stupid_asshole69 [none/use name]

I’m not suggesting you treat the word normie as a slur against some group, but that it betrays a type of thought process that will ultimately work against you. If you want to understand why, compare it to my generation’s equivalent: sheeple. The word is intended to express how people are concerned with what everyone else is doing, not on the consolidation of power after the fall of the Berlin Wall or the reliance of Nordic social democracies on the immiseration of the global south or the removal of tassels from flags or the reemergence of lemuria. The language creates an out group and invites the reader (or listener) to join the in group. It’s not useful for understanding what people outside your circle think about data or privacy because it assumes what they think broadly and its context provides the specifics of what they think.

That’s all just to clarify that it’s not a no-no word, but a word that asserts a premise that probably needs to be examined and rejected if you want to have success in your stated aim.

As far as shifting the message, I’d actually avoid talking about election conspiracy or any other conspiratorial use of data. Most people recognize the surveillance state. You can just talk directly about the way people’s information flows into the hands of data brokers and from there into the state surveillance system. People are already under the impression that they’re being tracked, just give them a way to impede it.

“You can stop yourself from being tracked, here’s how:” is gonna be a lot more effective than trying to convince people that they’re being tracked for the purposes of election manipulation.

You have a section about that but it’s way too far down and you need to lead with it. Of course that also means putting together straightforward steps for accomplishing that task that cover all current versions of android (yes including the bobo vendor specific versions), windows, macos and ios.

I feel the need to be clear that I wasn’t trying to be rude when describing the overall vibe as student. There’s nothing wrong with being a student and I don’t think it indicates immaturity at all. A few specific elements that contribute to me calling it that are the white on black text, anti corporate imagery with overtones of incitement and use of hot colors like red instead of cool colors like blue.

Those things make me think student because they’re the elements of a flyer or band tee instead of an informational pamphlet. The reason that comes across as student is that together they say “I’m freaked out/excited and you should be too!” Which is not something that helps your stated goal of helping everyday people become more aware of the importance of data privacy.

I chose the word student to describe it because i had hoped it would convey all that and some measure of how “crank” a lot of that messaging strategy comes across.

You don’t want to be ranting in the street, handing out flyers or selling newspapers if you’re worried about actually reaching people.

I’d avoid gamifying privacy. It’s kind of a masters tools situation.

I started writing about all the different things I don’t like about gnome but I realized that it’s veered wildly through several different user interface types since I’ve been around it and some of the stuff I was gonna bring up isn’t even currently part of the ui metaphor or even design philosophy.

Sure I dislike gnomes mobile ui model now, but what really bugs me is the absolutely hallucinogenic level of changes it’s been through. Even if I did like its current iteration, I had better not get attached, it’s likely to change so it can chase some new thing in a few years.

So not only does it piss me off now but learning to like it or changing my mind would just be setting me up for failure later.

Doing something so badly that even the people who like what you do will be negatively impacted is impressive though. Olympic level design failure.

My first recommendation would be don’t call people normies. Not using a pejorative to refer to your subject even in private goes a long way towards being able to think about them more clearly. I’m not scolding you, I don’t care how you think about people but if you really want to get people to care about privacy the same way you do then it’s important to avoid stigmatizing them straight out of the gate so you can understand what is important to them.

I’d abandon the adbusters model of “here’s how you can stick it to the man and all you’ve got to do is change your entire life!” It reads as performative and relies on the false assumption that disorganized, individual opposition can lead to change. Instead, revise your message to focus on first recognizing the hostility of the information space around us and taking an appropriate posture.

I would also abandon any mention of self hosting. If you’re trying to get people to clear their cache and turn on adp and lockdown mode throwing self hosting in the mix is absurd. Oh yeah, and as a long time user and contributor to open source software, treating it as a privacy and security panacea raises a lot of red flags.

From the perspective of an old man with a lot of experience, the website has high school/college student energy. That’s not bad per se, but it may be working against your stated goals.

Didn’t read, but I agree that gnome is bad.

My schadenfreude can’t do 120fps or hallucinate keir starmer with cow udders. I need the chippss

I can’t get the chip so it doesn’t matter to me.

There’s like a million reasons but broadly speaking the brown cover with the compass and photos on it is a happy medium before the organization tried to adapt outside of being an equivalent to the Nazi children’s program it was started to provide parity for.

Not really, but in terms of creating a group of children who have the skillset to be stormtroopers.

That’s good for American children (especially opening up the group to girls!), but it means the manual has lost a lot of what made it a good literal baby steps guide to building skills that will serve you in conflict.

Again, you want the last gasp of fascism edition because swimming a mile isn’t Nazi coded or woke, it’s continuing to live coded.

There’s probably a lot of differences but whatever you have is a great start to fitness, mental health and a ton of useful skills and ways of thinking.

It’s gonna sound lame but get a 90s copy of the boy scout handbook and learn all the stuff in it by putting yourself in situations where you will use them. For things like tourniquets and other first aid, take a class. Don’t be afraid to update the methods by looking up stuff online.

If you’re not sure why I suggested this: bsa operated at one point as a pipeline into the military for children. The skillset it teaches is basically hobby infantry.

There was still a penny chickle gum machine in the second floor of the courthouse till a couple years ago.

Yeah, I usually put it in the little pocket until I get home or keep it in the ashtray of the car.

Actually I only ditch the small change, the bigger ones are nice when you run across a vending machine.

Yeah, when you buy stuff they give you change.

The little pocket keeps it tight against your body so it doesn’t jingle around when you walk.

I’m gonna start doing that. Hell yeah.

I had a couple of hot dogs and a half gallon of sweet tea. Bout to eat an orange though. You save and candy your peels?

You’re fine, I had t had breakfast either so I definitely acted like an asshole. It’s just frustrating to broadly generalize with a disclaimer and still catch it.

The thing I didn’t say was that Stalin had no choice but to bring em home and the ideology I link that decision to and its consequences are not an indictment of him.

It’s just that often times decisions of state aren’t really made freely and except for certain circumstances, super deterministic systems tend to inherit a powerful inertia.

Socialism in one country leaves a place for a nation with a socialist developmentalist aim to occupy. China ended up being the one who occupied that space. Socialism in one country is a contribution generally attributed to Stalin, not that I think he had any choice in the matter.

Then what happened

Redditors read and quote even one entire sentence challenge level: impossible.

In all seriousness, we have to at least acknowledge that the ussr, under Stalin, stopped trying to expand the communist world so aggressively and that created the space for a nation like China to develop the way that it did after events like the sino-Soviet split.

To deny that China had this role is even more ahistorical than distilling 1945-maybe ‘51? - Idk I’m thumbing this sucker out at a truck stop away from any books - down to “Stalin decided it was better to build the Union up and pay out at least some peace dividend than to keep up the hellish war economy against the west.”

When Stalin abandoned internationalism and adopted socialism in one country (this is an incredibly broad generalization of events bordering on the ahistorical but please bear with me for the sake of brevity) it became possible for another nation to take a socialist developmentalist line without needing to support the ussr.

The history of Chinas post ww2 20th century is one of threading that needle. They did a pretty good job.

The most interesting and telling thing will be the Chinese governments actions in the next ten years. Will they make the same mistakes as the ussr did or will they chart a different course as America tries to align itself against a new communist bloc.

What’s your current router? What is the symptom you’re experiencing?

With that much stuff connected you absolutely have to be doing some kind of subnetting and traffic shaping.

If you’re pretty far out from your neighbors then you can use different wireless aps to make up the backbone of the subnets. If you’re close enough to the neighbors to see their networks in a site survey then there may not be enough spectrum to do that.

Give me the job.