They threaten the UK, France, Germany, etc for their internal audience, not the external one. To a middle class Russian (the target audience), those are “the west”, great empires, powerful players in the great game of geopolitics. It’s an empty affirmation to Russian citizens that they’re still at the big boy table. It would look bad internally threatening “weak Poland” without following through.

That doesn’t change or connect at all with the actual danger of an invasion. Before the full-scale war with Ukraine, Russia was “trying to negotiate between Ukraine and separatists”, they weren’t saber rattling. They quietly put their troops on the border for a “training exercise”, denied they were preparing for an invasion despite the British screaming from the rooftops, and then went in.

Specifically about Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia: yes, they’re in more danger than Poland, but an attack on them would pull Poland in. Poland sees an attack on them to be fundamentally the same as an attack on Poland.

Some of the first people to go in Nazi Germany were the Jewish German WW1 veterans. When a population is purportedly ‘weak’ and ‘incapable’, perhaps even ‘poisoning the nation’, the absolute worst thing you can have are patriotic members of that minority as living counterexamples.

That’s why for the fascist, they must go quickly and quietly so as to not undermine the message.

Today I also saw Biden raising prices in my local store. This is especially impressive considering I don’t live in the US. He got confronted by the manager about it, so he hissed and hunched his back over, then transformed into a puddle and escaped down a drain.

Not an hour later I saw him stealing candy from a baby and kicking a puppy off a cliff. This was unusual because I live in a very flat part of my country, but I know what I saw.

Just out of interest, what do you make of this situation in my country? Roma people make up less than 5% of the population of the country. They are heavily discriminated against. The majority of the population are racist against them. By your logic, we should ignore and maybe even embrace the racism to steer the conversation back to economic issues?

From your comment history, it looks like you’re an American leftist. Maybe don’t throw rocks at allies? You’re going to need all the help you can get with your current government structure.

That would rely on the contact of that user using the admin’s public key. In most systems I’ve seen that’d result in a big flashing warning that the user’s key has been changed. So, dangerous for people contacting you for the first time, much more obvious if the 2 users have been talking before that point.

Other people have raised the much more interesting and potentially dangerous point that it’s very difficult in this context to make sure that a particular public key corresponds with a particular user. I’m way more used to sysadmin style issues where you have a small number of known keypairs, while in this context it’s a large number of mostly unknown keypairs, so you need some way of confirming that. I’m starting to understand why this is a much thornier issue than it appears on the surface.

How much do you know about cryptography?

I’d describe myself as a relatively knowledgeable layman. Essentially I know enough to use it effectively in a sysadmin/dbadmin capacity, but not got a good grasp of the underlying math.

This was my earliest blog post on the topic, if you want a place to start.

Thank you, I’ll take you up on that.

As long as the admin doesn’t possess the private key, that solution still prevents the latter issue. If the admin swaps out your public key for one they control, they could technically impersonate you and read messages after the swap, but not read any messages from before. The user would be unable to use E2EE as soon as the key is swapped, so the only real issue here is impersonation.

An admin could theoretically take over a user’s account today, so there’s not really a new vulnerability here. And with E2EE, there’d be a big clue about something funky happening with the public key changing.

EDIT: Oh.

These aren’t encapsulation keys (a.k.a., asymmetric or “public key encryption” keys). Encapsulation keys belong to the MLS KeyPackages, which are NOT planned to ever be logged in a key transparency system. The KeyPackages will be signed by the keypair whose public component is stored, however.

That seems… strange? Not sure why that approach was chosen.

Or, far more likely, installed some devious listening device somewhere that records and occasionally phones home.

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Oh, ok. Sorry, I’ll stop reading the future ones then, didn’t realize all the slots were taken.

Gonna echo what others have said here from my general programming experience: you need to start WAY smaller. Build, for example, a top-down sprite art single-player extraction shooter. Once you’ve gotten the hang of the general problems with real-time gameplay, then move on to the next project.

I don’t think you’re wrong in starting with a particular focus and expanding the scope as you gain experience, but you’ve set your starting point aggressively too high.

What profits? AI companies are burning through money like crazy.

I am not quite in that demographic but getting pretty close. I’ve bought maybe a game a year for a very long time now. Most non-indie stuff is complete and utter trash. If I see a AAA publisher logo, I take it as a sign that it’s not worth my time or money.

If you’re an EU citizen, just paying taxes does a lot.

Even without the ratcheting, assuming the percentages are well calibrated, it works on everyone equally no matter your financial situation. A wealthy person paying tens or hundreds of thousands of euros for going 5km/h over the speed limit learns the lesson very quickly.

In some countries, the fine is not defined as a definite amount, but as a percentage of yearly income. In Finland, a mild speeding ticket is half your daily income. That means for Musk, if he was caught speeding there, would have to pay ~38,000,000 EUR as a mild slap on the wrist.

Thanks to previous abuse of the war powers act (unironic thanks Obama), they can kinda do whatever in that front mostly legally. A previously used tactic they can borrow is just to claim the same force is now part of a coalition force, so now it’s not a US war.

The whole thing is an exploration of one concept: temporal pincer maneuvers. The entire movie is one, and you have 3 more during the movie (car chase, Freeport, Stalsk).

I fully agree with your goals (last paragraph). Literally all I was disagreeing with was the finality of it, that your country is permanently wrecked. It is currently wrecked, but nothing is fully permanent, and with enough time (talking a decade at an absolute minimum, more likely multiple decades) and people commiting real effort, this is fixable.