Signal's Katherine Maher Problem - Is the integrity of the encrypted-messaging application compromised by its chairman of the board?

binaryblob · 2024-05-07T15:00:15+00:00

The law is compromised in many countries; you can't offer telecommunication services without a way to wiretap in even supposedly "free" countries with a development index >= 0.9. All, because everyone is so scared of the "terrorists".

I think there are much more grave dangers like, I don't know, someone threatening to nuke Berlin every other Wednesday?

binaryblob · 2024-05-07T14:52:10+00:00

Humans weren't around 500 million years ago.

binaryblob · 2024-05-07T14:51:06+00:00

I knew it!

binaryblob · 2024-05-06T19:01:28+00:00

Do you always ask such stupid questions?

binaryblob · 2024-05-05T15:44:59+00:00

Is there even such a thing as a ghetto in any Japanese city?

binaryblob · 2024-05-05T13:34:57+00:00

Some people have weakened immune systems and they do die when infected.

I think the most I hear are people that got sick and never recovered to the health they had before their infection.

My opinion is that pretty much everyone got infected before there even were vaccines and as such everyone that couldn't fight it naturally died already; that's why you don't hear them complaining anymore. About one in a million is still hospitalized per week with COVID, so it's not zero.

Did you ever lose your sense of smell? If not, it's kind of easy to not say it's a big deal. Some people claim they never got it back.

binaryblob · 2024-05-05T22:08:29+00:00

I wish I believed the West had any actual power left, because if they don't they might need some help. All of the "weapons were designed to beat the Russians" doesn't really seem that impressive anymore. The Chinese claim they can track F-22s. Now, whether this is true, I don't know, but stealth aircraft can obviously be defeated using satellite technology. The F-22 is fairly old already, but I surely hope the Americans have some wonder weapons left, because if they don't, Europe might be fucked.

Europe doesn't even increase shell production 50 fold in a year. What are they? Stupid? Suicidal? If you have decades of "peace" and robots have existed for 50 years, how the fuck do you mess up military production?

It's like our "leaders" (see Merkel and Schröder (Gazprom payroll)) got a Russian paycheck to weaken Europe.

Can the US even win a major war with just their planes? Won't the air frames wear out too fast? AFAIK, the military can't produce more plans themselves, but they need cooperation from companies like Lockheed Martin. What if they say "No"? Or, what if they say "Well, perhaps for a trillion dollars we will remember how to build another"? I don't know how it works in Russia, but I doubt Putin needs to beg to get some shells produced. He can just march in and shoot whoever is running it in the head and appoint a new one (probably not a good idea, but you get the point).

A no fly zone would have been the best option and it should have been done before Crimea was invaded.

I fully expect Taiwan to fall if China really wants to have it. I don't know whether it will be nuked by the US if that happens, though. All US military planners talking about defending Taiwan don't have a clue, IMO.

binaryblob · 2024-05-05T16:22:13+00:00

I don't even care about the climate. I know CO2 is rising and I already know that's bad, regardless of the climate.

This documentary has some idiot claim that 2000ppm is fine. I think if we put him in a box at 2000ppm for the rest of his life, he is going to beg to leave the box.

binaryblob · 2024-05-04T18:03:52+00:00

What is the joke? From what I can see (according to Wikipedia) Bernstein doesn't have a degree in economics. Why would he act as if he doesn't have a clue? I don't really see anything remotely funny.

The truth is that the money supply effectively expands indefinitely causing inflation. The US dollar being a reserve currency in which oil is settled means the US has a huge advantage in the world.

Instead of paying tax, increasing the money supply has also been pointed out as an alternative. As such, it's a quite serious topic, I'd say.

According to https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/white-house-economic-adviser-struggles-with-question-on-monetary-policy there is no joke, but he is just incompetent with his bachelor degree in Music. For fucks sake, can't you people find someone capable?

I'd imagine that the only reason you (I assume you and the OP are related) posted this, is because it allows one to attack Biden politically. It's a fair criticism, but Trump would be a much larger disaster. So both are senile men that have no place in government, but one is a lot worse. How hard can it be?

binaryblob · 2024-05-05T16:07:49+00:00

You sound very stereotypical.

binaryblob · 2024-05-05T16:06:14+00:00

Where are you going to get your news? Real-time video manipulation kind of killed how news has worked in the past decades.

How are you going to determine what is and isn't real?

binaryblob · 2024-05-05T15:34:27+00:00

I think they work to act as if they do anything for someone else, while not actually doing anything useful for patients, but if they can make an extra buck by fucking over patients, they will do that. Am I close?

binaryblob · 2024-05-05T15:16:54+00:00

How long are these legal issues expected to take?

binaryblob · 2024-05-05T15:16:26+00:00

But the very same principle applies to ignorance of overunity and cold fusion findings, which are also inexaustible sources of energy.

Can I have one of those over unity devices? Oh, you don't actually have one? How about you shut up until you have one then?

Regarding the "unbreakable glass", it's somewhat interesting, yes, but I think it's just that the glass isn't ultimately cheaper than its weaker competition. If it wasn't, someone would just start a new factory today producing the glass.

binaryblob · 2024-05-05T10:13:42+00:00

Of course it does. This guy has an association with Biden and as such Biden is unfit to be president. That's the argument. If you do not see that, you must be stupid.

binaryblob · 2024-05-04T18:35:27+00:00

Instead of memes we now link to videos? I mean, it's an accurate video, I will give you that and I agree that even a child understands these concepts, so if you wanted to imply that Bernstein has a lesser developed intellect than a child of let's say 7 years old, I would also agree, but was that the point you were trying to make?

binaryblob · 2024-05-04T22:55:46+00:00

It's completely insane to attribute inflation to Biden. Inflation is pretty much a US interest now, because how else are they going to repay the debt?

COVID mostly caused inflation (and in particular the government's questionable policies), the war in Ukraine caused a higher price of energy as well. I think at least 50 percent of what Biden did were strategically sound choices and even then, the idea that any single person actually makes these decisions is wrong. If a given leader gets a particular advice from his staff, there's not really room to think anything else anymore.

The US should probably have stationed troops in Ukraine, before the invasion. That would have been actual deterrence. Then again, perhaps the US is playing 5D chess and they just want to intentionally weaken Russia and have it fall apart under its own weight. As a citizen without my own intelligence apparatus, it's impossible to say whether the policy is good or not. The simplest explanation seems to be that Ukraine is now losing on the battlefield, because of widely reported artillery shell shortages.

Ultimately, there will be a standoff between NATO and Russia, so perhaps the US is just picking a better time or perhaps they just want to wait until Putin dies of some natural cause and hope for the next leader to be different. I think the NATO countries shouldn't just hold a 90,000 person exercise, but actually actively help defend to drive out Russia. What's Putin going to do? Threaten with nukes? Launch them? He can do that anyway. If the West didn't build some kind of working defense against nukes despite them knowing such weapons existing for literally decades, perhaps the West is just not the evolution nature has in mind. It seems that Europe doesn't even have enough nukes to cover every square inch of Russia. That's not even a MAD-strategy they can execute on their own.

From a distance, it seems that the US doesn't believe it's a world power anymore.

binaryblob · 2024-05-04T18:07:36+00:00

If all the people interested in global warming would spend $1,000 to fix the problem, it would already have been fixed.

I wonder whether the people involved in climate protests are just all mentally ill or whether they are just stupid of whether they are paid actors or a combination of those. I am pretty sure that individually I could convince every single one of them to stay away, if they were just stupid. If they are paid to be there, then it's just organized crime.

binaryblob · 2024-05-03T22:01:02+00:00

My more complex queries go into AIs not made by Google. That's kind of bad for Google in the long run. Where do yours go?

binaryblob · 2024-05-03T21:59:06+00:00

You posted something from 2021. Perhaps next time post something that happened today?

binaryblob · 2024-05-02T18:43:46+00:00

Whistleblower goes down, stock goes up.

The real "news" was that the CEO sticks around somewhat longer to train the next guy. Of course, why this would be good news seems odd. A great company should be able to switch CEO weekly without any fuss. If that's not possible, it should be considered a bad thing, so the stock should have gone down. Also a whistleblower dying should be considered a bad thing, because it lowers the reputation of the company regardless of whether they had anything to do with it.

When they change their ticker to HTMN, then perhaps that would be bullish, because they would be saying that indeed they run this world. For now, I think they would be happy if their factories were running.

binaryblob · 2024-05-03T10:04:58+00:00

What happens if you were to burn not just the Koran, but the Koran, the Bible and every other religious book in Sweden? Just burning the book of one religion suggests you think the others do make sense; I'd respect someone burning all of them, because all religions are ultimately institutions of violence (scientific fact).

I think it's scary when people believe in any god. What else are they going to imagine next?

binaryblob · 2024-05-03T05:57:58+00:00

If you interpret words in a particular way, you are right. I think what we currently have is a travesty of free speech. The word "free" has the established meaning of "without restrictions". In your interpretation presumably, I'd have to call it absolute free speech.

Such word games only show how indoctrinated most people are. If you advertise a product as "free", it can't be "not free", because it would be insane, but when it is about politics, suddenly we go all Double Speak over words.

The phrase "free speech" as use in common parlance, should be renamed to "limited free speech". That way, when someone says "we have free speech in this country", everyone knows that person is lying.

Not that it matters, because "free speech" is a retarded concept in itself. If you want freedom, you need to have the biggest stick on the planet. If you don't have that, you live in a prison of control of other people, no matter what you believe. You can't effectively own anything either, because someone else with the bigger stick can take it away, which happens to people all the time. If "property rights" need to be given to you, you don't actually have those rights.

All of those "universal human rights" sound nice on paper, but in the real world those do not exist in countries that supposedly implement them.

Laws only exist to serve whoever is holding the biggest stick. How many governments are run according to their own laws? Zero?

Let's say someday a virus appears which exterminates every race on the planet, but one immune race. According to your "free speech", none of the people of the other races can campaign to wipe out the immune, but virus spreading race. So, they literally all have to just shut up and die in your fantasy world. This example shows that in time of crisis, your limited "free speech" won't even be enforced either, which makes it a hollow concept. If you were to announce tomorrow that people of race X were carrying a deadly pathogen that would kill everyone else within a month, do you think you would be able to stop the resulting genocide? Would you even want to if you were not of race X? Where are your principles now?

The phrase "free speech" is only used to trick people in believing they have "freedom". The lie is working great

binaryblob · 2024-05-02T12:35:18+00:00

They claim to have rules, but banning in general is excessive for anything but spamming at a ridiculous ratio.

binaryblob · 2024-05-02T12:15:42+00:00

The more interesting question is what happened to this guy and how the response is different or the same in different countries. I doubt they like it when you lie about such matters.

binaryblob · 2024-05-02T12:34:02+00:00

The only problem with these "reveals" by James O'Keefe is that there are so many. Why would anyone working for the CIA just say that they do?

One could say "Oh, no a democratic leader doesn't get to know all the secrets", but one could also say that it's hardly a surprise that someone chosen by the public is not fit to actually be the Commander in chief.

It some authoritarian regime wants to say that democracy sucks or given the actions of the CIA doesn't actually exist, they are completely right; it's just that authoritarian regimes also suck.

In the US having a shared role for commander in chief and leader of a country is somewhat special in itself. It's probably better when discussing budgets is a role of the political leader and making decisions about troop deployments is left to the pros (without them spilling the beans on secret tech).

binaryblob · 2024-04-30T23:07:31+00:00

Anyone willing to spend that much time and money on plastic bins to cover ULEZ cameras will give up soon enough.

???

binaryblob · 2024-04-30T23:32:13+00:00

Can you show attack stats or if you can't do it publicly, just share them with me? I am very trustworthy.

I just find it hard to imagine that there are actually a lot of bots, because of the few users.

binaryblob · 2024-04-30T23:20:25+00:00

Imagine needing Cloudflare for 12 people. .

binaryblob · 2024-04-29T10:50:52+00:00

There is no place where anyone can say what they want, because free speech is dead. Go to a public square and advocate for killing some group of people and see what happens (most likely said group of people will kill you), if you are not arrested first.

If you want to have the freedom so say what you want, you could go to international waters as a pirate, I think, but there is a chance you will find a billion dollar warship to go up against.

binaryblob · 2024-04-29T10:45:11+00:00

The only relevant matter is when a request to arrest someone (like its PM) from Israel is made, whether it will be enforced and how.

Waging a war without AI is increasingly suicidal and it has been used in war planning operationally for at least 30 years. AI is not a lame attempt, but instrumental to any war effort.

I don't think most people in Israel would see a dead Arab as a mistake, but rather as someone that won't reproduce, which will make future wars easier. Ultimately, it's just an ordinary land grab and the people doing it are genocidal. Whether they keep the military target vs civilian ratios below a certain threshold to not be called genocide according to some lawyers is only because they want to be seen as "the good guys" (until the day comes that they get to dictate all terms).

This Antiwar sub is kind of silly, because it's just an attempt for some countries to weaken other countries. Stopping war is basically impossible, because bashing with a stick is something even apes do.

binaryblob · 2024-04-28T09:16:10+00:00

The whole God and Christianity theme would have fitted better in the 1950s. Not sure how much L'Oréal and filters she needs to look like this, but I'd guess the only reason people follow her, is because they like somewhat young blondes. She is in the intellectual feather weight division. I would expect she is a Russian bought asset by now, because her career seems dead and she likely is poor, making her an ideal target for something which is technically not a bribe; she would just be 'consulting'.

If you want to stop immigrants, the most effective solution is to build health care systems that will be able to clean your grandma's buttocks cheaper than an immigrant can.

binaryblob · 2024-04-26T15:23:59+00:00

She does have black hair.

binaryblob · 2024-04-26T15:23:32+00:00

In the humanities?

binaryblob · 2024-04-25T09:11:54+00:00

One could argue that women sports are like the Special Olympics (because they are assumed to be worse than the males) anyway and that's why nobody should care. This point of view would enrage the planet, but is logically sound. Lower weight divisions in fighting sports are kind of the same; ultimately what matters is whether in a fight one guy wins or another. Adding handicaps just makes it easier.

White people could claim that there should be an all white division too, because they can't ever beat Ethiopians in a marathon.

My personal opinion is that the easiest solution would be to just use the medical sex to group results (that way intersex people would also be able to participate somewhat in yet a separate group), so if one transgender wants to join, they would just win a $5 trophy because they presumably were the only contestant. So, they can still participate, because probably there would also be events like a world championship with more contestants.

The most popular option would probably be an outright ban, however.

I don't really get why you care so much about this topic. It makes me think it's just Russian propaganda.

binaryblob · 2024-04-24T05:33:54+00:00

Before the CIA got involved with Facebook, it was already popular, just not mass surveillance level of popular.

I never got the whole appeal of sharing personal experiences like pictures through a corporation. The popularity of Facebook only signals to me how incredibly stupid and shallow the average person is. Kind of similar to Reddit in a way, which has no values left from when it was founded; it was fun to be on Reddit, until it became the Chinese misery it is today.

Social media is essentially dead already, because there is no way to figure out what's real and what's fake anymore in the long term; imagine that twenty million trolls have an AI PC in five years with locally running LLMs. There's no way to filter that spam.

If you have real friends, you would actually visit them and show them your vacation pictures on your phone or hook them up to some projector or better yet: take them on said vacation. Shared experiences have value, some shitty picture of you near some place where millions of tourists visit every year is completely worthless.

binaryblob · 2024-04-24T05:11:07+00:00

Yahoo! Answers was an actual addition to the WWW. I don't really see the point of it ever having stopped. Perhaps they should relaunch it today, because spam filters should have improved by now.

binaryblob · 2024-04-24T10:35:28+00:00

The direct answer to your more specific question would be "I don't know".

However, in New York apparently this has already happened, so it's certainly plausible: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/nyregion/the-homeless-shelter-executive-who-earns-1-million-a-year.html.

binaryblob · 2024-04-24T09:02:07+00:00

"UNICEF USA President & CEO Michael J. Nyenhuis' salary, at $620,000, is less than 1% of all funds raised for children. "

binaryblob · 2024-04-24T07:35:28+00:00

Six lines of text is too long for you? Are you six months old or something?

binaryblob · 2024-04-24T07:34:20+00:00

That just tells me that you can't read.

binaryblob · 2024-04-24T05:30:09+00:00

I am not doubting that you believe you met right people; I am saying that there will come a day that they will abandon you if you have some adverse life event. It's a well documented phenomenon and it's also the reason psychologists exist (to explain that people are awful and to come to accept this as a fact).

binaryblob · 2024-04-24T05:06:11+00:00

That's like saying I haven't been touched by God yet. It's an assertion.

binaryblob · 2024-04-23T21:54:44+00:00

I am sorry, but what do you consider important? The fact someone put himself on fire? That happens every year. How is that even remotely interesting? The fact someone did it in the vicinity of Trump (an elderly citizen that should be in a nursing home)? Someone known to attract crazy people? I am sorry, but I don't see anything remotely of interest. Tell us what isn't pointless shit, please. Indulge us.

Almost by definition, if it is on this website, it's pointless shit. That's the real big picture.

How would you even know what I focus on? It's not like I am on this website all day long.

binaryblob · 2024-04-22T22:20:25+00:00

Well, how else can you track them all if you can't all label them to be a potential terrorist?

binaryblob · 2024-04-22T22:16:29+00:00

She probably can't write herself.

binaryblob · 2024-04-22T22:05:18+00:00

I don't get how companies can have a queue lasting years for ordering a plane. I also don't get why people still work in manufacturing, unless they are building/programming the robots/machines. From my understanding there's still actual human labor involved in building planes, which just shows how the industry is ripe for disruption. If you have $30B to invest one could probably crush every other player in the market. I don't give a fuck about planes, but someone should do that.

binaryblob · 2024-04-22T09:15:10+00:00

Everyone is an asshole; it's just that for some people it takes years to show their true face.

binaryblob · 2024-04-22T22:14:18+00:00

With judges like that, you don't need hybrid warfare from Russia. The UK will just tear itself apart from civil war. Imagine you hear tomorrow that this woman has been found at the bottom of some lake, would the first thought be "good riddance" or would it be "Oh no, this women still had so much potential?". I admit it would suck for her children, but then again who wants to have a mother like that? It's probably better if child protection services would take her children away.

Imagine being asked in a bar to guess someone's age and to have to say "Because of security considerations I cannot ask answer this question".

binaryblob · 2024-04-22T22:01:12+00:00

I don't think Trump knows the word honest. The US should just ban old people (anyone over 55 when elected) from Congress and the White House. The GDP would skyrocket.

binaryblob · 2024-04-22T21:57:44+00:00

Not sure why you would say that.

binaryblob · 2024-04-22T09:16:15+00:00

It would be more appropriate to discuss one particular Russian when discussing bad people.

binaryblob · 2024-04-22T09:13:47+00:00

They are friendly to tourists, because they see a walking wallet.

binaryblob · 2024-04-22T09:12:51+00:00

This paints you as a bot, because it suggests something that has not been proven in any scientific journal. Reuters and AP both claim this is false information. If you can prove that Reuters is spreading misinformation, you can sue them (because it's in their statutes).

binaryblob · 2024-04-22T09:09:07+00:00

She could travel on public transport just fine. All that parliament needs to do is pass a law that anyone touching her on purpose can be executed. It's just that apparently they don't want to protect her by giving her 24/7 protection.

The government asks her to write a report, she becomes a target, and the government is surprised it has had this effect. Are they stupid? I don't think anyone laying a finger on her would be missed in society.

binaryblob · 2024-04-21T18:19:30+00:00

So, a country is getting crushed by a bully three times its size and you credit Trump with being a financial genius? Should we all just now clap and awe at your brilliance?

I will tell you what will happen: the debt will get cancelled after the war whenever the Democrats are ever in power again, because the US would want to have a good relationship with a strategically located partner. It's like this guy has never thought a second about geopolitics.

binaryblob · 2024-04-21T18:38:42+00:00

Obviously, more mining of whatever is currently mined in China comes to the US. There's a full on cold war 2.0 with China going on for a few years already.

binaryblob · 2024-04-21T18:36:23+00:00

I don't think there is any country with a good reputation; that's why they are a country.

binaryblob · 2024-04-19T20:32:21+00:00

He did?

Not specifying a time frame is a bit weak when predicting anything.

binaryblob · 2024-04-19T23:16:40+00:00

Society already solved every problem; it's just that said knowledge is not equally distributed.

binaryblob · 2024-04-19T16:35:56+00:00

I don't think it's their god. They just want more such that another has less.

binaryblob · 2024-04-19T16:23:19+00:00

Perhaps they do some kind of advanced scan before they deliver the part to the customer.

binaryblob · 2024-04-18T14:03:25+00:00

I think people believe planes are made by a bunch of academics smoking pipes in an ivory tower, because the most precious thing in the world flies on them: people (a rather Western point of view when compared to Russia where a human life just exists for the meat grinder for the glory of the empire (or whatever it is that they made up this year)). As such, they think there is some kind of perfection going on (no doubt they believe their sky scrapers are also able to withstand the impact of an airplane (guess that didn't work out either)), which is obviously not the case. Perfection in this world exists, but anything complex made by average people (meaning everything made out of anything that is not fully digital (and any consumer digital product doesn't fall under this)) is going to be very much not perfect.

In short, I think it is not unusual.

Boeing claims to have adopted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS9100, which in 2015 already specifically mentions human factors as something they need to take into account, so somewhere there needs to be a document, which describes what happens when some idiot uses a tool that they should not be using for installation. That means that they have had at least 9 years to fix such issues and they probably have had continuous improvements over that time (they do have QA people and surely they must be doing something, right?). If Boeing was a full on circus, there would probably have been more serious problems.

If you look at the regulations, there should be processes for everything, but perhaps the "process" is that they can jump on some wing and that some machine scans it for problems afterwards. That too is still a "process". It would be a problem, if the process is to use XYZ Corp Screwdriver 5000 to install Magic Part and they didn't have that screwdriver and instead decided to just use the Tarzan method.

binaryblob · 2024-04-18T08:09:03+00:00

Are they too stupid to realize any work they do in any country would contribute to the defense industry of that country?

If they think it's not needed, why don't they start a new country in the Pacific without a military (to see how long it would be before pirates or other countries take their assets)?

Is it virtue signalling is it just that these people have no brain, what is it?

If the argument is just that they don't want to contribute, but they are OK with others doing it, they are just being hypocrites.

binaryblob · 2024-04-18T07:25:43+00:00

That by itself doesn't really mean anything, if the parts are supposed to be able to handle such stresses. I can certainly imagine there is regulation, which would prescribe for every part of an airplane how installation should happen, but since some planes have millions of parts that seems unlikely.

A full argument would be as simple as "Part A should be installed via procedure X and it was instead installed multiple times via the procedure Y with X not equal to Y". That way you don't need a long court case.

One guy claimed that the body was not aligned correctly and indeed that would likely be a big issue, but the only way to know that is to calculate whether that's the case and no plane has actually crashed from that, AFAIK. Who says that the engineers didn't account for a bunch of idiots working on planes in the factories (that's what I would do and which happens in construction as well)? I'd expect in the case of body alignment that there would be some kind of sensor that would record that alignment is OK and put in some system for automated review. Indeed, if such systems are not available Boeing might just be a shitty company, except that such technology has been in use for decades in other industries, so they would have to be absolutely retarded for that to be the case.

binaryblob · 2024-04-18T07:04:24+00:00

Jones has no money, anymore. How can he sue? According to the video, the CIA just wanted to make him poor such that he couldn't do anything anymore.

binaryblob · 2024-04-17T09:21:14+00:00

Certainly a possibility, although more videos have been shown in this format and there was at least a core of truth in those cases. Everything depends on context. It seems that someone working for the CIA would never actually say they do, unless behind closed doors in a secure room. If your enemies know you have a particular role, then can get leverage on you. It's an operational security risk, but at the same time a lot of people are fucking stupid.

binaryblob · 2024-04-16T22:41:24+00:00

Is there any chance of a fair trial in any Western country? It seems to me that any judge seeing this would award a hundred million dollars to Alex Jones for doing this as well as criminal charges for the agents involved.

There's one thing to say "educate", but by the time he said "targeting" any court case would be lost by the government, assuming this is all real.

binaryblob · 2024-04-16T04:40:04+00:00

I miss unmoderated forums (without spam or posts by bots) with a more sophisticated type of user. Another problem is that I am much more sophisticated now, so the amount of people that don't bore me, is approaching zero real fast.

binaryblob · 2024-04-16T22:17:00+00:00

Why not?

binaryblob · 2024-04-16T04:42:27+00:00

If it's really 99%, the US should just drop massive amounts of weapons over Iran from space such that a civil war breaks out and new leadership will appear.

binaryblob · 2024-04-16T04:34:33+00:00

A better question would be why anyone can vote at all. Ultimately, one is forced to accept the opinion of someone else via lethal force.

Democracy is a ridiculously stupid idea (autocracy even more so).

The fact democracy/autocracy even is popular shows what an extremely retarded world we live in. I think way too many people never consider alternatives even exist; if 1:1000 would even have read any literature of alternative systems in even their lifetime, it's probably a lot.

binaryblob · 2024-04-14T06:04:45+00:00

I think it's pathetic to attack another country when you don't know beforehand total annihilation will happen. In this case a state without nuclear weapons (a weapon theorized to exist for almost 90 years) attacks one that has enough to destroy the entire Middle East a few times over. Did they want to give a fireworks show? Do you need to be a Muslim to be that stupid?

What's next? Invasion by war elephants?

binaryblob · 2024-04-14T06:30:49+00:00

All of them are slow. Are they all sponsored by McDonald's or something?

binaryblob · 2024-04-14T06:19:44+00:00

Denying racism isn't real, is about the silliest position one can possibly have. It's the same mechanism as rich people defending other rich people. It's just comparing traits and if there is no common attribute other than skin color, they just pick that to determine their political position.

The only reason she is blasted, is because someone wants her job.

Since OJ Simpson it was clear the black people were keeping score (and perhaps white people also were). Every popular cartoon basically made fun of the verdict. A multi-race society is a security risk when racism in the small is tolerated; once a real internal conflict starts, people will revert to their default setting of comparing skin color to determine friend or foe.

binaryblob · 2024-04-13T21:29:55+00:00

I could do it without Indians.

binaryblob · 2024-04-13T21:29:25+00:00

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240221213839.htm claims Russia as a whole doesn't benefit from climate change. Who really benefits from denying climate change? Just some oil and gas people? If the world is on fire and they are universally hated, what do they want to do with their money when they can't visit Venice anymore (because it is under water), visit the Rocky Mountains (because of extreme winds), or ski (because there is no snow anymore)?

It's a scientific fact that lowering CO2 concentrations is good for people (or more specifically higher concentrations are bad for concentration). As such, who can possibly be against that? Whether or not it heats up the planet (spoiler alert from the 1890s: it does), is not even relevant.

binaryblob · 2024-04-09T00:15:06+00:00

From what I understand, when you have $300B, you are not autistic anymore, but excentric.

binaryblob · 2024-04-08T05:54:08+00:00

I don't disagree with the overall point he's making here

Same.

< can be overcome by conscious effort

By someone with sufficient intelligence. Not sure how often you get outside, but the world is full of stupid people that do not have the capability to modify their system configuration in non-trivial ways, unless they have someone doing it for them. What percentage of Windows users ever bothered to setup a custom system service? Even many Linux professionals would hate doing that.

binaryblob · 2024-04-08T05:39:37+00:00

You should learn to articulate your ideas better and you should understand that I am not merely a "developer". You still have not provided an equation for what is required to happen before a locally running LLM is going to crush Google Search + a big tech implementation of LLMs. Let's say all uses of Google Search are done by LLM agents, then do you not think Google will simply start charging for API access? So, whoever implements an LLM still needs an API for rank based search, if alone to be able to verify sources.

I think you are literally incapable of providing a multi-agent differential equation describing the economics surrounding LLMs.

If you want to do another attempt, you should just assume that I am much smarter than you will have be or have been in your life and have more experience. Just describe an actual vision of the future (also specify how many years in the future you are describing) based on actual plausible physics.

binaryblob · 2024-04-07T09:26:25+00:00

How would every single individual defend against misinformation? They can't. All Google needs to do is push a main stream narrative, because otherwise they won't have eyeballs anymore. You seem to assume this magical anti-misinformation technology is going to be available open-source .

I think full text regular expression search for the web or some subset of the web would be interesting to have, but even that requires tremendous resources. Searching without any index is just not realistic.

binaryblob · 2024-04-07T09:20:30+00:00

Google uses neural networks in their ranking function since a long time. You can't go and search the entire Internet for every single query, because it would cost $10000/query (or whatever big number it is). So, you still need an index somewhere. An agent would still take the action "find in some index" and that index needs to be created and paid for by someone. In your world, everyone has their own index or there is some shared index (that could work, but is very much not popular). There are all kinds of reasons why this is not going to work, but I asked you how it is going to work and you have not said anything specific. It's almost as if you are a LLM.

binaryblob · 2024-04-06T13:23:06+00:00

I am looking for an answer based on the economics of the operation. You are not making any sense. A LLM would still need an index for high performance, because otherwise you would have a search engine that is behind all the time.

If I were to stand on the street with a free computer with a Google interface builtin (but not depending on Google), people would still not want to have it, because "they can just use Google".

It was possible at least a decade ago already to run a distributed search engine node locally and even share resources for free. I know, because I did. I would say the key enabling technology for fast big indices is fast and large SSDs.

The thing is that even if it is relatively cheap, the utilization of the hardware would be so low that it would be an economic waste for the 99.5% of the time you aren't using the search engine (Google just serves another customer).

I think you are severely overestimating human intelligence; unless it's built into Windows it's not going to happen at a mass scale (and I am saying that as a Linux user). Surely, perhaps a million people will do it, but we have billions of people.

If there is a killer app, then perhaps it will happen.

binaryblob · 2024-04-06T08:42:27+00:00

Don't you sometimes think the rest of the population must be a real asshole considering that an instant death penalty for anyone doing something like that would make the world much nicer to live in, but yet we don't have that (instead, we have parking tickets (instead of abundant flying cars(!)))? Attacking a girl to a coma is not some "Oops, I did it by accident"-thing. It's malicious behavior and should be removed from the gene pool.

If I could set the fitness function, I feel like 0.01% would be fit. Honestly, I am amazed that 80+% of people don't just only want to kill themselves, but not actually do it. If your function in life is to be a guy writing parking tickets, why would you not think to end it immediately?

Why do I need to verify that I am a human for every single message I write instead of once per browser-session while being logged in(!)

binaryblob · 2024-04-06T08:24:36+00:00

The future of search is AI powered private web crawlers, and millions of independent repositories

Can you substantiate that claim? The first version of Google Search could run on hardware that's weaker than a current workstation level laptop. Why isn't local search for more than 5% of users a thing? Why is there no iSearch Apple product running locally to destroy Google?

Your vision of the future would hold true if people were 1) wealthy 2) not stupid 3) not lazy.

binaryblob · 2024-04-02T07:30:15+00:00

To make eugenics work one should be able to accurately have a preferably quantum simulation of a human existing in a virtual society for an entire lifetime, perhaps even for multiple generations. This technology is currently out of reach.

Anything less and by definition you are not knowing what you are doing.

There are many diseases that only have a single point mutation as a defect resulting in a single critical protein not working and in the cases where you really know the DNA has a defect (not just a new variant you know nothing about), then you could do it before birth (and ethically you should).

If you know a pregnant woman is going to be bit by a car and her child will be disabled as a result of that, would you not stop that car if you could? When a woman was made pregnant minutes ago to give birth to a severely disabled child (for some value of disabled) in 9 months, why would anyone be against a nano-machine performing an automated abortion and just selecting literally any other sperm cell at random until something is selected that isn't known to be broken?

binaryblob · 2024-03-27T07:34:48+00:00

Value and actual fair market value are not the same. If the "market value" includes dictators that want to subvert the US by bribing Trump, perhaps it's even "worth" hundreds of billions. It's just that this would be illegal and it does not represent the "market value".

binaryblob · 2024-03-27T12:45:33+00:00

Normal people use things like arguments to win a discussion, but I guess you just like to make a fool out of yourself.

I can probably name more Greeks by heart than you even ever heard of.

binaryblob · 2024-03-27T10:08:37+00:00

How else does the CIA know who the terrorists are if not by planning a screening and looking who comes to watch it?

Anyway, it the infrastructure is vulnerable, it's probably a good thing to find out now, before WW3; an unreliable energy infrastructure is the last thing a country at war (they have had a war economy since the 1940s) needs.

In fact, if the CIA doesn't know how many terrorists/freedom fighters it takes to bring down the US energy system and how long, I would say they are the real terrorists, because that's just irresponsible. The only way to play the security game is to know your own vulnerabilities first (and to systematically fix them). So, in this particular case there is a group of people walking around a pipe; that shouldn't be possible to begin with. It is a movie and I don't even live in the US, but that's fairly obvious.

The same holds for the EU with their wind mills at sea. Building a big wind mill costs a million a piece; if a drone could destroy it for 200 times less, perhaps some defense capabilities would have to be installed and perhaps wind as an energy source seizes to be competitive. Or, even more asymmetric, if a submarine drone could just dig for the cables and cut them for less than $100,000, there's no defense against that (the number of submarines in the world times their torpedo capacity is very limited and the length of the cables to defend is very long). Land based solar panels with community batteries are much better from a defense perspective, because no centralized assets are available then to attack for an enemy.

binaryblob · 2024-03-26T08:53:15+00:00

So, this DWAC is just Truth Social (a worthless website) and what else?

Is DWAC just a vehicle for the dictators of this world to transfer billions to Trump "legally"?

binaryblob · 2024-03-26T09:27:23+00:00

I had that idea a decade ago. Good that someone is doing it.

binaryblob · 2024-03-14T12:41:23+00:00

Looks like they don't know how to engineer anything.

They could first just build smaller versions, even if they don't even lift off. By the time they built one thousand smaller ones and have all the telemetry, I doubt a slightly bigger one is going to suddenly explode.

binaryblob · 2024-03-14T12:36:12+00:00

Almost all humans are sadists in my experience. I was too bored to read it. If we really wanted to do something about it, we could, but clearly humanity does not give a shit. If it's going to cost money, we are not going to do it. There, I figured out national politics. International politics is just about grabbing power in the long run. Thanks for attending my Ted talk.

In Belgian prisons they apparently literally make the prisoners eat shit (sure a group of prisoners did this to another, but does that even matter at this point?), because they supposedly don't have enough money. No, such things happen, because they do not give a shit.

binaryblob · 2024-03-13T10:54:06+00:00

I find it embarrassing that I share a planet with them. If you look at a population distribution map of the world and count the places that do not suck, it's such a tiny percentage. In they eyes of those people those places are "rich". Sure, but in my opinion everyone on Earth is poor. Nobody on Earth even owns an anti-matter fusion powered spaceship. We haven't even managed to solve energy scarcity.

Humanity is so fucking poor to the point that billionaires are even poor. The moment humanity would ever have that insight, perhaps we could actually become rich someday.

Any country in which you can get raped on a bus, is probably not such an enlightened area.

binaryblob · 2024-03-13T10:47:19+00:00

That news anchor says "Russian president" instead of "Ukrainian president". What a tool.

binaryblob · 2024-03-13T10:39:07+00:00

I suspect the footage coming from Kiev at the beginning of the war with Zelensky walking over town squares was fake (meaning either prerecorded or deepfaked), because it would be incredibly stupid to have done so. If it would be real footage, people would have grabbed their phones and record him, because who doesn't grab their phone when the leader of your country is in the streets?

Now, perhaps I just missed these phone recordings, but I doubt they exist (unless also faked, obviously). If Zelensky is safe and sound in the UK or France, that would be the best course of action.

I don't think it would be "easy" to kill him now, because air defense systems work good enough when they need to cover a small area. At the beginning of the war without a real front-line, that was different.

binaryblob · 2024-03-10T16:55:18+00:00

Thanks a lot for sharing that link. I think the creator of the logo, the person that invested weeks to create a logo should have ownership.

Imagine every YouTuber figuring out that they have no ownership of their trademark, because "that's how they started". Many started on YouTube, so if "Linux tech tips" wants to go to another platform in theory YouTube could sue them.

The insanity of the US legal system can only be understood in a context where the little guy is fucked every inch of the way.

binaryblob · 2024-03-06T22:20:45+00:00

Exactly the opposite. It can not be stored. It always needs to be generated.

It's a meaningless concept. Oil needs to be refined and evaporates.

Solar and wind are just temporary and very low in power.

You can argue all day long, but solar is an economic way of producing power right now.

The mechanisms for zero-carbon or carbon-neutral are FAKE.

Direct-air capture is a real technology and there are more. However, most energy is still dirty, yes. Apparently, even natural hydrogen has been found. If we plaster the oceans with solar panels, there's more than enough energy (and no, those don't have to be made from rare earth materials; it's just that their efficiency is much higher when they are).

Some nuclear fusion forms of power generation generate electricity immediately without boiling water. So, you are wrong. It is true there is no public commercial reactor yet, but that's irrelevant; the mechanisms already exist and it's just a matter of time and capital before oil is obsolete for power generation.

It is far better to drive with normal busses during winter and save energy.

I doubt you have ever compared the two in a commercial setting and as such, why would anyone care about your opinion? The science is not on your side. The science says that even in winter time the opex is lower/km.

Climate change is mostly a political problem, not a technical one.

binaryblob · 2024-03-06T10:59:31+00:00

No sane person would ever agree with the thesis of the article. All it shows is that someone made a mistake in a tiny part of the wind industry.

The equivalent would be to have a headline that oil is a scam, because all of it is leaked into Nigerian ground.

Having electric buses (yes, that's how you write it, genius) is obviously a good thing in the future for whoever is behind the bus (less exhaust and noise) and those inside (less noise). Do you think they will continue to use diesel generators forever at that location? If not, then why even report it?

Electricity is a superior form of energy, because it's convenient. Transporting fuel around all day long is just stupid. If diesel were completely clean, then in principle creating a network of pipes with diesel could work, but since combustion fundamentally causes wear and tear, you just end up having to replace your infrastructure all day long. It's just a dead end. Accept it and accept that everyone understands this.

In a few decades nuclear fusion reactors will output electricity directly to the grid. If there is a lot of demand for electricity, those are more economically viable. If there is only demand for diesel, nobody wants such developments. Electricity is the future and it has been gigantically successful already.

So, why do you post this? If anything, post an overview article of places where people do such things out of entertainment, but don't imply that these have any policy implications. The only reason to post something like this seriously is when you believe that electrons as charge carriers are fundamentally a bad idea because the transport costs would be too high compared to alternatives, like liquid energy carriers. In the real world, people are connecting continents together with cables thousands of kilometers long. If continuing to use ships to transport energy were cheaper, they wouldn't do that.

So, is there any user (not a shill) still left in the world that agrees with the article?

binaryblob · 2024-03-06T04:25:36+00:00

and have now gone back with Mint.

That's a distribution for beginners (which is a word professionals use to refer to ignorant people).

default support for Realtek Audio chips

There is default support.

I don't get why this was overlooked.

It wasn't by them, since the support is literally in the kernel. As to why it was overlooked by you, I can only guess. So, perhaps you might want to understand your hardware first and only then complain on the internet exposing your ignorance.

There is absolutely no reason not to use Linux for any application. I thought perhaps "not being able to run PhotoShop" was still a "valid reason" (it never has been), but apparently that works great too these days.

binaryblob