Obviously not. Think about supply and demand. Because a toxic product is being hailed as secure there isn’t enough demand for an actually anonymous and private messenger. So calling signal “secure” is just helping state security.

If you actually want to message about revolutionary (illegal, “terrorist”) activity and don’t want to be traced immediately by an agent of state security or an informant, Signal offers nothing (unless you use criminal activity like identity theft). In such a case a warrant will obviously be granted and they can immediately find and arrest you.

Can you see the logic how Signal isn’t secure at all for an actual dissident?

Just let it happen

Thanks. I’d already be happy with updating/mutable v2 torrents for browsing static websites via hashkey.

A regular captain of industry for whom the automatic searchers of his zero-privacy messenger is one step too far lol

There can be no security without privacy and a central server that can be extorted. But keep lying if you like.

plans in the EU to allow messengers to have backdoors to enable automatic searches for criminal content

Try to think a bit before you post

Signal is considered one of the most secure messengers.

I mean lol, they require a phone number to sign up, which you can only get with an ID in many countries. You chat with a gestapo officer and they know where you life.

Signal IS GARBAGE. Fucking garbage article, gaslighting bullshit. Fuck this timeline. Honestly this article is fucking terrorism.

What the fuck is a DIDs?

How does google plan to enforce this? Will they disable side-loading for any app that isn’t registered with google?

What matters is scalability and how much material and cost you need to produce per energy unit. Kites (either parasails or fixed wing) are much simpler, can be scaled up too, and you only need a simple cable that pulls the generator’s winch. Overall kites seem much more efficient to scale up.

Ok, it’s obviously a complicated task, and banning advertising will make things more complex. But that is what progress often is.

But before the internet we used to even have TV shows reviewing things, under the mandate they don’t get paid to do so. People do have an interest in learning about new cool things or improvements to old, and comparative reviews. There is no reason this wouldn’t serve the legitimate need for information better. Now we have ratings and that could be improved as well, through better technology to gather independent reviews.

And yeah, there are not free lunches from corporations, but there are from people or from the government. We pay collectively for things and distribute them for free all the time. Public broadcasting could be extended to youtube or even news papers, to make them more independent from profit driven behavior or owners. You can’t have democracy without free press, and currently we don’t have that. We have corporate press and every single youtube channel has to serve corporate news. And as you point out, in capitalism there is no free lunch. But we can make it free so we can stop the insanity of neoliberal and fascist propaganda currently destroying our civilization globally.

Another thing I forgot to mention, advertising is the main vector to increase consumerism. Which is killing our planet.

There are also market effects on what type of content is produced / profitable to advertise on.

And mostly unknown psychological effects of advertising on the human mind. Maybe advertising has altered your mind so much that you “don’t even mind” it any more. It is a brainwashing technique after all haha. Maybe all those youtube ads made about 5% of the people’s brain soft enough to vote for MAGA. Maybe the effect of advertising is as bad as lead in gasoline.

Yeah the value of art is that it can express or show things about the world that are hard to express in words. And we desperately need a new way and clarity about the failure of the old ways, because that is what leads to the cynicism and hopelessness. So either keep politics out of it, or have a bloody brilliant take on politics that provides actual value.

I quite like superhero movies as escapism, like a fantasy world where clear definitions of good vs evil exist. But I can’t stomach biopics or docudramas that mix this fantasy with real world propaganda, like some nostalgic fantasy about US politics or journalism any more. It feels like they all want to recreate the beautiful fantasy of Sorkin’s “The White House” or the classic thriller take of “a bad apple in a good system” but today that is a dangerous lie.

I only watched a cam-rip and stopped after Louis Lane “interviews” Superman which was painful to watch. The typical reporter tearing and deliberately misrepresenting or framing things in the dominant world order, every question a cut and propaganda criticizing people who disagree. It was kinda gaslighting, like “why did you attack our ally unprovoked?! Also some people are saying you’re an alien spy!”. Instead of asking questions to get the truth, they are loaded questions that can’t be answered without making yourself look bad.

What a total failures as a character introduction and makes her instantly an unlikeable removed. I mean holy shit is that bad storytelling. Or is that just me? If that is what you think a reporter should do, then don’t do it as a friend / girlfriend, and if that is how you see the world that you are not worthy of being the girlfriend of a hero like Superman. Because in my opinion you’re one of the villains in real life.

I do suspect this plays into why some people disliked superman. What people seek in these troubled times is strength. And they hate what tears strength down, seeking to control or subdue it or put it in it’s place in the proper order of things. They want someone to break things because deep down we all know the path we’re on right now leads downward (economic inequality, enshittification of products, appliances and services, climate change and environment, rising tensions, news and social media, post truth world). The people voting aren’t entirely wrong in just wanting to see the world burn.

There is a quote which I don’t know where it came from or remember well: “The samurai valued strength above anything else, because that is where all other values flow from”. Or differently: “The samurai believed that strength was the foundation of all values, as it enabled them to uphold honor, loyalty, and discipline.”

But our liberal world order sees strength as something that has to be separated, atomized, means tested and distributed into channels to control. Controlled by laws, bureaucracy or better yet, the dictates of capitalism, because it’s oh-so-efficient. I suspect right wingers like Homelander not because he’s a corporate product, but because he breaks out of that and goes rogue, and also rejects the “we must not kill anyone and obey the laws or we will be like the villains!” bullshit.

The cult of personality or hero worship represents a desire of people that someone comes and fixes all this shit and cuts through the red tape. Someone who has strength and the courage to use that strength, despite all the clever fucking shitty arguments and conventions to the contrary. Because we’ve heard it all before and it sounds so good but it’s clearly not working. Superhero movies are supposed to fulfill that wish and grand escapism into a world where our problems are magically solved. But recent movies (Marvel) failed to do that, instead pushing the failed real world fantasy of a liberal world order into the movies. Like the common trope of Washington and the government being fundamentally good and working well, except for a few bad apples, and as soon as you get the proof and give it to the good people or the newspapers, everything works out fine. Which is a painful reminder that it doesn’t in real life.

I suspect the “reactionary backlash” is not just about racism, it’s about the rejection of the distraction of identity politics - that if we only lean in more, if we accept different cultures, everything will be fine - because that is just distraction from the continued neoliberalism and disaster capitalism. But breaking things and bringing things to a head is also an opportunity - accelerationism.

These are just by jumbled thoughts on how this reflects on our culture war. Again, I haven’t watched the movie or read any of the right wing critiques, only seen the “liberal backlash to the backlash”. This controversy in itself is rather predictable and pisses me off. Like it’s a distraction in itself, a pair of two anger memes that complement each other perfectly are tossed into the ether to continue to keep us occupied.

Also after I stopped the movie I read some (serious) reviews and it’s also just a shitty movie.

Emotion > Facts. Most people have been trained to blindly accept things and cheer on what fits with their agenda. Like technbro’s exaggerating LLMs, or people like you misrepresenting LLMs as mere statistical word generators without intelligence. That’s like saying a computer is just wires and switches, or missing the forest for the trees. Both is equally false.

Yet if it fits with the emotional needs or with dogma, then other will agree. It’s a convenient and comforting “A vs B” worldview we’ve been trained to accept. And so the satisfying notion and misinformation keeps spreading.

LLMs tell us more about human intelligence and the human slop we’ve been generating. It tells us that most people are not that much more than statistical word generators.

Isn’t this an old strategy of microsoft? Dump shitload of money into a market, then once you captured a significant portion start the enshittification.

They would generate strategies that maximize their objective function based on the training data. Obviously garbage in garbage out, but my point is they would not be prone to certain irrationalities like humans.

It might be possible to regulate how AI CEOs are optimized and trained though. You can tell a human CEO a thousand times “we only have one earth, if you all externalize your cost we will all die and have zero profits” but an AI might actually get it. AI might also be connected to a kind of crowdsourced democratic economic global forum, where people can discuss, complain and make suggestions.

AI also has a much higher bandwidth and might catch institutional problems much easier because it doesn’t have to rely on summaries of subordinates to understand how things are going.

More broadly, it might be theoretically impossible for humans to act according to our shared values - no matter what rules, institutions, education or culture we create. Like “theoretically impossible, the system always degenerates” because individual humans will always follow their own greed and lust for power while pretending to comply, and then using that power to slowly pervert the system and it’s rules. I believe that is the root of our current malaise. But even non-sentient AI might be able to help us just enough to make it work. It’s much more likely that those in power will use it for the opposite, but that shouldn’t stop us from thinking about if it can be used for good.

People are a resource that keeps regenerating after all.

That’s what the AI would call “sustainable business practices”?

I’ve been wondering why they don’t blow up more regularly. I imagine a few long range sniper shots would make them explode easily. They should be relatively easy to hit, seeing how big they are.