Preston Maness ☭

  • 35 Posts
  • 553 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: March 2nd, 2022

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  • According to their constitution, the VP is in charge for up to 90 days in the case of the president being temporarily unavailable:

    (Article 234)

    A President of the Republic who becomes temporarily unavailable to serve shall be replaced by the Executive Vice-President for a period of up to 90 days, which may be extended by resolution of the National Assembly for an additional 90 days.

    If the temporarily unavailability continues for more than 90 consecutive days, the National Assembly shall have the power to decide by a majority vote of its members whether the unavailability to serve should be considered permanent.

    If it looks like the unavailability is permanent, then — since Maduro was within the first four years of his term (if it was within the last two of the term, then the VP would take up the office of president for the remainder) — an election is called within 30 days of the declaration that the unavailability is permanent, and the winner of the election serves out the remainder of the constitutional term:

    (Article 233)

    When the President of the Republic becomes permanently unavailable to serve during the first four years of this constitutional term of office, a new election by universal suffrage and direct ballot shall be held within 30 consecutive days. Pending election and inauguration of the new President, the Executive Vice-President shall take charge of the Presidency of the Republic.

    In the cases describes [sic] above, the new President shall complete the current constitutional term of office.




  • Khalil, who has a green card, is a lawful permanent resident. In ordering Khalil’s deportation, Rubio relied on a rarely used federal statute from the 1950s that played a major role in shaping American immigration during the Cold War. The McCarran-Walter Act, or the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, gives the secretary of state authority to decide that a noncitizen’s presence in the United States threatens the country’s foreign policy goals. [emphasis added]

    I think it’s telling that, 30 years since the Cold War’s conclusion, news outlets are still steering clear of describing what the war was actually fighting against: socialism. The statute was developed during the second Red Scare and was an outgrowth of McCarthyism, a series of anti-communist witch hunts. 30 years later, the mass media are still Inventing Reality.




  • Mozilla agrees that we need to improve search competition, but the DOJ’s proposed remedies unnecessarily risk harming browser competition instead.

    The only one hurting browser competition is Mozilla. They want to keep sucking at the teat of BigTech. They don’t want to be a non-profit with a focused mission, constrained by recurring and one-off revenues. They want to be an adtech company, bUt wiTH pRivAcY. The judge should absolutely rip the band-aid off. If Mozilla sinks, it sinks.




  • Every manufactured product, from toasters and automobiles to ballistic missiles, runs on computer chips. The United States invented the integrated circuit but now fabricates just 12 percent of the world’s chips, and none of the most advanced versions.

    As a dude that got a BS in Computer Engineering only to give up on the industry, yeah. That tracks. AMD and Intel were like “got a PhD and post-doc work? No? Maybe go fuck yourself, work in verification/validation for a decade at 40k/year, and then maybe we’ll consider you.” So I said “oh well” and wrote code instead. If I could tell my decade-younger self one thing, it’d be: Learn Chinese.








  • Preston Maness ☭toGenZedongHexbear down?
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    11 months ago

    Can you explain more about how this relates to alleviating the problem? I’m curious and admittedly, when I read “crypto”, I think of big tech grifters, but I know that’s not all of cryptography as a field.

    Cryptocurrency has forever ruined “crypto” :(

    But in any case, m-of-n cryptography (Shamir Secret Sharing) permits “m” keys out of a total “n” keys to unlock a secret, such as the login credentials for a domain registrar. So long as “m” keys are available, the login credentials can be recovered. This avoids having a single point of failure, for example, where only one person knows the login credentials and is AWOL. So long as “m” other folks are still around and active, they can recover the login credentials without the AWOL person.


  • Preston Maness ☭tohexbear@hexbear.netwe fucked up
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    11 months ago

    At the moment we do not have access to hexbear.net and there is a strong chance we will not get it back without participating in the auction, which is already over $300. Choosing to abandon the hexbear.net domain will cause federation problems and considerable technical issues which would lead to potential extended downtime.

    Sounds like it’s time to fund raise. If y’all’re serious about attempting to reclaim the domain via bidding, then pick a crowdfunding target and set us loose on it.




  • Preston Maness ☭toGenZedongHexbear down?
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    11 months ago

    This is one of the things that bugs me about the design of a lot of the internet. Far too much that ultimately comes down to one single person, with zero accountability process. … I don’t know what the answer is there because it’s hard to have accountability and a stable structure in disjointed borderline anonymous environments, but it has long bothered me.

    Part of the answer is m-of-n cryptography (and other crypto), but the tools around it are barely usable for technically inclined people, much less those that aren’t. It’s a common enough story, unfortunately. Theoretically, the tech is all there to ameliorate these problems. Practically, only people with encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric tooling have access. And typically, there aren’t enough of those people to go around.