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JarJarJedi


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 10 21:39:37 UTC

Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation


				

User ID: 1118

JarJarJedi


				
				
				

				
1 follower   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 10 21:39:37 UTC

					

Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation


					

User ID: 1118

The attacker was able to get a lot of trust so quickly because significant part of modern digital infrastructure depended on a library no one cared about.

I think "depended" here, while true in certain technical sense (as "being on the list of libraries the code is compiled with") in broader sense it is actually the main reason that enabled this failure. There's no technological reason for per se for SSH to use "xz", as far as I can see, it was merely added to make it work with another component. And while SSH, being sensitive component and a primary gateway to most systems, is scrutinized thoroughly, the dependencies may be softer. There's also no good technological reason why systemd needs xz and why it doesn't do whatever it needs to do with xz in a separate component isolated from the component that is needed for interacting with SSH. This is just lack of foresight, laziness and preferring convenience to security. I am not saying it is some outstanding failure - I probably have done decisions like that numerous times, knowingly or unknowingly, over the years of my own career. This particular one led to a very significant breach, and if people were more austere and security-minded in their designs, this likely wouldn't happen - but most people aren't. But I feel like the picture at xkcd, while being both hilarious and true, is not reflecting this particular case entirely accurately - neither systemd not SSH weren't destined to fail that way by any good technical reason, and probably nothing would happen to them - except for tiny amount of inconvenience for a tiny number of people - if these dependencies were removed.

I told exactly nothing about my preferred strategy, so you should not feel bad about not getting anything right about it. The reason I didn't is because I don't need it already, and hadn't needed for a long time, and the only person it is useful for is me. So telling about it is kinda useless, except for bragging - but I even have nothing to brag about, I just got lucky once. Best I could do is some very generic pointers that may help somebody else who is like me in many aspects to find where to look for their strategy. Yes, I know it's disappointing - the 1-2-3-4 guaranteed works advice looks much better and inspires much more confidence. It's just that over my lifetime, I've had such advice, and I've had to deal with the consequences of it failing, and it's not pleasant. If I can make somebody's potential landing softer - my work is done. If your plan works and I end up looking stupid - no problem, I'' be fine with that too.

This. Isn't. Talking. To. People.

For you, it isn't. For some others, it is. And that's why I found it necessary to add to your advice - because from what you said it seems to me that you do not understand how people that are very different from you work, and seem to view the way they work as some ridiculous performance bordering on stupidity.

OP is literally asking for ways to get better at dating

True. But sometimes the best way to the goal is not rushing at that direction headlong, but instead walk some roads not taken. Lifting weights is not dating. Expanding your horizons is not dating. Both may - not guaranteed, but may - lead to better dating.

What was the first thing for which you used your face hole to send sonic vibrations to her?

Not telling you that. It's a funny story, but embarrassing enough for me that I won't tell it in public. Fortunately, my (future at that point) wife shares my weird sense of humor and she found what happened hilarious, and it kinda warmed her up to me more (and she knew, from prior communication, that I am not actually a doofus I made myself look as at the moment). Could've gone other way, you never know.

All good self-improvement advice is a variant of "you're going to have to do things that aren't comfortable, but then things will improve for you."

Very broadly, this is true. However, thing being uncomfortable doesn't mean a) you can actually do it and b) it will effectively lead to the goal. For somebody like me, it probably wouldn't. Heck, I even started lifting weights only after I got married. I guess my point here is it's not easy, but it's possible if you persist and don't give up if one way doesn't work but try another instead.

I will await your reply wherein you tell me "Well it must've worked! - I'm married!"

No, that was pure luck in my opinion. Or God's providence, if you're inclined that way.

It's hard to give "best" explanations without knowing the facts. Like, do any those people actually want to murder John? Have they tried to do it already, or have he been accidentally CCed on an email with the subject "Re: Plan to murder John, Phase 2" saying "so far everything proceeding as planned, keep doing as discussed in the last meeting, we're close"? In that universe, is it common for people getting murdered by coworkers? Does John know anybody who has been murdered by coworkers, and did it happen because the coworkers were too annoyed by that person heating up a smelly fish in the microwave and incessantly complaining about work schedules and parking spaces? Is John a diagnosed schizophrenic? Does he have some other condition that could influence their cognition or decision making? Is John a sociopath and does accusation of murder bring him some benefits he otherwise can not attain? Too many variables.

That depends a lot of what you mean by "said". We communicated online for quite a while before we met physically, and even longer before we decided that we belong together. Of course, it was the time before Twitter, when people actually had conversations online :)

I am not implying the advice is given with bad intent - just that one must be careful that it may not apply to everyone, and if it doesn't work for somebody, it doesn't mean they are even more of a loser than they thought - but that there are other ways that would be better for them. Like, for example, find communities online where once could practice talking with various people. Maybe even with people of female persuasion without trying to score with them ;) It doesn't mean never talking to meatspace people - just maybe not jump right into that if that's not what you're comfortable doing.

If it's about money, how about staying in the house and getting housemates? (I assume the house if big enough for that - I don't know DFW market but $380k sounds like it should buy some decent space?) Once you marry and ready to start that adventure in a new house, you can sell this one, or keep renting it out - by then you'd know if it works for you.

There's an obvious flaw in this model. If all you need is a shag, why pay the middle-man? If what you need is long-term, how do you expect to sustain it once Cyrano is out of the picture? Of course, if you're just bad at passing the initial nutcase filters, it could help, but the prerequisite would still be to be able to survive the first date in person.

Start by making short observations at checkout lines.

I am an introvert. Note, I am happily married and do not need any dating advice, but this one sounds to be a bit like: "want to get strong? It's easy - start with bench pressing 300lbs and then do it every other day for 6 months and you'd be golden". I'm sure for some people that sounds like a reasonable advice, to me it looks so remote from my world and my character as a proposal to take a nice quick walk to the moon. I suspect it'd sound the same to many other introverts. My problem with it is not that it might not work - some people do bench 300lbs, so it might work for them - but that you make it sound like it's trivial for every normal person to do it, so when a person for whom it is not trivial reads this, they would only think it's because they are some kind of special extra-hard strength loser that go below even normal definition of loser. And that's just not the case.

Since as it seems virtually nobody cares for both Russians' privatized victory day and their shenanigans on that day - at least the mentions of it in Western press seem to be rather scarce - then paying attention to whether or not they successfully performed those shenanigans would also be counter-productive. In this particular matter, ignoring them seems to be the best course of action. Of course, declaring the new large weapons shipment to Ukraine would be a better reaction, but that seems to be beyond hope now.

Clearly the buyer's agent wants to steer the buyer to a more expensive property

It's not clear at all. The buyer, if they have any sense at all, would already know the state of the market and how much, in broad terms, houses they look for cost. Not precisely, but in certain boundaries. Sure, the agent could show them houses that are a little cheaper and a little more expensive, but the marginal gain would be in hundreds of dollars, while the price of the whole deal is for them in tens of thousands. So the incentive of the agent is to make a deal. It is true that it's not always correct incentive for the buyer (since the agent focused on making a deal first may push for the buyer to compromise on things they wouldn't otherwise compromise) but it much, much better for the agent to get a deal at a slightly lower price than to lose a deal at higher price. So the buyer agent would steer you enthusiastically to any property they think you could potentially buy, but the marginal incentive of showing you only the expensive ones - unless you are so rich the price is obviously not an issue at all for you - would be quite small.

I've been shopping for houses in the US a number of times, both successfully and unsuccessfully, and I didn't notice a lot of drive to only go for top expensive properties. Of course, price is correlated with quality and desirability, so the agent won't show me a half-ruined cheap house while they could show me a pristine new one for slightly more, but I did not notice the overt push that often. There are a lot of agents that understand the above, and if a particular one prefers to lose tens of thousands to gain hundreds, then you get a smarter agent instead.

It'd be hard to fix the incentives completely, since а fixed-price agent would be as interested in getting to the deal as quick as possible. I guess one should get an agent that would be able to keep themselves in check and work for the client.

Not really, it just needs to have the same set of vulnerabilities as legitimate governments, or at least a sizeable subset of them.

I don't think there will be something that looks like full-blown war, because there doesn't seem to be any western targets there for Houthis to strike beyond ships, and the US wouldn't go into a full scale invasion there, especially not in an election year. Some bombings would be enough to show Biden still has some cojones left, and I don't think it would go beyond that. More likely, there would be a repeat loop of what is already happening - Houthis attack some ships, the West does a dozen of warnings, then bombs something, rinse, repeat.

That is an obvious lie, Israel spent a lot of effort, lives and diplomacy to implement a separation solution. There would be absolutely no reason to do all that - from Oslo agreement to Gaza evacuation to creating Palestinian Authority to other measures - if Israel indeed wanted to eliminate Palestinian presence. All these measures - which constitute Israeli policies for three decades now - are completely contrary to that goal. You basically ignoring everything that actually happened in service of your insane hatred.

Israel is a genocidal project by definition

The definition of Israel is a state of Jewish people. There's absolutely nothing "genocidal" in it, you lie again.

Israel isn't going full auschwitz solely

That's a libelous statement by itself - Israel is not going not only "full auschwitz", but neither 1% or 0.001% of it. There are no camps designed for massacring any Arab population, there are no official program of eliminating Arab population, there is nothing of the sort. There is a war, truly, and a war among dense built area where the other side doesn't bother with conventional things like uniforms or military identification (a war crime by itself, but Hamas is committing every war crime in a book, none excluded, so of course they do this too) and using schools, mosques and hospitals as military outposts - of course it will bring some casualities, and given that, as I mentioned, the only figures are coming from Hamas, and they don't bother with formalities, everybody except senior leaders which are officially known as Hamas are called "civilians". Hamas membership is not exclusive - it's like being a communist. You can be a doctor and a communist, a journalist and a communist, a truck driver and a communist. Only with Hamas, you can be a doctor in the morning and keep Israeli hostages in the evening. You can be a "journalist" in the morning and a drone operator in the afternoon. You can be a farmer and one of you farms would host rocket launchers shelling Ashdod and Tel-Aviv. That's all "civilian" population and that's what the IDF is dealing with now.

Any honest assessment of sympathy for goy/Palestinian civilian life in the greater Jewish/Israeli public results in basically nothing.

If by "honest" you mean "completely false and libelous". Nothing can be further from the truth - a lot of people in Israeli society are bothered with Palestinians, and presenting Jews as some kind of genetics-obsessed community that treats everybody with wrong genes below animals (there's an active animal rights community in Israel too) is an utter bullshit. The level of blood libel bullshit. You obviously know absolutely nothing about Israeli society and what the dominating opinions there are. Yes, Israel population supports war with Hamas. No, nobody in Israel talks in the terms you are implying.

That said, if we call the Armenian Genocide a genocide I don't see what is so different about Gaza.

Everything. Armenians did not attack Turks and did not gruesomely rape and murder thousands of them, Hamas did. Turks did put as their goal destroying Armenian population, Israel does not. Pretty much every aspect of what is happening in Gaza, bar none, is different.

But even with Jewish subversion of the American government

Oh, you are one of those people....Basically, everything you ascribe to the evil Jews, you'd see in a mirror - it's you who are obsessed with racist genetics and view everything through the lens of the ethnic conflict. And of course, you are possessed with irrational, but flaming hate of Jews. I am sorry I just noticed it now. I am done spending time on you.

Some people have their own facts, and denying the existence of Israel is, unfortunately, only a small part of a myriad of falsities from which their worldview is composed. Pretty much everything they know and say about Israel is false, but they can't help themselves and reveal it by denying even the most obvious of facts - such as the very existence of the state of Israel. It is actually a good thing - it clearly indicates people that are not going to be open to reasonable argument.

Israel is aggressively preventing any kind of aid from going into the region

This is obviously false, there are numerous photos and videos of hundreds of aid trucks rolling into Gaza (and Hamas taking over them and shooting at residents trying to get to them before Hamas does), and there are Jordanians doing air supply drops (obviously with Israel approval). It is true that Israel limits the amount of supplies and the kind of supplies, because they know (and it is true) that Hamas is going to control and benefit from them, but it is absolutely false that Israel is preventing "any kind of aid" from going into Gaza.

The official goal is dismantling Hamas infrastructure and destroying their military capacity. The second official goal is freeing the hostages, though nobody actually knows how to achieve that. The former though is simpler - just divide Gaza into squares, go square by square, find anything that looks like it belongs to Hamas, destroy it, find anybody who is holding weapons, destroy them if they don't drop the weapons quickly enough, otherwise rope them in as prisoner. The north of Gaza is pretty much captured and being cleaned up, the middle is pretty much captured too, the south is still in progress. There's a lot of stuff to be done there, so it'll likely take time. Nobody really knows what to do after IDF will establish military control over the whole Gaza - which will likely happen soon, finds all Hamas caches they could find (which will also happen soon) and captures or kills all Hamas members that are stupid enough to keep actively resisting. Since it's probably still months away, the official position is "we'll think of something by then".

For all practical purposes attacking the Houthis is like going to war with an actual country.

If anything, that seems to be rather good than bad for prosecuting the war. For somebody like the West, it's much better to have a war with an actual proper country than a bunch of vaguely defined rebels. It's much easier to pressure the country into making some kind of a deal - after hitting their soft points, which any country has aplenty - than hunting down every single last cave dweller in the desert, without even knowing if there are more or where they are. If they are like a country, they have offices, stores, ports, materials, etc. - all this can be hit and destroyed. The bigger the target, the easier it should be to strike it, not? And then, the carrot can be presented - if you stop the stupid shit, maybe we'll let you have your country and run it as you please.

No European leader wants to get one of their cruisers murked with hypersonic missiles

Not even Russia is dumb enough to give those guys something like that, and also it's not a magic wand - it needs to be used properly to strike a warship, and the likelihood of anybody there knowing how to do stuff like that is null. Russian "advisors" probably could pull it off but Russia has enough trouble to be actively involved in another war right now. They are buying weapons from places like Iran and North Korea, not selling them.

The interesting twist here is that the haste with which Iran propaganda blamed Israel for that forced them then to claim that ISIS is actually working for Israel and the US, which is beyond hilarious.

That's an obvious lie, neither Israel (as an official policy goes) wants it nor it's doing it. With overwhelming power superiority Israel has, if they wanted to massacre a million people in Gaza, or West Bank, that would have already happened. There's literally nothing that could prevent Israel from doing that, militarily. But Israel does not want to do it, and didn't.

And please, spare me out-of-context quotes from early 90-s where some Israeli politician said something like "I'd be happy if all Palestinians went to hell". It's not policy, and if you think it has anything to do with the official policy, you are not qualified to have any opinion on any Middle East policy at all.

Biden reportedly has no intention of firing Austin, with officials stating that they will "learn from the experience."

Yeah, the Secretary of Defense is definitely one of those "learn on the job" positions, where competence is not to be expected, at least not immediately.

It is clear to me that the Feds/Deep State (pretty much the same thing by now) executed a brilliant (surprisingly brilliant, given their routine incompetence when it doesn't concern their survival) operation of surfacing, isolating and utterly destroying the passionate part of the right that was ready to fight against the left's long march through the institutions and against total alienation of power from any possibility of democratic control on the federal level. That operation was an overwhelming success, the right were easily provoked, totally unprepared and easily routed and utterly defeated, while the "mainstream" politicians either stayed away from the fray, or, like Pence, actively helped to destroy them. Was a specific person an employee of the Feds, an asset or just a fool easily manipulated by them - is not very important, though I do believe Epps had if not direct than at least once-removed contact with the Feds, and there were probably many provocateurs and instigators in the crowd beyond him. But again, the important part is not who they personally were, but the crushing defeat that the right suffered, from which they still did not recover and largely did not even realize what happened. This does not portent well for them for 2024 - even if Trump manages to gather enough votes to overcome the Dem machine efforts - which, given how actively he is promoted by Democrats, is not out of the realm of possible. That I can testify to myself - a year ago, I was very reluctant to the idea of voting for Trump, given his previous record and present behavior. Now, I am thinking I may not have any other choice. Not that my vote would mean anything, living in a deep red state. But the bad news is even if Trump is elected, his election would not be recognized by the left, and he will spend another 4 years fighting trench warfare against the Deep State, collecting more impeachments that any president ever lived, and achieving absolutely nothing. Maybe he'd appoint some good judges. Maybe.

If by taking over the world you mean make someone a lot of money by catering to the needs of a number of people who for various reasons prefer masturbation to the real thing, or are forced to resort to masturbation for the lack of access to the real thing - then yes, that is definitely going to happen, and probably soon. If you mean it'll meaningfully replace real human relationships - not likely. For some people, maybe, but not nearly for all people.

I'm not sure they aimed exactly at that at the start, but they certainly tried to paint Trump as criminally complicit - I mean, they impeached him for that (though failed to convict, as expected). But a near-term strategy has been to delegitimize and suppress any right-wing popular protest, and scare away any legit right-wing politicians from supporting any populist movements or anything at all that has to do with the electoral system. Which has been executed very successfully. Removing Trump from the ballots is the later addition to the strategy and reeks of desperation a bit, since they can't really prohibit the GOP from nominating Trump, and they can't meaningfully influence his electoral college numbers that way - he is not going to get deep blue states anyway. But they can make a platform for refusing to recognize the election result in the event he wins - in the words of one Peter Strzok, an insurance policy. I am sure it's not the only one that is being brewed up right now.