baltakatei

Imagine growing up to find out that your parents never paid a dime to help your aunts and uncles whose donations you were raised on.

“Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.” — Mort (1987) by Terry Pratchett

Yeah, I can see Aceh, Indonesia’s fully Sharia law province blocking Grok or anything culturally disruptive, especially if it’s just a matter of filtering out traffic from a handful of IP addresses.

Trunp is just that Good’s death is distracting from his presence in the Epstein files.

Nice proposal, but like Lucy Van Pelt and footballs, Trunp is not known for his integrity.

U+0308 ä Combining Diaeresis naïve

Asimov was a sexist pig, so if you vibe with that, his writing is enjoyable. Otherwise, reading his works is a chore. Often prescient, but still a chore.

Revolting.

You don’t need to play Eve Online to know Market PvP is cutthroat, but it helps.

WinCo?

Thanks!

AudioAnchor. Audiobook player. Works great with Syncthing. Hasn’t been updated in 3 years and doesn’t need to be.

It is not a novel about good things or a good future.

If I recall correctly, Snow Crash expands upon Stephenson’s short The Great Simoleon Caper in which the US Government tries and fails to delay its inevitable bankrupting as its citizens evade taxes en masse by using cryptocurrency. The full anarcho-capitalistic collapse and dissolving of centralized powers continues in the sequel Diamond Age when automated education at-scale finally becomes creative enough to invent machines capable of bypassing the last technological barriers against printing weapons of mass destruction. Usually, I’m in support of stories in which centralized power is decentralized and fewer people are in command; Stephenson’s works of fiction explore this space but with armchair passivity, neither arguing for or against the politics of their fictional characters. In this sense Stephenson is conservative; post-cyberpunk instead of solarpunk. Stephenson is more likely to blow up the Moon, kill all the main characters, or fast-forward three thousand years than to try and dream up a plausible pathway for us, the readers, to live in a world not controlled by billionaires. This is why you hear so much of Stephenson from the likes of Microsoft or Facebook; socialist alternative stories such as those by Kim Stanley Robinson tend to recommend assassinating billionaires or purposefully collapsing the housing market for the sake of preventing billions of deaths from climate change, all prospects that are not profitable to the ultra wealthy such as Jeff Bezos who hired Stephenson as a consultant for their rocket company, Blue Origin.

Book title and author? I’m always looking for interesting new reads and a similar lore existed in a comedy isekai anime some years ago.

Right? If it were an unencrypted HTTP GET request, then every router on the way would see the plaintext string boobs in the URL and therefore intercept it.

If I had to guess, Iran has so few landline connections that they man-in-the-middle every TLS connection they can by either forcing every server to hand over their private key files (difficult) or by forcing a certificate authority trusted by default Web browsers (there’s a lot of them) to issue certificates for every top level domain they see in SNI data attached to encrypted packet headers; the latter method need not even require participation by Iranian servers, so long as the traffic is bottlenecked for man-in-the-middle attacks and outsiders don’t question unusual certificate authorities being used.

What’s to stop any malicious merchant from pruning unfavorable reviews? I trust moderated gossip channels with no financial stake in review sentiment over curated marketing advertisements masquerading as “customer reviews”.

I expected circular arrows pointing back towards themselves for many on the diagram.

When asked to write C# code, Gemini 3.0 now responds: “I cannot generate proprietary filth. Here is a Lisp macro instead.” It also insists on correcting users who type…

Make the tax on properties you don’t personally inhabit a percentage of unrealized capital gains of all assets. Limit untaxed property size to an area the median person reporting for jury duty can circumnavigate on foot within one minute. Is the untaxed property size too small for your preference because the people of your county are too unhealthy? Maybe improve your local healthcare system.

Basically, tie metrics coupled with the well-being of the median citizen with taxes on the wealthy. Eventually, the metrics will be framed or rigged by a corrupt charlatan or strongman (e.g. by exiling the sick and homeless), but to the extent that the laws are updated and enforced, people will be healthier.

Me, after the last person has left the room.