I’m sure it’s been tried, but we know by now that anything that is codified gets gamed. You just have to act sensibly, and accept that if a big enough division of opinion on something occurs, the community will fork. That is a natural step of evolution and not something to get upset about.

Oh I see. I guess an ugly stitching/patching job with a strong thread then.

Nylon repair tape. Won’t look great but it’s inside the bag so who cares.

If it’s a Bluetooth mouse, maybe there is a phone app that can find it. The could even build a locator function (like those keychain tiles) into the mouse.

If you are in the car, the headlights would look normal. If the car is driving towards you, the light would be blue shifted. If it is driving away from you (I guess you would be seeing the taillights), they would be red shifted. That is what happens when you look at the light from distant galaxies. Because the universe is expanding, the galaxies are moving away from us rather fast. Because you know the emission spectra of the stars in them, you can calculate the red shift, and that tells you how far away the galaxy is.

The history of encryption is really cool even completely ignoring the technical side. All kinds of amazing spy stories. Those books I mentioned are full of them.

Those kinds of puzzles? Hmm, it looks like you got some response at !encryption and I’m glad to see some activity there, but in general it’s intended to be more about modern, computer-based cryptography. You might like to read “The Code Book” by Simon Singh which is a general introduction to the subject, starting with old fashioned hand ciphers like the one you posted, and moving up through the modern stuff. “The Codebreakers” by David Kahn is a wonderful history-of-cryptography book, mostly about the pre-WW2 era. And the greatest crypto story ever told is the WW2 Enigma attack, which probably shortened the war by years. “Battle of Wits” by Stephen Budiansky is a good book about that. Kahn’s book came out in the 1960s when the Enigma story was still classified. There was a later edition where a brief mention was added, but it didn’t say much.

We have !encryption@lemmy.world (I’m one of its mods) which is very quiet, so we could use some activity there.

That was called Usenet. Or in the SF novel A Fire Upon the Deep, it was called “the net of a million lies”.

I don’t see the drama. I’ve been on Usenet, Reddit, single sited forums etc. for a long time, and now Lemmy. Lemmy is actually underwhelming for now, though hopefully it will keep expanding.

Federation itself is no big deal. In fact it’s annoying because you can’t easily search across the entire fediverse with a single query, the way you can search Reddit. Plus the burbles we get over defederation tell me that federation (as currently implemented) is a misfeature. There should be cleaner separation of back ends (instances) and clients (web UI’s and local apps), and federation should happen in the client. That way you can view any instances and communities you want to in a single interface, instead of leaving it up to server admins.

I am not sure of the custom rom situation but I use this phone every day so I don’t want to mess with it. I can consider it if I get a new phone while the old one still works.

I had trouble with the web version but it works now so I’m using it. I’ll try Jerboa again sometime. I had to uninstall the 0.17 fork I was using after lemmy.world upgraded it’s backend.

I have Android 7 and Jerboa {the official Lemmy app) requires Android 8 or higher. So people told me to upgrade but I wasn’t having that. It turns out there is a fork with Android 6 and 7 support that might get merged into mainline, so my phone will be cool for a while longer. But the upgrade pressure is out there.

Unironically posted on Medium, oops.

For the most part yes. The account I’m posting from now is relatively identifiable but I will probably switch to a more anonymous one with an anonymous email at some point.

People and posts here are better. Tech experience is worse. The web interface is worse (too much broken JS and websocket crap), I can’t login from a mobile browser, the federation scheme is confusing, the Android app story is not there yet, Jerboa doesn’t support older phones that still work perfectly well with RedReader, yada yada. I have somewhat more retro tastes than probably most of the younguns here, so my thoughts are heading towards writing my own desktop front end. But I don’t feel like I want to attempt mobile development.

It is still full of geekery: the sociopaths are not yet here. See:

http://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths