@op looking back, what was the specific cringe aspect of what you described in your story?
that you’d hope for this seemingly impossible outcome, of being a positive force in an established group with a clear bigoted direction?
or that you feel foolish for relapsing into believing religious topics again?
or something else?
may i ask why you believed that and why you stopped believing?
what piece of knowledge changed things for you?
surely you already knew all the reasons why that sounds pretty fantastical, even back then?
tangent away mate
seems like i’m mostly telling people in this thread not to feel bad about their prior cringe…
i really didn’t follow this closely AT ALL. but i feel like back in the day libertarian ideas were much more left of center than they are now. to my inexpert perception, it feels like libertarianism (and alot of other things) have been co-opted by conservatism over the years.
which version of the hollow earth are we talking? if you mean a giant hollow shell, then yeh i’m not sure how well supported that is.
if you mean the honeycomb earth idea, where there could be myriad of huge deep caverns. then i’m kinda open to that possibility.
(not that my geoscience knowledge extends beyond highschool geography and the odd wikipedia article - so would welcome an opportunity to discuss with someone adept.)
this is a complex topic and probably belongs in a different thread.
essentially i don’t personally believe in punishing citizens of a country for the actions of its politicians.
at best its misguided, at worse it basically empowers politicians on both sides who draw power from friction between citizens of different nations. typical divide and conquer bs.
why do you not think a software developer wouldn’t have to
wouldn’t or shouldn’t? if you mean wouldn’t, it’s not surprising and its not the dev’s fault they have to comply with policy, so the criticism is not with them.
if you mean shouldn’t, i don’t agree with punishing athletes either, but regarding foss specifically, isn’t the “friendly competition” of olympics equivalent to that? sort of. in some ways yes. in other ways its actually the opposite.
collaboration is actually the opposite of competition.
and while there’s a case for the benefits of healthy sports competition, i don’t believe it truly fulfills the spirit of international goodwill to the degree it says on the packaging. foss and other forms of international collaboration for the betterment of greater society are definitely on a higher rung - in my opinion at least.
personally i don’t agree with sanctioning foss communities.
but fuckit, bring on more forks i say.
among other benefits, the scifi-type scenario of nations trying to patch eachothers backdoors and slip in new backdoors (and hopefully innovations). could make for an exciting OS space-race type scenario
its BIG. could be great to see some different teams tackle different issues.
for example a transcode team to tag and convert different media to the latest efficient formats might save alot of space.
and eg. voice-only recordings could be suitably encoded vs music etc
also some methods for diffing snapshots, or some kind of compromise on snapshots storage with minimal changes? not ideal but might be enough to get across the line maybe?
re. the “most important”, aside from specific items or archives, imo a crucial role might be text-only snapshots of most of the web. would help increase accountability amongst modern media outlets, journalists etc
incredible! can you please describe it a little more, how it worked and especially what the jets did and how that was pleasant vs being bombarded in an unpleasant way. what type of stream was coming out of the jets?
reddit is a cesspit, on reddit it used to be that misinformation or incompetency cope would be promptly identified, now its the top 5 comments on any thread…and the next 5 are circle jerks.
in other words: welcome reddit refugees. please please feel free to leave the reddit mindset at the door on your way in :)
Below is my general sleep guide.
From your post these points sound the most relevant:
Falling asleep to sounds can sometimes help. Different people like different things on different occasions: music, YT, movies, TV, audio books, ambient soundtracks (rainforest, crackling fire), even boring monotone talking can be good. Avoid any ads if streaming or TV as they’re designed to grab your attention.
There are music genres almost designed for sleep, various ambient genres can be great especially if they employ low frequency variations and alpha, theta and delta wave type transitions 5. There’s a bit of bs around this, but also some legit bio-entrainment science too. In general find what works for you.
If listening, consider using your phone & use a sleep timer app on your phone to automatically gradually lower the volume and switch off after a scheduled time, this can help avoid being woken up by it later in the night. Find the timer periods which work for you. Also ensure your alarm will still wake you.
1 https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-abstract/88/9/4502/2845835
3 https://www.flordis.com.au/products/redormin-forte/
4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JyE47-Ykjo [Download rather than stream to avoid interrupts/ads during the night.]
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography#Wave_patterns
excellent writeup
i agree with alot of what you said and will try to hit a few key issues and hope i can add something to the excellent perspective you’ve cast.
The sad truth is that the right are pandering to homophobia because it’s a vote getter for them not because they really care about it.
exactly, they know its a very useful mechanism to accumulate power. so imo we should constantly remind ourselves - they’d be doing this anyway. if homosexuality didn’t exist or was non-viable for this, they’d be onto something else. they’d have used any topic to get what they want. (you could ofc have a metadiscussion about why certain topics are more powerful than others. but thats a different discussion).
anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years
another critical point, as you correctly identified, this is how christianity has become, not what christianity was even purportedly about. if you take the actual words attributed to jesus in the bible, afaict never said a god damn thing about being gay trans whatever. according to their own book - after centuries of fucking with the bible - it STILL says the greatest commandment of all is to love your neighbour as yourself and you can’t judge cos you’re all fuckin sinners afterall.
so it’s all hypocrisy built upon hypocrisy , basically typical “there are 5 lights” bs. in other words it has all the fingerprints of a propaganda pathology not an expression of positive spirituality.
Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime
yeah to that end i think the OPs timeline of 40 years was a bit optimistic, or we at least have to recognise that represents a cross-section of OPs experience which wasn’t necessarily universal 40 years ago. that said i feel there has been a backslide in the last say 10-15 years)
conservative people see the ‘gay agenda’ exactly as you see the ‘homophobic agenda’ in that they believe it’s political narrative being pushed just to destabilize morally virtuous power structures to allow corrupt and evil people to take power and steal money.
tbh i think thats because its probably both at the same time, its a documented soviet technique to covertly fund two sides of an issue to control the outcome. not picking on the soviets btw, just that they did a great job perfecting these kinds of things, wrote it down and then the power structures keeping them secret began to collapse and the methology leaked to the public.
we see this in a simpler form where corporations invest in pride month and also unironically heavily invest in homophobic organisations, (so i guess it doesn’t always have to be a cold war operation for powerful entities to effect control via seemingly conflicting interests).
and in what is presumably a less consciously aware context, consider how jk rowling veils her attacks on the trans community behind a thin veneer of “caring about gay people”. i’m strongly of the belief if she’d been born 50 years earlier she’d be jumping on the homophobia bandwagon instead of the currently “trendy” transphobia bandwagon.
to say another way, not everyone pretending to be our friend has our interests at heart, infact sometimes they’re just trying to accumulate power by taking the positive stance on this issue - probably for no other reason than the negative position won’t currently yield them as big a return.
and this can lead to eg. conservatives becoming outraged about a stance taken by someone who is vocal and politically motivated, but who has no business speaking on our behalf, then conservatives end up feeling like they’re “under attack from the homosexuals” when it wasn’t even a homosexual who said it!!
next the conservatives says some hateful thing in retaliation, people respond to that and it spirals…everyone loses (except perhaps the actual perpetrator). this is definitely a flaw in human thinking where our tribalism clouds our perception, we feel under attack and in the heat of the moment incorrectly assess which side someone is taking (or even that there’s only 2 sides, when in life there’s probably rarely ever only 2 sides).
Companies that shoehorn a poorly written gay character into everything for the sake of inclusivity feel like a pandering cash grab to me but to the homophobic Christian it feels like asymmetric warfare from a deranged and selfish elite hellbent on ruining western society.
again, its probably both? tbh i don’t think that laziness is the only explanation for the woefully shoehorned characters we’re currently getting. honestly its fucking insulting (to us, not the biggots - though the biggots might feel insulted too?). as you mention its a profitable cash grab, and i’m sure it hasn’t escaped their notice that a certain type of aggressively half-arsed inclusivity will provide alot more value to them from the hysteria it generates vs actually doing it ‘right’ in a sensitive and compassionate way, which might actually lead to healing.
if healing is what they actually wanted i think it’d look very, very different than how it currently looks. and the kindest interpretation is they’ve realised it’s more profitable short-term to produce hysteria instead of healing.
compare in contrast to what i still think (despite modern news) was a great example of inclusivity characters with the lesbian main characters in buffy:
in 1999 no less, it showed a lesbian couple in bed and instead of a cheap sexiness grab, they’re literally sitting up in bed reading & having a mundane conversation. no sexualisation of the lesbian relationship as something existing only for hetero male gratification, or out attacking heteros. just plain, believable real life characters living a boring normal part of their life. so yes i very much agree that the boring normality is a very powerful thing. surely ALOT more positive overall than aggressive hysteria.
their MO is to use a scapegoat, they’d be attacking someone vulnerable, regardless of whom
not everyone pretending to be our friend actually wants to help us
hysteria is sadly apparently more profitable (short term) than healing
I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is
i really don’t either, though something think how homosexuality has been hijacked in modern perception (by that 1000 years of fake christianity as you mentioned). in eg. parts of ancient societies, men could love men and women could love women, someone could be a third gender, and it wasn’t even a thing to get upset about it, because it was just normal life. why do we suffer when they didn’t even know they were supposed to be suffering?
why does it need to be device agnostic?
happy to get into into these subtopics, but it’s also possible i may not be understanding you properly because i agree with alot of what you just said.
what are you attributing the close to 0 probability to?
if you wanna say “whats the probability that CMG was at least partly talking out their arse about their capabilities (and especially any claim they were currently in possession of that capability)?”
i’d also give it like >90% probability they (CMG) are full of shit. in which case you could say i agree with you (to within say 10% error margin).
if you’re instead saying the probability is ~100% that audio surveillance capability cannot possibly currently exist outside TLAs because “someone would’ve published it already” then i really cannot agree. (and afaict that ars article does not support that stance either)
extremely good question to ask OP.
thinking on it right now, perhaps Moon (2009)
Not disputing the three letter agencies
The capability they were claiming to have would make a three letter agency very excited.
sorry i didn’t understand. didn’t you say you don’t doubt TLAs likely already have this capability?
oppressive regimes
most (all?) of whom are operating outside typical legal constraints and likely already have access to the million dollar exploit trade which already exists.
further, i’m not sure how this changes the landscape anyway? its not without precedent that variations on capabilities can be useful to more than one market segment concurrently?
trivial to discover and flag as malware
can you explain further what you mean by this? i’m not sure there’s anything trivial about conclusive analysis of the deep complexities and dependencies of modern smart devices
Apple and Google would also be very keen to find and squash whatever loophole let’s them record without showing the notification.
historically we’ve seen google can take over half a decade to address such things, afaict (welcome correction on this) apple’s generally been faster to respond, and i do agree apple’s current public image attire would be contrary to be seen to enable this. [not simping for apple btw, just stating that part of their brand currently seems to be invested in this]
in reality there are a confluence of many agendas and there’s likely ALOT of global users running non-bleeding edge or other variations on the myriad of sub-system components, regardless of what upstream entities like google implement. if you are aware of any conclusive downstream binary analyses please link
which if true would have been exposed/validated by security researchers long ago.
i agree the probability of discovery increases over time. and the landscape is growing more hostile to such activities. yet i’m not aware that a current lack of published discovery is actual proof it’s never happened.
tbh we have our doubts this leak is directly connected to solid proof “they are listening”.
but we’re not currently aware of any substantiated reasons to say with certainty “they’re absolutely not listening”
well they’re an ad company, so being full of shit is pretty much mandatory.
but i’m not aware of any evidence they’re actually 100% full of shit on this exact issue or not? can you explain a little more how you know for certain they’re full of shit. or you just meant “they’re most likely full of shit”?
so what they’re really saying is they won’t give it away for free