I did do the 5 minute search, and found his write-up. I said I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was fabricated, not that it was.

Thank you for proving my point

Nobody wants to point out that Alexey Grigorev changes to being named Gregory after 2 paragraphs?

Slop journalism at its sloppiest. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that this story was entorely fabricated.

The good news is that Russia is only evil and fascist and so it’s always bad to be associated with them. Trust me, I’m one of the good Americans

You fool, you absolute bingus. You have fallen for one of the classic blunders, for I, in my infinite wisdom, know that all states are bad. And all equally so at that. 😎

So there are words I can say that get you to immediately stop listening to anything else I say and make broad assumptions about me and my beliefs?

Talk about being trained

Picking apart the single definition used by one entity doesn’t mean the term itself is completely meaningless.

But fine, I’ll bite, just for fun:

the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo

That’s every country

That’s “whataboutism.” Or alternatively, it’s “authoritarian realism”—a term I just made up which refers to any view that assumes a nation has to centralize powers to exist because that’s how the world under capitalism currently operates.

Reductions from what? The USSR was an increase in all of those things from Tsarist Russia.

So 1. You just gave a counterexample to your first point, and 2. I guess the metric depends on who you ask. It could be reductions from a historical state (as we could say of e.g. the current USA compared to North America’s political systems prior to european colonization), or compared to some standard of liberty (e.g. your use of USSR).

I can agree with your first point and still posit that the term is meaningful: e.g. authoritarianism isn’t a binary state of extistence, but rather a spectrum that different states can be compared on; all states can be authoritarian to some degree, but some states are more or less authoritarian than others.

Or to put it another way, saying “authoritarianism” is meaningless because all states exercise authority is like saying “conservativism” is meaningless because all living creatures seek to conserve resources (to some degree).

I agree that language is an imperfect map for the real world we inhabit—and I especially agree that the language (as with any social tool) gets abused to manipulate people—but I don’t agree that those facts make the terms completely useless in communication.

In most instances, “authoritarianism” is a more rigidly defined term than simply meaning “exercises authority.”

E.g. Wikipedia defines it as

a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law.

Time and again, across years and product categories, Amazon has reached out to its vendors and instructed them to increase retail prices on competitors’ websites, threatening dire consequences if vendors do not comply.

Yes, buying from alternative websites is the bare minimum and the bar is so low it’s underground. But that’s beside the point: Amazon is price fixing across the internet.

Stoat and it’s been mostly fine, but they’re already implementing age verification.

Can you elaborate on this? I can’t find anything about it online

Con Te Partirò - Andre Bocelli
遙か彼方 - ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION
アイワナビー - Stance Punks
I Samma Bil - Bo Kaspers Orkester
A 67-Es Út - Republic
Papaoutai - Stromae

What white paper?

First and foremost: about 10-20 Exabytes worth of storage space, or roughly 4 Petabytes per day.

That’s 4,000,000 Gigabytes of new video per day.

And of course you’d need an efficient way of loading all that video data and streaming it to the end users, so they don’t experience major interruptions, even when hundreds of thousands of people are all watching the same video at the same time. Youtube does this with caching servers/proxies, and highly optimized data delivery algorithms.

Once you have all that infrastructure, just make sure it’s free and ad-free for all the watchers and uploaders. It’s not like you need to pay for all those servers and storage… right?

The controversial opinions come in the form of “GUI is better than CLI” or vice-versa. I prefer the efficiency of keyboard-only navigation/usage, but I think GUIs are cool af and a great way to be noob-friendly

Because privacy is a spectrum, and it makes a good stepping off point for the people that still use text messages and social media chat clients to stay in touch. I can’t convince half of my nerd friends to leave Discord for literally anything less shit, but I can convince even my tech-averse mother to use Signal instead of FaceTime.

A few answers say “they aren’t private by design,” but don’t really go into the “why.” There’s the obvious “it’s an electronic tracking device, duh” reason, but there’s also a more nuanced reason:

Airtags are able to be picked up almost anywhere because they connect to the nearest bluetooth-enabled Apple device, and then send location info across the internet to you. Without this functionality (the ability of any and every Apple device to locate it), they wouldn’t have any way to send their location back to the owner.

Your best “privacy respecting” alternatives are something that uses meshtastic (and hoping there’s enough repeaters near you), something that uses cellular data and GPS (which is about as privacy-respecting as Airtags are), or just a key finder/beeper (which only works within a small radius)

This article was more constructive (suggesting alternatives) than destructive (leveraging critiques), but it did link to several critiques/vulnerabilities with OpenPGP.

Unfortunately, half are about implementation issues (granted, it’s made more difficult to implement something correctly when it’s as convoluted and all-encompassing as PGP)—which are hopefully not applicable to Delta due to their 3rd party, applied cryptography audit—and the rest are obsolesced by the 2024 updates to the standard—RFC 9580, the so-called “crypto-refresh.”

Do you have any critiques that address the current state of the PGP protocol’s security?

Oh, for sure. All it takes is me looking at an Awk one-liner to make my headspin. Give me a simple “for each line in $FILE, reformat MM/dd/yyyy as dd/MM/yyyy” instead of… whatever that looks like in Awk.

The hardware of a computer is not designed to handle natural language parsing. Techbros with just enough knowledge to be dangerous will say it’s a matter of complex-enough software, but it’s more that human brains are not Von Neumann machines

rtorrent!