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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • and the government would have to explain precisely why they decided to ban all Google services over a song about freedom.

    They wouldn’t explain shit. This is an authoritarian government we’re talking about; they have near total control of what information gets to their populace.

    More likely they’d just accuse Google of supporting terrorism, and make a show of raiding their offices and jailing their local executives.

    I don’t think the people in charge would last long if that happened, considering how integral Google’s services are to many people’s lives.

    This is China we’re talking about. Chinese equivalents to nearly every big tech service are more than present and accounted for, even often preferred by the local populace. Hong Kong is a little different, but the CCP still exerts near total control there.







  • Imagine your computer is a big block of flats and your applications are all people who live in the building.

    Mail sent to the building address alone isn’t going to reach the intended recipient, because the postman doesn’t know what flat to post it to. So they need additional information such as ‘Flat 2C’

    That’s the basic concept of ports. It’s basically additional addressing information to allow your computer to direct internet traffic to the correct applications.

    When an application is actively listening on a port, it means that they are keeping an eye out for messages addressed to them, as designated by the port number. While an application is sending or receiving messages using a given port number, that port number is considered ‘open’.

    Now, all sorts of applications do all sorts of things. Some are for the public to use and there are some that are useful within trusted circles, but can be abused by malicious people if anyone in the world can send messages to it. Thus, we have a firewall, which acts as a gatekeeper. A firewall can ‘block’ a port, denying access to a given group of people, or ‘unblock’ it, allowing access.

    VPNs are a totally different thing. They are literally middlemen for your internet traffic. Instead of directly posting a message to somewhere and receiving a direct reply back, imagine you flew out to Italy to use a post box there and receive replies from there.










  • It’s not that they can’t read, it’s that you didn’t put enough info in there to distinguish it from the genuine article.

    If, for example, I were to satirise an antivaxxer over text (like here!) without being able to use any giveaway symbols like /s or alternate casing, I would have to go for the most batshit insane example, to the point where its not funny, just stupid. Something like ‘I got vaccinated and turned into a fucking velociraptor. Jurassic Park is real! Don’t believe the lies!’

    Fair enough if that’s your humour, but if I try to go for anything more subtle than this, I can easily be mistaken for a genuine antivaxxer, because it’s not far off the BS they actually spew. In real life I can put on an exaggerated Karen voice with exaggerated resting-bitch-face and people will know I’m playing a character, rather than espousing my genuine beliefs. I can’t do that over text though, so what’s the alternative?


  • He’s got a point though. Shakespeare goes into painstaking details to set up contexts and the portrayal of character emotions with the limited tools he had (remember these are 15th century plays).

    A Reddit/Mastodon comment has very little background information to work from. You may know the comment they’re replying to, but you don’t know the content of their character. Are they a bit of a facetious troll? Do they genuinely believe what they are writing? Chances are you’ll never know unless they explicitly state it.

    Text communications also lack the nuances of vocal tones, of facial expressions, of body language. We have to explicitly state our emotions over text, and that’s something many people aren’t used to doing.

    Like how I rolled my eyes when you said ‘I recommend you learn how to understand context.’, to which the main reasonable response is often ‘what context? There is too often no context that decisively points one way or another’.