• 160 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I mean, if you want a lecture, YouTube has those in spades. I’ve got a few financial reports I listen to month-to-month. They’re very dry, info dense, and getting through them feels like dragging myself across sand paper.

    I tend to prefer podcasts that mix in the history and the news with a few joking asides and tangents. Makes the show feel more human and less like I’m supposed to take an exam on it at the end of the week. And, frankly, I’ve found more hot tips in TrashFuture than anything UBS has dolled out.




  • It’s the same thing really, but without the “negative” connotations usually attributed to atheism or atheists.

    Atheists and Agnostics would obviously disagree. There’s a core philosophical difference between being convinced in the negative and being unconvinced in the affirmative.

    That said, what are the consequences of being a Theist, an Atheist, or an Agnostic? I might argue that Theists and Atheists have history of leveraging their confidence into an active policy of discrimination and bigotry. Whether you’re a Chinese Communist cracking down on under-18 church attendance or an Israeli Zionist conducting a pogrom against Palestinians, there’s a habit of imbuing your personal beliefs with political teeth.

    “See, I’m not really an atheist but agnostic. It means I’m not to be expelled from this community as a heretic”

    The flip side of this being, “I’m not expelling you from the community for excessive display of religious ferver”.

    It’s easier to sympathize with avowed Atheists in nations where atheism is a disenfranchised minority. But as soon as you give someone like Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris an ounce of political capital, they start cheer leading a genocide.

    That, I think, is a real tangible difference. Agnostics tend not to begrudge other ideologies in the same way.


  • It is entirely true that all models from all manufacturers are compromised by spy agencies.

    I think there’s a little bit of space between “spy agencies employ systems professionals that know the guts of a component’s security and tricks to bypass it” and “every device firmware has a double super secret protocol for sidestepping all of its security features”.

    However the worst offender by far is Cisco even though they’re “American”.

    Sure. I’m willing to believe that Cisco, specifically, has relationships with the Five Eyes network such that they make monitoring their traffic easier. Even then, there’s limits. One thing to say techniques exist to bypass security. Another entirely to know what those techniques are and whether they’re practical for application at universal scale.

    One of the more chronic problems that big spy agencies have is sifting through all the spam and bullshit and empty chatter. Decryption takes time. And you can’t monitor everything, everywhere, all at once. The bigger sins of Cisco are in how they expedite access on behalf of their agency partners, not that they fail to produce perfectly hack-proof hardware.




  • Stop trying to optimize experience gains for fucking making me have to play 20 hours a weeknto unlock the battlepass I already bought within the 3 month window. Seriously, fucking stop, I have other things to do in life too.

    The worst part about all these games. It’s like your weed guy blowing up your phone telling you its time to smoke another J. Only a group of sales guys coked off their asses could have come up with this as a marketing gimmick.

    I have no interest in playing against hackers or no lifes who run everything with Potato mode graphics and swest skins who play 24x7 and have 2000 crown wins by day 2.

    The truly crazy part about this group is that it is increasingly just bots. Like, not even proper “professional gamers” anymore. Just scripts running on a server built by a madman.