lightreads: a partial image of a etymology tree for the Indo-European word 'leuk done in white neon on black'; in the lower left is (Default)
[personal profile] lightreads
Being Mortal

5/5. Discussion by a surgeon about how poorly we often handle mortality – care for the elderly in general, and death for both the old and young.

Excellent. I’ve had this book on my radar for over a decade, but the last time I went to pick it up, I found out literally the next day that my father was terminally ill, and I noped out. He lived another eleven months, which was about five months longer than he was expected to, but it’s taken me nearly eight years to come back to this book. I’m very glad I did, though this is depressing and infuriating and did make me cry.

It is also incredibly useful. There is an aging person in my life whom it is likely my wife and I will need to provide care for when it is needed, and this book was incredibly grounding on what that might look like, and in supplying an ethical framework to think about it. It would be oversimplifying to say that the book argues for privileging autonomy over safety, because there’s more to it than that, but the points it makes about how so many elderly care facilities are designed for the psychological comfort of the residents’ families at the expense of the residents’ comfort and happiness is sobering.

Also notable for some candid and messy examinations of how doctors do and don’t approach mortality with patients. There are no easy answers there, as patient need will vary widely. Some need to hear it to be prepared. Some don’t ever want to hear it. But he offers up some really good advice on frameworks for decisionmaking in life or death situations that can, if done right, make things vastly easier for the family making hard calls.

Highly recommended.

Content notes: Terminal illness, death of a parent, medical gaslighting

Too many rockpilled cavecels nowadays

Oct. 21st, 2025 04:35 pm
proustbot: (But it was she and not the sea we heard)
[personal profile] proustbot
Waldorf told me my Comic Sans flyers were "deeply unhinged" and "extremely [Proust] in every way."

Genshin Impact (2020-, PC) -- Powered through the first chunk of Nod-Krai and am officially caught up on the plot (until the second chunk drops tonight).

Genshin Impact 6.0: A Dance of Snowy Tides and Hoarfrost Groves


my future wife is probably just taking a depression nap right now )

(no subject)

Oct. 20th, 2025 09:19 pm
skygiants: Kozue from Revolutionary Girl Utena, in black rose gear, holding her sword (salute)
[personal profile] skygiants
For our friend/former roommate M's birthday last weekend he decided to host a screening of the recent two-part Three Musketeers film adaptation, D'Artagnan and Milady.

Apparently this is the first French film adaptation in sixty years?! (which I did not know before looking at the Wikipedia just now) and I think we all had a vague conception that, being French, it was likelier to be moderately book-accurate than the run of modern English film adaptations. As it turns out this was foolish and prejudiced of us. French directors have just as much fun picking and choosing their favorite bits of The Three Musketeers and jettisoning the rest as anybody else.

That said: I think most of the changes are quite fun and interesting! Perhaps most notably, this is the most successful Milady Positive Musketeers adaptation that I've yet encountered. At least 50% of the plot changes are in service of ensuring that the Musketeers continue to see Milady as a primary antagonist while ensuring that we-the-viewers are tilting our heads like 'hmm ... but is she though ......'

Case in point: the biggest plot change is that suddenly we are very concerned about Huguenots. Athos now comes from a Protestant family and has an ardent Huguenot brother who is on the other side in La Rochelle; meanwhile the whole conflict is being escalated by Gaston of Orléans, who's the real villain of the piece. Why does Gaston of Orléans need to be the real villain of the piece? So that by comparison Cardinal Richelieu is not so bad, so that the schemes on which he's sending Milady are really not so bad, so actually --

more Milady changes, big spoilers )

The other two biggest plot changes are also very funny to me .... one is that the creative team were like "what do Porthos and Aramis have going on with the Milady plot? Well ... nothing really. So instead we are going to give them a comic b-plot about finding which hot soldier knocked up Aramis' feisty sister. Since when does Aramis have a feisty sister SINCE NOW." more spoilers )

The other is that midway through movie two they slide in a new semi-historical OC (semi-historical because he's based on this guy but sixty years too early) who immediately steals the show in every possible way; he drops the best one-liners in the film, saunters casually in to save the Musketeer's asses on at least two different occasions, and is also the hottest man on the screen. To be clear I love this, big ups to the New Improved Musketeer, absolutely in the spirit of Dumas Pere. It did not at all shock me to learn that the creative team were now angling to make a TV show with this guy as the lead. I hope it succeeds because I'd watch the hell out of it.

Other notes: the costuming is very brown in the way that is clearly intended to shout "historical accuracy!" while demonstrating the exact opposite. One of the friends attendant at the party is a historical costume hobbyist and she spent the whole evening glowering at the screen muttering 'where is everyone's LACE?' And then every so often someone would show up with a plasticky lace border around their neckline and we'd all shout 'LOOK! LACE!' which strangely did not soothe her.

ON the other hand, at one point a character in a fraught chase sequence is shown actually changing horses, which so delighted the horse-knowers among us that they immediately forgave Eva Green every implausible corset lugged straight off the set of Penny Dreadful.

On the third hand: no valets. WHEN will someone make a Three Musketeers adaptation with vales?

Where are we on X Chat security?

Oct. 20th, 2025 03:45 pm
[personal profile] mjg59
AWS had an outage today and Signal was unavailable for some users for a while. This has confused some people, including Elon Musk, who are concerned that having a dependency on AWS means that Signal could somehow be compromised by anyone with sufficient influence over AWS (it can't). Which means we're back to the richest man in the world recommending his own "X Chat", saying The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange “AWS dependencies” such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head.

Elon is either uninformed about his own product, lying, or both.

As I wrote back in June, X Chat genuinely end-to-end encrypted, but ownership of the keys is complicated. The encryption key is stored using the Juicebox protocol, sharded between multiple backends. Two of these are asserted to be HSM backed - a discussion of the commissioning ceremony was recently posted here. I have not watched the almost 7 hours of video to verify that this was performed correctly, and I also haven't been able to verify that the public keys included in the post were the keys generated during the ceremony, although that may be down to me just not finding the appropriate point in the video (sorry, Twitter's video hosting doesn't appear to have any skip feature and would frequently just sit spinning if I tried to seek to far and I should probably just download them and figure it out but I'm not doing that now). With enough effort it would probably also have been possible to fake the entire thing - I have no reason to believe that this has happened, but it's not externally verifiable.

But let's assume these published public keys are legitimately the ones used in the HSM Juicebox realms[1] and that everything was done correctly. Does that prevent Elon from obtaining your key and decrypting your messages? No.

On startup, the X Chat client makes an API call called GetPublicKeysResult, and the public keys of the realms are returned. Right now when I make that call I get the public keys listed above, so there's at least some indication that I'm going to be communicating with actual HSMs. But what if that API call returned different keys? Could Elon stick a proxy in front of the HSMs and grab a cleartext portion of the key shards? Yes, he absolutely could, and then he'd be able to decrypt your messages.

(I will accept that there is a plausible argument that Elon is telling the truth in that even if you held a gun to his head he's not smart enough to be able to do this himself, but that'd be true even if there were no security whatsoever, so it still says nothing about the security of his product)

The solution to this is remote attestation - a process where the device you're speaking to proves its identity to you. In theory the endpoint could attest that it's an HSM running this specific code, and we could look at the Juicebox repo and verify that it's that code and hasn't been tampered with, and then we'd know that our communication channel was secure. Elon hasn't done that, despite it being table stakes for this sort of thing (Signal uses remote attestation to verify the enclave code used for private contact discovery, for instance, which ensures that the client will refuse to hand over any data until it's verified the identity and state of the enclave). There's no excuse whatsoever to build a new end-to-end encrypted messenger which relies on a network service for security without providing a trustworthy mechanism to verify you're speaking to the real service.

We know how to do this properly. We have done for years. Launching without it is unforgivable.

[1] There are three Juicebox realms overall, one of which doesn't appear to use HSMs, but you need at least two in order to obtain the key so at least part of the key will always be held in HSMs

The Hexologists by Josiah Bancroft

Oct. 20th, 2025 05:16 pm
lightreads: a partial image of a etymology tree for the Indo-European word 'leuk done in white neon on black'; in the lower left is (Default)
[personal profile] lightreads
The Hexologists and A tangle in Time

3.5/5. A pair of fantasy mysteries set in an industrializing city and featuring a married couple detective duo.

These are fun, a little briskly funny, and correctly not pretending to have any real there there. The mysteries are twisty, the world building is interesting, the jokes are decent, and the protagonists have an entertaining dynamic (she does the magic and most of the mystery solving, he does the cooking and carries her bag and occasionally punches someone).

I did get annoyed with the metronomically predictable action scenes, which arrive every few chapters whether they are needed or not. It has that vibe where the author doesn’t trust the reader to stay interested without some running about and shouting and getting into plot-irrelevant peril. I think he would be better served by putting just the tiniest scrap of there in here, problem solved.

Also, I think the villain in the second book is spoiler I guess ) but YMMV on that.

Kill the Beast, by Serra Swift

Oct. 20th, 2025 02:36 pm
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Nothing lastingly bad happens to the dog in this book.

Sorry but not all that sorry to those of you who wanted that suspense, but Brandy is a lovey good big boy and I think most of you will have a much better time if you don't have serious worries about the mastiff. This is a debut novel, so Serra Swift doesn't have a lot of trust built up. This is the beginning of building it. Brandy gets a nice chewy in his nice bed. He is fine.

The humans...well. The humans are a bit more messed up. A bit more tangled in grief, a bit more vengeful, a bit more desperate. The Beast has been slaughtering humans since time out of mind, and after Lyssa Carnifex (Cadogan) loses her brother she swears that she will put an end to it no matter what. She manages to dispatch a large and varied number of magical beasts, but The Beast eludes her. But when she meets Alderic Casimir de Laurent, it seems like she's found someone who's just as dedicated to helping her slay The Beast as she is to doing it. She just has to put up with Alderic's annoying fashion sense and weird priorities.

...or so she thinks. Obviously, "or so she thinks," there's not a book if there's not an "or so she thinks." I don't feel like the twist is one that will surprise most experienced fantasy readers, but if you're looking for an engaging and well-written adventure fantasy, this may well suit.

Pinch Hits & Mid Sign-Ups Notes

Oct. 20th, 2025 01:31 pm
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
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(no subject)

Oct. 20th, 2025 02:38 pm
kradeelav: Dr. Kiriko (amused)
[personal profile] kradeelav
[ slowly blinks like a cat at the constant tumbleweeds of discourse i see rolling by with other artists ]

not sure if i'm like. that unpopular of an artist in terms of drawing themes or if i'm so far removed from discourse centrals i don't even notice people vagueblogging / snarking about me XD

( probably a mix of both! i get the feeling Quite a lot of people block me on both tumblr/bsky to avoid getting jumpscared by the occasional dead dove, but i honestly like that, no judgement there. a little barrier/friction is a very, very good thing, if there's anything that the web 2.0 has shown. ) 

anyway having a decent few days after being in a funk for a bit, working outside and re-finding some great industrial/synthpop hits thanks to this article. ^_^  been procrastinating on some hobby art projects, but drawing some new schmoopsy shit with the Muse (versus endlessly tweaking old complex artwork) put some fire back into me.


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