• 13 Posts
  • 137 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • There are several options. Sometimes they overlap:

    • Direct gain such as romantic opportunity from sabotaging a rival or items of value from theft. Some people are callous about the harm caused, while others rationalize it as necessary or justified.
    • Retribution or justice. Most people are happy to hear that a child molester will receive abuse from other prisoners, to give an example.
    • Sadism - direct satisfaction or pleasure from causing pain to others. This is unlikely to make much sense to those of us who aren’t sadists, so it may have to be enough to just know it exists.

    Now consider politicians promising to harm some out group and people voting for them. It’s a combination of the first two: the politicians attempt to gain elected office by convincing people that the out group is evil or dangerous and promising to do something about it. The voters believe these cruel actions to be justice done to vicious criminals.









  • Most Western societies are much less explicitly based on religious scripture, though as others have noted negative attitudes toward polygamy may be rooted in Christianity. Some Western societies, such as the USA explicitly forbid establishing an official religion, but cultural norms are still based on the dominant religion.

    Modern ideas about equality in Western societies are not based on a religion, but on how people decided they want things to work. Until about 50 years ago, women did not have legal equality in many Western countries, and a single woman was often unable to open a bank account, rent an apartment, or get certain jobs. A social movement worked very hard to change both attitudes and laws, and now the majority belief is more or less equal = same.

    Qatari women are provided with household staff by their husbands to make their lives easier.

    How does this work for people who are not extremely wealthy, such as members of your household staff?


  • This one gets more complicated the longer I think about it.

    My first pass was to imagine humans just as we are aside from the ability to die. Many things about how humans are don’t make sense without death though. Pain, for example likely evolved to cause organisms to avoid stimuli that could lead to their death. Fear largely derives from the anticipation of pain. Would true immortals have either? I imagine the psychology of such creatures would be vastly different from our own.

    There’s also the question of what form the immortality takes. If it’s possible to destroy someone’s physical body, but their soul can immediately manifest a new one, and pain doesn’t exist, then doing so is just an inconvenience. If bodies are impervious to any damage or alteration, a large category of crimes vanishes.

    It would probably come down to some sort of long-term imposition on the freedom of others, but it’s really hard to guess what that would look like.


  • It’s on a VPS. Whether that’s really self-hosted may depend on how much of a purist you are, but it’s fully self-managed, not SAAS.

    It’s recommended to have a PTR record mapping your IP address to your domain, which you wouldn’t be able to do with a residential connection from a typical ISP. I do send mail from multiple domains though and I haven’t had issues with deliverability. What I do not send is any kind of high-volume mail, which would likely attract a different kind of scrutiny.



  • Sort of. This is apparently done on-protocol so anyone can issue verifications, but they’re only shown in the official client if they’re from BlueSky or someone approved by BlueSky.

    A better way to do this would be to let users subscribe to verifiers the way they can labelers. Better still would be for the label to indicate what the verifier has verified about the account, like “nytimes.com says this person is an employee of the New York Times”, which is something labelers can already do.

    So I really think they should have just leaned into labelers.


  • The thing about this age range is there are a bunch of social changes people go through. Some of them are automatic at a specific age, like being able to legally buy alcohol. Others may not happen at quite the same age, like getting a driver’s license, graduating high school, or moving out of the parents’ house.

    I suggest some introspection to be sure she likes you for you more than for social advantages you might have, and to check local laws to make sure a sexual relationship isn’t illegal. Other than that, the half your age plus seven rule of thumb others have mentioned seems pretty reasonable to me.








  • Terms like “safe” and “private” are not binary.

    Are the contents of your Signal conversations on an iPhone private with regard to mass surveillance conducted by governments and ISPs? Probably. Apple uses security and privacy as marketing points, and there are a whole lot of people looking for vulnerabilities in its products who are incentivized to disclose them (possibly with a delay for patches). Signal itself takes steps to prevent data leaks to less secure parts of the OS and other apps.

    Would your conversations remain private in the face of a targeted attack against your device by a nation state willing to spend a significant amount of time and money when you’re using Signal on an iPhone that’s presumably used for purposes other than secure conversations with a small set of people you know? Almost certainly not.