AI is a surveillance technology.

The planet could be a capture.

“Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”

Is the entire neighborhood a cornfield?

That seems… impractical.

Instructions unclear; set teeth on fire.

The short selling is over. Time to pump the market again.

There’s this quote attributed to Rabbi Yisrael Salanter:

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

There are two lessons here. First - the best way to affect meaningful change is to start local. Rather than spending a lot of time agonizing over national politics, get involved in your community - your neighborhood, your town, your apartment building, even just the house you share with your family. Your community will take better care of you and the other people that you care about than any national government ever will.

Second - ultimately the only person whose behavior you can change is your own. Don’t be too harsh with other people when they don’t behave the way that you believe they should. Be a more stringent judge of your own behavior.

But temper that with this:

Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much. Or berate yourself too much either.

Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.

Baz Lurhmann

Fall of Civilizations has an excellent episode on this:

Episode 2: The Bronze Age Collapse

rhymes with lootin’

VPNs as a technology might not be illegal but circumventing the firewall certainly is.

Unless you are very vocal and high profile person no one will black bag you in a country of billion people, lol.

This is a bit of a misunderstanding about how things work in an authoritarian system. Sure, you might fly under the radar for awhile, but if you call attention to yourself (say, by getting caught trying to bypass the government firewall) and you are not high-profile, then it is very low-effort to make you disappear. Few will notice, and those that do will stay silent out of fear.

If you are more high-profile you still get black-bagged, you just get released after, with your behavior suitably modified.

Naomi Wu no longer uploads to YouTube.

relevant xkcd

Depends - how many family members do you have that the PRC might use against you? or who would miss you if the PRC black bagged you?

And there are hundreds if not thousands of them, plus a lot of automated tooling.

Or it plunges us back into the dark ages, where people believe things based on anecdotes and superstitions, and sources of factual information are rare and typically locked inside some walled garden or other.

This is just another form of control being asserted by the wealthy and powerful - knowledge is power. Removing effective access to knowledge keeps people in the dark, making them easier to manipulate.

Hold on to your public institutions. Fight for them tooth and nail. Collect books (unredactable, uneditable, un-paywall-able sources of information). Donate to libraries. Don’t patronize LLM systems. Prefer local storage and applications over cloud services.

And don’t romanticize ignorance.

Aaron Swartz was right about everything

Ostensibly, that’s what it’s for.

Of course, the online features are bait on the hook.

I think the barrier to entry needs to be higher.

This works in theory, but the mixer knows, and we know that several of them have been infiltrated by various government agencies, and records extracted for criminal investigations. I’d put 50/50 odds on any current mixer being already infiltrated and having some enforcement agency collecting data on the transactions.

If not law enforcement, I wouldn’t trust the mixer operators to not be gathering data and profiting off of it somehow. You’re talking about money launderers. Trustworthiness isn’t exactly the status quo. Hell, for all you know the people operating any given mixer are actually backed by Russia or North Korea or something.

He’s never played with a full deck anyway.

If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.