Who’s paying him? Seriously:

• If nobody is, then we got our value’s worth.
• If someone is, then we should look at who, how much, and why.

What’s the progress of the Human Connectome Project?

I remember what the standardising committee did to XMPP: users wanted to share photos, send files, and make audio/video calls; XMPP said “we’re not going to standardize that, but each application can use its own extensions”… then it all went to hell.

Banks are allowed to use fractional reserve to lend several times more than they are required to warrant themselves, governments only force banks to have an entity who will pinky swear to write down up to a certain amount in everyone’s accounts in case the banks can’t. Neither skill nor labor produce money, central banks produce money as a loan with a repayment obligation, skill and labor only shift around the fractional obligations created by banks from thin air. Crypto is actually generated as an effect of the skill and labor required to secure its own ledger. People use golf courses to claim carbon offsets they sell in get-rich-quick schemes, or stamp collections, or digital collectibles, or natural gas extraction plants, or a thousand other schemes; everything can be, and is being used to scam someone somewhere at every moment, doesn’t mean everything is a scam.

Someone had real gold in their coffer full of gold coins, then someone convinced them that credit written down as a number on some slips of paper had the same value, that they could trust the bank’s computers with keeping track of the total value, and everyone clapped.

You don’t. That’s on purpose, to test your blind unwavering faith, and you won’t know your score until after you’re dead. Just follow without question whatever your spiritual leader says in order to maximize your chances… ain’t that convenient?

Recently saw a report on cocaine, apparently the prices haven’t changed since the 1990s… just the purity has gone down and it now comes laced with fentanyl.

Shining light on a problem is a good step to make people realize there is a problem in the first place.

What the fuck are you going to do about it?

Start a meme campaign targeted at countries with privacy legislations, aimed at making their future governments ask for higher bribes more lobbying before signing away taxpayer money to Microsoft contracts…

I mean, ideally have Microsoft rethink its approach, like Meta is rethinking its with Instagram, but let’s start with something simple.

Too late, it already has learned it:

Default (GPT-3.5)

User: Translate the following text into Esperanto: “I’m just going to start posting in Esperanto. Even AI won’t be interested in learning Esperanto.”

ChatGPT: “Mi ĵus komencos afiŝi en Esperanto. Eĉ la intelekta artifiko ne estos interesita lerni Esperanton.”

Didn’t Mozilla get most of its funding from Google for promoting its search engine? Or has that changed?

encrypted body of the message

Encrypted what? LinkedIn lets you add a key/cert to send you encrypted emails?

Unless you followed by installing gpg… then you failed. There are tons of uses for it, not necessarily encrypting emails (or more precisely, it kind of sucks at encrypting emails).

The joke is reverse text emojis are evil and used by trolls, and you said to report trolls… 🤷 maybe it’s a generational thing.

We suggest reporting and not engaging with obvious trolls (;

Reverse text emoji… repeated offense… by an Admin… instructions unclear… 🙈

Doesn’t that describe pretty much everyone commenting (more than one liners)? Writing what?

As has been prophesized… and it’s only starting.

when they have any actual power

Spoiler: they don’t. Elected presidents can’t speak against whoever would successfully lobby to impeach them.

Resolution 181 is a red herring.

There were already Arab vs. Zionist clashes before it, and they would have continued with or without a resolution that nobody was following. Only thing the British can be seen at fault for, is leaving without having enforced 181… which meant leaving Israel alone to fight a war against a coordinated attack from multiple Arab countries at once. Not precisely “cowtowing” to Israel.

Modern terrorist groups are the result of Israel going against its own Declaration of Independence where it promised to follow 181, and instead trying to get exclusive control of the whole territory… while Palestinians are getting pummeled, but still also refuse to consider a two-state solution, leaving them in an underdog position where all they can do is some terrorist attacks and wait to get destroyed.

That isn’t even a question, it’s a tautology given how the US is fully supporting whatever Israel is doing.

The objective of the IDF is to free the hostages. They will make an effort to minimize civilian casualties.

When a legitimate target is hiding among civilians, there are two possible responses:

• Civilized nations: “F%ck, guess we’ll have to wait until they move”
• Non-civilized nations: “Collateral damage”

But they must achieve that objective even while know civilian causalities are a certainty

No “buts”. Like it or not, defend it or not, that’s what non-civilized nations do.