Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
#209, #StandUpLocust
User ID: 2418
I’m odd as a Catholic in that the liturgy itself never beguiled me very much, but I’ve never attended a service of any variety that generates these kinds of experiences for the attendees. Christianity was always an intellectual compact I had with the religion and its one I never found fully convincing but I love and enjoy the trappings of the ideology and the fact that I grew up in it. Even atheism wouldn’t cause me to fully abandon the religion. I always enjoyed watching movies like The Seventh Seal that explored the difficulties of believers.
One of the benefits of it over say Islam, is that the Bible wasn’t as tightly written as the Qur’an is. Therefore you can be more unconstrained in your interpretive schemes to reconcile things. In the Qur’an on the other hand, the fact that Allah can’t do fractions and that it’s caused lots of Muslims to apostatize has made some of its verses very difficult for scholars to reinterpret. So difficult in fact that medieval theologians had to invent a whole system just to make it work. When Islam dies it dies ‘hard’. The advantage Christianity has is its durability as a concept to last through the ages.
When a written document is given to any group of people, it’s much more complex than the superficial readings of a text that you get at the first pass. Some people think US Constitution allows people the right to own slaves and others think it doesn’t allow women the right to vote. If you just read the historical casebooks that have foreshadowed amendments to our understanding of the founders intent, certain interpretations of our founding document have fallen out of favor because of how inconsistent they are with the modern world. This is by no means a problem unique to religion. Science can falsify all kinds of theological assumptions and philosophical premise's, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
1d ago
I recommended that here recently too. It uses Google’s API, and it’s worth paying for. Otherwise I recommend Startpage to people.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
1d ago
You actually think the MSM would corroborate something like this?
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
1d ago
100%. You shouldn’t trust any one particular individual because of their character. You critically examine their analysis and you always keep your ear close to the ground to catch alternative perspectives and dissenting voices; lest you put yourself at risk for staying trapped in a bubble.
Frankly I don't care about labels, no matter what the source. You have to address the arguments made by people, not the person. There's a very serious deficit of critical thinking in the population that goes dangerously unaddressed. Even in more intellectual circles.
You shouldn't read sources that only suit your preconceived ideas. You pay attention to both sides. All cranks distrust sources merely because they disagree with them and they often use no valid appeals to evidence to justify their claims. Back when I was in school and Wikipedia first became a thing, there was a lot of controversy using it as a source when doing your homework. It's been demonstrated to be just as reliable as any other encyclopedia. Which is to say, not great; but it's better than asking Uncle Joe. The principal value it has is that it at least tries and makes an effort to have a cited source for a claim, and more than that, one that is a 'good' source as opposed to a bad one. Because of that, it's a valuable place to begin when you decide to want to start "doing your own research."
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
2d ago
Extra glaze here please, hold the raisins.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
2d ago
Far more than a few actually. In Britain at one point it was so common (enough to warrant a solution to the problem at least) that they tied bells to the foot of the deceased at the time of burial so the watchmen on duty could detect when someone had accidentally been buried alive.
So then I assume Trump/Hegseth and CNN are who you're quoting?
And Iran has the largest missile arsenal out of any single other country in the entire Middle East... I actually wonder if I'm being trolled or not.
My understanding is that the US is depleting it's stockpiles and it's causing concern amongst the administration. Especially because our high tech conventional arms rely heavily on advanced guidance and strike systems, which are in turn dependent on accessing key supplies of rare Earth metals that are overwhelmingly found in China. Restocking and resupplying these munitions isn't a walk in the park. Those supply chains are extremely fragile and the dependencies on them is enormous.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
2d ago
Yeah... I'm definitely curious to know where you're getting your news from so all of these claims can be vetted.
Just to take one of your points as an example, I assume this is the rescue operation of the pilot in question that you're referring to? I hope you'll forgive me for doubting official statements made on this matter; because I'm not buying it. The massive show of force is highly disproportionate for a discreet personal recovery mission.
A boots on the ground operation wouldn't be anywhere near as big of a problem for Iran as it would be for the US. There's no long-term military solution for this problem from the American POV, but when you factor in Israel's designs for the region as a whole, you understand why we got involved in it (stupidly).
When the US-Afghanistan war/occupation was still going on but nearing it's end, there was an American soldier that asked some local there who had connections to the Taliban why he thought the Taliban would be back as soon as the Americans left; and his reply was "... Uh. Because we live here?..." You saw the same sentiment echoed after our withdraw by Suhail Shaheen when he said "... they (Americans) have all the watches, but we have all the time..." So go ahead. Put us in timeout for the next 20 years; we'll be back tomorrow... Unless you manage to completely eradicate the regime, the same conditions will continue to persist, just in a modified form.
Your only rejoinder to the fact that America is losing is the fact that it hasn't surrendered yet? By this kind of logic, if I told you the US accepted a strategic defeat and begrudgingly pulled out of Iran, you'd still claim it's a victory because the Iranians didn't conquer the moon.
Ok so your theory is that the Iranians refused to agree to never develop nukes because….? Maybe Trump is lying? Elaborate
At this point if Iran were smart, nukes wouldn't be off the table. If they had them, this war wouldn't have happened. You'd still be stuck with the problem of nuclear proliferation in the surrounding region; perhaps that would provoke future conflict in other wars, but the US and Israel would absolutely not be bombing Tehran.
Suppose the Iranians were sincere though. If you're dealing with such an erratic foreign policy establishment as the US has, even if Trump and Pezeshkian or Mojtaba came to a peaceful resolution (unlikely to happen), could the administration guarantee to them that future administrations will uphold the original agreement (almost certainly not)? In that case, what would you have Iran 'do' for it's security against western attacks?
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
2d ago
I was going to say this as well. Congratulations on your "victory," I suppose. It seems pretty empty to me. Unless that's the kind of victory you were hoping to pull out of this situation from the beginning. Considering what the original war aims were, given that the US has still been unable to achieve it; I wouldn't call it a victory at all. All they're managed to do is destroy infrastructure.
Hey man, one side of my family came from poverty and the other came from wealth. I’ve been on both sides of the fence and know what that’s like and let me tell you, growing up at a period in my life having anything I desired and wanting for nothing still didn’t leave me happy. And that was when I learned what true happiness really is. Catholicism and religion is a huge source of that to me every day that I wake up. It’s the most durable concept that fills the void. It isn’t money.
You’re not alone and by yourself. Thinking and reflecting about your failures is one of the things that makes you a good person because you’re reflective and thoughtful; but it’ll completely eat you alive if you let it. If you ever want to talk, send me a message.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
2d ago
As a kid I once resized Maddox’s image of flipping someone off as my avatar, but forgot to remove the copyright notice at the bottom of it. Lol.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
2d ago
Your username is what I think of every time someone mentions that book. I figured that was what might have inspired it. It’s been years since I read it but it was always one of my favorite science fiction novels.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
2d ago
It’s a toothless, unhealthy trend you find in the west. To the people who preach this shit they don’t even realize it’s like encouraging people to marry alcoholics, or people with severe and unresolved psychological problems.
I’m a firm believer that the interests of the child do tend to override the personal interests of either parent, because that’s what the unity of the family essentially turns on. The problem is it applies with equal weight and force to both parents and not just one of them.
I’ll never forget how I learned hexadecimal. When I was very young I was a curious kid and I loved my video games. I ended up getting irked at one point playing Diablo II where I found it too difficult to advance in the game so I started looking for ways to manipulate the engine and get all the most advanced items and then just destroy my way through everything.
I ended up downloading a hex editor, and I located and then started editing the .d2s save files to max all my character attributes, stats and abilities during runtime execution. The rush of euphoria I felt was awesome. I felt like a God. Naturally you could only make it work seamlessly in offline play, once you connect to the server you start battling against direct memory inspection. I didn’t have time for that. Most of the techniques used even today though, remain the same as they were 20-30 years ago: entry point analysis, patching conditional jumps, tracing serial verification subroutines, etc.
Forging CD-keys was fun back in the early days of StarCraft and Battle.net. One thing I ended up finding out was that StarCraft used checksums for a license key. Checksums are just very rudimentary expressions performed on a block of binary data, such as simply adding all the numbers together. In the checksum StarCraft used, the 13th digit was used to validate the first 12. So you could literally enter anything you wanted for the first 12 and simply generate the 13th and create a valid license key for the game. It's why you could generate keys like 1234-56789-1234 that you could register, and it was widely used to pirate the game. Not all checksums are equal in this way, but the type of way they calculated it was very simple:
x = 3;
for(int i = 0; i < 12; i++)
{
x +- (2 * x) ^ digit[i];
{
lastDigit = x % 10;
There were two approaches you could take to cracking this. You can run the algorithm and calculate the correct value of the last digit. Or, the other way, is you can brute force it because there's only one digit you have to figure out and you only have to calculate from 0-9. Had Blizzard been more careful they would've hashed the keys beforehand. Not great security hygiene still, but it adds another layer to wasting a hacker's time; and it's essentially how Microsoft verifies legitimate software through digitally signed keys. Spyro the Dragon also had a hilarious anti-piracy scheme.
We use similar schemes in other ways. Credit cards work the same way, incidentally. The digits on your debit/credit card aren’t derived arbitrarily or at random. The first digit is the “start code,” often referred to as the major industry identifier (MII). This specifies the industry it’s in (e.g. banking, airline, etc.) and network (e.g. 3 = Amex, 4 = Visa, 5 = Mastercard, etc.). Those are all 1-6. The remaining ones are your account number and the last digit is the checksum used to validate your identity. People mistakenly think credit cards XOR the card number with your PII at the point of the interchange but that isn’t how that works. Your card number isn’t a “secret,” to someone who’s determined to know it. It’s like knowing someone’s bank account number. That information isn’t terribly relevant if someone has it, unless coupled with other information. All it is, is simply a pointer to your database. I don’t care if someone hacks or obtains it. But only ‘some’ payment processors validate the name. Most don’t. For modern systems, name and number are distinct and separate fields.
Reverse engineering is extremely fun on closed, proprietary systems to me but difficult as hell as you move on to more complex things. If you try performing dynamic analysis on a binary and you see ones that are packed with a loader like VMProtect that decompresses, decrypts and generates the code in memory, it becomes a gigantic pain in the ass. It’s much more complex than battling against say UPX where today you can easily automate its deobfuscation. Myself and a couple friends of mine once spent a night trying to examine how it worked. It works by substituting native machine code into a customized bytecode format that runs on a VM. Trying to find the OEP before the packer added its layer can leave you feeling like you're going insane. If the entropy of the code section is high, everything you do is going to amount to an examination of the loader stub and not the real code. Those are all wasted hours.
RE is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my entire life. In another life it’d have consumed 100% of my attention and I’d be doing that professionally. I’ve reached some very high levels of mathematical proficiency, but even so I was never one of those guys who could see the matrix. I'm a very visual and intuitive learner. I have to touch and feel what it is I'm doing, otherwise I can't understand it. I envy the former type of people.
(Edit: Hey Lydia!)
People often forget that video games as an avenue for storytelling is a fairly recent thing in the full analysis of its history. John Carmack (one of the co-creators of the original Doom) once said: “… story in a video game is like story in a porn movie. You assume it’s there somewhere in the background but it’s not primarily why you watch it…”
I never thought Halo had a great story - I thought it was boring at best; but it was most definitely fun playing when it originally came out. And when it spawned off Rooster Teeth and the creation of Red vs. Blue, its capacity for storytelling expanded into other areas.
Childhood favorites of mine like MK2 on the Sega Genesis were iconic for the blood and violence every physically energetic young boy could exact on his opponent. Steve Ritchie had one of the greatest in-game voices ever performed for a video game. He was actually a legend in the pinball scene who once said he regretted playing the voice of Shao Kahn; because he would go to pinball events and conferences and nobody in the Q&A ever wanted to ask him about pinball stuff; fans of his came because they always wanted to ask him about the voice of Shao Kahn. I think overtime he came to accept it with a smile and just go with the flow.
That’s always how it’s been throughout history though. And this is no different. “Without justice, what are kingdoms but great robberies?” Every claim is given at least a thin veil of justification and some justification may indeed really be present but power has always been a first principle, first and foremost. No country on Earth is going to cede territory to someone else out of superior moral arguments or by divine edict.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t
5d ago
Good luck to your search, truly; but right now the market for this stuff is getting ‘hammered’ and is over saturated as of late. The word among the people I know is if you have a good job already, keep it. Don’t make the jump. If what you’ve got looks promising, make the jump, but be careful.
Second that. When I lost my calico, Sweet Baby Esther Goldstein, I was devastated and depressed for weeks. Her passing was inexplicable. One day she just stopped eating. I noticed she was losing weight, but nothing was found to be wrong with her just before her passing. She was found in the bathroom where she had passed away. She was up there in age though and she was very well taken care of by me all the days we were together. Hope I get to see her in Heaven.
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