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It sounds like you're trying to shift the legal goalposts of "peaceful" into something more like "inoffensive" or "respectful" or "polite".

For example, you have a First Amendment right to "peacefully" hurl the most awful insults you can think of at a police officer.

If that police officer feels "antagonized"--or even if your goal was to hurt their feelings--that does not permit them to abuse the special power of their workplace to attack you. If they try anyway, now that's a real crime.


> The fundamental idea is that "intelligence" really means trying to shorten the time to figure out something.

"Figure out" implies awareness and structured understanding. If we relax the definition too much, then puddles of water are intelligent and uncountable monkeys on typewriters are figuring out Shakespeare.


In particular, Live Nation gave $500,000 to Trump's "inauguration fund" [0] and took on a Trump flunkie onto their board of directors. [1]

[0] https://www.citizen.org/news/trumps-corporate-inauguration-d...

[1] https://variety.com/2025/music/news/live-nation-names-richar...


I do use fewer em-dashes now, but only because I spend more time on Linux, where my habitual Windows trick of alt + 0151 no longer works.

Press Ctrl+Shift+U to enter Unicode entry mode in GTK controls, then enter the code point for the em dash, 2014. That will produce '—'.

Although I still prefer the traditional ASCII double-dash -- easier to type, and less potential for character encoding issues. Also, LLMs don't seem to use it at all.


> I think a part of the reason is that these roles are not just about sending emails and looking at graphs, but also about dangling a warm body over the maws of the legal system and public opinion.

Spoilers for "How I Met Your Mother" ... but there's a character who has that kind of job, as a legal meat-shield. Now, ~10 years after airing, this funny clip feels like it would only need slight adjustments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u62HptZ6TE


Ditto, I clicked and was disappointed.

"How to send a magic packet in $LANG" isn't very interesting to me. There are plenty of guides for it, and I remember actually doing it 20+ years ago with a short PHP script.

Even at the time, the task didn't seem like "enough" for a show-the-world blog post. A dramatically shortened version (no validation, error handling, logging, etc.) for your amusement:

    // Given $macAddress and $addr and $port
    $macAddress = str_replace(":","",$macAddress);
    $macAddress = str_replace("-","",$macAddress);

    $header = pack('H12','FFFFFFFFFFFF');
    $payload = pack("H12",$macAddress);
    $packet = $header . str_repeat($payload,16);

    $sock = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, SOL_UDP);
    socket_set_option($sock, 1, 6, TRUE);
    socket_sendto($sock, $payload, strlen($payload), 0, $addr, $port);
    socket_close($sock);

To perhaps give a little insight into why this is on the front page by someone who upvoted it: I didn't realize it was so open and easy. Now I do. The Golang code simply serves as proof in how open and easy it is.

> Even at the time, the task didn't seem like "enough" for a show-the-world blog post.

Its an old (de facto industry) standard, but maybe more relevant than ever. I'm interested in moving more of my compute usage off-cloud these days, which is why this is of interest to me right now. I suspect many others feel the same way.

Might be a good time to post other tidbits of knowledge you have like this, targeted at software engineers that are starting to get more into infrastructure management. Standards that are ubiquitous and just work are awesome.


Necessary, but not sufficient.

Even if we somehow, perhaps via magic genie-wish, made the government totally disinterested... these systems would still enable dystopian levels of private surveillance and manipulation.


That can sometimes be true, but the reverse is also problematic: Uniform automatic updates can turn some users who were happy with the status-quo into unwitting guinea pigs for unexpected features and changes, without informed consent.

All else being equal, I'd rather the people who desire the new features be the earlier-adopters, because they're more likely to be the ones pushing for changes and because they're more likely to be watching what happens.


The issue is single-channel feature and security updates.

Uhhh, me? My home directory has 20-30 years of documents, photos, emails, the email address itself, instant-messaging logs, etc. Even a downloaded zip of every comment I ever made on Reddit. (But not HN, I should look into that.)

The primary exception would be Google Photos pictures which were auto-uploaded from my phone that I haven't curated and downloaded yet.

I predict I will maintain my custom-domain email address much longer than if I had used Gmail, given the attrition rate of bannings without support.

> on non-archival media you still control [...] Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured.

Hold up, is this OR or XOR? It sounds like you're trying to add unreasonable (dis-)qualifiers. TFA isn't saying one must boycott "the cloud" and erase all data, it just advocates that you retain an independent copy.

> Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services.

I think that's conflating different use-cases.

* Having a regular offsite backup into S3 isn't that different from when the data was rsync'ed to a Linux machine I paid for an account on. Any cloud-ness is a remote implementation detail, not a change in the consumer relationship.

* In contrast, "all my photos are in the cloud and my friends and family can collaborate on shared albums" is different, it permanently moves the locus of control.


> * In contrast, "all my photos are in the cloud and my friends and family can collaborate on shared albums" is different, it permanently moves the locus of control.

No, it doesn't. You're fooling yourself. All the criticism of "cloud" providers is predicated on a presumption of bad faith on the part of the provider. Do the same to Amazon and Dropbox and you get the same risk. More actually, since you're not just storing photos but raw backups that might end up with chat logs or password or authentication tokens or whatever.

All you're saying is that you trust party A but not party B to give you the same service. Which is fine, your trust is yours to give. But it's not an indictment of the technology behind the service!


You're still against against a strawman. Please re-read this part of TFA:

> Don’t trust the Cloud to safekeep this stuff. Hell yeah, use the Cloud, blow whatever you want into the Cloud. The Internet’s a big copy machine, as they say. Blow copies into the Cloud. But please: (1) Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of.

____________

Here's an analogy for how I feel things are going. Keep in mind the differences between: (1) a kind of product-offering, (2) the people offering it, and (3) an underlying set of technologies that could be in multiple products.

* Alt-TFA: "Fuck Asbestos - Everyone's selling asbestos pillows which are dangerous and being pushed by amoral sociopaths. Don't use them without a respirator."

* Alt-ajross: "All your criticism of asbestos is predicated on a presumption of bad faith by the providers. Stop being mean to asbestos. Asbestos can be useful."

* Alt-Terr_: "All asbestos pillows are still terrible no matter who's selling them."

____________

> All you're saying is that you trust party A but not party B to give you the same service.

No, applying logic I choose is a fundamentally different service than accepting data into logic they choose.


> You're still against against a strawman.

No, I was arguing with you, who posited that the difference between Dropbox and iCloud Photos was the "locus of control" and the "change in consumer relationship". That's not an argument about data reliability, it's an argument from trust. And it didn't make sense to me.


> Americans always vote for lobbied parties. They are clearly happy with this compared to whatever other reasons they have to vote.

That's kinda backwards. (Yes, I know you said "compared to".) Rather, citizen are seldom "happy" about their selection of choices, and many are so very not-happy that they don't even vote.

The main fault is in the math and mechanics of our voting system, rather than the personal-traits of the people. The spoiler effect [0] is unusually strong with plurality-voting, an archaic scheme that still dominates US politics.

It's main "feature" is how it was easy to implement 250 years ago when more people were illiterate, calculating and printing was harder, and nothing traveled faster overland than a galloping horse. Nowadays there are many alternatives [1] and most would be an unequivocal upgrade.

> "I'll tolerate a bit of corruption because at least he's promising XYZ".

Hey now, don't tar the whole electorate with a worldview that is concentrated into a much smaller bloc. There's a reason that the most blatantly corrupt President in history never got anywhere when he spent years trying to run as a Democrat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect

[1] https://fairvote.org/resources/electoral-systems/comparing-v...


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