That’s a good idea. Send message > Message signed and sent > Receiver opens message, signature bits are hidden, but clicking report sends plaintext with signature included. Only ends up in report queue if signature is valid.

Every wild dog will chase and eat prey and their own poop, and attack any dog that challenges them or their pack.

Every wild cat will chase and catch their prey, and then play with it while keeping it alive for a while until it ultimately dies.

Humans are basically dogs or cats that have 1000’s of societal incentives not to chase and play with prey, drilled into most of us from the beginning, but everyone still has that innate ability that will come out under the right circumstances. If civilization ended today, who you think you are, and what you think you are not capable of today, ends today.

He did use existing network but the furniture was from the Craigslist free section and re-sold on fb marketplace. He arranged transport etc (unsure how, don’t remember)

you never had any dark thoughts? Never did anything bad?

Yes, you might not be doing this particular bad thing.

You: Yeah sure, but I never did this particular bad thing.

Welcome to the species, bud. We’re all a little mad here.

New features get released into the developer preview. It’s basically beta test windows. It’s what the tech sites watch to see what new features/etc have been added/removed/changed. Usually they end up making it into the release builds, but sometimes they end up not doing it, or the change doesn’t apply to certain regions.

He’s not being cloak and dagger. He’s an old guy (double spacer spotted) who works in the military or private sector under NDA and can’t talk about it.

Or he’s LARPing. But the double spaces make me believe him.

I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network.

You must MITM all traffic and do some magic with stripping/injecting JavaScript then? Because every time I’ve tried with pihole, its just threads and threads of people saying its not possible with DNS blocking because the ads are served from the video servers.

I know it’s not a comfortable thought, and it’d be nice if we didn’t have to, but you considered moving to a lower cost of living area (whether its an hour from your current job, if the +2 hours daily makes it worthwhile) or finding a job in a state with lower cost of living where your skills are in demand?

If you make 100k/yr and 90% of your income goes to necessities, then it makes fiscal sense to take a paycut to 70k/yr when your necessities only take 40℅ of your income.

It’s nice to live in nice places, and moving and leaving your family/friends behind is a horrible thing to have to do, but it doesn’t have to be forever and this is a matter of survival.

Edit: This was an interesting read.

That’s a favorite of mine, and also a good way to show the honest, rational debate of LessWrong. Has “politics is the mind-killer” been a mind-killer?

GreaterWrong is a nicer way to read LessWrong, IMO.

You might be right. But at the end of the day, when everything goes to shit, at the very least I can honestly look into the mirror and like what is looking back, someone who tried to make things better.

That’s a good point. I need to stop being so jaded, it never leads to anything positive.

But it is hard, having fought time and time again to get a single person to halfway see the reason. I can only hope that a seed has been planted when I do, and eventually it will grow.

If you’re not aware of it, LessWrong is a good forum for enhancing your knowledge via discussion in a rational way. Unfortunately the majority don’t want logical discussion, as there’s no direct benefit to them in the short-term and it’s much harder to think that way and you’ll be excluded from your ingroup because you’re going against the grain.

You can lead a horse to water, you can’t make them think deeply about ‘boring’ things.

Funny how hot takes are often the nuanced, grounded in reality takes. I guess that’s what makes them spicy… people like things that confirm their beliefs and insecurities, and the truth is one of the most disturbing things for a lot of people to hear.

ETA: The 4 billion people in the 80s was still growth. Infrastructure has been scaled up, and it will take a ton of work to scale down - work which we will be hard-pressed to find enough skilled laborers for. Also overpopulation isn’t the main driver behind climate change, overconsumption is. We are a society of consumers, we buy convenience, and evil corporations force planned obsolescence on us to make us buy more. Many of us will scoff at high-priced long-lasting items yet still buy a new iPhone every 3 years.

If you reduce the population as fast as its decreasing now, lower than replacement rates, all modern conveniences including infrastructure and faith in the economy are going to take a hit. That includes the internet and hospitals and all internet-dependant companies. Public utilities like trash, shipping - we already saw how many products were discontinued and companies went out if business because of the inability to get parts, over a 6 month (at first) brief shortage of truck drivers, which is still recovering 4 years later. If you think the economy is bad now, wait until faith in the market completely collapses and we have a full-on crash, not just a recession. It’s been showing signs for years now, and things aren’t improving.

Throw in experienced power plant operators, people that install and maintain pipes and lines, water treatment plants, public transit, the people that make parts for the machines that installs the infrastructure, the vehicles, etc. Everything you can think of will be affected, along with many things most people never think about.

Immigration is a way to slow it down, but almost every country on Earth has falling birth rates at the moment. Immigrants coming from, say, Mexico and Canada to US will only delay the problem, and cause a larger problem for those allied countries we rely so much on.

You can find pros and cons, and it’s been a while since I did heavy research into the subject, but my takeaway was that once we reach a certain point, mass deaths will start to occur, especially in population centers. Rural communities won’t be affected as much provided they have plenty of weapons and systems for defense, livestock, agriculture and close community. Knowledge will need to be retained - on disease, birth complications, fixing nuts and bolts technology, etc. Authoritarian countries who decide to force birth (whether by force or accommodations - see USSR support and metals for mothers with greater than X number of children) will become a serious threat.

There are many variables and moving parts, but one thing is for certain: there will not be mass population decline without major hurt for everyone.

I agree that a Phoenix will rise from the ashes, but make no mistake, there will be many ashes, you and I and most of us posting here likely included.

But we are long overdue for a reset. Maybe this time we can just skip the internet infrastructure during rebuild, and develop near-peer networks instead.

She knew full well, she was just playing ignorant since she knew it would be printed. better to play dumb while you think of something to say than to give ammunition to your opponents

I give you a B+ for General_Effort.

I also liked this bit:

[Reporter] But again, you think that’s unfair because of who your mom is. Because she suffers. Something about her suffering catalyzed in you the desire to end suffering in other people. Does that make sense?

No, that doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, not all disease is genetic. There will still be disease and suffering. We are not that much of an optimistic fantasy.

Like she knows it’s partly optimistic fantasy that will eventually work if she just keeps it going, but let it slip. E. Holmes thought the same thing… just a little more time and we’ll have it.

I’m very glad I found the link to read the full article. She really does come off just like Elizabeth Holmes. When there isn’t a viable product to sell, you really have to sell yourself. There are plenty female tech CEOs that stay out of the media, just like the majority don’t know the names of most male tech CEOs, besides the few largest.

The way she reacted to the question of “your company is basically using exactly the same style of claimed technology as Theranos” as “Ugh. You’re a meanie. Women shouldn’t only be slaves!” is really quite telling.

As long as you either have many tens of millions, or you don’t care about electricity, water, food, and you’re extremely physically isolated and/or hidden very well and armed to the teeth, it shouldn’t affect you much.

For the rest of us it’s something to worry about. Infrastructure needs a lot of trained people to operate. Once the train gets going it doesn’t stop, and that means as time goes on it gets worse and worse until it reaches a point of stability some X years after collapse. And you won’t be able to freely and adaquetely hunt/pick your food if you’re anywhere near a city until point X, because everyone else will be doing the same. Also some idiots will be bathing in the only still good stream near you with whatever leftover chemicals they can find.

Your country can open the immigration floodgates and become a country without borders (i.e. become whatever country is currently your neighbor) but that comes with similar problems listed above.

So as you can see, it’s not an issue for a small privileged few. For the rest of us, its a big fucking deal. I would encourage you to look into it.

Hot take: if you have so little free time that the best you can do is phone time, maybe you need to work on priorities or time management.

I get it. I also have shit time management and spend too much free time on my phone, when I could be replacing an hour spent on my phone with an hour at a nearby coffee shop reading a book, or participating in an hour social club once per week.

In essence, when the growth rate slows to a certain point, people are dying faster than they’re being replaced, and the trend can only continue unless everyone starts having 10 kids.

It’s a matter of job replacement. Maybe AI will partly help, or maybe we’ll open our borders so immigrants can come end masse and do all the jobs we don’t have enough people for, but unless extreme measures are taken once it gets to that point, civilization as we know it will collapse.

I’m by no means pro-forced birth. But birth rate decline is a serious issue.

The U.S. population grew at the slowest pace in history in 2021, according to census data released last week. That news sounds extreme, but it’s on trend. First came 2020, which saw one of the lowest U.S. population-growth rates ever. And now we have 2021 officially setting the all-time record.

U.S. growth didn’t slowly fade away: It slipped, and slipped, and then fell off a cliff. The 2010s were already demographically stagnant; every year from 2011 to 2017, the U.S. grew by only 2 million people. In 2020, the U.S. grew by just 1.1 million. Last year, we added only 393,000 people.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/03/american-population-growth-rate-slow/629392/