DaftDank

That will be quite a sight -- seeing the videos of people on the ground, filming future drone laser battles

I think the difference with John vs. Assange is that Assange seemed a lot more willing to take political sides/positions, whereas John was more neutral. I have visited Cryptome on/off for something like 25 years now. I have never once got the impression that he is the type of person who would selectively leak information out of political considerations.

He says that, but what do you call being aggressive and hostile to allies -- i.e. threatening military force to take the Panama Canal and Greenland -- while aligning with Russia and China, who play the long game and will pretend to be friendly until the moment they see an opening and take it?

The most genuinely good person I've known, my wife's very devout grandmother, who belonged to the United Church of Christ and whose husband was a preacher for a United Methodist Church, never once went out of her way to proselytize (in my presence at least.) That's not to say she wouldn't talk about God or her beliefs if it was somehow directly relevant to a conversation, but I never saw her trying to "spread the word" just to do so. She emphasized caring for others and the "love your neighbor as yourself," part. Her favorite scripture was the story of the Good Samaritan and that was what she requested to be read at her funeral. She didn't spend time talking about what Jesus wanted, or trying to convince you to believe, she set the example by living it.

The unfortunate part is, in my 38 years of existence, she is possibly the first "real" Christian I've known: Christian through her acts, not just her words. In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Jesus bases judgment not on religious rituals or verbal professions of faith, but on acts of compassion towards others: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the unclothed, caring for the sick, and visiting the imprisoned. This seems to emphasize practical love and concern for the vulnerable as true evidence of discipleship, rather than one's ability to proselytize.

Isn't the most important part of the New Testament the Gospels and almost everything that comes after is more about institutional Christianity? Acts, describing the spread of Christianity after Jesus' ascension, with little new information about his teachings. Epistles focus primarily on doctrine, ethics, and church organization rather than Jesus' words and actions. Revelations...well I'll leave that to others to interpret.

If Christianity is built around Jesus, shouldn't his teachings and words be the focus rather than the institution of Christianity itself? I don't think there is anything wrong with proselytizing per se, it's obviously critical to ensuring the survival and expansion of any belief system and from an evolutionary standpoint, ideas that encourage their own reproduction tend to thrive. But it seems misguided to focus on spreading the faith rather than doing all the things Jesus says you should do.

It would indeed be hard to convince me Trump has not committed crimes, considering a jury found that he had and the whole, "Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck," thing. Tony Accardo ran the Chicago Outfit for 4-5 decades and never spent a single day in jail. I don't think most people would agree that because he was never convicted (or even charged), he was not committing crimes.

If you read a story about a drug kingpin being convicted at trial, do you assume that he might be innocent?

Subjective interpretation is very fundamental to being human and the way our minds work, but the underlying physical reality -- the wavelengths of light reflecting off the shirt -- can be measured objectively. A physicist might say that gravity is the curvature of spacetime caused by mass, which can be measured and tested.

Trump being a criminal is based on a shared legal and societal context. As a society, we accept that if you are convicted before a jury of your peers, you are guilty and have been convicted of a crime. Jury's get it wrong and the justice system is flawed and has made mistakes. A black man in the 1920s (or even the 1960s for that matter) being tried for murder with absolutely no evidence and sentenced to death is a clear miscarriage and corruption of justice. The testimony of Trump's employees during the trial, who all said they loved working there (most of them still worked there), but weren't willing to lie on the stand about checks and phone calls they participated in, was pretty clear cut. This wasn't random people off the street of [insert preferred liberal enclave here] testifying against him: it was his own people who still work for him.

Some people prioritize political allegiance over legal judgments when it suits them.

If we dismissed facts entirely, science, medicine, and countless other fields reliant on objective reality would collapse.

This exchange is a great example of the subjective nature of our experiences: as I've gotten older -- 38 now -- I've come to accept more and more that some things are objective reality, whereas in my teens and 20s, I questioned reality and society on the structural level, torn down to the studs. From Plato's cave, to brain in the vat, Kant, the Hindu Brahman and Maya, Buddhism, etc.

Thanks, man. I appreciate that. Merry Christmas to you as well and Happy New Year!

I learned this the hard way when I was homeless at 17-18 years old in the middle of Wyoming winters. I had at least had my old Grand Cherokee to sleep in the trunk space, but not enough money for gas to run the heater. I'd pile all my clothes on top of me, but there were always patches where the cold got through and I'd spend so many nights just shaking from the cold. Spent the Christmas of 2004 this way. You are also correct that when it would be sunny (but still cold) the next day, it was an awesome experience. Almost like a ray of hope, as cliche as that sounds. It's crazy what having sunlight can do to improve your mood. That's one reason I loved living in SF later on, there were so many sunny days and I also wasn't homeless lol.

My brother has had life-long, serious mental health issues, and it's only been because of both medication AND life-long therapy that he has been able to reach a baseline of normalcy and being able to function. I think if you have a serious underlying mental health issue, that it often takes both the meds and therapy. I also don't think most psychiatrists feel they are "playing God." I think most genuinely want to help patients get better, to the extent they can.

I'm not following. Why is being a doctor scary? And why do you believe or suggest doctors are killers?

I am pretty sure if I went straight to a psychiatrist instead of investing into long term therapy with a psychologist (that eventually suspected me having ADHD), I would have probably been given an SSRI and sent on my way.

That's probably true, but a lot of hospitals try to push this dynamic onto doctors/psychiatrists. When my dad (was psychiatrist for 43 years) took a job as medical director at a hospital in Wyoming, they told him when he first got there that they only wanted his role to be prescribing medication, and that they would have psychologists evaluate the patient first, and then determine what medication is needed and then his job would be to write them. I assume the previous psychiatrist was fine with this (he was an unusual guy in general but that's another story), but my dad told them he would not operate this way.

But at the end of the day, the "roles" usually end up being the therapists and psychologists doing the more therapy-focused work, while the psychiatrist makes diagnoses and determinations of which medications may work, and prescribes them because of his M.D.

My brother has been bipolar his whole life, major depressive for large parts of it as well, and generally has had a rough time with mental health. It's taken both medication and life-long therapy to get him to a sort of manageable/live-able baseline.

Out of curiosity, which test/company did you go with? A quick search reveals a lot of options, and I'm hoping you may have done some of the legwork already to determine if one is better than others for privacy reasons etc.?

Doesn't the NSA represent a huge portion of our signals intelligence capabilities as a country? How would that role be filled otherwise? Wouldn't the best people to do many of those new jobs still be the people who used to work at the (now defunct) NSA?

In legal parlance, he will be "fu*ed."

I assume that storage has gotten so cheap now that storing everything forever is feasible for companies? I always knew they had to retain content for X period of time, to comply with laws about data retention for criminal investigations, but I always assumed (from reading about it 10+ years ago) that because of how much extra storage space all the "deleted" content would take up, that it wouldn't be feasible for them to do it long-term for everything. I knew that would become a moot point eventually, and I suppose that is now.

I am thankful to HN's existence for this reason. It is among the last outlets where I can get quality content.

Hopefully this doesn't make me some kind of elitist or something, but I specifically never link to Hacker News or mention it on my social media accounts because I don't want HN to become "watered down" like so many previously high-value content sites/forums have been over the decades. I'll just share the linked article if I want to share something I found here.

I think there was more of a "break" in the decades since with Germany and Nazism, where in Russia, there wasn't as much of a break from the old Soviet systems and ways of thinking. Many years ago, I read this book, "The Limits of Partnership" by Angela Stent, one of the foremost US-Russia relations experts. She lays out in detail how an entire generation of Russians came up believing that the Soviet Union collapsed almost solely due to outside influence -- i.e. the United States -- and that it otherwise would not have failed without that undue influence. They want to see Russia restored to its former Soviet-era glory, encompassing all of its former territories. This is how pretty much the entire leadership in Russia thinks/believes. Putin 100% feels this way.

"If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”

-- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

It does not seem unusual that an organization (NATO) created solely to defend/protect against one particular country would not allow that country to join forces with them.

Let me start by saying I do not condone the destruction of government buildings in any way. Full stop.

If there are separate parts of a system -- but all part of the same underlying system -- do you really see them as completely different things? For example, I've heard cops, while arresting someone for marijuana, just "pass the buck" and say, "We don't write the laws, we are just enforcing them."

If you are part of maintaining, propagating, and continuing a system, are you not an equal part of that system and the things done in its name?

It is for me

Check out APEC RO systems.

Plot twist: He's applying at Pornhub next, and this gets him instantly hired.

I'm not following. I feel like you are trying to tell me the Sun isn't warm, and is in fact, cold. Opioids are most definitely addicting by any definition of the word.

I think when you are providing such a valuable service, there is almost zero chance they just stop.

I think China's intention to surpass the U.S. as the dominant superpower by 2049, the 100-year anniversary of the PRC founding, is absolutely crystal clear and without doubt. They have said they would like to accomplish this through military means if necessary, but focusing on economic and technological means/"warfare" -- their term not mine (see "Unrestricted Warfare" by PLA Colonels Liang and Xiangsui written in 1999 on the 8 year anniversary of the Gulf War; https://www.c4i.org/unrestricted.pdf) In fact, the paper clearly argues for going to war with a more powerful adversary by using network warfare prominently. Full disclosure: I have not read the entire paper, but enough of it to get the gist since they clearly state their goals and intentions.

Now, is China doing something America has not done? Absolutely not. Is it crazy for a country to want to become more powerful? Absolutely not. Is it wrong for a country to do so? I would argue not, since their first responsibility should be to their people, and usually -- not always -- a more powerful country on the world stage is better for the people of that country.

I believe in a globalized world, I am not a nationalist, and think if the world could truly come together, it would obviously be better for all of mankind. However, I am also an American, and although I don't love everything about my country by any means, I am going to pick and favor my country over a foreign one when that country is clearly an adversary. Does that mean I want harm to come to China? No. Does that mean I wish ill-will of the Chinese people? No.

And for what it's worth, I don't think anyone is unbiased and believe it is unrealistic to expect people to be. I think biases are as fundamental (in good and bad ways) to being human as walking on two legs is. Biases are critical to how our brain/memory works -- we have something like 180+ known cognitive biases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases). I think the best thing we can do is recognize and acknowledge when we have bias, and factor that knowledge in to how we are thinking about a topic. For example, because of what I do for a living, if I see a positive story about the benefits of marijuana or crypto, I will initially be inclined to believe it may be true; the good ol' confirmation bias at work. But, I also usually try to stop myself, and think more critically of the information being presented, since I know that I am going to be inclined to have that bias towards the two topics. I feel as humans, that is the best we can do. Anyone who pretends to not be biased in any way whatsoever is lying. My father was a psychiatrist for 43 years, and I talked to him about this many times over the course of my life, and he agreed that he's never seen someone who did not have bias.

That's my mistake then, if it still allowed me to edit the comment I would do so to make that more clear.

Once you push parts into the supply chain you can’t really tell where they will end up.

That's why I wonder if it wouldn't be a good, "broad spectrum" attack. I imagine aides to key Senators, Congressmen, White House staffers, C-suite people at defense contractors etc. buy all sorts of devices off Amazon, which they plug in without a second thought like the vast majority of us do. Obviously, 98% of the people plugging in the devices aren't valuable from a military/intelligence perspective, but even if only 1 in 10,000 targets was worthwhile, I imagine there would be a few that were goldmines of information.

On the other hand, I imagine if it was that sophisticated of an attack, the more devices you have randomly "in the wild" increases the chances it is discovered potentially, which could then nuke your whole operation. I remember in the Snowden docs, the NSA's TAO was sometimes intercepting orders for laptops etc people placed online, carefully placing backdoors in it, then sealing it all perfectly back up and putting it back on track for delivery. It arrives and you think it's safe since it's factory sealed and you got it brand new from a reputable retailer. That's a more targeted example of the same concept

I am spreading propaganda by mentioning a fictional book I read, which made me think of potential security vulnerabilities? Things like a LAN Turtle exist, and have probably existed long before most people were aware of them.

After reading "Ghost Fleet" by P.W. Singer and August Cole, the idea in there about China putting backdoors in chips sent to the US for years -- laying the 'groundwork' for an eventual cyber and physical invasion -- has really stuck with me. He makes the point in the book (which has tons of citations to describe the attacks/weapon systems) that even critical defense-related chips, for things like our most advanced fighter jets, are often still assembled/manufactured in China. But I imagine an equally useful strategy could just be putting backdoors in all the various things ordinary people order off Amazon each day: fast charger wall outlets, USB cables, etc.

I've always assumed that we just had a way to 'check' each chip used in critical industries, such as defense, if they came from another country. It kind of feels the same way it did the first time I learned how to pick pin and tumbler locks, and realized locks are purely an illusion of security.

I agree with @wefarrell that it generally gives a lower yield. It can also be very difficult to do living soil on scale, but there are definitely plenty of businesses doing it. Closest to me, in Ann Arbor, Michigan is a place called Apothecare that does living soil on scale for example.