Urr, I don’t think that’s it. I’m not sure stereo sound for vinyls has ever worked so that something like this would be necessary, and it wouldn’t really make sense – why would they have to put vocals on one channel and instruments on the other?

A stereo vinyl player just has the needle moving up and down in addition to left and right, so that the left-right axis is the sum of the waveforms of both channels and the up-down axis is the difference – which means that a regular mono player can play stereo vinyls

That’s known as a ligature and they’re pretty common in many programming-oriented fonts, which usually have stylistic sets with different ligatures for different programming languages that you can optionally enable in your editor’s configuration. For example, here’s the stylistic sets the Monaspace font offers:

Personally I’m not too fond of ligatures so I never enable any, but many folks do like them.

Edit: and just as a side note, ligatures are super common in many fonts, you just might not notice them. Here’s some classic examples from the DejaVu Serif font, with and without a ligature:

"A".reverse() == "∀"

Where is your god now?!

Use a dynamically typed language and you won’t have to: just override the default reverse() method on strings like a Real Programmer!

Unintended consequences you say? Nonsense! What could possibly go wrong?

This is absolutely true, but it still seems to me that we’re throwing the baby out with the bath water when we just stick to extremely terse symbols for everything regardless of context.

Reading articles would be so much easier if they used even slightly longer names – thankfully more and more computer science articles do tend to use more human readable naming nowadays, at least.

Sure, longer names make manipulation harder a bit more annoying if you’re doing it by hand, but if you do need to manipulate something you can then abbreviate the terms (and I’m 60% sure I’ve seen some papers that had both a longer form and a shorter form for terms, so one for explaining shit and one for the fiddly formal stuff)

Of course using terse terms is totally fine when it’s clear from the context what eg. ∆x means.

Ah, I managed to completely miss the last part of the comment because I’m an eejit who can’t read good

In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s.

By a character who was explicitly evil and whose judgement we were not meant to trust, though

It’s always great fun when people who have absolutely zero fucking clue how something works declare it “stupid”.

Ah well that’s certainly fair enough, I had no idea it’s a Google-encumbered format.

Not sure I’ve ever “voluntarily” converted something to webp. Many Lemmy instances’ pict-rs setups seem to use it, my home instance sopuli.xyz obviously being one of them, which I guess is a sort of a funny choice considering

Why do so many folks dislike webp? I really have no strong feelings towards it one way or the other

Which, I guess, is part of the problem

Exactly so!

While I’ll definitely do what I can to try and influence the trajectory we’re on I’m just one person with very little power, and I’m not exactly optimistic about how things are going and figure that at some point something like this meme will be the best I can do

It’s the step between primary and secondary school that a lot of countries have, also known as intermediate school, junior high school, junior secondary school, or lower secondary school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_school

Yeah it was a middle school thing in Finland too, at least in the 90’s.

I did an exchange year in the US in my 2nd high school year, and I was honestly a bit surprised at how… well, simple it all was. I was a senior in the US and I’d learned just about everything they taught that wasn’t specific to the US or the English language (and even some of those…) either in my 1st year in high school or in middle school.

With “guarantees” I meant things like whether you want to have perfect forward secrecy, or whether you want to provide some degree of deniability, and so on, not so much what kinds of guarantees you’re relying on although they’re definitely also good to keep in mind.

“As secure as possible” is a very all-encompassing goal which doesn’t really say much – what I was trying to get at with my point about the guarantees you want to make is that you’ll want to have a clear idea of what you actually mean with “as secure as possible” so you’ll know what sort of eg. architectural decisions to make before you do a lot of work and paint yourself into a corner.

It’s a very ambitious project, but I can guarantee it’ll probably be very interesting to work on and you’ll learn a lot regardless of the outcome, and I’m definitely rooting for you.

I have a background in distributed systems and some background in security (I’m by no means a cryptography expert but I do know more about the subject than average developers), and I’d say that at this stage you shouldn’t worry too much about meeting all parts of some guideline or another; they’re often geared more towards bigger teams and slightly more established projects. What I think could benefit you would be first of all to have a clear idea of what exactly you want to accomplish (from a security standpoint, not necessarily so much from a functionality standpoint) if you don’t already have have one, ie. what sort of guarantees do you want to be able to make. Doesn’t have to even be a public document at first, just some notes and sketches for yourself. Then you’d want to find other projects with similar guarantees and aims and see how they did things, find research papers on the subjects and so on. Security guidelines can be useful, but generally it’s more useful to understand why something is in a guideline in the first place. For a project such as yourst I would personally really emphasize design documents and research over code at an early stage, because you need to have a clear goal in mind before you start cranking out code which might turn out to be worthless (at least to some degree) after you run into problems with your approach. Not saying that the documentation has to be public, just that you / the team know exactly what the goal is.

“Encrypted P2P chat” can mean vastly different kinds of projects, with very different aims. For example, do you want perfect forward secrecy? If so, you’d want to find out the challenges associated with it, especially in relation to interactivity since you’re building a P2P architecture, etc. etc. Same with anonymity / user “traceability” like I mentioned earlier; you need to have a clear picture of what kinds of guarantees do you want the users to have to be even able to say what kinds of best practices you’d have to follow.

Sorry, that turned into a bit of a ramble and might be completely obvious to you already, since I have no idea about your background and the level of research you’ve already done.

Yeah, was the C++ dev just “pre-empting” the PHP devs by ordering all their beers for them so they don’t do it one by one and sing the rest of the song?

Honestly, just properly funding anything that is designed to do benevolent things for the community as a whole is a tough sell with way too many US community politicians

This seems to be a problem with at least conservative politicians everywhere. In Finland where I live we do still have the vestiges of a welfare state (and it really is vestigial at this point), but right wing politicians keep dismantling it and cutting taxes on the rich, and later on leftist politicians find it impossible to roll back any changes due to resistance from the right.

Right that makes sense.

But yeah, after glancing through the links you provided, I’d agree that you’ll definitely need to pay someone for an audit / review, there are so many pitfalls and gotchas when it comes to encryption alone, and depending on the guarantees you want to be able to make you’ll find even more pitfalls and gotchas – especially if you want to make even relatively light guarantees about anonymity. The classic problem is that even with encrypted payloads the metadata / protocol itself leaks information, which might or might not be a problem depending on what your guarantees are.