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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • In Russia they seem to be trying to make it so that everyone uses either VK or TG for communication. Life is in TG, so.

    WhatsApp has not been banned yet, but WhatsApp stores metadata Signal doesn’t. Signal is technically banned, but one can use it proxying it via Tor or something else.

    OK, too many words.

    I think it’s safe to assume all power-hungry people with their hands on opportunity to spy on others are class allies, regardless of their country. That includes companies and that includes politicians and that includes bureaucrats. So - it’s also safe to assume that Russian and American special services might exchange surveillance data. Police services do that when it’s about criminals and criminal organizations. No reason this wouldn’t work the same for 3-letter services - for some people being a honest person is a crime.

    So the common wrong wisdom that it’s safer for a US citizen to use TG than FBM, say, and that it’s safer for a Russian citizen to use FBM than TG, is kinda useless. Power doesn’t work this way, they are not eternal enemies.

    What I really wanted to say is that Russian-aligned or not doesn’t matter much here. Just that communications should be protected, and those trying to creep to power should have their heads broken so gruesomely that a few generations would remember how tyranny must be fought. OK, these are emotions, in fact they’ll likely succeed and the planetary digital concentration camp will happen.







  • It was “scientific” when they’d “confirm” it with stats.

    What they call AI today is a family of obscure statistical instruments pretending to carry truth in that trait alone.

    No, other than having stats you should also know and be capable of proving how those stats apply to the task at hand.

    And they use the all-powerful electronic computation machine as a piece of technomagic to give it credibility.

    Have you read Klemperer’s book on Third Reich’s language? I recommend it highly. Nazis used a lot of names for their policies, the subtle semantics of which are usually lost when translating from German. They used terms from radio and from automobile industry, for example.


  • but the face is a display of your genetical base, your hormonal exposure the last few years and of your health currently. Btw, that’s why the face is important in dating.

    Everything is a display of everything else affecting it.

    You are in some sense correct.

    But using statistical instruments requires deep understanding of how they work. The article hints at that too.

    And you do use it the same way in social context, although subsconsciously.

    My experience is very different. When I see faces on photos, I get a completely different impression than seeing their owners personally and talking to them. Including romantic context.



  • First, I don’t think I can find anything not perfect about Alien or Aliens, but the “female-led” context there is emotionally strong in very primal sense, liking those movies doesn’t prove anything because both movies (especially the second one) just give a new spin to pretty traditional perception of women.

    Xena is nice, but uses some stereotypes as well, just more lesbian than traditional, ahem.

    Anyway, I wanted to say I’ve been accused of being such a whiner and screecher about Disney fake Star Wars, and Rey there is just a shitty character.

    Star Wars outside of movies has plenty of very cool female characters, and the “conservative fans” Disney accused of being racist and misogynist are supposed to know most of them.

    So let’s please remember that companies are sometimes trying to do damage control with things that are just bad, by accusing people not liking those of racism or misogyny.

    It’s a huge difference when you hear just that some movie is not cool and when you also hear that those calling it not cool are very bad people. If you didn’t like the movie in question yourself, you might stop telling others it’s bad, and even try to reconsider your opinion, probably buying another ticket.



  • A monarch. Not a dictator. There’s a bit of difference with dictators, but it’s funny how for the western world monarchy seems to be the natural form of government in MENA and West Asia, and at the same time dictators are bad, very bad and should be dealt with.

    That Islamic Revolution of theirs was kinda fine before mullahs took power. BTW, one of the mojahed parties took Saddam’s side in Iran-Iraq war and would recruit collaborationists, and the general sentiment of Iranians about them is like of Russians about ROA in WWII. And guess who’d the Iranian opposition USA tried to support - right, those guys. It sometimes seems American approaches to that region are just incompetence this big and not pure malice. But then one thinks about Turkey and Saudis and Israel being “the normal” countries for Americans there - and nah, it’s malice.



  • If you are really preparing for something like that, I suggest you think sabotage instead of actual fighting.

    Because, first, you might want to google casualty numbers for guerilla campaigns, they won’t look nice for guerillas, and second, times change and certain countries either already have or can quickly achieve capability to just track everything resembling a human over all the territory of Canada, from space.

    Of course it’s amazing that people are seriously discussing USA invading Canada. It’s no different from the Mexican wall.




  • Just yesterday I’ve seen a humorous post in Russian TG. In short, it was that if just Trump’s re-election and his friendly remarks towards Russia without anything of substance made all the Russian officials and “patriots” drop all their “our special way” and “friendship with China” crap and start celebrating, then probably the easiest way for USA to solve any Russian mischief permanently would be to offer Russia to become a state (but that won’t work, because US states don’t have their own presidents for life). And the usual old Soviet jokes about declaring war on USA, then surrendering.