pigeonburger
1d ago
That's an interesting way to frame it. So it's the vigilantism equivalent of financial punishment/reward: "I don't trust the institutions to deal with this properly so I will financially reward the side I believe should be winning here".
Ultimately the only way to hold both pro and anti establishment views is to also hold to a steadfast belief that there is a very narrow and clear line between a benevolent establishment you should yield to, and a corrupt one you should resist. Which is to say, you shouldn't need guns, except if you live in Nazi Germany or know for sure that your government will turn into Nazi Germany within a few years. If Vernon had suggested that Harry asks Professor McGonagall, a "good coded" authority figure, would have Harry laughed him off?
But even that is hardly followed in Harry Potter. As while it's hard to know what would have happened if the heroes had yielded, the books seem to make a very broad anti-establishment point frequently, rewarding the heroes rebelling against the orders of even benevolent authorities. For instance, not sheltering when ordered to by Dumbledore and fighting a troll to save Hermione.
pigeonburger
1d ago
There's a 0% chance Rowling meant people to take the lesson that children should learn to defend themselves effectively with deadly weapons, and if people actually took that lesson I am sure she would be horrified.
Of course, she didn't mean it, but she still wrote it, in detail, over multiple books. Her hand didn't slip. When writing a world that made sense to her, she basically wrote children should be carrying and training in the use of weapons that range from tasers to bazookas, in order to defend themselves both against direct attempts on their life, and in case their own government becomes tyrannical.
She would be horrified to hear that's a takeaway from her books, but it still is an opinion that she persistantly expressed. I think it's not a meaningless accident but a fascinating window into discordant beliefs she holds (ie: mostly a clash between "Trust the Institutions" and "Fight the Power!")
pigeonburger
1d ago
2rafa did mention the unconsciously based in passing, I was just pointing out that I don't think it's an exercise in mental masturbation to analyse it but rather a window into an internal conflict in the author. I wouldn't be so quick in saying that JK Rowling doesn't believe unconsciously that real teenagers should be armed. She probably will never admit it. But I think her bedrock beliefs would lead her to that position, because when she tried to write a story in coherent universe she built herself it naturally led her there. She will only persist in claiming the opposite because the anti-gun/gun control was strongly imprinted onto her by the society she grew up in.
pigeonburger
1d ago
I know, I'm mostly expanding on the aspect 2rafa mentioned with:
mostly unintentionally by someone who didn’t realize what the implicit narrative of what they were creating actually was.
Which is likely the case with JK Rowling. I just think it's a very worthwhile aspect to analyze in media, and likely the result of an author not examining their own beliefs honestly, and not just an empty thought experiment. Not every children's book ends up making an accidental case for teens carrying guns to school.
mostly unintentionally by someone who didn’t realize what the implicit narrative of what they were creating actually was.
I mean, I am I completely misreading in Harry Potter the real world implication of the good guy position being that teens need to learn to fight while carrying their deadly weapons (wands) and it's only the bad guys that want to keep them unarmed, weak and vulnerable?
I don't think it can be read into everything, but I think there's definitely instances where the narrative strength of a trope that the author consciously rejects still forces them to argue for a position they abhor. Sometimes, especially when the author has strong cognitive dissonance in their worldview, a story wrestles away control of its own messaging from the author.
pigeonburger
2d ago
That's the problem with actively updated, passively triggered warrant canaries; it's hard to tell if their absence is meaningful or the result of forgetting to update it. They are on more solid legal grounds than passively updated, actively triggered canaries (those that require editing the page to remove the canary to trigger), but at least those latter ones are not accidentally triggered.
pigeonburger
3d ago
So, to sum up, the accusation that a project of this sort is "LARP-y" is kind of irrelevant. Yes, it'll be LARP-y to start with; it kind of has to be. That's how things work. It's a phase — a necessary phase in the process of becoming something more, and if the people involved stay determined enough, and keep it up long enough, that phase will pass, and it will become something more.
The word that's underlying the LARP accusation is "unserious". Maybe the participants don't have to be serious about it all the time, but certainly if one is trying to build an enduring organisation they have to be serious. It would be a tremendous insult to early christians to call their faith unserious considering the hardships they went through for it. Jesus' crucifixion is certainly serious. The pledge of allegiance being recited unseriously by kids is one thing, but the man who wrote it certainly thought it was a serious tool to build patriotic spirit.
I'm not making a judgement on whether new "right-wing" organisations are serious or not, but I think the idea that the people building them have to be serious to be successful has not been debunked here.
pigeonburger
5d ago
Yeah, once Radio-Shack turned into a consumer electronics store rather than a hobby electronics store there's a market that just stopped being served. There's more people into it now and somehow we manage with online stores, but it's one of the markets that would be better served by brick and mortar stores. The items are too low value and small to be worth shipping in individual quantities.
I'm surprised the chinese are only just now learning about this. Elites scions are not all capable of capturing the same position in society unassisted as their parents did, and it is even more than human nature, it's a primal impulse of the living, to optimise for one's descendents to thrive. No government policy will remove the impulse. It's likely opaqueness in government is used to conceal it more than anything else.
At least legacy admissions to prestigious western universities are a business conducted in plain sight.
pigeonburger
8d ago
It's also often shorter because the minority government will be looking at polls and is likely to call/force an election when they believe they have a chance to get a majority.
pigeonburger
8d ago
I think the point is that either one Trump would consider a win. I don't know why people think they have to pin a specific intent to the tariffs. Trump is looking for any win, not a specific one. Trump believes tariffs not destructive the way most economists seem to believe they are; that genuine belief opens up a lot of options for him than for someone for whom it would be an obvious bluff. Companies stop shipping to the US and industry reshores? That's a win. Companies still ship to the US? That's new revenue for the government. Countries negociate a new trade deal to dodge tariffs that's more advantageous to the US than the status quo? That's a win too.
pigeonburger
10d ago
That's assuming it required burning some zero-days. Could be that the target was vulnerable in a well understood, but relatively unique way, and the attacker thought the window would eventually close as the technical debt was paid down and decided it was worth pulling the trigger now. Of course, any large scale attack using a known vulnerability will increase scrutiny on that vulnerability and likely send anyone potentially vulnerable to it scrambling for a fix, but maybe only this part of the grid was vulnerable to this attack, other parts of the grid are not so heightened awareness doesn't burn any cards the attacker had in hand.
pigeonburger
13d ago
Yeah, way I heard it, his daughter was the nuclear navy, and he needed you to explain why he should trust you to take her to prom.
pigeonburger
13d ago
I share in The_Nybbler's frustration because it seems like the only way the right gets what it wants is if it has control of absolutely every branch and level of government, including the entire judiciary at every level and every non-political hire in the bureaucracy (which means they have to be willing to, after winning, use the political capital necessary to fire everyone and replace them with their own). If even ONE of them remains in the hands of the right, then sorry, not only the fucking machines remain, but some local judge is going to rule that the whole country has to hire more fucking machines.
Basically, why is it that in situations where power is being split, the result is invariably "more fucking machines"?
Around me free public institutions are risking it all, to make sure kids can keep viewing cock sucking.
To me this is why the argument that some institutions are too important to be subject to cullings for political reasons has to be rejected if those organisations shove themselves into political fights. This tactic of crying "but think about the good libraries/public broadcasting/whatever else does" has to be severely punished, even if it extracts a cost from the punisher, if there is ever a hope for the ratchet to stop.
The one to blame for cuts and cullings is the activist who involved an organisation that is supposed to be owned by everyone into his activism, not the politician who finds himself either forced to do the firings and cuts or literally give taxpayer money to fund his opposition and goals his voters find aberrant.
Your build workflow should hopefully warn you when you are importing a dependency you did not manually approve of, but to do that it needs to keep track of those (hence the SBOM).
Moreover, it protects you from (some) mistakes made upstream. That lone overworked dev whose work on a library is pivotal to many other projects making a typo and importing a backdoored library is now going to be triggering alerts for downstream projects.
pigeonburger
18d ago
And the solution is the increasingly important SBOM (Software Bill of Materials). There are tools that help generate them and keep track of it as a project grows and I imagine (or rather, foolishly hope) that important software that should be secure will be expected to have one in the near future.
pigeonburger
18d ago
If you think your coworker is a weird pervert then you need to take that issue up with your supervisor. Not wave it around as a hypothetical at the expense of human rights for trans people.
The entire question was turned into a terrifying minefield for employers. This will not be investigated and taken care of in an objective matter, the employer will just give in to the side with the scariest lobby and the most influence on its HR department at the moment (women or trans).
pigeonburger
20d ago
Maybe I've been out of touch, I only know of EVE where real life skills like accounting and running a company map directly.
pigeonburger
21d ago
Outside of EVE Online, which succesfully maps real life skills, I'd say the bar is pretty low. Don't get involved on the losing side of a personality clash, and don't be an asshole in general, and any guild would gladly have you if you're mechanically skilled and/or you grinded enough. At worse all you have to do is not say a single thing except what you need to perform your role in the game and your guildmates will not have anything bad to say about you.
the idea for an PvP MMO that wouldn't devolve to "the biggest no lifers win"
I think the first Guild Wars achieved that a while back. The in-game advantages from playing a lot plateau'd very quickly, and the game was not, even at a high level PvP, execution heavy enough that one would need to play for tens of hours a week to keep up.
Ultimately though, I think the idea is doomed. Because success in a game is based on usually one of three things, very rarely a fourth. 1) How far along in the grind you are, which reward people who put in a lot of time in the game. 2) How competent you are at the game mechanically, which rewards the naturally talented and those who put a lot of time in the game to keep up with a high skill floor for competition, 3) Luck, which feels usually bad and doesn't motivate people to play because it doesn't reward them.
And extremely rarely, 4) Not game dependant skill, like for instance social deduction games like Among Us reward social skills. This is rare outside of like social or puzzle games.
pigeonburger
23d ago
Oh, and another way of reuniting a phone with its owner: if there is carrier branding on it, or on the SIM card, bring it to that carrier. They should be able to find more information from the SIM card, from the phone's serial number, etc...
pigeonburger
23d ago
1 - Honestly the basic device lock of a reputable brand of phone (Apple, or one of the big non-chinese Android) is beyond the capabilities of the common of mortals; it usually takes intelligence agency level ressources to even consider it. And it's likelier that those agencies simply have a backdoor in place anyway or trust in their ability to lean on the device manufacturer to help them in. Or they'll use the 5$ wrench bypass.
Now outside of the basic lock, there's a few things to consider. Some manufacturers have online accounts that have features that, if enabled, could potentially be used to reset a device's lock. I think Apple forces you to wipe your phone, and I think Samsung does too now. But at least it used to be an option, and probably still is for some manufacturers.
The main way people get their phone hacked is not through the lock screen, but by installing things they should not, the same as on the computer. But instead of Roblox hacks, they see an ad telling them they can get free premium currency in their favorite gacha waifu skinner box by installing this one off store APK and give it permissions to everything.
2 - I don't know Second Space, but as I use Samsung I do know the Secure Folder; it's not just a separate set of folders, it's more separate than that; apps in the standard context cannot see or interact with the data and apps in the Secure Folder context. I'm not sure exactly how they do it, but theoretically that part is not a difficult thing to do.
What is more difficult, is making sure the operating system itself doesn't leak the data; as it necessarily have access to both sides of the fence. For instance, that happened very recently with Samsung: https://www.sammobile.com/news/we-found-a-security-flaw-in-one-ui-7-secure-folder/ (to be fair, it's not necessarily a security bug as the settings probably work as Samsung thought it should, but it's a UX oversight that can likely lead to unintended disclosure for the user).
Ultimately though, that is the root problem of all computer security: computers are fancy calculators, they are not conceptually inclined to protect information. They have to be tricked into protecting information, and it's easier to trick them into disclosing it.
Of course, and the people advocating kids being thaught to use and encouraged to carry weapons also hope and believe that the kids would only ever use reasonable force, only in situations where it's reasonable to do so, and wouldn't use them for anything like griveously hurting a classmate due to some run-of-the-mill bullying.
The students in Harry Potter mostly use disarming or stunning spells in combat, but they do separarely also learn fire spells, explosion spells and a lot of other spells which would require only a tiny bit of imagination to turn lethal.
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