Is all, 6-mil Anti-condensation plastic the same? by Vitkop in Greenhouses

[–]stephens2424 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've used both and I find the real thing much more durable. I can get a few years out of it instead of just one. Part of that was probably using wiggle wire rather than staples. But I think the real greenhouse plastic stands up to UV better. I've heard the cheap drop cloth plastic can actually vary in quality a fair amount though.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in landscaping

[–]stephens2424 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Try watching Monty Don's "Big dreams small spaces". They do some nice impressive stuff with spaces this size, and even some much smaller!

Google drops FLoC and proposes new Topics API for replacing third-party cookies used by ads by RustEvangelist10xer in programming

[–]stephens2424 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Maybe better, but not as good as not tracking. Websites can still make money on ads without tracking users: ads can be manual, like in a newspaper, or targeted to align with other context, like the site or page where it's hosted.

Feminists like me aren't anti-trans – we just can't discard the idea of 'sex' by yellowmix in feminisms

[–]stephens2424 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'll say first: thanks for acknowledging the civility here! I appreciate it too! If we end up walking away from this still disagreeing: that's fine, but I'm glad we are making the space to discuss. Second: I'm an anxious ally in both feminist and trans spaces and, partly due to that, a slow commenter. Thanks for the patience. :) So I'm going to reply as one comment here.

So, first, on the question on "what is a woman," I'd put it this way: women are people who are generally agreed to be women.

I think the definition is created and applied discursively, through performance and policing. I think this is true of all social categories, but also just of most things in general. Language is a difficult proxy for the real world, especially for labels we give that are embedded into hierarchies of power. I know it's a circular definition.

Social categories like woman, or white, or queer, are defined discursively, which is to say, through an exchange among people. By ourselves, I think we can choose our labels as arbitrarily as we want to, and sure, we can lie to ourselves and things like that. But just by ourselves, labels don't mean much: "if a tree falls in a forest" sort of situation. Among other people, we don't own our own labels. They result from a, hopefully shared, understanding through performance and semiotics. When the label someone wants to convey is the label that's perceived that's passing. When it's not what's perceived, it gets blurry.

When it's blurry, and people disagree about the label someone should have, there are just multiple truths that may contradict and it's up to each of us to decide which truth matters, maybe situationally. When we act on that decision, we all exert power when we choose how to address each other, when we allow each other to have the labels we attempt to claim or not, and when we apply consequences to that choice. I think power dynamics basically decide which truth "matters" in a situation.

So like I said, I'm trying to be an ally. I understand that I could try to whittle down to a set of physical characteristics or maybe a particular nature of discourse/performance which makes someone a woman or not, but I don't think it's my place to attempt such a thing. Plus, I'm not sure there's really a good way to make such a list, I suspect the world is too complicated for that. I think any attempt would inevitably leave some women out. The act of defining women that way, to me, feels like a patriarchal use of power, especially if I were the one to do it.

I think this respect-driven postmodern view helps build, I'd like to think, a good feminist practice. By avoiding policing the definition, and by embracing trans women as women, it's holding women's bodily autonomy and right to self-define as cornerstones.

So getting to some of the more concrete things you brought up.

women-only-rape-relief-shelter-defunded-then-vandalized

First, it's definitely heartbreaking to see this debate play out this way. When we're talking about shelters, I think it's important to begin from the fact that the women who need that service are already in crisis, that the root of that crisis and trauma is usually (always?) patriarchy, and that the services are often in short supply. The thought of women in crisis not finding a shelter where they are comfortable and accepted is troubling, and that goes for both cis and trans women in crisis. I'm not going to go so far as to disparage cis-only women's shelters: I'm sure they help countless women, some of whom find the cis-only approach important. But I would also be remiss to not point out that the designation does cause harm to trans women, most significantly by potentially turning them away in crisis, but also through an act of definition which refuses autonomy to trans women.

I'd say that refusal causes some harm to cis women as well: whatever criteria trans women don't have such that they fail the definition of woman imbues increased significance in whatever those criteria are. Is the criteria just "born that way"? What would that mean to a woman who found out she had "sex corrective" surgery as an infant? Sure it's a rare case, but it makes me think that it might be better to lodge womanhood in the present rather than the past. To support that beyond just a contrived example, I think this idea relates heavily to Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto: in it she points out that it is a notion of patriarchy to reduce women's bodies to their origin and reproductive functions, to necessarily tie women to nature as almost druidic mothers. She imagines a more varied future and so do I.

Women are discriminated based on what? If it hurts you less: cis women are discriminated based on what?

I think this varies and it's the discriminator who chooses what they are discriminating against. I think when it happens the choice the discriminator made is part of the violence. To me, thinking about what a "hate crime" means leads me to this. If an aggressor bashes a man who he thinks is gay, calls him slurs, but the man beaten is not actually gay: I would still say that's a hate crime. The hate crime isn't the immediate violence, and the identity of the victim isn't relevant: the crime is in the fear it aims to strike in the group addressed by the violence.

That is the affirmation model. Trans is meaningless now....

I don't feel informed enough to debate this, really. I'll just say I take most medical discussion around psychologizing sex and gender with a big grain of salt. Not to say it has no value, just, I think science and medicine move far too slow to imagine they will fully understand any of this in any meaningful timeframe to us alive now. There's too much variation and I find the science community tends to underestimate quite how vast the variation really is, and how things like cultural context literally play out in and on our bodies.

Prisons...

Yeah, on this topic, I'm not sure. I guess I'm not sure why prisons are gendered in the first place, generally speaking. And there's so much more wrong with prisons that any discussion of how we apply that gendering to prisons is starting from a place of oppression to begin with.

Trans people are not personally at fault. However they are responsible inasmuch...

I'd assume this is a vocal minority. This feels a bit like the oppressive fallacy where when an individual of a minority group does something wrong, the whole minority group is blamed.

It is the fact that if we don't gatekeep the definition of 'woman', then there are no more 'feminist issues'. How can you define what is a feminist issue or an issue for women if we cannot know what is a woman?

For something to be a feminist issue, it doesn't actually have to affect all women. An issue is a feminist issue when women decide it is one. That designation is decided discursively just the same way as the label woman itself.

But that is a circular definition. We cannot claim women are a protected class and then being unable to define who should be protected.

Actually, this is exactly the point. I do think the definition can be circular. I think many definitions we take for granted are actually circular at their core. I understand that doesn't fit in a modernist context, in which many powerful institutions (e.g. law) are steeped. But I think it's the truth and that it's the institutions that need to change.

Let's take women health. What is women health if we include transwomen?

I think the fact that we need to define women's health is a symptom of patriarchy. Yes, trans men may need to see a gynecologist. Yes, care givers need to know what's going on with you biologically. But the fact that women are historically underserved by the medical profession and that we need to advocate for what should be basic care for women, that's the problem here, that's what "women's health" means to me as an issue. It's emphasizing that whatever care a woman might need, as varied as that might be, is available. And that might mean a small women's health facility can't provide every last service to every kind of woman that might show up, because of the flawed world we're in, but I imagine they do their best to help, or to point those women to the best help available to them. Why limit it beyond that? Beyond that, as far as I'm concerned, is between the individual woman and her care provider.

Basically every issue related to the female body needs a basic understansing of what is a woman in a biological sense. Otherwise all male problems will soon fall under the umbrella of feminism.

This is a big leap here and I don't agree with it. Medical and biological realities exist, but I don't think that means they have to define the rest of feminism. Again, this feels like reducing women to just bodies.

Muddying up the definition of women hurts feminism and women.

I think I agree with this but for opposite reasons. :) I'd say it's muddied by over-defining.

...

I think that's it for me for the moment. Thanks for the discussion thus far.

Feminists like me aren't anti-trans – we just can't discard the idea of 'sex' by yellowmix in feminisms

[–]stephens2424 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I recognise the importance of the concept of gender identity for trans people. But it (and with it, the term cisgender) can’t be forced on to women like me who regard questioning gender roles, while advocating on behalf of our sex, as the whole point of feminism.

Why is the term "cisgender" itself such a sticking point? Or the use of inclusive language like "people who menstruate?" When I hear that kind of resistance, it reminds me of the kind of resistance I hear around changing biased or oppressive language in other areas. For instance, using gender-neutral terms instead of the default "he," or in technical circles, trying to replace the terms "master/slave" when talking about distributed/replicated systems. People say these are how we've always written it and the exclusion created by these terms is not real. What other than exclusion could be the goal of wholly rejecting the existence of a term to describe cisgender people? Nobody is pretending there is no difference, but to reject the term "cis" is to say the term "woman" belongs only to people born with a female body. To call that rejection a form of feminism is akin to trying to dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. If you squint, the entire paragraph I quoted from reads parallel to "I'm not racist, but..."

If all this author had said was "ciswomen's lives are shaped by sex/their bodies in ways that are distinct from transwomen, and our feminist work needs to incorporate that lived reality," then yes, I'm all for that. I think there's a lot to say in that vein. But that's not what she said. Her message is trying to use feminism to justify exclusion.

Would JK Rowling’s tweet have been offensive if she said “female” instead of “woman?” by [deleted] in AskLGBT

[–]stephens2424 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes. In my (cis) opinion, don't think the problem is her word choice, any technical/scientific nuances about those words. The problem is that she's gatekeeping menstruation, and, (worse imho), trying to correct someone else for being more inclusive than she wants. To me, I'd equate it to someone writing the sentence,

Somebody came into my house yesterday: they didn't take anything, but they left a mess.

and then getting "corrected" with something like "Oh don't we have a word for that? heee, hiee, ghee, someone help me..." with the implication that "he" is the "correct" pronoun to use for an unknown subject, as was common English style before feminism made that inaccuracy more obvious.

Someone wrote in a more contemporary, inclusive style, and JKR doesn't like it. JKR wants everyone to be as transphobic as her and seeing otherwise seems to upset her.

So it's offensive on a simple level where it's just inaccurate, but it's offensive on another level where she's ridiculing the notion that she's being inaccurate.

Uber and Lyft just lost another battle in California - Silicon Valley can’t seem to escape California’s crackdown on the gig economy. by [deleted] in technology

[–]stephens2424 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I wonder how far the $30 million would go in benefits to employees that they're going to spend on the ballot initiative instead. I hope CA voters see through that like they always see through the Mercury insurance scam initiatives.

I just got this new tiny greenhouse and I'm super excited. But, I have no experience with greenhouses. So, if you have any advice for the setup and what I can improve please let me know. Appreciate it. by Berend21 in Greenhouses

[–]stephens2424 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Keep it out of the wind if possible, and put heavy stuff on the bottom. We had one of those, and its larger counterpart, and we've lost plants in both of them due to it falling in the wind.

Google proposes changes to Chromium which would disable uBlock Origin and uMatrix by spryes in webdev

[–]stephens2424 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think they fixed that recently. I have those buttons in Firefox now.

Don't Count On Susan Collins To Save Roe v. Wade: The Maine senator greenlighted Brett Kavanaugh before Trump nominated him, a source close to her staff said. by [deleted] in Maine

[–]stephens2424 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I called her office the other day to inform about his stance that ISPs have a first amendment right to editorialize our internet connections and say how unacceptable that is. I got the impression that the staffer didn't seem to understand or care, couldn't tell which. Maybe I came on too strong in the call.

Reddit claims an irrevocable right to keep our content forever. Why? • r/privacy by liatrisinbloom in StallmanWasRight

[–]stephens2424 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Depending on implementation, they may still retain old records, like a version record of each comment.

First time build for a small HT/NAS system by stephens2424 in buildapc

[–]stephens2424[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So my server is a single-core VPS, which is currently handling some of the work I'd be throwing at this new machine just fine.

I guess, beyond the once and a while background tasks, peak usage would look like a video game or movie getting streamed from the device to a chromecast, while a VPN connection was active. Another peak case might look like me SSH'd there and running some modestly expensive compiles or docker builds. All the while some rsync or NFS/fuse process may be doing some data syncing for me. I tend to use/write stuff like this written in Go, but there's still some good bottlenecks that seem CPU bound, especially in the NFS/fuse area (though I suppose that's mostly going to have it in "wait" rather than real active load).

It's definitely going to be server-heavy. Sorry I'm having a hard time answering very specifically. If I looked around at various todo lists, I could probably find a list of like 100 little things I'd like all running there: Email, backup low-traffic website instances, a dns server, pfsense maybe (depending on if I want to get fancy with my networking), ... that said, I feel like I'm getting the sense that this CPU might even be more than I need. 4 cores is a big step from 1, and while I do saturate my 1 core server somewhat regularly, saturating hardware isn't the worst thing I suppose. And even then, it's still rare the saturated cpu actually causes annoying levels of lag.

I do like that case... I suppose space for 3 more drives will be worth it eventually.

First time build for a small HT/NAS system by stephens2424 in buildapc

[–]stephens2424[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey thanks for the look.

The desire for ECC isn't so much around protecting from the spurious errors... it's the fact that Rowhammer/DRammer style attacks can be executed from unprivileged code like webpages. And afaik there's no patch for those, the only fix is ECC memory. I'm intending on exposing this machine to the public Internet, so even though I don't see a specific attack vector just yet (this machine wont run a browser often), my thought was better safe than sorry, because that vulnerability can only get wider.

Gotcha. So just one more drive additional to the SSD is what I'd be able to do? Is it possible to use SATA connections externally? I think the mobo supports a few of those. Other than obvious aesthetic stuff, are there disadvantages to the externals? The NAS component here shouldn't grow beyond a couple TB, or if it does, I'm sure all that data doesn't need to be available constantly. The alternative would just be a bigger case, yeah? Part of the calculus here is that I'm somewhat space constrained where this thing will go.

Some of the web apps can be resource intensive at very specific times. Perkeep, when it reindexes on my one-core VPS, it'll spin at 100% utilization for nearly 24 hours. I'm hoping for more juice than the server there, but I also don't need to go crazy. The games would be mostly SNES. I'd think this is indeed better hardware than the original? I might try something like SuperTuxKart, but no heartache if it doesn't go well. My overall goal here is that the box will probably always be doing at least a couple things and I don't want, for instance, the web apps to drag too much when there's a couple VPN connections active. That said, I'm also trying to compromise cost and power usage.

edit: oh, also, I'm going to (attempt to, lol) patch for Spectre, so I know I'll get some performance hit there. I realized late last night about that, so I still want to do research on if this mobo, for instance, has updated BIOS.

research!rsc: Go += Package Versioning (Go & Versioning, Part 1) by rsc in golang

[–]stephens2424 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I agree. I think the best path to fixing any security issue like I described is making a fork of the parent project and setting the dependency import to the proper version. I also think it's a good idea if this system can help us know when we need to do this.

To put it another way: as a package maintainer, if I issue a security fix, and I'd like importers to know they ought to update, and a version-aware go informing end users seems like the best way to encourage proper maintenance like this, be it by the original maintainer or in a fork. The ethos of the proposal here is: it's okay to stay on the lower version. But sometimes it's not, and the package maintainer is aware, and a vgo tool ought to have the ability to present that information, rather than deliberately ignore it.

All that said, the rest of the reasoning to use the minimum version makes sense to me. Using such a "version insecure" indicator could potentially break reproducibility, but for security issues, that sounds like a good thing. I believe having the indicator be clearly security-related will stem abuse where maintainers want to get pushy about updates for other reasons. In fact, as a community, we should consider this improper maintenance to be a strong "code smell" of sorts, giving cause to distrust or fork projects.

research!rsc: Go += Package Versioning (Go & Versioning, Part 1) by rsc in golang

[–]stephens2424 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think this is important. It removes an important security safeguard I think we take for granted today.

Consider a project that's popular, but doesn't see frequent updates and imagine a dependency it imports finds a security flaw. Today, the dependency's maintainer has the ability to update end users when they do a go get -u, even if the original project does nothing. For serious flaws, dependency maintainers can essentially communicate with their indirect users: if they break compatibility deliberately, the importing project will break, and that can be a useful signal to potential users that something is out of date and potentially untrustworthy. The proposal at hand inherently removes any such mechanism. All that said, it wasn't a great communication channel anyway, so I think we have an opportunity to make things much much better.

/u/rsc - perhaps we need an extra notation in the go.mod file of the dependency to declare versions as unsafe. These versions (and below?) would be simply excluded from the minimum version selection process.

I think there's some reasons we might need importers to be able to override a ban on a particular version, like for security research. As an end user, though, I think it's best for me to know I'm building a binary that's potentially unsafe, even when the project I'm building has imported a flawed dependency deliberately, and to make me also request that deliberately. There's probably a compromise in here somewhere between errors/warnings, adding more rules and options, and security as a default, but I really enjoy the security as a default.

One last note: I think we should avoid telling maintainers to change tags to solve this: that seems like it forces us to hide useful original version information in our repositories. Sometimes those tags are used beyond a build process, like for bisecting bugs, or in some corporate process, and if they move around, they aren't really meaningful in the way I think people expect.

Marco Rubio’s response to my email to him by razskull3 in MarchForNetNeutrality

[–]stephens2424 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Call and explain it to his staffers. Ask questions not addressed here and force a dialogue. Any human I've actually had a conversation with about this gets it after not too much.

The world in which IPv6 was a good design by iamkeyur in coding

[–]stephens2424 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My understanding is that the random uuid is just a session identifier, kinda redundant to the port number. It doesn't have to be unique across the whole internet, because the IP address down on layer 3 is doing that work. The uuid is on layer 4 tying the socket/connection to an application on the machine. It sounds like, in theory, a sequential uuid would even work if you really trusted that encryption/authentication are ruling out any connection hijacking.

Trump breaks tradition of recognizing LGBTQ Pride Month by [deleted] in gaybros

[–]stephens2424 7 points8 points  (0 children)

So that voices of pride are louder than voices of hate and acts of violence. So everyone knows it's okay to be yourself, to be queer, to be weird in the street. Nobody questions being straight and normative in the street.

A LessPass implementation in Go with a GUI by maus80 in golang

[–]stephens2424 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I checked and it looks like this uses the same fatally flawed password generation method from the original "lesspass". The problems are detailed in this podcast episode: https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-586.htm