Damn dude, you don’t have to get so defensive.

Wow, I guess I could say the same to you, huh? I’m not going to bother trying to explain the myriad ways you’ve misread and misunderstood my comment, go ahead and keep believing whatever it is you’re believing right now, it doesn’t bother me a bit.

Who says we need or are entitled to a decentralized replacement for the modern internet? Communication can be accomplished with much less, and necessity is the mother of invention. We managed to communicate quite effectively by having computers intermittently screeching at each other through a phone line for several decades. This discussion is about the modern internet being cut off while they try to identify and root out persecuted populations and dissidents against the regime. Nobody said it was going to be fun and you will still be able to freely watch all the youtube your bored brain can handle while streaming video games on another screen. If that’s your expectation, you might as well go sign up for the brownshirts right now.

He’s also talked publicly about sprinkling people he disagrees with (financial analysts IIRC) with fentanyl and urine from drones.

He’s sick in the head. Absolutely unhinged.

If the US government still has any functioning watchdogs left I’m sure that mistake will be corrected in short order.

It doesn’t sound like you really have any understanding of, or concern for, what happened to the other 77 women, nor what happened to the other 79+ men your girlfriend “swiped left” on in your scenario.

And you’re accusing me of using boomer logic? That’s some classic boomer logic if I’ve ever heard it: “I got mine, fuck the rest of you, it’s obvious why you all failed, you just need to work harder or lower your standards, even though I didn’t, because everything just worked out flawlessly for me and I don’t want to be too introspective about why in case I accidentally develop some empathy about it”

Yeah, dating apps are just fine the way they are. Nothing wrong with them at all.

Yeah yachts are among the least disgusting things rich people do. I mean, they’re still disgusting in some ways, but it definitely can and does get a lot worse than that.

My girlfriend had 80+ matches when I started talking to her. I had 3. And yet here we are.

That math ain’t mathing, bud. You ever wonder what’s going on with the 77 other women you didn’t match with? Or are we supposed to believe they somehow never actually existed? Are hospitals lying about the number of girls born into the world? Are 90% of girls dying as children? Do women have lower standards for relationships? Is there one guy out there engaged in polygamy with all 77 women? Or are they all ugly and don’t deserve love?

Conversely, why did your girlfriend have to go through 80+ guys to get to you?

Dating apps are incel factories. They have no incentive to actually match you with a mate at all, much less a soulmate. The fact that you did anyway is actually a failure-to-profit on their part, and you have successfully defied their business model and found love despite their efforts. Good for you.

Good for you doesn’t imply good for everyone though, nor good for society. They are toxic hellholes, and I stand by my assertion that they are what broke dating (for almost everyone, genuinely glad they didn’t get you, enjoy your life of never having to use a dating app again)

Dating apps are what broke dating. If you are using dating apps, you’re doing it wrong.

From what I understand, social credit score is mostly an invented bogeyman to demonize China in the west, and while many frightening “consequences” of low social credit score were imagined, none ever materialized and it was rarely even actually tracked. Yes, they could, in theory, but we imagine a massive level of administrative competence and effectiveness that I think serves both western interests and Chinese ones without necessarily being reality. As far as I can tell (granted, not very far as I’m not in China and haven’t been for a very long time) it actually had very little real impact in China itself and has already been mostly forgotten. China’s got lots of problems, but social credit score isn’t really part of any of them. They don’t need to have social credit score to genocide Uighurs. They didn’t need social credit score to massacre Tienanmen square. They don’t need social credit score to prepare the South China Sea for war and try to subvert Taiwan. They’ve got bigger fish to fry, and they’re frying them, and social credit score is a silly distraction that nobody there is taking seriously and neither should we.

I don’t have to worry about my OS because it’s open source. Yours should be too. They can’t actually enforce age verification on an open source OS because my OS can lie, and I can use its source code to make it lie if I have to (which I won’t, because many other people will do it for me). For that matter they’ll find ways to make Windows lie too, but you still shouldn’t be using it, it’s shit.

I don’t have to worry about my ISP either because I live in a still-civilized country, but yeah, if they really lock it down at that level that’s going to be tough, you’ll probably have to identify someone for that if that’s the next place where they go to. There are countermeasures and workarounds though. VPN, mesh networking, borrowing somebody else’s wifi or mobile data hotspot, finding open networks. Maybe we’ll get to the point where we need point to point links, pirate satellites, datajacking ourselves into communication lines, who knows.

But we’re not there yet. We’ll continue to develop more countermeasures as these sorts of hostile police surveillance state measures encroach on our freedom as it becomes necessary. You don’t have to let your identity be associated with anything beyond your ISP if you’re only using your ISP to get to somewhere you do trust with a VPN. If they block VPNs, then we will find other ways around the blocks. Are you familiar with I2P? If you aren’t, maybe you should get familiar with it. We already have plenty of ways of sneaking information into and out of even more totalitarian of states like China, Russia, at least until there’s an absolute shutdown like in Iran. You should also consider not living in a totalitarian country, and doing what you can to stop yours from becoming more totalitarian, because it’s only going to get harder the longer you let them do this. Give them your ID in exchange for internet access for now if you absolutely have to and can’t find any other option, but you might not absolutely have to, yet. And if you do have to, do it with caution: start learning and planning what you’re going to have to do after that and how you’re going to get very active in your resistance to being monitored and observed.

You sound like you’ve got a little bit of learned helplessness, but people in shitty, scary countries have been dealing with this for a long, long time. Yes, it sucks, but it’s not the end of freedom. You have to learn how to fight it.

I mean, the fediverse that you’re already on already kind of is the ground floor. Most of these places are not going to be affected by age verification.

But if you want to climb a few floors up to where the blackjack and hookers are probably hanging out, there are things like I2P it’s delightfully sketchy. the best kind of sketchy.

It actively divests itself from any centralized shit like SSL or DNS, it’s a raw HTTP only darknet that operates through its own peer-to-peer proxy network, totally anonymized and encrypted and segregated from any hint of open network traffic.

The death of anonymity for most people, yes. Not me though. I’m going to make my own internet. With blackjack. And hookers. And protonmail too, probably.

Perhaps he is hoping that Marijuana memory loss will help people forget about the Epstein files.

Or, was there perhaps a suspiciously large Polymarket bet for this? Just curious.

The unbelievable hubris and short-sightedness of believing you can freely open this pandora’s box and never have it used against you.

I have no doubt they can do what they intend. But are they really this unimaginably stupid to think they’re the only ones who will ever be capable of doing this? They evidently can’t even shoot down Iranian drones and missiles as it is. How do they imagine this is going to end for them?

Oh indeed so. I’m very excited for the opportunity to charge desperate corporations at least 10x my current hourly rate for the privilege of unspaghettifying their “mission critical” “production ready” spaghetti without causing more outages and data loss than they’ll already be suffering from by that point.

“Oh, you replaced your entire SRE team with Claude? I see, interesting choice, would you like me to guess what your annual Anthropic budget probably looked like? I’ll be able to fix it for half of that.”

So they’re mostly overblown report slop with no real-world value until an actually skilled and experienced human sifts through it to find the gems and properly polish them? Much like pretty much anything else AI produces? Yeah I thought so.

As a senior software developer, the reports of my job’s demise remain greatly exaggerated. I do worry about the lack of junior devs being afforded the opportunity to be gainfully employed while they earn the same level of experience I have, though. Considering they’re called “learning models” I’m not convinced the current crop of AIs are actually capable of the quality and speed of learning that an actual human is, deeply flawed creatures though we are. AI cannot achieve the same without access to enormous quantities of training data which, while it might be available in sufficient quantity for the right price and energy cost, won’t be of sufficient quality to actually learn valuable insights from, especially so the further we move into replacing all carefully curated human knowledge with an AI slopfest, reducing the signal-to-noise ration and actually get further from solving the “discovery problem” that has plagued us since the dawn of the information age.

Junior devs, don’t give up. We haven’t given up on you. (only the corporate AI bubble leaders have, and the bubble will eventually deflate even if it doesn’t catastrophically pop, which it probably will)

Trump’s Art of the Deal: “I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further.”

Unfortunately, a lot of Americanisms have infected Canada due to our historically extremely close trade and cultural relationship with them. Measurement ignorance is one example. Some Americanisms actually become arguably worse in Canada, because we are effectively rudderless, pulled in all different directions by both our own laws and customs and American laws and customs at the same time, resulting in an even less well-defined choice of units. Another example is dates. The US uses mm/dd/yy which is already stupid on its own, but Canada uses BOTH mm/dd/yy and dd/mm/yy seemingly without rhyme or reason, which results in complete ambiguity of many dates, or trying to figure out based on context, looking for other dates that might use a day number >12 to identify which one actually is the day vs the month.

It’s awful. I am happy we are distancing ourselves from the US right now, but I’m not sure it will ever be enough to totally escape their shadow.

Oh god no, the reason I use TUI is to get away from all this graphical rendering shit. What’s wrong with ASCII art? If your TUI is too much for even bloated Unicode to handle, you’ve probably already wandered into the lands of the GUI and you should probably just be honest with yourself and stay there.

Yes. During the rise of Hitler, Jewish newspapers stubbornly insisted not to worry, that he couldn’t do all the horrible things he said he was going to do because of “the constitution”. It turns out a piece of paper with words written on it doesn’t protect you from someone who doesn’t value it, no matter how much you might value it.