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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Alien intelligence is not required to follow human reasoning.

    The Lords of Alpha Centauri could run a long-term social engineering program on Earth because they believe capitalism, conflict and social darwinism are objectively Good for You and we need to be purged of the folly of humanistic ideology before we can be allowed to join the galactic civilization market.

    Or because they find our struggles entertaining.

    What I can tell you is that no rational spacefaring civilization would need to resort to social engineering if they just want to kill us. Just toss a bit (or a lot) of spare delta v on a sufficiently large asteroid (or five) and humanity goes the way of the dinosaur.

    (Different story if they want us dead, but want to make it look like suicide because of the space police.)



  • Whatsapp is encrypted. The problem is the Metadata they want - i.e. your whole address book.

    I do not agree to Facebook having my phone number, but if you use WA and have my number, they have it, too - even if I don’t use WA myself.

    If you can convince your family to switch, use Signal or Matrix.

    Otherwise, use Shelter on your phone with a limited, WA-ony address book.


  • Well, it works well for some people.

    Once you get used to it, it can be a dang powerful tool. For people doing a lot of config-wrangling on the CLI (i.e. admins working a lot ovet SSH), overcoming the learning curve will pay dividends.

    If you’re working mostly locally and in a GUI environment environment, it’s probably not worth it - there’s a reason most devs use more specialized IDE’s.