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Cake day: October 26th, 2025

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  • Yeah, and now that you mention it directly it’s got me thinking… technology in its own right seems to maintain this capacity to destabilize power dynamics, given it can change fundamental ways we depend on the world. With social media, you could say discourse in many ways has become dependent on a platform built by the private interests of its creators. In a perverse way, maybe as a consequence of it being able to change our way of life, technology poses this constant risk — doesn’t it? And with our societal culture of glorifying technological innovation (e.g., social media at its start) without proper risk assessment — aren’t we inviting this kind of power disruption?

    I suppose, in a way, a “functional” government should be able to intervene to prevent changes in power structure where it shouldn’t occur. Or, perhaps some kind of social paradigm that has the passive capacity to cannibalize any such movements in its power structures? What do you think is the cause effect relationship there, and a proper response to maintaining long term stability?




  • It’s really great, isn’t it? But I’d leave you with one theoretical angle to consider…

    What if the FBI actually did get into the phone? If so, then why would this information have been made public?

    The only reason why, that I can think of right now, is that the FBI wants more people using Lockout. If so, the only reason I can possibly imagine for that is—there are actually some good commonly available techniques to keep them out of your devices, of which Lockout is insufficient. They’d want more people assuming that it is sufficient, and this news could accomplish that.

    Purely theoretical… but the bigger point here, whether that framing is strategically true or miraculously over-thinking things, is that something does work. No matter what, you know something works.




  • Yeah, I’m agreeing with you more now.

    I’ve thought a lot about god and decided that, even if it does exist, my best way to honor it would be to live my life honestly and freely as though it does not exist.

    I’ve considered the argument about the size of the universe, with us being specks of dust in all of that…that perspective does make us seem insignificant, until (IMO) you consider that we humans (as far as we know) are the only species in the whole universe that even tries to worship a god. We’re matter that asks about morals, and it’s possible you might only find that here on Earth. Given, we’re the center of the epistemological universe — not the ontological one.

    I’m not saying that’s necessarily true. I am saying, however, that there are angles which make us more significant even in this big universe.

    Personally, I like to think of God as being the first thing that could move. It very well may be explained as a quirk of quantum mechanics that results in the state of nothing being inherently unstable — allowing for something to arise. We are beings of that something which this mechanic produced, and that’s godly enough (relative to me) for me.

    Again, I’m not saying that’s what god is necessarily. That’s just how I think about it.


  • I disagree completely, and I am not a believer in any god. You care about things as a human, but (should a god exist) don’t you think it a step too far to assume a gods experience would be anything at all like our own? Whether it cares or doesn’t may be the wrong question entirely — too anthropic of a question. Even if it did have the human sense of care in its faculty of psychology, something that may entirely be a social construct, then wouldn’t it equally so be arrogant to assume what a creator does/not care about? A creator might care a lot about you, and sees suffering as some kind of tough love… who the hell can say? The universe could be infinite, and that could simply be a preference in design. Who the hell can say?

    God isn’t our enemy, whether or not it exists. Our enemy is the people who claim to speak for god.


  • “Sentience” is like this hand-waving magic word. Defined typically as the ability to experience sensations and feelings, it’s very anthropic and egocentric.

    We know that life evolved on Earth, to include our own species. We know that much life on Earth has an internal sense for pain and pleasure, as well as many instinctual drives like self-preservation. We know that our species knows things, and we know that other species don’t have the same depth in their capacity to know things. We’ve demonstrated that other species don’t seem to understand the world in the same way as us humans. Yet, we’ve never quite figured out what any other species knows. We’ve never modeled their form of sentience, let alone our own. We only really know about sentience intuitively, via our own experience. We judge everything’s capacity as though it’s either less than, equal to, or greater than our own — without consideration for how something might just be different. Not higher or lower, but parallel in a way.

    I don’t know what sun sentience would be like, not any more than I already know why any sentience is like (beside my own), but I can say one thing for sure. Our own sentience is heavily influenced by bias: social, political, legal, economical, financial, emotional, religious, moral, and scientific bias. Peel back those layers of bias, what’s left? Sun sentience might be something like that, like a blank slate that just exists.









  • It’s not End to End and The guy in the Middle. The message is encrypted from one end to the other. The detail about who has a copy of the key doesn’t spoil that fact, and I guarantee you Meta doesn’t care about using E2EE as a marketing term even if it misrepresents their actual product by matter of status quo. What matters is what they can theoretically argue in a court room.

    A proper solution would be to have an open standard that specially calls out these details, along with certifications issued by trusted third parties.


  • Yeah. E2EE isn’t a single open standard. It’s a general security concept / practice. There’s no way to argue that they don’t really have E2EE if in fact they do, but they keep a copy of the encryption key for themselves. Also, the workers client app can simply have the “decrypt step” done transparently. Or, a decrypted copy of the messages could be stored in a cache that the client app uses… who knows? E2EE being present or not isn’t really the main story here. It’s Meta’s obvious deceitful-ness by leveraging the implicit beliefs about E2EE held by us common folk.


  • For me, I think a really interesting take would be if Linux had a stronger office suite — meaning IT could more easily justify being a “Linux shop.” Active Directory + Microsoft Office 365 is the killer combination that leaves so many professionals saying “just use Microsoft.” Then it’s so much more natural to just issue everyone a Windows machine, and keep it that way because it’s already set up that way. If Linux could bolster itself to impress a similar level of confidence in IT professionals at the office, I think we’d see many more jobs willing to let their staff work on Linux (or even choose it exclusively for the business).

    There would need to be corporations that can accept the same levels of liability Microsoft does, but for Linux. For many organizations, it comes down to who’s liable for what theoretical issues.