Reminds me of “goof”, which was used endearingly in my family growing up, like “silly goof”. Later, when my circle overlapped with some wannabe gangsters, I find out some considered it one of the worst insults you could give.

And even if the question isn’t being asked in good faith, just dismissing it might feel like you’re showing them up, but someone who would be convinced by the bad faith question isn’t going to change their mind when they see a “just Google it, it’s so simple”.

And even for those that do search it, who knows what sources they end up looking at. “Oh, 9/10 oil execs say it’s actually ok while the 1/10 remaining just laugh when asked, so it must be ok! Oh and Fox News confirms it!” Buys another unnecessarily large truck.

You need to explain that, though they are generally rich, it’s not unusual for unheard of princes to occasionally fall on hard times and have their fortunes compensated until they are able to pay a ransom to get a corrupt bank or government to release their vast wealth back to them AND that they are almost always grateful to anyone who assists them in paying that ransom.

Oh wait, sorry, wrong scam.

Wouldn’t you find it useful to be able to prove that you paid for something? When you buy an NFT, you’re buying just that: the ability to prove that you bought it. And sometimes it even comes with a copy of an image or a spaceship you might just be able to use in a video game or just hold on to until we develop the technology to live in video game spaceships and you sell it for massive profits!

Or marked as duplicate and closed but when you click the duplicate it’s a different issue.

WWI complicated things, eg Ukraine was given up as part of the deal to get the Leninists out of the war. WWII probably didn’t help, at least in some ways. It did help with unity but a lot of Soviets died, either directly in combat or as part of the Nazi purge (Slavs/Russians weren’t seen as much better than Jews by the Nazis).

There were several factions in a civil war (Leninists, other communists, anarchists, capitalists) and all the alliances and betrayals that goes along with that. Plus outside capitalists didn’t want to see socialism or communism succeed and played interference, though I don’t think that ramped up that much until after WWII, where wars were fought to stop the spread.

Stalin had a bias for “communist-like” scientific theories, and there was one about how to grow food that came up just as a lot of farm land was being reallocated from long time landowners to people who didn’t have much experience farming. These theories weren’t very successful but those involved had a personal vestment in making others think it was working rather than failing (because gulag vs living nicely). So reports said there was tons of food being produced while there wasn’t, leading to famine, which makes it harder to bring up a brand new economy.

China also fell for those false reports and adopted the fake science themselves, which contributed to their own famine.

I don’t recall a lot of the details of that fake science, but a couple of the ideas I do remember: fit as many seeds/plants as possible into any given area because the plants will work together to strengthen their comrades. If you store seeds in the cold, it will make them more cold resistant, allowing crops that wouldn’t normally grow in some areas to thrive there.

Just those two things plus the land redistribution resulted in people who didn’t know how to farm trying to grow more crops than the land would support, sometimes picking a crop that wouldn’t even grow in that area over less desirable ones that would.

And of course it didn’t help that the Kremlin still feasted while (false) reports said there were tons of crops being produced, which were also taxed as if the production numbers were valid, so those farmers were also starving, which killed the public support momentum and they had to deal with Stalin’s brutality on top of that.

Unless you think of earth/humanity as one organism.

Marketers using all of their skills to try to sell the idea that they’re a good guy doing something people (who aren’t ad buyers) want.

Sad part is they are probably able to fool some people.

LET GO OF MY PURSE!

My cousin had one a few years back and said it was very painful. He didn’t end up needing more than one shot because the bat that got him tested negative, so I’m not sure how many doses it was in total.

Don’t they usually just administer the rabies vaccine anyways just in case? As I understand it, even with the testing they’ll give the first dose because there can be bad effects if they wait for the test results before then.

Technically, they could have. But it wouldn’t have really been Nirvana without Cobain. It was pretty much Cobain’s cult of personality. If they had tried to continue without him, it would have been another one of those bands that starkly contrasts between before and after and the comment above would have been about never knowing Nirvana in its heyday.

Even if the continuation was good (and Dave Grohl is proof that there was enough talent for it in the rest of the band), it would have still been tainted by the lack of Cobain.

I’m not sure there’s any guarantee that it will ever be sorted, since bit flips will be random and are just as likely to put it more out of order than more in order. Plus if there’s any error correction going on, it can cancel out bit flips entirely until up to a certain threshold.

Though I’m not sure if ECC (and other methods) write the corrected value back to memory or just correct the signals going to the core, so it’s possible they could still add up over time and overcome the second objection.

If you read your history books you’ll find it was a little more than just disbanded.

If I need to use consumables in this fight, then I might run out of consumables when I built a dependence on them in a harder fight later!

Yeah, you’re right, Russia isn’t the only one with troll farms. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some based in every country in the world. Not all of them state sponsored, but it’s an effective strategy to disrupt communities and keep people from working together. Edit: though I’ve come to see it as kinda like Kleenex, where the entire phenomenon is referred to as Russian trolling even though not all trolls are Russian brand trolls.

And you’re also right about that last point. I don’t know if there is an effective way to deal with them. Even if someone called out as a troll really is one, just calling them out can alienate others who resonated with what the troll said.

I’m not sure if there even is an effective counter strategy.

Fuck man, add a spoiler tag or something if you’re going to post an image of a vicious attack like that!

I’m not sure they are going so hard right now, since the election is done, but the Russian trolling strategy was to sow division by pushing every side of every conflict further to the extremes.

Like say for feminism, there would be some claiming feminists are just anti-man and want to replace the patriarchy with a matriarchy, others would be pushing the message that men are evil and shouldn’t be trusted, while others would be saying women belong in the kitchen to serve their husbands and sons, and yet others would be complaining that men never listen. And they’d do all of this loudly with the hope of drowning out the more reasonable and moderate positions and make it an unsolvable issue because all sides don’t think there’s any compromise possible.

And once you know the pattern, it’s visible all over the fucking place.

Yeah, I think there is a lot of potential for code analysis. There’s a limited cross section of ways malware can do interesting things, but many permutations of ways to do that.

So look for the interesting things, like:

• accessing other programs’ address spaces
• reading/writing files
• deleting/moving files
• sending/receiving network traffic
• os system calls and console commands
• interacting with hardware
• spawning new processes
• displaying things on the screen
• accessing timing information

Obviously there’s legitimate uses for each of these, so that’s just the first step.

Next, analyze the data that is being used for that:

• what’s the source?
• what’s the destination?
• what kind of transformations are being applied to the data?

Then you can watch out for things like:

• is it systematically going through directories and doing some operation to all files? (Maybe ransomware, data scrubbing, or just maliciously deleting stuff?)
• is it grabbing data from somewhere and sending it somewhere else on the internet? (Stealing data?)
• is it using timing information to build data? (Timing attacks to figure out kernel data that should be hidden?)
• is it changing OS settings/setup?

Then generate a report of everything it is doing and see if it aligns with what the code is supposed to do. Or you could even build some kind of permissions system around that with more sophistication than the basic “can this app access files? How about the internet?”

Computer programs can be complex, but are ultimately made up of a series of simple operations and it’s possible to build an interpreter that can do those operations and then follow everything through to see exactly what is included in the massive amount of data it sends over the network so that you can tell your file sharing program is also for some reason sending /etc/passwords to a random address or listening for something to access a sequence of closed ports and then will do x, y, z, if that ever happens. Back doors could be obvious with the right analysis tools, especially if it’s being built from source code (though I believe it’s still possible with binaries, just maybe a bit harder).

I’m skeptical that there exists any leftist mainstream place that isn’t actually a right-wing place disguised as leftist.

I’m also skeptical that all of those loud but irrational voices are genuine. Especially given Russia’s MO for online trolling where they push both sides of any issue to extremes to sow division. Not to say that I believe everyone on the left is rational and reasonable. But why would the tone be so different between “mainstream” and “non-mainstream” left places if the position you’re talking about is as ubiquitous to the left as you claim it is?

They are phrasing it in a way that makes plausible deniability harder!