate New York in areas that had been ignored.

    She also was pretty blunt with certain areas, like talking in West Virginia about needing to plan for a future after coal. To his credit Bernie didn’t jump in there to attack her, but he also didn’t exactly jump to cover the subject. Trump of course did, lied to the workers, got their votes, and they’re still losing jobs anyway.

    And it all came to a waterfall moment when Sarah Silverman was on stage. And people were chanting Bernie and she lost it and told everybody to shut up and said the Bernie supporters were stupid.

    She shouldn’t have lost it, but I can see why. I remember Bernie supporters in general getting extremely annoying around that time. It’s the same attitude that we saw out of Trump supporters: everyone I know loudly supports Bernie/Trump, no one I know supports Clinton/Biden, therefore I was cheated. I couldn’t poke my nose up on /r/politics in support of Clinton without getting my face gnawed off.

    And that was it. The only thing that came out of it was somebody got fired, but there was no regard or representation for us in the Democratic Party anymore.

    There was supposedly a takeover of the DNC by the Clinton campaign. This is a questionable interpretation. tl;dr: A heavily indebted DNC traded fundraising by the Clinton campaign for some control. Nothing stopped Bernie from a similar deal. Also Donna Brazile told the Clinton campaign that there would be two questions: one on capital punishment and the second on lead in drink water. I’m sure she had a stock answer for capital punishment. For the second, the town hall was in Flint, Michigan. Yeah, of course they’re going to ask about lead.

    For me it was a massive dissolutionment, and drove me to Trump. Since he was saying we need to take our economy back from the 1%.

    Did Trump ever actually say that? I ask the question because Trump does this thing where he leaves himself as a blank canvas. Two supporters with different values can believe contradictory things about Trump without there actually being evidence of a contradiction because he either never said anything or because he just says things without meaning them.



  • All media outlets were predicting a landslide victory for Clinton. But then, as we all know I’m sure, the unbelievable happened: Trump won the electoral college. Why didn’t the data predict that?

    Nate Silver was singing a different tune, though. I remember an interview he gave a month out from the election where he noted significant softness in support for Clinton. There were also a lot of undecideds who might swing elections in key states. That is, of course, exactly what happened. When the Comey letter was leaked by Congress, it likely cost Clinton the election. Her poll numbers dropped from +7% to +3%, well within the advantage that the Electoral College gives to Republicans.

    On Election Day, the 538 model was about 3:1 in favor of Clinton. That sounds highly in favor of Clinton, and it is. But it still leaves plenty of room for a Trump win. And lo and behold, she lost.






  • I didn’t realize how lucky I was to have my immediate family, my mother’s extended family, and my husband’s family. We get along well and can talk openly even about contentious or difficult issues. My mother and her sisters have showed an excellent way to structure a family, where each has specialized on certain areas: finance, technology, organization, etc. They all have a deep trust built up over a lifetime that they will work in the best interest of each family member.

    As I got older, I started hearing people’s experiences with terrible family situations, chiefly online. I also started to hear and see more of my dad’s side of the family. Two individuals on that side have bipolar disorder. My grandmother’s bipolar disorder destroyed her marriage to my grandfather and led to a messy divorce. The treatment that was given in those days likely did more harm than good. Then my uncle also has bipolar. His bipolar destroyed a marriage. Unfortunately, Switzerland where he moved to has old fashioned laws that allows one spouse (my uncle in this case) to drag their feet on a divorce.

    There is also some distrust between other family members involving my grandfather’s second wife splitting him from contact with his beloved sister and her family. Of the family I listed in the first paragraph, I simply cannot imagine any of them doing something that horrible. I would consider that intolerable in my own marriage, not that my husband would think to do so (he was friends with my husband in high school).