This is an awesome TIL. I’m tempted to take a stab at introducing “thou” into my daily verbiage. I am wholly aware I’d sound like a pretentious prat, but still… :-)

Exactly. Often when people spout fundamentalist (i.e. stridently unlistening) opinions about abortion, porn, and other hot-button topics like (fundamentalist AKA naive) capitalism, etc I wish they would just study some of the spectacular historical failures at iron-fist methods (orthogonally to their respective ethical for/against arguments). The (alcohol) prohibition and “war on drugs” should be enough reference material alone to see that they don’t achieve their stated goals, they just increase income for the people with a hazy enough moral code to play the system. Eventually it ends up looking like the primary goal often is in fact increasing said income…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

I long ago stopped getting caught up in “that discussion” about recent trends despite a stream of people lobbing leading questions to get the ball rolling. Because I also try to not do so more rudely than necessary, I have developed several diplomatically worded (or at least ambiguous enough to float opaquely off to the side of the offense spectrum) ways of essentially saying the following: The simplest and cheapest way of [A] learning the “computer science” end of software is by becoming proficient in Lisp, [B] learning the “engineering” end of software by becoming proficient in Forth, [C] learning how “busywork” is a dangerous and demoralising thing to confuse with “actual work” by maintaining some Java code, [D] learning how insidious and self-sabotaging “expert beginner syndrome” is by reading a lot of the relevent code-reviews and blogposts when maintaining Javascript & Python projects, [E] learning how mob-mentality and populism can lead to selective blindness and architectural stubbornness by working with large volumes of C & C++ code, [F] learning how it is all really abstraction-layers over something akin to an old-shool phone switchboard by working with Assembler, [G] learning how the only work with longevity is that which stands on the shoulders of giants by using Fortran libraries, [H] learning how the mere act of developing using languages with baked-in discipline can be inherently educational by using DbC/TDD/BDD/dependent-type/formally-verifying/etc based languages (SPARK-Ada, Haskell, Eiffel, ACL2, Rust, etc), and then [I] learning how - after a certain level of experience - the languages, frameworks, and tools become less important than the engineers’s mindset and the work that happens both before and after the fingers hit the keyboard…by finding semi-performant techniques for implementing masochistic things like a VM and a network stack in Bash script (as hobby tasks, not for real use). If they are coming from a more hands-on/hardware background I also recommend [J] how eye-opening it is to maintain your own customized LibreCMC image flashed onto an open router (the older/smaller the HW the better, because you have to be increasingly creative with your kernel & OS configs), and [K] how educational it is getting a RISC-V working on an FPGA. I top it off by saying that [L] despite coding on-and-off since my start with z80 assembler on an Amstrad in the mid-80s I still feel like a beginner with so much to learn, and [M] that fact is by far the part I love most about the field (not just field of “work” but of “mental endeavour”) - far more than status/seniority/raises. I find I don’t get bombarded so much with JS-framework-du-jour zealotry and expert-beginnerism after that.

const isEven = (n) => !(n & 1)

It seems the technique you’re describing is a kind of societal “good cop, bad cop”. Similar scenario to an interrogation too (trying to get information from someone who does not want to share the information) because in this case the challenge is “how to get people to share the capacity for self-determination, quality of living, and dignity when they clearly prefer to hoard it, even to the detriment of others”.

My youth was at least partly misspent hacking z80 assembler on an Amstrad CPC664. Not as many regrets as one might assume. I miss when (8-bit) assembler was simple enough to hand-code without playing “surf the reference manual”.

…which is very much by design. The “Ownership Class” have understood the value of “Targeted Divide and Conquer” for a while now. A line from Metallica’s Master of Puppets comes to mind: Keep them tired it makes them well.

Although I entirely agree with the spirit of your point I’d like to add a long-winded side-note (essentially “and also”, not “but”). I guess when treated as a “title” Veganism is an inherently philosophical stance, but many conflate “Veganism” with “Having A Strictly Vegan Diet/Lifestyle” so my comment is for those people. Some who identify with the latter of the two (like myself) may be as such - or at least have become as such - for various other “logical reasons”. In the early-90s I inadvertantly became “mostly vegetarian, sometimes pescaterian” due to living with a vegetarian girlfriend. Working in an extremely physically strenuous career, and also coming from a childhood littered with various unexplainable health “issues”, I noticed (with hindsight) huge and surprising physiological benefits from that change. Due to that, and reading about how fundamental human classifying parameters are at the very herbivorous end of the spectrum (nails not claws, very long intestines, low-acidity digestive system which struggles to break down harder animal cell-walls in food, sweating through skin not tongue, mostly non-canine teeth, not having predatory close-set eyes, etc), I proceeded within a year to full vegetarianism - this time consciously. It took years to overcome the n00b mistakes (lack of nutritional knowledge, cooking skills, motivation) that usually eventually turn people back off vegetarianism, and at that point as some of the “fog of war” cleared I noticed a few lingering “issues” from my youth. I had researched food intolerances so did a test to find I was moderately intolerant to 3 types of meat and a few other odd things, and more importantly strongly intolerant to milk (and milk products). The followup consultant told me such a strong reaction indicates all animal-milk would be problematic, not just cow’s. That prompted going vegan in about 2013, with such a dramatic further health-improvement I had to tell myself not to obsess with “if only I’d known this 30 years ago”. Even though I have since become increasingly “philosophically vegan” through a kind of mental osmosis, the point I want to make here is that was really post-hoc, as a side-effect. My original drivers were “purely by accident, then conscious but for functional reasons”. These days - nearly 30 years after going vegetarian and more than 10 years after going vegan - I just do some resistance/weight-training each morning yet I’m far more healthy and “built” than I ever was throughout an effectively “acrobatic” career (even when training for that career 45hrs/week and eating half-kilo mincemeat-based meals as a teenager), even though I ended that career years ago. Those are also very “logical reasons” in addition to the usual “logical ethical vegan reasons regarding treatment of animals”, as also are the “logical ecological reasons” too (particularly the extreme amount of deforestation that is done to create grazing land for livestock).

I guess that makes us screen-siblings, or screen-cousins, perhaps. Maybe we should print up some T-shirts celebrating The One True Way. Maybe some flyers for a recruitment-drive.

If you’re only talking about Storage (data at rest) or Network (data in transit) then encrypt/decrypt offsite and never let symmetric keys (or asymmetric private keys) near the VPS, or for in-transit you could similarly setup encrypted tunnels (symmetric/private keys offsite only) where neither end of the tunnel terminates at the VPS. If you’re talking about Compute then whatever does the processing inherently needs access to decrypted data (in RAM, cache, etc) to do anything meaningful. Although there are lots of methods for delegating, compartmentalising, obfuscating, etc (like enclaves, TPM/vTPM…) the unavoidable truth is that you must trust whomever owns the base-infra ultimately processing your data. The one vaguely useful way to use “other people’s computers” trustlessly is with SMPC (secure multi-party computation) spread sufficiently widely across multiple independent (preferably competing - or even adversarial!) virtual-computation providers, with an “N-of-M keys” policy that avoids any single provider being able to attain a meaningful level of access to your data independently, or being able to view tangible portions of your data while providing functionality during SMPC. That stuff gets super-niche though.

(apparent deadlink BTW). In answer to the question: slow and steady Hawking radiation from all the black holes, perhaps?

Not all made up though. I’ve been following this one’s mailing list for a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(operating_system)

I was around long before TiVo and I’m not sure what it says about me that the only thing of substance I know about it is that the GPL3 (GNU Public License v3) was largely referred to as the “anti-tivoization” license because it addressed loopholes being exploited in GPL2 by TiVo hardware manufacturers to use copy left software opaquely.

(NOTE: I am not a doctor, nutritionist, etc - just someone who has learned a lot of lessons the hard way and likes to share). Without challenging the focus of these stats, I’d like to add two interrelated side-notes (from decades of being professionally physically active, and then decades of being professionally deskbound and too burnt out to move in my spare time, and then getting it mostly back under control later): (1) If you have reached the point where you have long-term struggled with losing weight then - unless you are a very rare exception - changing diet alone will likely not be enough because (2) the steepest but most important curve is “reprogramming your metabolism”. One of the most common psychological obstacles I see people hit after years of sedentary living is naively changing only what they eat and getting disappointed when their body doesn’t magically “change gears” by itself. The second most common obstacle I see (when people do also start moving their body too) is “counting kilos/pounds” and giving up in frustration when the numbers don’t go down straight away, or even go up. When you do “any old exercise” you burn energy while you exercise (which is of course better than not doing any, and helps with aerobic/cardio/psychological fitness too) but beyond that one of the best secrets to serious body transformation is to build muscle (including the women, and not necessarily to a “bodybuilding” degree - a lot of muscle building happens before the “looking jacked” phase). When you do that the increased muscle burns more energy all day and night, not just during the exercise - it reprograms your metabolism. Even better, the longer you do it it doesn’t just “change gears” in those moments/days, it teaches your body to become better at “changing gears” in the future. Eventually (unless you have a medical condition, etc) the excess fat burns itself off in service of your body’s new functional requirements. Another thing that surprises many is how little resistance training is actually needed for a good baseline to start with (for many people three “adequate but not crazy” workouts per week is enough to see steady progress). BUT a big confusion happens for people weighing themselves all the time - muscle is more dense than fat so there is a good chance if doing it the right (emotionally & financially sustainable) way your overall weight might appear to plateau for ages (or even increase) at first while the increase in dense muscle offsets the loss of sparse fat. I suggest for “tracking weight/fat loss” in most typical cases do so indirectly, not by naively counting loss of overall kilos (of fat, muscle, bones, organs, tendons, ligaments, and so on combined). Regarding diet (especially when exercising) some good rules of thumb are to ensure a broad spread of micro nutrients by shopping for various fruits, veges, nuts, seeds, etc (including semi-regularly surprising yourself with things you usually wouldn’t buy to cover the edge-case micros), ensure a good balance of macro nutrients (often the “40 30 30” guide is near enough - 40% carbs, 30% protein, 30% fats - but when strong muscle-building you will need higher amount of protein, covering broad amino acid spectrum), reduce processed foods which are “energy dense” (a euphemism for “nutrient sparse”), keep hydrated, get sun (or other source of vitamin D) every day, reduce sources of stress (stress-addiction to adrenaline and cortisol is real and devastating to your body, and highly addictive if you continue for too long). The most important part is - whatever positive changes you achieve - you need to win the mind-game by making them part of your unquestioning routine, not a novelty that you try to keep kicking down the road. The best equivalent I can think of for this is brushing your teeth - most people find it boring but “just do it” without pondering “will I manage to brush my teeth today”. Internalise the other changes the way you brush your teeth.

Remember this?

Old Star Trek: “…to boldly go where no man has gone before…”

New Star Trek: “…to boldly go where no-one has gone before…”

I noticed, and to be honest - once my pattern-recognition subsystems adapted to that very minor cognitive dissonance - I was very glad to hear it. It also prompted me to think more consciously and diligently about similar mental shortcuts elsewhere in my life (and not just for gender equality), and bolstered my nascent efforts to be actively fallibilistic in all things - especially the things I am expert in, which are the hardest ones. It “raised the empathy bar” by way of ripple-effect.

I’ll answer the “why would it now lead to disaster” part, and by shuffling names, places, & contexts around I believe much of that can be obliquely backported to the same question with respect to runup to the world wars of yore.

USA’s multi-decade cultural imperialism and dogged pursuit of economic hegemony led to it imposing itself as a global barometer and gatekeeper (despite being famously incompetent at both). The upshot is that now, even though philosophically it would be wonderful for the US to finally stop enforcing a petrodollar-driven serfdom on so much of the world in the name of “infinite (US economic) expansion”, pragmatically speaking a magical and abrupt “pull out” would be wildly irresponsible, much like yanking an arrow out of a wound in the direction from which it entered (causing a Jackson Pollock’s worth of collateral damage). That would largely be because the sudden power vacuum would not be able to be filled in time by other countries (who are under-resourced due to aforementioned hegemonic squeezing), leaving not enough people to “not tolerate the intolerant”, leading to explosive expansion of the “ignorant bullies masquerading as politicians” brigade (not unlike Hitler’s opportunistic power-grab while the politicians who should have been the ballwark against him hubristically sat on their hands). See: https://www.ournationalconversation.org/post/explaining-the-paradox-of-tolerance

But… but he’s not a hurricane… I guess they could fix him up with horse tranquilliser and bleach afterwards though. (adding a /s here for the terminally oblivious)

TMBG :-)

printf ‘GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n’ | openssl s_client -connect example.com:443 -ign_eof | html2text