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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • or fucking off the country

    … and then your descendants end up living in something like Louisiana …

    Sorry, associations with Murrica and Frenchies.

    Anyway, thinking you are different makes you learn the hard way that you are no different. I thought Russian state is too cowardly to actually invade a big enough country for a real war (Georgia just doesn’t count, they simply don’t have strategic depth, they barely would even if they somehow annexed East Pontic mountains and Artvin from Turkey, that is, Tao or Tayq, the latter is the Armenian name for this and I’d prefer it to be annexed by Armenia, but neither will likely happen, anyway, a separate republic would be better, it seems some people there are chill enough). Oops, got excited. Back to “too cowardly”, murdering and torturing those infinitely weaker than them - yes, bombing Chechnya - yes, betraying allies - 100% yes, but 2022-now was unexpected.

    Same with ISIS-like groups being now preferred to Iran and Shia militias for the west. If we kinda remember why the latter are supposed to be bad, that’s because they are threatening Israel and are a theocracy and against freedom and rule of law and all that. I mean, if HTS is about democracy then I’m an alien. If HTS is more democratic than IRI (which still has traces of being founded by both mojahed and left-liberal groups), then I’m a donkey. And in any case it kinda went unnoticed how groups formerly part of ISIS suddenly became better than Iran in western media. So the (military-wise associated) west supports groups clearly worse than their adversaries everywhere except Ukraine. And nobody questions that. I think the part about “free media in the free world” in western worldview should be revised too.

    While your average Russian still thinks their state is just dumb\incompetent\evil-but-cowardly, and your typical European still thinks EU and NATO and such are on the right side of history. While the Russian state has already grown that meat grinder mechanism it lacked in Russian public conscience (Chechnya was considered something both unintended and in the past), and the EU and NATO are quite clearly on the strong side of history, sometimes officially congratulating jihadists with massacring whole towns.

    OK, I went into politics, just - a nice joke, but tables may turn overnight and Americans may start giving out such advice.


  • That’s not what their roots are, that’s the branches that became prevalent in every one mentioned (Judaism least of all, but with the state of Israel existing there are attempts to make Jewish religion suck just as badly as others).

    Say, gnostic sects of Christianity and Judaism had this sometimes inverted, sometimes different from how you describe it. Natural world was considered wonderful, but bigger than our existence, in some, and the way to divine was to take off your mortal existence, like clothes, and embrace it in full. In Judaism it’s almost mainstream that natural sexuality is good and actually sacred when in marriage, and only outside of marriage is it bad, but not on the degree of murder or theft.

    I’m not very knowledgeable on Islam, but I think even Shia Islam is not so cruel on that part, though since Iran is Shia, I guess nobody will believe me. Alawis being massacred right now have a pretty tolerant to life religion, and Druze too, though they have that weird relationship with death similar to Latin American Catholics. Smaller branches like Nizari-Ismaili are very tolerant. It’s just that Islamic mainstream of today is barbaric genocidal Wahhabism or Salafism, and generally Sunni Islam is not nice.

    My point was - restrictive rules correlate somehow with strong organization, so such branches win the struggle for power.





  • Bad actors are sowing distrust by implying that Signal is not secure. Always remember that the powers that be don’t want the public to have encrypted comms and would love to ban private messaging apps altogether.

    Wrong logic, trying to guess what they are doing. I mean, if you were a god-level poker player, then maybe, but most people are not and god-level players lose too.

    and Signal is in fact a fed honeypot

    Being competitive and protected from network effects (decentralized, p2p, federation, one standard and many implementations, all that) can hurt being secure. The complexity of being both may not be practical.

    The point of Signal is academic level security. It has a clear model and is not doing anything to make it more complex.

    Which is why it is centralized, leading to suspicions and accusations of being a honeypot.

    The code is open-source though, and I’m hoping that individuals more learned than I would surely alert us if there were any backdoors/exploits…

    That’s a wrong hope in any case.




  • I think it’s intentional. Where you had to think to do something, you’d inevitably learn to think. Where you had to put soul and wisdom and aesthetic feeling into your work, you’d inevitably touch those things for other parts of your life.

    There are people higher in the society, who think lower castes shouldn’t have that and will be fine with knowledge and expertise just sufficient to do their jobs.

    They wouldn’t be so hellbent on this particular technology, if they didn’t see how relatively recent progress changed that curve of expertise for radio, electric engineering, all engineering, computer science, automobiles, home appliances, and what not. So they see this consistently works for 25+ years.

    So they work to deprive us of practice that allows to do more in all those directions. There’s a moat that could as well be an abyss between what we know and what we’d need to know to make relevant things. That moat wasn’t there 25 years ago. The path from a novice computer user to someone knowing all DOS interrupts and what DMA and IRQ are was less than the path from a novice computer user today to making a simple GUI application.

    (I’ve got executive dysfunction, so feel these things more, but I’m certain they are true.)