Countries anger and provoke each others’ populations by pointing out the bad stuff, and defend against that by censoring or otherwise cracking down on dissent. Articles like this are just attacks against us in this process, true, but I think specific ones like this are still useful, when critically understood, to help us realize that not only the countries we don’t like use those authoritarian tricks, but more or less every one (and those countries that don’t are couped by one or another who does).

There’s this post of mine, also this article gives some background on the application of PIR to anonymous messaging. Basically, I’m trying to do a basic version of that, but using a state-of-the-art PIR protocol introduced in this article. It’s still not great performance-wise, but it’s enough to be practical (as stated, many thousands of users given enough resources).

No, sorry, I haven’t uploaded anything yet, I’ve only coded the protocols and some benchmark code. The idea is for each client to send and receive data continuously. Since text messages are pretty small and YPIR+SP doesn’t have a lot of overhead, that could be a reasonable way to conceal all metadata, as long as there are not enough people connected to overwhelm the server.

Sorry! I meant Private Information Retrieval, that could allow metadata-hiding messaging.

I wouldn’t consider it an ideological thing, but more of a strategic decision by Xi et al.

I wanted to delete all the subfolders in the current directory:

 rm -rf ./*

After a few seconds, I realize in horror that I had mistyped the path. Whole system nuked. Had backups though.

“Escanciar” in Spanish means pouring from a height for the purpose of mixing a beverage (usually cider) with air. I suppose it would still be valid if you’re pouring a mix from some height.

I wonder what the writings were, although I’m cautious on believing that they were antisemitic, since hating Jews and hating Israel have historically been opposing positions expressed by two widely different demographics, and now that division is clearer than ever.

Well, to be fair there are indeed enough houses… We kinda just assumed they would, by the grace of the market, end up distributed among virtually all people and at a fair price. The reason they never did and increasingly don’t is one of the largest unsolved problems in economics /s

Indeed. Do you disagree on what I said?

Israel was basically created by the West, in land that belonged entirely to Palestine. Then, decades later, with Western help, Israel had conquered half of that land, and the UN just decided to enshrine the borders at the time. Now, some more decades later, Israel has expanded way beyond those “compromise” borders, thanks to even more Western help.

There is no “internal conflict” that the West needs to help ending. It was always the West, seeking to create an allied enclave in someone else’s land. Or, to build on your metaphor, this is a fight between the adults and the only child who was there from the start, because they want their own kid to play there instead.

Palestine has attacked territory that was assigned to Palestine by the UN in 1947. The UN also makes it very clear that a country may lawfully recover occupied territory “by any means, including armed force”. UN laws are thus very clear: Ukraine and Palestine can recover territories by force. Now, that doesn’t mean you should support them in their struggle to do so, but if you don’t, it must be for some other reason (e.g., Israel taking over would constitute a huge strategic gain for the US, while Russia taking over would destabilize the world and thus benefit small or weakly aligned players).

One way to see it is that if you tried to use a Linux filesystem on Windows, it would entirely refuse to read it. At least Linux can handle Window’s filesystems to a reasonable degree.

Why would you tell that to them? Schadenfreude? It’s just asshole behavior, and probably false even under your own definition (you should read up on medically defined biological sex, chromosomic vs genetic, gonadal vs apparent, also sex hormones and embryological development of primary sex characters), not to mention current definitions that are much more useful in practice. And even if you want to keep believing that trans people are just delusional and their ideas are completely false, think whether it would be fine for an atheist to laugh at someone whose only reason to keep going is God.

What you’re saying is that children should carry the responsibility for the acts of their ancestors.

No. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that people carry the responsibility to choose against unfairness if they have a choice. Whether the unfairness was created by your ancestors or someone else’s is irrelevant. If you are in an unfair position thanks to past unfair acts, and you can choose to let go of that position (or do some other action) to remove that unfairness from the world, then you should. Or, put otherwise, you don’t “deserve” that position, because it was attained unfairly.

Who’s the judge calculate the outstanding balance they both will naturally come to the conclusion that they’ve been unjustly treated

Well, I’m just stating that forgetting the past is not a good ethical standpoint. It is reasonable to believe it’s at least a practical one, and maybe it’s interesting to reason about the role it should have in lawmaking, resolving conflicts on a case-by-case basis, etc., but that is far from applicable in this case, or in general. I find no reason to use that simplification (which gives different outcomes) unless we’re in a situation where it’s become really difficult to reach consensus.

What if it turns out that your grand grandfather was a soldier who brought home some gold of dubious origins?

Then I would have the obligation to act according to it (return it, etc.). I would still have the right to get that wealth back, but then I would be forced to do something with it.

Anyway, I think I might be overexplaining and making it way more complicated than necessary. Everything I said can be summarized as follows: people have the right to not be affected by anything outside their control. Managing to provide that right is equivalent to effectively deleting the effects of every past and present unfair action. For example, if you properly redistribute wealth, then all of this family wealth robbery stuff simply fades away over time, as redistribution favors differences of recent origin and smooths out older variations.

Forcing people to be responsible for more than their immediate actions (e.g., also for guaranteeing other people’s rights, justice for everybody, etc.) is only concerned with what people should be expected to do. A cycle of violence is not any more justified than it would be in any other situation. For example, I can use violence to defend myself from immediate aggression; if I include an unjust status quo in my reasoning, then I might also use violence to free myself from the consequences of past violence, but that would not create a “cycle” wherein a stable, nonviolent state cannot be reached, since every “allowed” instance of violence would still only be associated one-to-one with an equivalent instance of “disallowed” violence.

I’ll give a more concrete example. If someone is trying to rob me, let’s suppose it is lawful to use threats to protect my personal property. Now, if my family’s wealth was robbed long ago, I would have a right to recover it, and whoever has it now would have an obligation to return it. If they refuse, then they are essentially under the same ethical case as if they were directly robbing it from me, so it would be lawful for me to threaten them too. If they escalate, that would be unethical, so it is simply impossible to justify any cycle of violence.

But those events have consequences for the living right now. If you’re in poverty while someone else is rich because their ancestors stole from yours, then the current situation is unfair. You could of course simply equate all past actions to a sort of “ambient” condition, presumably outside the realm of ethics, but that would not necessarily have the effect of negating them:

• Thinking in terms of rights, if you have the right to inherit (literally or effectively) wealth from the past, then that should be conditional to also inheriting any ethical considerations associated to that wealth.
• At any rate, there’s no reason to believe ethics doesn’t apply to ambient conditions. E.g., if I become seriously ill for reasons outside my control, society should compensate and take care of me. This comes naturally in the form of welfare, or partially as insurance.

Exactly. Every change to the world order has people in favor and against, and can have a multitude of effects deep into the future. If one carefully considers them, one can subjectively label some change as good, some as bad, a few violence justified, most condemnable. But setting some arbitrary point in history as the stop point is unsound from a justice standpoint.

Events are not isolated in time; past events make future events possible, while future events are determined by the past. If you condemn the events leading to the status quo, then it’s necessarily the case that you should not take the status quo as any sort of ethical baseline. That is, the current inhabitants of the island must not be exposed to war, and they will obviously decide their fate with their actions, but I don’t find a reason to believe that their government deserves any special status regarding the island.

You are wired to think that you currently exist and that you should keep doing that at all costs, but those beliefs cannot be explained or comprehended in terms of logic, so for all purposes they are false, and acknowledging that has been useful to me.

Anyway, if your existential crises are very short and intense, accompanied by intense fear and feelings of impending doom, feelings that you can’t breathe, then they probably have a physical component to them. It is very important that you understand the difference between regular intrusive thoughts of death and panic attacks that express themselves as feelings and thoughts of death that you might already have interiorized. The former can be managed, the latter cannot, and are usually self-reinforcing and need a combined therapy.

If you think you might be having the latter (I did for a couple of months), avoid alcohol for a while, and talk to a doctor; you may be advised to take a low dose short-acting anxiolytic drug whenever you feel like you’re going to have one (I started with 0.5 mg lorazepam sublingual, then switched to 0.25 mg).