Ah, true… Although the inverse is true too

It’s a two way street even if it’s designed to not feel that way. They were right to reject you, because they already fucked up on your end… Maybe piles of money could’ve brought you back, but it clearly wouldn’t have been a healthy match

True, but the second you can’t buy enough food at the grocery store it all goes poof

If we stop, even for a couple weeks, the system collapses. If a third of people stop showing up for work, if a third of people steal their food rather than pay for it, if a third of people stop paying rent… It all just melts away like a snow flurry

Money means the value assigned to it - if it can’t feed you, it means nothing. If it stops moving, so does ‘the economy’. It’s so much more fragile than it seems

That’s wasteful and dangerous

Harvest the beast for batteries and GPUs

What do you mean? It’s a problem in your way, it takes how long it takes to get through it

I love the in between, where you have to actually adapt algorithms to useful situations

It’s like 2% of all the work I do, but those moments stick with me

I mean, yes and no. They just capture device info for a location, which can often be tied back to a person, but they just grab the info the phone sends to the tower. These days with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi you can even do something similar with just your phone

I don’t love that it exists for obvious reasons, but it’s a far cry from looking through your phone

I mean, the cell providers already sell your location info to anyone (including LEO, which is unconstitutional without a warrant as far as I’m concerned), as can Google, apple, and all sorts of apps - so this is a niche thing

FWIW, you can defeat that pretty simply… Just leave your phone behind and/or in a faraday pouch. No signal, no signature, no location data (from your phone at least). It won’t necessarily stop the NSA, but it’ll protect you in a protest where your just another face in the crowd

Rather than locked down, they’re basically a black box - I think they have their own firmware and hook into the OS and hardware in weird ways (part of the reason why Linux phones are so difficult to make work)

If the NSA wants to ping your phone location or even turn on the microphone, they can, supposedly even when the phone is “off”. If they want to side channel load in a rootkit, they probably can

But NSA surveillance comes in two main flavors - broad and focused. If they think you’re a terrorist or of strategic interest, there’s a lot they can do… But that means actual humans are interested in you, personally.

But for everyone else, they’re not going to sift through ten million phone storages - that’s way too much data to be useful, and they already have long collected way more than they could make use of. The broad stuff is about flagging people - the most effective is to look at networks of people. If you have connections to a terrorist, you’re a potential part of the network, and so you’ll be flagged as more interesting. I’ve heard rumors that certain keywords might be flagged on calls too, who knows. Too many flags and they might devote some man hours to looking into you personally

But generally, they’re very protective of their tech. They don’t use the good stuff widely, because it’s not useful, and it increases the chance for discovery and countermeasures. My understanding is they won’t share their surveillance systems either - they might put notes or flags on shared LEO systems or tip someone off, but they really, really, like to play it close to the vest. Even with other 3 letter agencies

So yes, this possibility exists - especially with llms to help filter through this information ocean - but there’s no shot they’re sharing capabilities with border control agents

The NSA doesn’t generally give access to agencies on the ground like that - at most they flag individuals in the interdepartmental system, they don’t hand over what they have easily

But, if you have physical access to a device, there’s always a way in. Border control or a police department can buy tools to do it or hire contractors

I prefer the second picture, but angled back 30°

Yes and no… They’re very similar conceptually and ingredients wise, but the experience is very different. Frying the outside really firms it up like a French fry, and you get that flavor and texture all around. They also sometimes will add weird things like olives and raisins to it, which is still good, but I don’t particularly like those to start with so I might be biased

You’ve got the right idea of what it is, but you really have to experience it for yourself - a lot of South and Central American countries have their own versions that are very similar, so if you go to a Latino restaurant that isn’t Mexican or Peruvian chicken, you’ll probably be able to find it.

I’ve never tried adding jalapenos to the onion topping though… That sounds delicious. I might have to make that, it is a great topping and adding some heat to it sounds even better

Papa reyeñas(sp?). They’re so good, it’s basically mashed potatoes with ground beef mix inside, then fried/seared and baked until it sorta looks like a potato again. Then you take finely sliced red onions and soak them in lime juice for 12 hours so they get less harsh and use it like a topping

Honestly, I know how to do all off the top of my head except how long to boil the potatoes…I just would never put that much effort into my meals, so I would need a reason to cook it for others. There’s also a lot of cleanup, you need a frying pan you need a frying pan you wash twice, a big bowl, a masher, an oven dish, a lime squeezer, Tupperware (or a ziplock, but I get enough plastic), a knife, a spatula, and whatever serving dishes

I don’t enjoy cooking, but I’m pretty good at it when I want to be… But I have to want to be

Honestly, it’s scale. It dillutes the humanity to nothing, and all that remains is our worst selfish impulses

Communities become so large that bonds and reputation mean nothing. We create organizations to try to artificially recreate that, and they grow so large their primary purpose is to self purpetuate

It’s hard to muster up the will to hurt people right in front of you, it’s much easier if you can abstract it all to rules and numbers, and separate the actor from the decision maker

I think the only way something like communism works is like the fediverse - we need to find a way to weave ourselves into small communities that can act together. You can’t let power sit anywhere for long, or you’ll draw in power hungry sociopaths like flies - but inside a community they have to keep on good terms with others

We still have to collaborate, but if we shared methods and designs openly we could produce a lot of stuff locally. We don’t have to always be scaling up - if you have a thousand people, you don’t have to produce a 100k phones a year to make a phone. Working at that small scale even let’s you get creative and make better things - there’s all sorts of technologies that we don’t have access to only because they can’t be produced at scale

Plus it means people would be smarter and more skilled… Capitalism wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and that makes for craftsman that require a whole supply chain to be useful. Giving up scale means you have to make things last and be easily reparable. It means picking and choosing between your priorities

Know what? I endorse it. Aside from the cyber truck, if you want to pretend, ok take that as “I was bamboozled”. But the cyber truck… There’s no hiding that. There’s no hiding the timeframe on that. You can’t just call that POS a Toyota

Sorry, but that’s a bridge too far. Deal with the consequences… It’s just spray paint, if anything it’s protective compared to the lack of any kind of paint. Take it on the chin

I think forking android could be viable if they put some weight behind it

The difference between this and fireOS is they’re almost guaranteed sales. No foreign government is going to stick with an American company if they have a comparable option from a reliable ally at this point… That’s got to be hundreds of millions of sales on that front alone

If they can make something good, polish it for a few years, and demonstrate they can lock it down that’s almost guaranteed sales. And if they use that opportunity to further improve for a couple generations, they could become a real contender

The only question is will they throw enough resources at it and will they stick with improving it without giving up too early

A few months ago, I would’ve said how people try to engage you in good faith and how people would read walls of text and engage

Lately I feel people are scared and angry. Which is totally reasonable, but has some of the best parts of our communities

We also probably got a lot of new refugees and more interest from botters… But I used to get love with near every message I posted. Or at least honest engagement. Now? I get way less replies, and way more of them are reading into something I didn’t say

This is why I don’t contribute. Kudos to you for doing so, but I literally couldn’t handle that on a passion project. I get enough of that in my day job

If I could make a living off my passion projects I would love that and deal with what it entails, but dealing with that in my free time sounds like a nightmare.

There’s got to be a better way… But I appreciate you and hope you all the best from the bottom of my heart

Someone owns that land, because we’ve decided every inch of the planet is already owned

Human habitation is visible from space. There are parts of every government dedicated to just enforcing just this… Go out and try it, people are arrested for tents on this land, let alone homesteads

I mean, you could try, but eventually someone will find you, probably arrest you, and tear down your home

Because they’re just teaching their understanding of the world, it’s not like they’re lying. Propaganda works

And it’s not like it comes up often. And even if it does, very few people are able to explain why that’s wrong on the spot