In Russian “мокросовт” (mokrosovt), as in “wetly poke”.

There’s another Tolkien’s notion, one expressed by Eomer, how Rohirrim don’t lie and thus are hard to deceive.

The concept of some insight, mystery, deeper knowledge in that context seems similar to lies for me.

Perhaps Hegseth’s approach and tooling are enough to be as significant as the evil that Tolkien’s characters did put some effort into defeating, not waiting till it defeats itself.

They, eh, want for every local user account to be tied to some central database?

In general this is going out of hand, age verification is parents’ responsibility.

But they do have a clue how laws work, and the element of fuzziness in who’s guilty is a beneficial effect.

It’s a trope that every problem posed by the plot has a solution of difficulty level properly fit to the audience.

A culture of arcade games, unfortunately, has such long-standing effects.

While we are playing a roguelike. With no respawns.

As a source it’s rude. As a piece of unreliable help of the kind “we both don’t know the syntax of that programming language, let’s ask Ollama how to draw such and such a shape in it” it’s kinda fine.

You can run actual Windows in a hypervisor, and have all malware you want for everything inside that hypervisor, and also hypervisor escape is a thing if you have something like guest additions with access to host filesystem etc.

Attack surface is smaller.

It’s a thread about comparing Signal to Telegram of all things. In comparison to Signal as anything secure Telegram doesn’t exist in any quality.

At the same time Signal doesn’t have mass group chats and is not intended for that purpose.

The first link does count, it’s a valid failure from Signal devs. Humans err.

The second link does not, it’s an unofficial centralized aggregator, not from Signal devs, and the “hack” was a direct consequence of how it worked. It’s absolutely something that no sane person would use.

There’s a commonly used Russian metaphor “to not see the forest behind the trees”.

What you are calling a device is in fact a system. It’s a local system, that you are carrying in your hand, but it’s functioning due to a very complex global system which is not. That device in itself is like a 1960s’ town in complexity. In itself, but there’s also the global system.

And these are a result of quite a lot of people employed by various organizations with hierarchies and dependencies. And most of the power in those organizations doesn’t want you to have privacy and autonomy as much and when you want. If you want those, you should produce your own hardware and everything above it. Or build organizations interested in your full privacy and autonomy which will do that. It’s about structure, so just creating a few of them (a goal hardly reachable in itself) with manifests saying “we want to be good” won’t change anything.

So, if you were wondering why contemporaries of Stalin’s regime were reluctant to divorce it with Marxism and call it something else, - that’s similar to this. They really wanted to believe there’s a Marxist superpower, just like some people wanted to believe Google is a good corporation, and before that some people wanted to believe Apple is a counterculture corporation, and so on. And, at various moments in time and space, in various dimensions, sometimes these were. Just like in some ways the British Empire was really bringing civilization to the world.

The more life and diversity there is, the likelier we are to have good things. That doesn’t mean we’ll ever have full privacy, full autonomy, fully civilized, peaceful and honorable world, and so on. We won’t.

And it will again be about someone added to the wrong group. Meaning - not a hack.

It has a soft flavor. I don’t put it into anything spicy, and probably won’t be noticeable with the way Americans seem to do seasoning. But if I’m making a soup with some meat and potatoes and various vegetables, I’ll put it in, it’ll be noticeable.

If you just boil beef with and without it, you’ll feel the difference the most, I think.

We just print our way out of our problems; problem solved.

Emission of currency is a valid tool against crises. The institution that can do it possesses power that needs to be controlled, yes.

I’ve met people better than Hitler at speeches. That’s not the only trait that affects whether you go up in power or down. But no less important is that they might have had different desires.

Yes, and I meant that BLE doesn’t spread far. Which is good in such an environment.

There is a technology called BLE, which together with mesh networking and synchronization of messages instead of routing them can give you connectivity in the middle of big events, without too much signal noise.

Of course other than Briar and that Bitchat thing I don’t know what to use in such situations.

I know this is not the point of your comment, but which Georgia specifically is the right target to bomb?

The one in Caucasus is supposedly friendly, South Georgia is British property so allied land, and, eh, the remaining one is, as I understand, the always wrong one to bomb.

Then they’ll comply with some formal limitation.

There’s one thing funny about this - everyone is treating what’s happening as still some tomfoolery that will end after an election.

This is institutional. I don’t live in your country, so I might be mistaken, but even if pretentious naming like “Department of War” goes, autonomous weapons remain. And also it’s easy to play a fool or employ a fool as a talking head, but most people are not fools, especially those with power. There will be wars.

I’m not excited.

Actually I might be, I had a thought now that I might have a more specific interpretation of what happened to one girl. She had sort of a “dark triad” personality, and a nasty one, but I’m starting to think that what I was hearing about her without specifics wasn’t connected to what she did to me (which I’d forgive despite her probably not caring at all). It was about her once having met herself, that is, seen a sadistic event and enjoyed it, and having been shaken since. And people who carried those indirect and vague messages to me seemed to think very badly of her because of that reaction alone, but I don’t know - I might be the reason she even saw that, and she wasn’t looking for it. She loved Exupery’s “Citadelle”, and if you read it, then you might notice that the same man who wrote “The Little Prince” definitely had some sadistic leanings.

And that was because another girl took interest in me, and then was disappointed. That another girl was a real depraved sadist. That’s how this one got involved, my acquaintance from another place. And this one too took some interest in me.

And I’m thinking that perhaps I too have something sadistic in my personality if they liked me. The girl I’ve started about is a pacifist. And one of my family members is a veteran (and he was basically special forces, so the kind of service that’s usually not a transformation but a discovery of personal traits) and a pacifist. And I’m a pacifist (I think everyone should be armed to react to violence, but I’m against any initiation of violence). It just seems to make sense that if you notice something sadistic in yourself early on, you become interested in pacifism, as well as in other ways of considering and containing your (and others’) inner Mr Hyde.

So, getting back to names and what matters.

The change that has already happened is contained in human psyche. Your society might have a hidden, but slowly unearthing desire that will have to be fulfilled. I think Freud also described in sexual terms (well, as was his usual trick) what he was feeling about the start of World War One.

You have a Department of War and have probably even gotten used to that name.

Somewhat funny i actually realized this dynamic when watching star trek. Whenever they need to do something illegal they simply put their badges on the desk and just like magic they are no longer bound by federation ethics.

That’s the main reason I don’t like the “good people in uniform as beacons of virtue” trope. That always happens. Every time I see that on screen I immediately imagine the morally inverted version of the same plot.

At least in Babylon-V such a decision is something not reversible and important for the main characters.

And in SG-1, despite that being sort of a piece of military propaganda, that too doesn’t happen too easily.

But there the main characters are not some beacons of anything, they are just people with their own way.

You clearly don’t understand how finance works or don’t understand how leveraged these incestuous deals are. It’s perfectly possible for AI to make killbots and for an AI economic crash to happen.

You might want to consult a history book. There are a few recurring themes there, silent leges inter arma and vae victis capture most of them. New weapons might change the intensiveness of wars all around the world, because they help those owning them avoid loss of life whatsoever and those not owning them to pay with lives for dealing damage that doesn’t even upset their adversary. Which will bring enormous profits, just not to everyone, only those who conquer. Finance is not all you need for that subject.

On a humanist note, in “drone army against another drone army wars of the future” scenarios loss of life might be so small that pain and death in wars will be reduced to cases of deliberate sadism. Meaning that … again, there’ll be more war.

They industry needs to make Trillions of dollars to pay off their creditors and to achieve the profit their investors need to make this worthwhile. That only happens if most white collar workers are replaced with AI.

No, because profits are not only made from replacing existing mechanisms, but also from building new ones.

Specifically, most people don’t use computers as really-really meta-machines. They use them as platforms for running specialized applications.

But LLMs, however expensive in resources, change that. They make computers meta-machines for everyone.

And also in some races you want to be further from the rear, not closer to the front. If this technology promises a profound crash in any case (because, suppose, it’ll bring about planet-wide totalitarianism), those investments might mean that rush to try to avoid getting eaten completely in the future. Losing less, not gaining more.