#Top 10 software company in UP

[torrentinfotech]

Torrent Infotech Providing School Management Software 

[merge-conflict]

the tumblr text editor having some ephemeral weird to pin down but easy to trigger off-by-one error in its selection tool Sure Is Something.

[lord-radish]

Tens of thousands of people have been fired in the tech sector in the last six months alone. With the economy the way it is, and with people who are already unable to get a job, I wonder how an extra 20,000+ jobseekers are going to have any luck finding work.

[ms-demeanor]

Hello! First, I wanted to say thank you for your post about updating software and such. I really appreciated your perspective as someone with ADHD. The way you described your experiences with software frustration was IDENTICAL to my experience, so your post made a lot of sense to me.

Second, (and I hope my question isn't bothering you lol) would you mind explaining why it's important to update/adopt the new software? Like, why isn't there an option that doesn't involve constantly adopting new things? I understand why they'd need to fix stuff like functional bugs/make it compatible with new tech, but is it really necessary to change the user side of things as well?

Sorry if those are stupid questions or they're A Lot for a tumblr rando to ask, I'd just really like to understand because I think it would make it easier to get myself to adopt new stuff if I understand why it's necessary, and the other folks I know that know about computers don't really seem to understand the experience.

Thank you so much again for sharing your wisdom!!

A huge part of it is changing technologies and changing norms; I brought up Windows 8 in that other post and Win8 is a *great* example of user experience changing to match hardware, just in a situation that was an enormous mismatch with the market.

Win8's much-beloathed tiles came about because Microsoft seemed to be anticipating a massive pivot to tablet PCs in nearly all applications. The welcome screen was designed to be friendly to people who were using handheld touchscreens who could tap through various options, and it was meant to require more scrolling and less use of a keyboard.

But most people who the operating system went out to *didn't* have touchscreen tablets or laptops, they had a desktop computer with a mouse and a keyboard.

When that was released, it was Microsoft attempting to keep up with (or anticipate) market trends - they wanted something that was like "the iPad for Microsoft" so Windows 8 was meant to go with Microsoft Surface tablets.

We spent the first month of Win8's launch making it look like Windows 7 for our customers.

You can see the same thing with the centered taskbar on Windows 11; that's very clearly supposed to mimic the dock on apple computers (only you can't pin it anywhere but the bottom of the screen, which sucks).

Some of the visual changes are just trends and various companies trying to keep up with one another.

With software like Adobe I think it's probably based on customer data. The tool layout and the menu dropdowns are likely based on what people are actually looking for, and change based on what other tools people are using. That's likely true for most programs you use - the menu bar at the top of the screen in Word is populated with the options that people use the most; if a function you used to click on all the time is now buried, there's a possibility that people use it less these days for any number of reasons. (I'm currently being driven mildly insane by Teams moving the "attach file" button under a "more" menu instead of as an icon next to the "send message" button, and what this tells me is either that more users are putting emojis in their messages than attachments, or microsoft WANTS people to put more emojis than messages in their attachments).

But focusing on the operating system, since that's the big one:

The thing about OSs is that you interact with them so frequently that any little change seems massive and you get REALLY frustrated when you have to deal with that, but version-to-version most OSs don't change all that much visually and they also don't get released all that frequently. I've been working with windows machines for twelve years and in that time the only OSs that Microsoft has released were 8, 10, and 11. That's only about one OS every four years, which just is not that many. There was a big visual change in the interface between 7 and 8 (and 8 and 8.1, which is more of a 'panicked backing away' than a full release), but otherwise, realistically, Windows 11 still looks a lot like XP.

The second one is a screenshot of my actual computer. The only change I've made to the display is to pin the taskbar to the left side instead of keeping it centered and to fuck around a bit with the colors in the display customization. I haven't added any plugins or tools to get it to look different.

This is actually a pretty good demonstration of things changing based on user behavior too - XP didn't come with a search field in the task bar or the start menu, but later versions of Windows OSs did, because users had gotten used to searching things more in their phones and browsers, so then they learned to search things on their computers.

There are definitely nefarious reasons that software manufacturers change their interfaces. Microsoft has included ads in home versions of their OS and pushed searches through the Microsoft store since Windows 10, as one example. That's shitty and I think it's worthwhile to find the time to shut that down (and to kill various assistants and background tools and stop a lot of stuff that runs at startup).

But if you didn't have any changes, you wouldn't have any changes. I think it's handy to have a search field in the taskbar. I find "settings" (which is newer than control panel) easier to navigate than "control panel." Some of the stuff that got added over time is *good* from a user perspective - you can see that there's a little stopwatch pinned at the bottom of my screen; that's a tool I use daily that wasn't included in previous versions of the OS. I'm glad it got added, even if I'm kind of bummed that my Windows OS doesn't come with Spider Solitaire anymore.

One thing that's helpful to think about when considering software is that nobody *wants* to make clunky, unusable software. People want their software to run well, with few problems, and they want users to like it so that they don't call corporate and kick up a fuss.

When you see these kinds of changes to the user experience, it often reflects something that *you* may not want, but that is desirable to a *LOT* of other people. The primary example I can think of here is trackpad scrolling direction; at some point it became common for trackpads to scroll in the opposite direction that they used to; now the default direction is the one that feels wrong to me, because I grew up scrolling with a mouse, not a screen. People who grew up scrolling on a screen seem to feel that the new direction is a lot more intuitive, so it's the default. Thankfully, that's a setting that's easy to change, so it's a change that I make every time I come across it, but the change was made for a sensible reason, even if that reason was opaque to me at the time I stumbled across it and continues to irritate me to this day.

I don't know. I don't want to defend Windows all that much here because I fucking hate Microsoft and definitely prefer using Linux when I'm not at work or using programs that I don't have on Linux. But the thing is that you'll see changes with Linux releases as well.

I wouldn't mind finding a tool that made my desktop look 100% like Windows 95, that would be fun. But we'd probably all be really frustrated if there hadn't been any interface improvements changes since MS-DOS (and people have DEFINITELY been complaining about UX changes at least since then).

Like, I talk about this in terms of backward compatibility sometimes. A lot of people are frustrated that their old computers can't run new software well, and that new computers use so many resources. But the flipside of that is that pretty much nobody wants mobile internet to work the way that it did in 2004 or computers to act the way they did in 1984.

Like. People don't think about it much these days but the "windows" of the Windows Operating system represented a massive change to how people interacted with their computers that plenty of people hated and found unintuitive.

(also take some time to think about the little changes that have happened that you've appreciated or maybe didn't even notice. I used to hate the squiggly line under misspelled words but now I see the utility. Predictive text seems like new technology to me but it's really handy for a lot of people. Right clicking is a UX innovation. Sometimes you have to take the centered task bar in exchange for the built-in timer deck; sometimes you have to lose color-coded files in exchange for a right click.)

[godbirdart]

Hello! I hope you are having a nice start to your week :) I seem to remember you recommending a certain tablet once and tried looking for it but couldn’t find it. Is there still one you recommend for art? I’ve got an ipad now but I was thinking of trying something different when it reaches the end of its days (but still hopefully a draw-on one). I think I’ve heard some tablets let you actually download programs and not just apps. I would love to just 1-time buy clip studio or something instead of the app subscription Dx

No worries if you don’t have a recommendation, I may have just misremembered. Either way, I hope you have a lovely evening and thanks for sharing your art! ^_^

Oh I can talk tablets for Hours don't even worry

I have a tablet that can download programs and that is this one right here!

The Huion Kamvas Studio 22

It's been retired from Huion's store for a couple years now, succeeded by Huion's new Kamvas Studio 24; the new, sleeker edition of my 22.

If you're looking for a tablet that can download actual software and not just act as a second display for your computer, you'll be looking specifically for a "Pen Computer". Huion currently offers two - the Kamvas Studio 24 and the travel-sized Kamvas Studio 16. Both come with Windows 11 preinstalled.

Huion also released the Kamvas Slate 10, and while it is categorized as a pen computer, it's designed to compete with tablets like the iPad or PicassoTab and operates on Android 12.

While the idea of an independent computer you can draw on the screen of isn't at all novel, they're still arguably "new" for the companies whose target demographic is artists. At the time of this post, Huion appears to be Wacom's main and only competitor in that field. Artisul, Gaomon and XPpen do not manufacture them. Options for standalone drawing tablets that can download software [not just apps like a phone] are largely limited to:

Huion Kamvas Studio 16

Huion Kamvas Studio 22

Huion Kamvas Studio 24

Wacom MobileStudio Pro 13

Wacom MobileStudio Pro 16

I know I hype up Huion a lot and that's primarily because I have actual firsthand experience with their products, but I cannot stress enough that the Huion can do the job just as well as the Wacom. If you're hellbent on the Wacom, get it when it's on BIG sale, or cheaper secondhand / refurbished. Wacom's MobileStudio line can start at around ~$2600 USD and up, whereas the Huion Kamvas Studio, while still costly, can start from ~$1700 USD. I've seen Kamvas Studio 22s floating around for around $1000 USD which is already $500 off what I originally paid for mine.

Pen computers are one hell of an investment but they're extremely convenient to have. I'm currently saving up for a Kamvas Studio 16 as my travel laptop barely has the power to support Clip Studio and I want to be able to take my work on the go without fumbling around with cords.

To anyone else reading: if I somehow missed the release of a pen computer from another art tablet brand, feel free to drop it in the replies! I'm usually on top of these but I've been so swamped with work the past two months I've barely enough time to check my social media most days lmao

[totheseok]

uh oh?

synopsis: what happens when the daughter of the CEO of a major film company and the son of the president of a successful food company move in next door?

episode 2: cats holding banners

last episode ▪︎ next episode

word count: 924

(italic writing is yn's thoughts)

Taboba had been y/n's absolute favourite boba shop in Seoul, she first discovered it while she was studying abroad. Upon returning home she found out there was ONE outlet in Seoul, which was conveniently just a 10 minute drive from her parents house. But, they were closing down and she was moving to a different part of Seoul, half an hour away from the shop.

Growing up as the daughter of a big-shot movie producer, she was privileged enough to live in one of the expensive neighbourhoods of Seoul, in a big house over-looking the Han river. And though it was true that she was to eventually take over the company her parents wanted her to pave her own way and make her own name in the industry. Granted her heritage would certainly give her a boost in popularity.

She decided one of the first steps to make her own way would be to move into her own space and live by herself. So with the help of friends and family she chose a penthouse apartment for herself in Gangam and bought it (cus wth is rent when ur rich). But thats all irrelevant right now because she's not moving there for another week. Right now what's important is that she just parked her car outside the new boba shop that opened near her new apartment.

Bobobble.

It's a cute name even she cant deny that. She hopes with every atom of her body that the boba is good too. It was also owned by SeoulFoods, a company that sponsored most of SilverWoods' shows and movies, and also catered for their events.

The issue isn't bad boba, the issue is being as good as or topping taboba boba.

Stepping inside, the cafe looked like any other, it was simple, with mood lighting, wooden floors and comfy looking leather seats. But there was one recurring theme. Cats. It wasn't a cat cafe, yet, cute pictures of cats doing stupid things were hung up on the walls, the bookshelf was shaped like a cat, the little plant pots on the table were cats that looked like they had leaves growing out of their heads. Overall, a-lot of cats.

Y/N made her way to the counter and luckily didn't have to wait too long considering it was 11 AM and everyone was either at work or at school, no long lines. She greeted the barista and placed her order, payed for her drink and then chose a table by the window. Good for working and people watching.

Y/n's first mistake today was forgetting her laptop charger at home, but she was already on the highway when she realised and couldn't turn back even if she wanted. Now the question was if her laptop was already charged or if she would open it and it would die in the middle of her editing a scene.

79%. Not bad, good enough to edit at least one scene. She started opening the softwares she needed to work and got started.

Soon enough her drink arrived, paired with a slice of cheesecake. Wait... Cheesecake? YN hadn't ordered any. Her original plan had been to have her drink and order a sandwich if she got hungry a while into working.

Maybe I should ask the server. Luckily for her he was walking by after serving another order.

"Um, excuse me?" She called out.

"Yes, ma'am"

"Uh, I only ordered a drink, i was served cheesecake as well are you sure it isn't someone else's?"

"Ah, yes, it's on the house, our manager said there's a newcomer gift for today, and since it's your first time visiting Bobobble, you qualify for it!"

"Ohh, I see, well um thank you so much!"

"No, problem ma'am, enjoy your meal!"

Newcomer gifts huh? Lets hope this boba is also good because so far I'm liking this place.

YN reached for her cup of bubble tea and immediately noticed logo. A cat holding a banner that said bobobble. Omg cute pls be good i want to come back here.

Bringing the straw to her lips, she took and sip and...

"Holy shit" She whispered to herself.

Looks like bobobble just gained a new and very loyal customer.

In the break room, a barista sat with their phone in front of them, voice recording app open.

"Dear diary, today the owners son Taesan came to overlook the store. He's a chill guy around my age but he's generally pretty quiet. Anyways, around 11 AM a girl walked in with her laptop bag and stuff, she ordered her drink and sat down then started working on whatever it was that she was working on, she was pretty nice but thats not the point

"the issue here is that when i was going to serve her drink, Taesan told me to take some cheesecake for her and tell her it was on the house as a welcome gift for her first time here. I didnt know we were doing one of those so it was news to me but i didn't question it.

"HOWEVER, later another girl came in and i had never seen her before so as i was taking a slice of free cheesecake out for her Taesan stopped me and said he changed his mind? so no more free cheesecake for new people? idk man. my guess is that he thought the other girl was cute. ig we'll just have to wait and see, anyways my break is ending so ill finish this at night when im home"

a/n: pls tell me yall got the chenle reference w the "whats rent when ur rich"

and special thank you to @taesancore for reading it for me before i posted to help me figure stuff out.

taglist (open): @seungzzzz @thvvcut @ywnzn @livelaughlovetaesan @lovelyannoyingcher @blurryriki @xyxlyn @lovandr @lcvehee @sobun1est @roxasrana @loyalsunwoo @luv-y0urself @rosesfortaro @nujeskz @ryunjin0 @milkmilkmalk

bold couldn't be tagged 😔

[milesluna]

My Favorite Games of 2023.

Hi. Hello. Thanks ever so much for clicking on this page. Happy to have you.

First thing's first: I'm a little freak when it comes to video games. I don't feel the need to beat most games I play. From Software is one of my favorite studios in the industry and I've never finished a single one of their games. This means, fortunately, that I get to play a LOT more games than the average bear.

I've written up some blurbs about my top ten favorite games from 2023, but before that here's the list of every game I remember playing this year that left any sort of lasting impact on me (in no particular order):

Dead Space Remake Resident Evil 4 Remake F-Zero 99 Humanity Dredge Metroid Prime Remastered Anemoiaplois Alan Wake 2 Baldur’s Gate 3 LoZ Tears of the Kingdom Counter Strike 2 Hunt Showdown El Paso Elsewhere Jusant Slay the Princess| Remnant II The Finals Street FIghter 6 Lethal Company BattleBit Remastered Don’t Scream Homebody The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog Pizza Tower World of Horror Super Mario Wonder Mr. Sun’s Hatbox Fifa 23 Sea of Stars (Demo) Half-Life (25th Anniversary Update)

And the games I played that were NOT released in 2023:

Unpacking Persona 4 Golden Picross 7 The Order 1886 Shovel Knight Dig Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Spider-Man: Miles Morales Pac-Man Championship Edition DX Project Zomboid Quake LoZ The Minish Cap Drill Dozer Wario Land 4 Pokemon Pinball Resident Evil Revelations Summer of ‘58 Trackmania TwinCop We Were Here Visage Cursed Halo CE Half-Life 2 (I probably play this once per year) Witch Hunt Red Dead Redemption 2 Cyberpunk 2077 Borderlands 3 Brutal Legend Cultic Slay the Spire PUBG Rez Infinite Batman Arkham City Alan Wake Alan Wake: American Nightmare Max Payne LoZ: Majora’s Mask 3DS Metroid Prime Metroid Prime 2 Tunic Everhood Final Fantasy VII Final Fantasy VII Remake GOODBYE WORLD Yakuza: Like a Dragon Critters for Sale Dome Keeper Phasmophobia Hades Nintendo Switch Sports

Now that you understand the kind of freak you're dealing with…

Let's dive into my top ten favorite games from this objectively fucked up year.

10. El Paso Elsewhere Developed by Texas indie studio Strange Scaffold, El Paso Elsewhere is a Max Payne-clone with vampires, an opinionated narrator, and lots and lots of bullet time. As a small studio punching well above their weight class, Strange Scaffold leans into abstract, PlayStation 1 minimalism when it comes to visuals and pairs them with a soundtrack that will make your hands sweat. The vibes are here and they're ready for the end of the world. I'm personally also a big fan of everything this studio stands for.

9. Mr. Sun's Hatbox I want you to imagine Metal Gear Solid V. Now I want you to imagine that game as a 2D, level-based, slapstick platformer you can play with up to three friends. If you think that sounds stupid, you'd be right. And it's beautiful. As you build up a secret army of soldiers with various skills (and disorders), you'll start to develop *favorites*. This game constantly asks if you're willing to send those favorites on a harrowing mission and risk losing them forever… or if you'd rather send an idiot you recently captured who blinks constantly and can't kill anyone without fainting.

8. Dredge Every year I feel like I find one game that falls into the “just one more round” category, and baby… Dredge was it for 2023. As a weary fisherman in strange waters, you'll make the most out of your 12 measly hours of sunlight only for your daily voyages to inevitably pull you into the darkness of night, and night is when things get weird. Rocks emerge from the fog that you swear weren't there before, your equipment malfunctions, and you're pretty sure you just saw something in the water… something big. Despite only containing a small collection of islands, the world of Dredge manages to feel vast - perhaps vast enough to swallow you whole.

7. Resident Evil 4 Remake I was curious to see what sort of changes would be made to the timeless classic and father of modern 3rd person shooters, Resident Evil 4. I wasn't let down. RE4 Remake takes all the things that didn't age well about the original, tossed them out, and replaced them with only good things. And MORE things! It's campy, fun, and better than a game of bingo.

6. Jusant I really feel like this one didn't get the recognition it deserves. Jusant is a rock climbing game that combines the quiet contemplation of Journey with the mechanical specificity of Death Stranding. Unlike Death Standing, though, there is very little story to interrupt your flow. There are plenty of collectible bits to find for those curious to learn more about what happened before the events of the game, but the environmental storytelling does most of the heavy lifting. For me, the joy of the game comes from how it feels. Right trigger controls your right hand grip, and left trigger controls left hand grip. Plan your route, manage your stamina, and climb high above the clouds in search of answers.

5. F-Zero 99 This. Shit. Slaps. I've never been a big F-Zero guy, but this MADE me one. The “battle royale”, 99 player format is the perfect fit for the ruthless, high octane world of the game. Races last about three minutes, and friend, they are the most intense, white-knuckled three minutes of your life. The decision to make your boost meter the same as your health meter started in F-Zero 64 (I believe), and it is so much more HARROWING in this game when another player could side-swipe you mere meters from the finish line and blow you to bits. Sadly it's only playable via Switch Online, but it made me cheer, laugh, and scream enough this year to earn a spot in my top 5.

4. Alan Wake 2 Remedy makes weird games that also manage to exist in the AAA space and for that I will forever love them. Although Alan Wake 2 resembles a 3rd person shooter survival horror, I'd honestly say it's more of a narrative game than anything else. There's sidequests, there's puzzles, there's upgradeable skills, but at the end of the day the characters, world, and story are what kept me playing. If you haven't checked them out recently, you should definitely watch a story recap of the original games before diving into this sequel, but the wild swings for the fences this game takes are well worth that small price of admission. There's a god damn musical number, for Christ's sake.

3. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom I've really got nothing to say about this game that most people don't already know. It's incredible. The fact that Nintendo made a game that redefined an entire genre and then made a SEQUEL to it that ups the ante is remarkable. To be honest, I've only cleared the Rito, Zora, and Goron cities. I got a bit tired of exploring the depths and guiding Koroks to their friends, but I can't deny the sheer level of complexity and polish on display here. I saw someone on TikTok build a functioning Mecha Godzilla in this game. Good God. I've heard that the ending of this game is one of the best in the franchise, and if I'd seen it this year then it may have wound up higher on my list, but for the time being I'll continue picking up this masterpiece from time to time, chipping away at it until the day comes that I can finally smack the tits off thicc Ganondorf.

2. Half-Life (25th Anniversary Update) I know I'm gonna get shit for this, but I don't care. This year was the 25th anniversary of Half-Life and Valve released an update that made playing it (and it's online Death Match) much more accessible. I threw it on my Steam Deck out of curiosity, expecting to play for 20 minutes. I could not put it down. It is unbelievable how modern this game still feels. I simply had so much fun sprinting through the corridors of Black Mesa with a dozen weapons strapped to my back, blasting aliens and military Spec-Op chumps as a 24(?!) year old theoretical physicist.

1. Baldur's Gate III This game is fucked up, man. The sheer amount of writing in this game scares me. We can all talk about how BIG this game is, it deserves it, but the thing BG3 does better than any other role playing game I have ever experienced is actually encourage roleplaying. I've played through Act I four times now, with four different groups of friends, and it has felt fresh every time. I have seen the same events play out in so many different ways that it boggles the mind, but in every one of those play sessions I see players asking themselves “What would my lil guy do here?” rather than "what is the best thing to do here?" The game rewards players constantly for just trying shit and the D&D 5e rule set means playing like the character you said you were from the start leads to frequent Points of Inspiration. Maybe one day I'll see the end of this story (probably not), but I don't have to in order to feel a connection with BG3's world, characters, and most impressively, the characters I made myself.

Honorable Mentions for 2023

5. Dave the Diver 4. Homebody 3. Sea of Stars 2. Humanity 1. Super Mario Wonder

Top 5 Favorites NOT from 2023

5. Metroid Prime 4. Final Fantasy VII Remake 3. Cursed Halo (Halo CE Mod) 2. Red Dead Redemption 2 1. Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (3DS)

Games I didn't have a chance to play from 2023 but still want to when I find more time...

Viewfinder Venba Chants of Sennaar Thirsty Suitors Hi-Fi Rush Moonring Armored Core VI Laika Aged Through Blood Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

OKAY THANKS BYE!

[phantomrose96]

I never understood the concept of "doing taxes". Taxes are just there and you just pay them, like everytime you buy something it includes a tax you have no other choice but to pay it, what do you have to do?? (I live outside the USA)

Oh fun! I get to explain U.S. taxes!!

(disclaimer: if you're a young adult in America who will have to learn to do taxes soon, please don't take this as a reason to panic. It IS absurd and it is kinda stressful the first time you do it, but you get a handle on it, and filing services like FreeTaxUSA walk you through it and do all the math parts for you. [Though learning the math parts yourself is kinda smart if you want to understand what you're doing.])

(other disclaimer: I might have some details wrong because I'm a random blogger and not an accountant. Accountants don't maul me please.)

So it's true that tax is included when you buy something, but the whole "doing taxes" in America is about income tax.

My experience is with a company that does withholdings (god bless all you freelance workers figuring it all out for yourselves.) Withholdings means my company will estimate how much tax I should owe and take it out of each paycheck to give to the government. So from a $1,000 paycheck, they might withhold $300 to pay taxes with, and gives you the remaining $700.

But that might NOT be right. So in April every American has to go crunch all the numbers and figure out if they paid the right amount :) (chances are the answer is no).

We get a form called a W-2 (god bless, I only have one W-2 because I work just one full time job) which includes *adjust glasses*: employer's name, your info, your federal ID number, your social security number (partially redacted), your total wages, your federal income tax withheld, your social security tax withheld, your medicare tax withheld, your deferrals with things like 401k contributions, tips, dependent care benefits, STATE income tax withheld (my state has a 5% income tax, on top of the federal income tax) AAAAAAND other boxes I won't even bother with.

You feed this into software (like turbotax, which CHARGES you to do this, but I used FreeTaxUSA which had free federal filing and almost-free state filing) - RIGHT, you file federal and state SEPARATELY. And you owe/receive SEPARATE amounts.

America has tax brackets, which means you owe x% of money you make between--actually, lemme get the fucking chart

fucking delightful.

So if you make $50,000, as a single filer, you owe 10% of the first $10,275, then you owe 12% of the next $31,500 (that's the amount between $10,275-$41,775, in the second row), then 22% of the remaining $8,225 (cough and then also state income tax if you have it cough). It's a little bit like filling up a thermometer, and the amount between each tick mark is what you owe x% of.

BUT WAIT. THERE'S DEDUCTIONS.

DEDUCTIONS are where most of the complexity comes from. Because there's like 1,000 random things that can give you a tax break. And there's also the standard deduction of $12,950.

What's the deduction? It's an amount of your income that qualifies as tax-exempt. So for the $50,000-earner, if they go with the standard deduction of $12,950, then only $37,050 of their income is taxable. So FORGET that calculation above, it's now 10% of the first $10,275, and 12% of the remaining $26,775

But if your itemized deduction is higher than your standard deduction, it's in your interest to calculate all your itemized deductions and use those, if they add up to more than $12,950

My itemized deductions were almost higher than the $12,950, between my state income tax contribution, property tax contribution, and mortgage interest payments. Other people might have a fuckton of other things--uh like dependents, business expenses, uh I'm not even sure since I skim past all the ones that don't apply to me.

OH, ALSO, THERE ARE OTHER FORMS YOU MIGHT HAVE TO PROVIDE BEYOND THE W-2. There are 1099-INT forms for interest made on bank accounts, 1099-DIV forms for money made from stock dividends, and others I don't even know about.

And all my knowledge and experiences comes as someone with relatively simple taxes by U.S. standards.

(The state taxes then have their own things and own deductions and whatever. They're usually kinda less complicated than federal, but they're a separate thing you have to file.)

And after you do all that, it figures out how much tax you SHOULD owe, how much you ACTUALLY paid, and tells you the difference that you owe/are owed.

I got back a decent amount of money in 2019 and 2020. 2021 was preeettty much even. 2022 I OWE a lot of money because, fuck it, I dunno.

[learnfromali]

How to Become a Billionaire in 10 Easy Steps (According to Ali)

Hey there, folks! Today, we're going to be talking about something that's near and dear to Ali's heart - making bank. That's right, Ali knows a thing or two about becoming a billionaire, and he's generously decided to share his secrets with all of us. So sit back, grab a notebook, and get ready to take some notes.

Step 1: Get a Loan

The first step to becoming a billionaire is to get a loan. Sure, it might seem counterintuitive, but trust Ali on this one. Borrow as much money as you can and invest it in something risky. If it pays off, you're already on your way to the top.

Step 2: Take Risks

Speaking of risks, that's another key ingredient in the billionaire recipe. You can't be afraid to take chances if you want to make it big. Whether it's investing in a new company or quitting your job to start your own business, you need to be willing to put it all on the line.

Step 3: Be a Hustler

If there's one thing Ali knows, it's how to hustle. You can't sit around waiting for opportunities to come to you - you need to go out and make them happen. Whether it's networking, pitching your ideas to investors, or cold-calling potential clients, you need to be willing to put in the work.

Step 4: Surround Yourself with Successful People

As the saying goes, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If you want to be a billionaire, you need to surround yourself with other successful people who can mentor you and help you grow.

Step 5: Learn from Your Failures

Failure is an inevitable part of the journey to becoming a billionaire. But the key is to learn from those failures and use them as opportunities to grow and improve.

Step 6: Stay Hungry

Once you achieve success, it can be tempting to rest on your laurels. But if you want to stay at the top, you need to stay hungry and keep pushing yourself to achieve more.

Step 7: Embrace Technology

In today's digital age, technology is key to success. Whether it's using social media to market your business or using cutting-edge software to streamline your operations, you need to stay up-to-date with the latest tech trends.

Step 8: Give Back

As Ali always says, "it's not about the money, it's about the impact." Giving back to your community and supporting causes that you care about is not only the right thing to do, but it can also help boost your brand and reputation.

Step 9: Stay Focused

With so many distractions and competing priorities in today's world, it can be easy to lose sight of your goals. But if you want to become a billionaire, you need to stay laser-focused on what you want to achieve.

Step 10: Never Give Up

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you should never give up on your dreams. Becoming a billionaire is a lofty goal, but with hard work, determination, and a little bit of luck, it's definitely achievable.

So there you have it, folks - Ali's 10-step guide to becoming a billionaire. Are you ready to take on the challenge? Let us know in the comments below!

[metaforth]

Fuck Linux.

Everytime I complain about a minor issue with Windows I get like 6000 tech bros falling over themselves to screech "JUST USE LINUX" at me. No. I won't use Linux. I have a full time job, medical issues I'm dealing with, friends I wanna hang out with, a game I'm starting work on slowly but surely, and hobbies that have nothing to do with software, and responsibilities as an adult who lives with other people on top of all of those things. And when you consider that combination of obligations and things I enjoy doing and want to do there's not much time for me spending 8 hours fighting with an operating system to make it run the EXEs for the emulators I like.

I don't have the time, will, nor desire to spend days upon days or possibly even weeks struggling through IT bullshit to make my computer do all the things I want to do. The windows computer I already have already works with at least 85% of those things right out of the box.

Sure, fuck Microsoft (though Valve is an awful company to buy LinuxBros get mad when you acknowledge that), and Windows has tons of issues of its own not including the outdated ones MACbros like Dankpods who's barely touched the operating system since Windows 7 think are still relevant (Yes I said something negative about Australian retro funnyman, cry about it.)

I am perfectly happy dealing with the annoying administrative permission issues, inexplicable performance drops doing something it handled perfectly fine yesterday, or apps not closing sometimes even when I go through task manager. Those and many other issues are all annoying but I'm accustomed to them.

My only direct experience with Linux in the last few years has been on my steam deck, and every problem I've had with the steam deck has come entirely from trying to download things through Desktop mode and having to deal with Linux. If there isn't a native Linux version of the program I want to run I have to jump through hoops after hoops doing research for hours as I try multiple methods, most of which fail and the rest seem promising then just won't successfully install for some inexplicable reason. Eventually like the 58th thing I try finally works and then I try and get something else working and that somehow BREAKS THE PREVIOUS THING!

All of which is compounded by this software having no native support for any of this so there's no official Linux support line I can reach out to for further assistance. I have to look up guides or forum posts and pray to the god I don't believe in that they're up to date which 9/10 times they aren't.

I'm glad you techbros enjoy spending 40 hours a week getting Linux to work for you, but I don't want every little thing I do on my computer to be a full time job. I have a lot of other shit going on in my life, including things I actually enjoy doing, and I don't have time. I'll stick with the operating system that works out the box.

[torrentinfotech]

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Delegating trust is really, really, really hard (infosec edition)

CORRECTION: A previous version of this thread reported that Trustcor has the same officers as Packet Forensics; they do not; they have the same officers as Measurement Systems. I regret the error.

I’ve got trust issues. We all do. Some infosec pros go so far as to say “trust no one,” a philosophy more formally known as “Zero Trust,” that holds that certain elements of your security should never be delegated to any third party.

The problem is, it’s trust all the way down. Say you maintain your own cryptographic keys on your own device. How do you know the software you use to store those keys is trustworthy? Well, maybe you audit the source-code and compile it yourself.

But how do you know your compiler is trustworthy? When Unix/C co-creator Ken Thompson received the Turing Prize, he either admitted or joked that he had hidden back doors in the compiler he’d written, which was used to compile all of the other compilers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/11/rene-descartes-was-a-drunken-fart/#trusting-trust

OK, say you whittle your own compiler out of a whole log that you felled yourself in an old growth forest that no human had set foot in for a thousand years. How about your hardware? Back in 2018, Bloomberg published a blockbuster story claiming that the server infrastructure of the biggest cloud companies had been compromised with tiny hardware interception devices:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

The authors claimed to have verified their story in every conceivable way. The companies whose servers were said to have been compromised rejected the entire story. Four years later, we still don’t know who was right.

How do we trust the Bloomberg reporters? How do we trust Apple? If we ask a regulator to investigate their claims, how do we trust the regulator? Hell, how do we trust our senses? And even if we trust our senses, how do we trust our reason? I had a lurid, bizarre nightmare last night where the most surreal events seemed perfectly reasonable (tldr: I was mugged by invisible monsters while trying to order a paloma at the DNA Lounge, who stole my phone and then a bicycle I had rented from the bartender).

If you can’t trust your senses, your reason, the authorities, your hardware, your software, your compiler, or third-party service-providers, well, shit, that’s pretty frightening, isn’t it (paging R. Descartes to a white courtesy phone)?

There’s a joke about physicists, that all of their reasoning begins with something they know isn’t true: “Assume a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density on a frictionless surface…” The world of information security has a lot of these assumptions, and they get us into trouble.

Take internet data privacy and integrity — that is, ensuring that when you send some data to someone else, the data arrives unchanged and no one except that person can read that data. In the earliest days of the internet, we operated on the assumption that the major threat here was technical: our routers and wires might corrupt or lose the data on the way.

The solution was the ingenious system of packet-switching error-correction, a complex system that allowed the sender to verify that the recipient had gotten all the parts of their transmission and resend the parts that disappeared en route.

This took care of integrity, but not privacy. We mostly just pretended that sysadmins, sysops, network engineers, and other people who could peek at our data “on the wire” wouldn’t, even though we knew that, at least some of the time, this was going on. The fact that the people who provided communications infrastructure had a sense of duty and mission didn’t mean they wouldn’t spy on us — sometimes, that was why they peeked, just to be sure that we weren’t planning to mess up “their” network.

The internet always carried “sensitive” information — love letters, private discussions of health issues, political plans — but it wasn’t until investors set their sights on commerce that the issue of data privacy came to the fore. The rise of online financial transactions goosed the fringe world of cryptography into the mainstream of internet development.

This gave rise to an epic, three-sided battle, between civil libertarians, spies, and business-people. For years, the civil liberties people had battled the spy agencies over “strong encryption” (more properly called “working encryption” or just “encryption”).

The spy agencies insisted that civilization would collapse if they couldn’t wiretap any and every message traversing the internet, and maintained that they would neither abuse this facility, nor would they screw up and let someone else do so (“trust us,” they said).

The business world wanted to be able to secure their customers’ data, at least to the extent that an insurer would bail them out if they leaked it; and they wanted to actually secure their own data from rivals and insider threats.

Businesses lacked the technological sophistication to evaluate the spy agencies’ claims that there was such a thing as encryption that would keep their data secure from “bad guys” but would fail completely whenever a “good guy” wanted to peek at it.

In a bid to educate them on this score, EFF co-founder John Gilmore built a $250,000 computer that could break the (already broken) cryptography the NSA and other spy agencies claimed businesses could rely on, in just a couple hours. The message of this DES Cracker was that anyone with $250,000 will be able to break into the communications of any American business:

https://cryptome.org/jya/des-cracker.htm

Fun fact: John got tired of the bar-fridge-sized DES Cracker cluttering up his garage and he sent it to my house for safekeeping; it’s in my office next to my desk in LA. If I ever move to the UK, I’ll have to leave it behind because it’s (probably) still illegal to export.

The deadlock might have never been broken but for a key lawsuit: Cindy Cohn (now EFF’s executive director) won the Bernstein case, which established that publishing cryptographic source-code was protected by the First Amendment:

https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice

With cryptography legalized, browser vendors set about securing the data-layer in earnest, expanding and formalizing the “public key infrastructure” (PKI) in browsers. Here’s how that works: your browser ships with a list of cryptographic keys from trusted “certificate authorities.” These are entities that are trusted to issue “certificates” to web-hosts, which are used to wrap up their messages to you.

When you open a connection to “https://foo.com," Foo sends you a stream of data that is encrypted with a key identified as belonging to “foo.com” (this key is Foo’s “certificate” — it certifies that the user of this key is Foo, Inc). That certificate is, in turn, signed by a “Certificate Authority.”

Any Certificate Authority can sign any certificate — your browser ships with a long list of these CAs, and if any one of them certifies that the bearer is “Foo.com,” that server can send your browser “secure” traffic and it will dutifully display the data with all assurances that it arrived from one of Foo, Inc’s servers.

This means that you are trusting all of the Certificate Authorities that come with your browser, and you’re also trusting the company that made your browser to choose good Certificate Authorities. This is a lot of trust. If any of those CAs betrays your trust and issues a bad cert, it can be used to reveal, copy, and alter the data you send and receive from a server that presents that certificate.

You’d hope that certificate authorities would be very prudent, cautious and transparent — and that browser vendors would go to great lengths to verify that they were. There are PKI models for this: for example, the “DNS root keys” that control the internet’s domain-name service are updated via a formal, livestreamed ceremony:

https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/dnssec/root-signing-ceremony/

There are 14 people entrusted to perform this ceremony, and at least three must be present at each performance. The keys are stored at two facilities, and the attendees need to show government ID to enter them (is the government that issued the ID trustworthy? Do you trust the guards to verify it? Ugh, my head hurts).

Further access to the facility is controlled by biometric locks (do you trust the lock maker? How about the person who registers the permitted handprints?). Everyone puts a wet signature in a logbook. A staffer has their retina scanned and presents a smartcard.

Then the staffer opens a safe that has a “tamper proof” (read: “tamper resistant”) hardware module whose manufacturer is trusted (why?) not to have made mistakes or inserted a back-door. A special laptop (also trusted) is needed to activate the safe’s hardware module. The laptop “has no battery, hard disk, or even a clock backup battery, and thus can’t store state once it’s unplugged.” Or, at least, the people in charge of it claim that it doesn’t and can’t.

The ceremony continues: the safe yields a USB stick and a DVD. Each of the trusted officials hands over a smart card that they trust and keep in a safe deposit box in a tamper-evident bag. The special laptop is booted from the trusted DVD and mounts the trusted USB stick. The trusted cards are used to sign three months worth of keys, and these are the basis for the next quarter’s worth of secure DNS queries.

All of this is published, videoed, livestreamed, etc. It’s a real “defense in depth” situation where you’d need a very big conspiracy to subvert all the parts of the system that need to work in order to steal underlying secrets. Yes, bottom line, you’re still trusting people, but in part you’re trusting them not to be able to all keep a secret from the rest of us.

The process for determining which CAs are trusted by your browser is a lot less transparent and, judging from experience, a lot less thorough. Many of these CAs have proven to be manifestly untrustworthy over the years. There was Diginotar, a Dutch CA whose bad security practices left it vulnerable to a hack-attack:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar

Some people say it was Iranian government hackers, who used its signing keys to forge certificates and spy on Iranian dissidents, who are liable to arrest, torture and execution. Other people say it was the NSA pretending to be Iranian government hackers:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/new_nsa_leak_sh.html

In 2015, the China Internet Network Information Center was used to issue fake Google certificates, which gave hackers the power to intercept and take over Google accounts and devices linked to them (e.g. Android devices):

https://thenextweb.com/news/google-to-drop-chinas-cnnic-root-certificate-authority-after-trust-breach

In 2019, the UAE cyber-arms dealer Darkmatter — an aggressive recruiter of American ex-spies — applied to become a trusted Certificate Authority, but was denied:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spying-raven/

Browser PKI is very brittle. By design, any of the trusted CAs can compromise every site on the internet. An early attempt to address this was “certificate pinning,” whereby browsers shipped with a database of which CAs were authorized to issue certificates for major internet companies. That meant that even though your browser trusted Crazy Joe’s Discount House of Certification to issue certs for any site online, it also knew that Google didn’t use Crazy Joe, and any google.com certs that Crazy Joe issued would be rejected.

But pinning has a scale problem: there are billions of websites and many of them change CAs from time to time, which means that every browser now needs a massive database of CA-site pin-pairs, and a means to trust the updates that site owners submit to browsers with new information about which CAs can issue their certificates.

Pinning was a stopgap. It was succeeded by a radically different approach: surveillance, not prevention. That surveillance tool is Certificate Transparency (CT), a system designed to quickly and publicly catch untrustworthy CAs that issue bad certificates:

https://www.nature.com/articles/491325a

Here’s how Certificate Transparency works: every time your browser receives a certificate, it makes and signs a tiny fingerprint of that certificate, recording the date, time, and issuing CA, as well as proof that the CA signed the certificate with its private key. Every few minutes, your browser packages up all these little fingerprints and fires them off to one or more of about a dozen public logs:

https://certificate.transparency.dev/logs/

These logs use a cool cryptographic technology called Merkle trees that make them tamper-evident: that means that if some alters the log (say, to remove or forge evidence of a bad cert), everyone who’s got a copy of any of the log’s previous entries can tell that the alteration took place.

Merkle Trees are super efficient. A modest server can easily host the eight billion or so CT records that exist to date. Anyone can monitor any of these public logs, checking to see whether a CA they don’t recognize has issued a certificate for their own domain, and then prove that the CA has betrayed its mission.

CT works. It’s how we learned that Symantec engaged in incredibly reckless behavior: as part of their test-suite for verifying a new certificate-issuing server, they would issue fake Google certificates. These were supposed to be destroyed after creation, but at least one leaked and showed up in the CT log:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/google-takes-symantec-to-the-woodshed-for-mis-issuing-30000-https-certs/

It wasn’t just Google — Symantec had issued tens of thousands of bad certs. Worse: Symantec was responsible for more than a third of the web’s certificates. We had operated on the blithe assumption that Symantec was a trustworthy entity — a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density — but on inspection it was proved to be a sloppy, reckless mess.

After the Symantec scandal, browser vendors cleaned house — they ditched Symantec from browsers’ roots of trust. A lot of us assumed that this scandal would also trigger a re-evaluation of how CAs demonstrated that they were worth of inclusion in a browser’s default list of trusted entities.

If that happened, it wasn’t enough.

Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Joseph Menn published an in-depth investigation into Trustcor, a certificate authority that is trusted by default by Safari, Chrome and Firefox:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/08/trustcor-internet-addresses-government-connections/

Menn’s report is alarming. Working from reports from University of Calgary privacy researcher Joel Reardon and UC Berkeley security researcher Serge Egelman, Menn presented a laundry list of profoundly disturbing problems with Trustcor:

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-policy/c/oxX69KFvsm4/m/etbBho-VBQAJ

First, there’s an apparent connection to Packet Forensics, a high-tech arms dealer that sells surveillance equipment to the US government. One of Trustcor’s partners is a holding company managed by Packet Forensics spokesman Raymond Saulino.

If Trustcor is working with (or part of) Packet Forensics, it could issue fake certificates for any internet site that Packet Forensics could use to capture, read and modify traffic between that site and any browser. One of Menn’s sources claimed that Packet Forensics “used TrustCor’s certificate process and its email service, MsgSafe, to intercept communications and help the U.S. government.”

Trustcor denies this, as did the general counsel for Packet Forensics.

Should we trust either of them? It’s hard to understand why we would. Take Trustcor: as mentioned, it has a “private” email service called “Msgsafe,” that claims to offer end-to-end encrypted email. But it is not encrypted end-to-end — it sends copies of its users’ private keys to Trustcor, allowing the company (or anyone who hacks the company) to intercept its email.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Trustcor is making an intentionally deceptive statement about how its security products work, or it lacks the basic technical capacity to understand how those products should work. You’d hope that either of those would disqualify Trustcor from being trusted by default by billions of browsers.

It’s worse than that, though: there are so many red flags about Trustcor beyond the defects in Msgsafe. Menn found that that company’s website identified two named personnel, both supposed founders. One of those men was dead. The other one’s Linkedin profile has him departing the company in 2019.

The company lists two phone numbers. One is out of service. The other goes to unmonitored voicemail. The company’s address is a UPS Store in Toronto. Trustcor’s security audits are performed by the “Princeton Audit Group” whose address is a private residence in Princeton, NJ.

A company spokesperson named Rachel McPherson publicly responded to Menn’s article and Reardon and Egelman’s report with a bizarre, rambling message:

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-policy/c/oxX69KFvsm4/m/X_6OFLGfBQAJ

In it, McPherson insinuates that Reardon and Egelman are just trying to drum up business for a small security research business they run called Appsecure. She says that Msgsafe’s defects aren’t germane to Trustcor’s Certificate Authority business, instead exhorting the researchers to make “positive suggestions for improving that product suite.”

As to the company’s registration, she makes a difficult-to-follow claim that the irregularities are due to using the same Panamanian law-firm as Packet Forensics, says that she needs to investigate some missing paperwork, and makes vague claims about “insurance impersonation” and “potential for foul play.”

Certificate Authorities have one job: to be very, very, very careful. The parts of Menn’s story and Reardon and Egelman’s report that aren’t disputed are, to my mind, enough to disqualify them from inclusion in browsers’ root of trust.

But the disputed parts — which I personally believe, based on my trust in Menn, which comes from his decades of careful and excellent reporting — are even worse.

For example, Menn makes an excellent case that Packet Forensics is not credible. In 2007, a company called Vostrom Holdings applied for permission for Packet Forensics to do business in Virginia as “Measurement Systems.” Measurement Systems, in turn, tricked app vendors into bundling spyware into their apps, which gathered location data that Measurement Systems sold to private and government customers. Measurement Systems’ data included the identities of 10,000,000 users of Muslim prayer apps.

Packet Forensics denies that it owns Measurement Systems, which doesn’t explain why Vostrom Holdings asked the state of Virginia to let it do business as Measurement Systems. Vostrom also owns the domain “Trustcor.co,” which directed to Trustcor’s main site. Trustcor’s “president, agents and holding-company partners” are identical to those of Measurement Systems.

One of the holding companies listed in both Trustcor and Measurement Systems’ ownership structures is Frigate Bay Holdings. This March, Raymond Saulino — the one-time Packet Forensics spokesman — filed papers in Wyoming identifying himself as manager of Frigate Bay Holdings.

Neither Menn nor Reardon and Egelman claim that Packet Forensics has obtained fake certificates from Trustcor to help its customers spy on their targets, something that McPherson stresses in her reply. However, Menn’s source claims that this is happening.

These companies are so opaque and obscure that it might be impossible to ever find out what’s really going on, and that’s the point. For the web to have privacy, the Certificate Authorities that hold the (literal) keys to that privacy must be totally transparent. We can’t assume that they are perfectly spherical cows of uniform density.

In a reply to Reardon and Egelman’s report, Mozilla’s Kathleen Wilson asked a series of excellent, probing followup questions for Trustcor, with the promise that if Trustcor failed to respond quickly and satisfactorily, it would be purged from Firefox’s root of trust:

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-policy/c/oxX69KFvsm4/m/WJXUELicBQAJ

Which is exactly what you’d hope a browser vendor would do when one of its default Certificate Authorities was credibly called into question. But that still leaves an important question: how did Trustcor, who marketed a defective security product, whose corporate ownership is irregular and opaque with a seeming connection to a cyber-arms-dealer, end up in our browsers’ root of trust to begin with?

Formally, the process for inclusion in the root of trust is quite good. It’s a two-year vetting process that includes an external audit:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Application_Process

But Daniel Schwalbe, CISO of Domain Tools, told Menn that this process was not closely watched, claiming “With enough money, you or I could become a trusted root certificate authority.” Menn’s unnamed Packet Forensics source claimed that most of the vetting process was self-certified — that is, would-be CAs merely had to promise they were doing the right thing.

Remember, Trustcor isn’t just in Firefox’s root of trust — it’s in the roots of trust for Chrome (Google) and Safari (Apple). All the major browser vendors were supposed to investigate this company and none of them disqualified it, despite all the vivid red flags.

Worse, Reardon and Egelman say they notified all three companies about the problems with Trustcor seven months ago, but didn’t hear back until they published their findings publicly on Tuesday.

There are 169 root certificate authorities in Firefox, and comparable numbers in the other major browsers. It’s inconceivable that you could personally investigate each of these and determine whether you want to trust it. We rely on the big browser vendors to do that work for us. We start with: “Assume the browser vendors are careful and diligent when it comes to trusting companies on our behalf.” We assume that these messy, irregular companies are perfectly spherical cows of uniform density on a frictionless surface.

The problem of trust is everywhere. Vaccine deniers say they don’t trust the pharma companies not to kill them for money, and don’t trust the FDA to hold them to account. Unless you have a PhD in virology, cell biology and epidemiology, you can’t verify the claims of vaccine safety. Even if you have those qualifications, you’re trusting that the study data in journals isn’t forged.

I trust vaccines — I’ve been jabbed five times now — but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to doubt either Big Pharma or its regulators. A decade ago, my chronic pain specialist told me I should take regular doses of powerful opioids, and pooh-poohed my safety and addiction concerns. He told me that pharma companies like Purdue and regulators like the FDA had re-evaluated the safety of opioids and now deemed them far safer.

I “did my own research” and concluded that this was wrong. I concluded that the FDA had been captured by a monopolistic and rapacious pharma sector that was complicit in waves of mass-death that produced billions in profits for the Sackler family and other opioid crime-bosses.

I was an “opioid denier.” I was right. The failure of the pharma companies to act in good faith, and the failure of the regulator to hold them to account is a disaster that has consequences beyond the mountain of overdose deaths. There’s a direct line from that failure to vaccine denial, and another to the subsequent cruel denial of pain meds to people who desperately need them.

Today, learning that the CA-vetting process I’d blithely assumed was careful and sober-sided is so slapdash that a company without a working phone or a valid physical address could be trusted by billions of browsers, I feel like I did when I decided not to fill my opioid prescription.

I feel like I’m on the precipice of a great, epistemological void. I can’t “do my own research” for everything. I have to delegate my trust. But when the companies and institutions I rely on to be prudent (not infallible, mind, just prudent) fail this way, it makes me want to delete all the certificates in my browser.

Which would, of course, make the web wildly insecure.

Unless it’s already that insecure.

Ugh.

Image:

Curt Smith (modified)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sand_castle,_Cannon_Beach.jpg

CC BY 2.0:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: An animated gif of a sand-castle that is melting into the rising tide; through the course of the animation, the castle gradually fills up with a Matrix-style 'code waterfall' effect.]

[cult-of-the-eye]

False God

Statement of Saskia Rambeau regarding an unusual meeting. Original statement given 3rd December 2006. Committed to tape 29th March 2024. Audio recording by [REDACTED], Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, Manchester.

Statement begins.

Oh, uh. Should I just...start? Well, ok, well- I guess I've never quite been a lonely person. Alone maybe, but it's, I've never found it uncomfortable. I have a small flat, I'm busy with my job as a software engineer, I never exactly found it easy to make friends. That's just how life is. Was. I guess.

Anyway, you don't want a sob story about my life, sorry! I, uh, first noticed something strange a couple weeks ago. Just some rustling outside my flat, which I chalked up to a cat or something, probably chasing some rat in a bush. That was, until I remembered that I lived on the top floor. It would be sort of impossible for a cat to be rustling outside my window on the top floor. I didn't go to check what it was, I'm not an idiot. I know what happens to people who are curious. It was only on the fourth night of the noises, when I was so delirious from anxiety that I had gotten less than an hour's sleep within those four days, that I cracked. I wasn't sure what I would find, just that I wanted to make it stop.

You might sit there and think, it's just a rustling noise, it's probably the wind or some piece of litter getting jostled through a drain pipe, but you don't understand. When you spend all that time with just your thoughts for company, going from screen to screen to the dark walls of your bedroom, it does something to you. And usually that's fine. Comfortable, even. But when that predictability is disturbed, you start to do stupid things, like walk up to your window with a kitchen knife tucked under your sleeve.

I inched towards it, moved more by adrenaline than coherency. The night was clear, weird for a Manchester night, but I wasn't focused on that. There was just enough moonlight to illuminate my hand and the little jutting out piece of brick just outside my window. Now that I think about it, it seems almost...intentional. I gripped on to the handle, took a few short breaths and wrenched the window open with a small shriek. There was nothing. Of course there was nothing. Of course I had tormented myself over a silly little noise for days on end, for nothing.

And then I turned around.

You know how different religions have different images of their gods? How some have 5 hands, others 10? Some view it as heresy to even try to imagine their god? Some have wildly different interpretations even within one singular religion. Describing what materialised in my bedroom that night, would sort of be like if you asked me to describe god. If you asked me 3 days ago, I would've said it was a bright, pulsating light, softening and sharpening my vision in tune of the beating of my heart in my throat. That night, I would've said it was insectoid, feelers twitching towards me in a curious manner. Yesterday, I wouldn't have been able to begin to describe the events of that night. But today? Today, it seems more like a- a deer. The one you see at 2 am on a country road, that stops you in your tracks, headlights shimmering off the darkness of their eyes. It's nothing you've seen before and you know it's nothing you'll see again. The only thing I can say with absolute certainty is that it was beautiful.

I'll be honest with you. I'm not sleeping. I quit my job. The couple of people I would occasionally talk to haven't seen me in weeks. I spend my days staring out that window, into the glorious light of the day and darkness of the night. Nothing can shroud the Holy One. Don't you see, Archivist? I didn't have anything before and now I have someone to serve. My god is benevolent, it has granted me a new chance at life. I know my identity, where I belong, clearer than I ever have and I think it's time you saw it too.

It will be beautiful.

Statement ends. Did not love that ending. The original copy came with a sealed container of what seemed to be...dust? It says "Do Not Open" and I've never been one for defying authority. Any attempted follow ups to this case have obviously led to dead ends. 2 weeks in and I'm already starting to see a pattern here. I'm...gonna...go get some water.

[tippenfunkaport]

Inspired by a recent poll, could you tell us a bit more about the software you use for writing and the advantages with it?

Thanks so much!

Can I keep this short is the question...

So, for anyone who didn’t see the post this is referring to, I mentioned on another post that the writing software I use is...

4TheWords for drafting (brainstorming, first draft, etc)

Scrivener for all subsequent stages (editing, formatting, etc)

ProWritingAid for a final look before I submit / post

Longer version (and, like, I could talk about this all day so feel free to ask follow ups but I will try to contain myself)

4TheWords is a fantasy RPG-ish writing game where the words you write defeat monsters, earn loot, complete quests, etc. I have been playing it for five years ish and the game-ification just works really well for my brain. Earning silly little prizes and moving the game plot along keeps me motivated to keep writing when otherwise I would be a useless slug so I do most of my early stage writing on there like drafting, brainstorming, journaling, etc. It is silly but I love it and it basically saved my writing life when I was in a huge slump so they have my undying devotion. The company is also the kind you feel very good about supporting and they are HUGELY queer friendly with a big yearly Pride event with many of the main in-game characters being queer and/or trans. (The closest the game has to main characters are a lesbian couple that just got married as part of the Valentine's Day event last month!)

It costs money but a) there is a 30 day free trial of you want to check it out and b) there is a community pool if you cannot afford the fee as well as frequent sales/deals. (If anyone wants to try it out, feel free to use my referral code when you sign up because then you’ll get some extra crystals and I can send you a welcome present of some loot! If the image link above is annoying, dm me and I will give you it via text for copy and paste.)

Scrivener is very robust writing software that I use for fiction, non-fiction and scriptwriting. I only rarely use it for first drafts (bc I use 4TW for that) but I do almost all my editing / rewriting / formatting / publishing in it. I have been using it for probably about a decade and am still finding new tools and features I didn’t realize it had. I absolutely swear by it. The learning curve can be steep but luckily it’s one of the most popular writing programs in the world so there are a TON of great tutorials out there. (My advice? Just watch a video of something like the top 5-10 features and then play around and look up stuff as you have questions instead of trying to do the whole long tutorial it comes with.)

Disclaimer that I only own the desktop version. There are mobile versions that are a separate purchase from the desktop version but I don't use them.

Biggest selling points of Scrivener to me are:

while many writing services have a monthly fee, Scrivener is purchased exactly once and you can use it for life on your laptop and desktop AND you can get 50% off that one time price with a NaNoWriMo winner code (this alone is enough to buy my loyalty for life)

it’s incredibly versatile for both plotting and publishing and works really for my writing process (which is, admittedly, chaotic and weird) and has near infinite customization. It's esp great for making story bibles, organizing research, and plotting out larger works with lots of cross references and chapters you need to rearrange

as a script writer, Scrivener only cost me a one time fee of $35 and includes all updates and bug fixes until the next major version (which happens like once a decade). FinalDraft is $250 and that only includes the current version (which changes about once a year) to do the same thing. That’s a no brainer to me.

ProWritingAid is editing software. Like Grammarly but MUCH more robust with a lot more reports you can run. It’s not replacement for a human editor (AI editing can only do so much) but I like it as a second pair of eyes before I post or submit something because it does catch a lot of the basics and makes me feel a little better about sending something out. There is a limited free version and the full version can be pricey if you pay the monthly fee but I bided my time until the lifetime subscription went on sale for 50% off and paid once and now I have it to use for life.

There. That was almost short, right?

[detailtilted]

Hi there! I've belatedly seen your question about coloring, and I'm someone who likes to tweak color, so in case it helps, I thought I'd write up some things I might do. I don't know if you have the same tools I have, but I saw you use Color Balance, so I've used that for an example below. I usually start by adjusting lighting levels so that the lightest and darkest points are where I hope them to end up. Then I'd adjust color hues which in your case was using the Color Balance tool. I might also adjust the saturation or vibrance because too much can cause colors to get extreme quickly. Here are some quick settings I did in Photoshop.

Levels: dark point=19, mid point=1.37, light point=249, output levels=18 to 255

Color Balance: shadows red+13, green+5, blue-4; midtones red-8, green-9, blue+3; highlights red-60, green-28, blue-25

Saturation: reds-8, master-4

Here's the result:

I know it can be hard to translate setting between different apps, so I wonder if this will be helpful at all, but feel free to ask me questions if you're so inclined 😊

~ Dani

WOW, your results are incredible! Thank you so much for taking the time to play with this and to offer some tips! Adjusting lighting before trying to adjust colors hadn't occurred to me at all.

I'm using Adobe Premiere for the video editing, so same software company at least, but I couldn't find any lighting level settings like what you described. Through Googling, it looks like a setting called "Lumetri Color" is typically used for lighting corrections and it's broken out differently.

I have to go to work pretty soon, so I haven't had sufficient time to really dig into it and play with it, but I did mess around with it a tiny bit. I'll play more this weekend and see if I can get closer to what you were able to accomplish.

For reference, my original adjusted version (which I can see now looks soooo horribly orangey compared to yours!):

As a starting point, I just clicked the friendly "Auto" button on the Lumetri Color tab to see what it would do. A little better, still pretty orangey.

Then I tried to make some of the color adjustments that worked for you. It looked like your adjustments had been based on my adjusted version, so I'm not sure if my attempt at making it a direct mathematical adjustment was the right way to go, but I tried to add your adjustment #'s on top of my adjustments. So for example, I'd had Shadow Red set to -10 and since you said you added 13, I changed it to 3. When I changed all 9 settings it didn't improve too much, definitely nothing like yours:

But while applying those changes, I noticed that before I applied the last two (highlight green and blue), it looked closer to what you had. Still not there yet, but closer.

Once I have time, I'll play with some of the Lumetri sliders and stuff a bit more. It may also help just to have your beautiful image as a reference point. Thanks so much!

Addendum: Additional Efforts

I spent some more time playing with this. I present two versions for your judgment.

The first version isn't exactly like yours, but it looked pretty close to my eyes. So I was happy for a minute or two. Then when I started watching the video instead of just staring at the still frame, I felt like it looked a little too green. Maybe that's because I've spent so many hours staring at my previous orangey version that my idea of what looks normal is skewed.

So in version two I adjusted the Tint setting. I feel like this looks a little better, especially when I watch the video, but I don't trust my judgment at all. My color judgment was bad before, and now I think my eyes are permanently warped from staring at different shades for so long.

I'm including both versions below. For each version I'm including a side-by-side comparison with your example vs mine. I wanted to include a video clip for both, but it looks like tumblr limits it to 1 video, so I only included the video for version 2.

Please don't be afraid to tell me they both look horrible! I feel sort of like the proverbial monkey hitting a bunch of random keys and hoping I might hit upon Shakespeare by pure random chance. 😅

Version 1

Version 2

[mariacallous]

Sixteen years ago, software developer Jeremy Vaught created the Twitter handle @music to curate news and share stories about, obviously, music. Tens of thousands of Tweets later, he’d built a following of more than 11 million. Then, last week, Twitter—now rebranded as X—took the handle off him. An email from X, which Vaught posted to the platform, offered him no explanation but told him he could choose one of three other handles: @music123, @musicmusic, or @musiclover. All three were held by other users and so would presumably have to have been taken off them. 

“It feels like this would be this forever thing where somebody's got their account taken and they were allowed to go take another one,” Vaught says. "Where would we end up? That'd be crazy."

He has since been assigned @musicfan.

The confiscation is entirely within X’s terms of service. As the company tries to turn itself into an everything app, from music to video to finance, it’s likely it will need to stake a claim to handles related to its new business lines. But unilaterally taking a popular handle off a user could be bad business and another demonstration of how X under Musk is stripping away the things that made Twitter, Twitter.

“I definitely think that it gives pause to building any sort of a brand on there,” Vaught says. "When you can't have any confidence that what you're working on is not just going to be taken away, that's huge."

The platform’s success was built on people, like Vaught, doing the work to build followings and create organic communities around shared interests. Heavy-handed land grabs on top of surging hate speech, shifting policies on verification, and, of course, the dropping of a globally recognized brand in favor of a letter, reinforce the feeling that Twitter is more and more becoming a place catering to a usership of one: Musk himself.

“It seems to me that he wants it to turn into a fanboy platform where people just go agree with him no matter what he says,” says Tim Fullerton, CEO of Fullerton Strategies and former VP of content marketing at WeWork. “There has been just this ongoing attack on the Twitter users that have made Twitter what it is. He doesn't respect the user base.”

Before purchasing Twitter, Musk was a super user of the platform, having tweeted some 19,000 times to an audience that now stands at 152 million. This meant that his experience on the app was likely radically different than that of most users—the average Twitter user has 707 followers, and many have no followers at all. On pre-Musk Twitter, about 80 percent of tweets came from just 10 percent of Twitter’s users.

Verification helped average users figure out who was worth following. Twitter invented the blue check mark (which now exists on other platforms like Instagram and TikTok to indicate a verified user) after the manager for the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team threatened to sue the platform over a parody account. From then onward, it was used to indicate the authentic accounts of public figures such as celebrities, journalists, and politicians, as well as brands or particularly large accounts (like @music).

Verified accounts “were the people who were producing the majority of the content that was driving more people to stay engaged and increasing the number of people who were using Twitter,” says Fullerton.

But to an influencer like Musk, a blue check was a valuable commodity. Who wouldn’t want to pay for it? So in December he launched Twitter Blue as a pay-to-play “verification” program, replacing the previous merit-based system.

It was, Fullerton says, the first step in its erosion of the communities that made it so popular.

According to a report from Similarweb, only 116,000 people signed up for the $8-a-month service in March. Less than 5 percent of the platform’s 300,000 legacy verified accounts have signed on to keep their blue ticks. Of the 444,435 users who signed up for Twitter Blue in its first month, about half have less than 1,000 followers, according to reporting from Mashable.

And for most users, removing verification has done away with a key visual shorthand that allows users to easily discern if the account or information they’re looking at is real. Firing most of the company’s trust and safety staff, the people who made and enforced the company’s policies around hate speech and misinformation, exacerbated the problem and made the platform increasingly unusable as a real-time source of information and news.

This week, Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC, became the latest large news organization to say it was leaving the platform over its “toxicity.”

For advertisers—still the largest source of X’s revenue—the growth of hate speech and misinformation is a major problem. In the first six months of Musk’s ownership, Twitter lost half of its advertising revenue.

Before, verified accounts and organizations were vetted by Twitter staff for authenticity and legitimacy. These accounts could drive conversation about certain topics, even without getting paid. The communities and engagement that they drove was part of what made Twitter attractive to advertisers.

“It's clear [formerly verified users] are not getting the traffic that they once did, because it's just a jumble and that's not what people want to see. They want to see the news. They want to see political people or sports,” says Fullerton. “When the Grammys or the Golden Globes or something like that happens, you're littering the feed with the RFK Jr.’s and all these awful right-wingers who used to be—rightly—banned.”

Musk has tried to entice influencers with a revenue-sharing program, which requires that users be verified to access. But, as Benedict Evans, an analyst and former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, pointed out in a tweet, confiscating the @music handle illustrated “essentially why no creator in their right minds would invest in Twitter’s monetization products.”

Research from Media Matters for America, a nonprofit watchdog group, found that the revenue-sharing program was cutting checks to right-wing conspiracy theorists. One user identified by MMA, Dom Lucre, regularly pushes QAnon conspiracy theories.

In December, shortly after taking over the platform, Musk announced that he would offer amnesty to accounts that had been previously banned from the platform, including right-wing influencers and Andrew Tate, who has been indicted for human trafficking. While these users may not be the ideal community for legacy users of Twitter, Bill Bergman, a lecturer in marketing at the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond, suggests that perhaps Twitter’s current users are not the ones Musk is seeking to retain or draw in. “I get the impression Musk, with the direction it's going, doesn’t care what Bill Bergman, who has 400 followers, thinks, because Twitter as Bill Bergman knows it doesn’t exist anymore.” But what is coming next (except perhaps an ill-fated super-app) seems unclear.

And while his antics may have hurt Twitter’s brand, Bergman notes that the company is getting consistent if somewhat outsize coverage, a “pretty good” promotional strategy.

“Has he intimidated and upset all of the advertisers? Absolutely. Has he intimidated and upset all of our users that have been with this platform for 20 years? Absolutely,” says Bergman. “But he doesn’t seem to care about that.”