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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • Those mass disinformation campaigns are being done by (sometimes “almost”) nation state level actors. Governments are going to counter only some of them.

    As for my own opinion - in 2020 during Artsakh war there were a few Turkish immigrant events in European countries where they’d march, yell Turkish neo-Nazi stuff, yell that they are looking for Armenians and so on. I don’t remember governments of those countries (who are already in charge of regulating fascists on their streets) doing anything about that.

    I think this is going to be the same here - a regulation is a price tag in disguise. Smaller actors will be barred from doing those disinformation campaigns, bigger ones or friendly with the right governments will not be.

    Killing and splitting corporations is better, but the previous part about price tag is the exact reason they are not doing this. Those governments want to have bot campaigns of their own, to manufacture consent, to see what people are saying, to control the public discourse. They just don’t want others to do it too.

    This is a toad fucking a viper, as they say in Russian.






  • Digital voting is just the same human error with more steps. Nearly all of the issues with paper voting are present in digital voting and then some.

    I wonder if one can use ghost keys for an anonymous voting system, which still ensures that a voter only votes once, and still makes all votes verifiable.

    That would have much fewer issues.

    Running unique code that cannot be run elsewhere, and is 100% open source such that the source can be viewed by anyone without exposing itself to risk that a smart enough bad actor can cause havoc?

    No need to use some fantastically obscure hardware. Source code being open is not bad.

    A voting system is the easiest thing to emulate. Except for load.





  • “This shit” was said in the context of a society exactly opposite to anglosphere, where being “poor” is an indulgence for violating every moral rule, every promise, every obligation and every law.

    More than that, it was said about the exact people who are, relatively speaking, not poor, rather almost privileged, but are hateful and envious of everyone actually doing useful work, and consider corruption good because in their opinion a bureaucracy worker stealing something entrusted to them is “a respected in the society person collecting rent from their position” or something like that.

    The profession of a schoolteacher in Russia pays shit, which is why 3 kinds of people want that - those who are too dumb for other work, those who are idealistic, and those who want to feel that they are important and powerful (power over children) even more than to be paid well.

    There are more people of the 2nd kind than you think, but those were of the 3rd undoubtedly. 1st kind is almost extinct - it’s not hard to find a job that pays better, if you don’t want power over children.

    I think it’s clear how the 3rd kind intersects with sympathies to sociopathic behavior, and sympathies for corruption and organized crime.


  • Being successful and not talented doesn’t make you talented even if success pays the bills better.

    Doesn’t mean Taylor Swift is not talented in her own way, I don’t get what triggered all you guys. It seems sometimes that the expected variety of thought among English speakers is less than among Russian speakers. Where even in the toxic Russian Web people would ask first, you guys go stampeding.

    Just like, say, Azerbaijan having oil to bribe politicians and wage war doesn’t mean they have history and culture and Armenia doesn’t. They would very much like to buy history and culture, but they can’t.