Granted this was 1999 but I wish I could unsee the shit I saw one day when I did a SELECT password FROM user

And what is a private key? How exactly do you “keep” it across multiple devices? It’s all still black magic to me.

It reminds me a little of Game of Thrones, where all the major players, the royals etc all have spy networks. This is a world where very poor peasants and servants are everywhere and many of them, including children, end up in the employ of this person or that person, watching who is coming and going and reporting back, such that one’s movements and meetings are trackable to a minute degree. The better your spy network, the more power you have.

Of course Varys, spymaster to the crown, is famed for the effectiveness of his network, which spans the continent and even across the sea to other major cities.

He himself is a master of disguise. This was left out of the show entirely but he frequently appears by surprise, whipping off the guise of an old woman and later leaving the scene dressed as a priest, etc. He grew up with actors and uses makeup and costume changes to hide his tracks. He can change his voice and gait at will and routinely shocks people by his ability to blend in and appear or disappear at will. He knows how to leave a place by a different entrance than he came in, and knows all the secrets passageways of the castle.

Basically, in a world with no privacy, the world’s foremost surveillance master is a model for all of us in these times. If you want to move freely in public but do so without a trace, be prepared to pull your hood up and when you leave a restaurant, take off the hoodie you were wearing when you went in. Practice different postures to throw off gait tracking.

You don’t have to like it, but this is the world we live in.

Imagine thinking that what god wants most is for you to put on a little hat, grab a rifle, and go live in the desert in an RV.

Find a $2 scam you can pull hundreds of times a day and you’re a third world billionaire.

We’d need to know exactly how far back because NewEgg has for years been just like Amazon: a listing service for junky third party sellers.

Like I said, childish. And you just used a fucking AI reply as evidence? Call me when you’ve ever had to accomplish something in this world.

That’s a childish response. It’s very hard to change anything at the societal level by 20% and any program that does so is among the most successful of all time.

I don’t know why you act like taking old, crappy guns out of circulation isn’t meaningful. Just because assault rifles are involved in the biggest and most horrific shootings doesn’t mean that no harm is done with more mundane weapons. It seems plausible to me that old shitty guns are the very ones that kids find lying about the garage, or that get sold under the table to who knows what criminal, or that misfire and injure someone during legit usage.

20% is hugely successful.

I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing or is about, even.

There’s another possibility I don’t see anyone talking about. It could just be the higher ups at Mozilla doing the old performative “we’re doing AI” dance for their shareholders and the investment community. Everyone assumes they are 100% sincere about embracing AI but this could simply be them paying the AI tax that all companies seem required to pay right now.

If this is plausible, then we should just wait for it to manifest as actual feature changes and then judge. Right now this is just high level messaging and PR.

This is pretty much the only metric that matters. There is absolutely plenty of room to improve on human drivers! One crash per 500k miles sounds extremely low to me. But if the cars are not better than humans, they should not be on the road.

It’s soft power until they start using it.

And what do you call Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan…

Seriously man if I have to point out the obvious to you like this, the conversation isn’t worth continuing.

They say it’s not a DEI initiative; they just want to get this talent onboard for their business.

Ironically, that’s exactly what DEI initiatives were all about: recognizing that if we let white bros excluded all others from the workplace, like they have in prior decades, we will shut out the majority of the world’s talent, and we should do whatever it takes to make sure everyone can join, work, and truly focus without watching their back all the time.

US didn’t have total dominance around the globe either. They just had a lot of soft power

The US has military bases, nuclear subs and aircraft carriers stationed around the world. That’s a little more than soft power. And our military spending has always been outsized.

Sure, but Japan was always relatively small. It was a country with a low population and few natural resources.

This stopped being the yardstick for influence around WW1. Japan has the number 4 GDP in the world right now and they were number 2 for a while, very close to the US. China’s landmass and population don’t mean much to the rest of the world if all they represent is impoverished agrarians, which fairly describes a lot of China still.

The biggest issue with China is that they don’t believe in the right to free speech and free expression.

They don’t. They believe in collectivism and order. However I don’t know that they aspire to bring Hanification to me here in California. Their ambitions are more regional. The US definitely reached around the entire globe.

While the US has been more of an outlier in allowing unfettered free speech

For whom though? This is more myth than reality. The US deposed democratically elected leaders all over South America, and has supported dictators around the world if they offer us resources or control. Look at the Middle East. China has a long long way to go before they even begin to be as scary as the US has been for the last 50 years.

free expression is pretty central to European identity.

I’m not sure what “European identity” has to do with this conversation, which has been more about the US and China. I worry that we are veering into vague concepts like “western civilization” that are more myths for white supremacists than actual entities.

It’s true. The very poor people I’ve known in the US have believed that “the system is rigged” and they have little freedom and no voice. They believe they are exploited by powers far beyond their ability to challenge and the last way any of it would ever change is through voting, which they see as an empty, farcical gesture.

“Multilateral” may include a very powerful China. The two are not mutually exclusive. China has been very prolific already in exerting its soft power around the world. They probably do stand to gain from the US losing standing. However I very much doubt that the US losing standing will immediately lead to total Chinese dominance around the globe. China has a lot to deal with, surviving its impending demographic apocalypse. There was a time we feared Japan in the same way: nonstop economy, strong culture, they bought a lot of American assets and real estate… soon they’ll take over the world! They’re still here, and very powerful, but the “big bad” fears were overblown. I think similarly, China wants its historic provinces back, and would like to exert the same kind of influence over Asia that it once did, and be a global trade power, but all of that put together is still far less than the imperialism which America has actually achieved and maintained around the world. So yeah, an ascendant China may be one feature of this future but I don’t see the problem with that. I don’t start from a position of hating and fearing China.

Good. Obviously it was wrong to trust the US this entire time. It’s time to dismantle the post-WW2 American dominance over the world, and move toward a more multilateral future. This process feels scary and might be quite difficult, but it’s important and it’s time. No one country should be considered the world’s policeman or supreme authority. I just hope that everyone shaking their head at the US realizes that they can only sit there doing that for so long, because the very next thing they need to urgently do is step the fuck up into that leadership vacuum before dictators do.

He said he would end the war in a day.

He just didn’t say which day.

Yes. But they don’t seem to.