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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • You need a way to generate a psuedo random sequence that’s synchronized. You can then use that random stream as something that works like a stream cipher.

    Getting synchronized sources of random numbers like that isn’t trivial, but it can be done.

    To spitball a notion: get something like a small microcontroller that can drive a small screen, no wireless capabilities needed. Putting an implementation of something like the hotp algorithm on it will let you get some random data with each button press. That data can basically be used like a one time pad where you press a button each time you need more data. People decrypting the data just need to start at the same point in the sequence.

    There are so many issues with this that I haven’t thought of, but it’s the most reasonable approximation of a pen and paper algorithm that has modern security levels and can be done in a reasonable amount of time.

    Basically, you’re going to want to look into stream ciphers. Since those can be done without feeding the data into them, it’s possible to have a more disconnected system.

    It’s worth noting that against a governmental adversary, you’re far more likely to be revealed via poor application of a custom crypto system than by a targeted bypass of a commonplace one.
    If you’re under suspicion, a cop can grab the piece of paper you did your work on out of the trash if you forgot to burn it and no decryption is required. Being physically readable, the key material can be seized and it’s lost. If they have a warrant they can put a camera in your house and just record your paper.
    With a cellphone, the lowest level of scrutiny that can use a backdoor that we know of would be a sealed fisa court order. Anything less official would require more scrutiny, since the NSA isn’t going to send a targeted payload to the phone of a generic malcontent/domestic subversive.

    Widely used crypto systems address an extremely wide array of possible attacks, most of which aren’t related to the cipher but instead to issues of key management and rotation. This can give you guarantees about message confidentiality being preserved backwards in time if the key is stolen,cand only new messages being readable, as an example. (Perfect forward secrecy)

    What you’re looking for can be made, but you need to strongly consider if it actually makes you more secure, or less. Probably less.


  • Anarchism is opposition to power hierarchies, specifically non-consensual or coercive ones. Wealth inequality without safety networks is a coercive power hierarchy, and so needs to be fought. Capitalism as a whole is almost always incompatible with anarchy, at least in the way we tend to do it now. In a system with strong social safety networks the choice to work for someone can actually be a choice, and so some schools of thought would view it as compatible.
    Others view exclusive ownership of property as someone asserting power over someone else’s ability to use said property, and therefore wrong. Needless to say, abolition of private property is not compatible with capitalism.


  • Depends on the anarchist. Many would focus on seeking the absence of involuntary power hierarchies. A manager who distributes work and does performance evaluations isn’t intrinsically a problem, it’s when people doing the work can’t say “no, they’re a terrible manager and they’re gone”, or you can’t walk away from the job without risking your well-being.

    Anarchists and communists/socialists have a lot of overlap. There’s also overlap with libertarians, except libertarians often focus on coercion from the government and don’t give much regard to economic coercion. An anarchist will often not see much difference between “do this or I hit you” and “do this or starve”: they both are coercive power hierarchies.
    Some anarchists are more focused on removing sources of coercion. Others are more focused on creating relief from it. The “tear it down” crowd are more visible, but you see anarchists in the mutual aid and community organization crowds as well.



  • I don’t know that I’d agree with the notion that games that are engaging need to be rated higher. Is there harm to playing one game a lot?
    I’ve read books that were so engaging I kept reading long after I should have stopped for the night. The author very much intended for the book to be engaging and to hold my attention. Should we rate the book as more mature because I kept reading it?

    I don’t think balatro is any more addictive than most other games, it just has a low barrier to starting and a quick turn around.

    Ratings should be informative and harm based. “This game is full of violence” and “this game has gambling”. Factual.
    A game being prone to being played alot isn’t factual, it’s just an observation that some people find it fun. Without an associated risk of harm you’re just putting a scary number on something because of your opinion about it.



  • Yeah, you’re not exactly sounding rational there buddy.

    You think we should mistrust doctors who advise you take a preventative treatment that every healthcare system on earth recommends and has since the treatment was created because in one country the people who pay for medicine sometimes don’t want to pay for things the doctors recommend (and you’re saying don’t trust the doctors, mind you), even though the people who pay for it actually recommend it because they make more money if you don’t get sick.

    Even in a full conspiratorial mindset your nonsense is disjointed.

    Antivaxers are fucking idiots because they don’t have a coherent internal logic for their paranoid woo, they don’t have the ability to understand any of the research that’s happened, and they don’t want to trust the people who do because those people clearly want to hurt them and give them… A developmental disability. For profit somehow.


  • “a drink” contains roughly the same amount of alcohol regardless of type, so a daiquiri should get you about as inebriated as a beer.
    Some caveats: since drunk people drink more, some places have specials earlier in the evening or on some drinks where you can make it a double for no or low upcharge. That glass now has two drinks in it.
    Some drinks are easier to drink fast, which makes you feel the effects faster and stronger, so you might perceive yourself to be “more drunk”, even though it’s really just hitting you all at once. Delicious sugary drinks that mask the alcohol flavor are notorious for that.

    It takes about an hour to process a drink; sugary drinks will inevitably give you an upset stomach; water and food help keep your stomach settled ; you’ll have a better time not having a drink you could have and feeling good than having a drink your shouldn’t have and feeling gross, so if in doubt say nah.

    You’ll be fine with one with a meal with someone you know. A second is probably fine in the circumstances but more than that is iffy.


  • So, for the actual answer to how you get private security: you hire a company like constellis (formerly blackwater, or Iraq war crime fame) or the honest to God pinkertons, who are actually still around.
    You pay them unholy amounts of money and get some burly people to follow you around, with skills proportional to how much you’re paying them. If it gets to the six figure a month range, they also get more war-crime-y because you’re going for the highly qualified special forces folks who miss the fun of combat and murder.
    If you try to pay what feels like a reasonable sum for private security you’re getting a cop working a second job who is definitely not taking a bullet for you, and probably not doing anything more to keep you alive than what’s coincidental to keeping themselves alive.

    The company I work for does business in countries where kidnapping foreign business people is a common and lucrative way to make money (it’s effectively IT consulting, we’re not evil beyond the baseline capitalist level). We hire security people for preposterous sums and basically get former special forces who drive a car, make sure the person who showed up to the meeting is actually who they should be, orders delivery food, and tells you not to do stupid things. They try to keep you from getting kidnapped in boring ways, and if you do get kidnapped they coordinate the ransom exchange. (That I know of the most that’s ever happened was someone made the phone call to verify that the car they were about to get into at the airport was the pickup, and were told that it was not, abandon your bag if they’ve already loaded it and immediately go back into the airport and wait for the guard who showed up a minute later and handled the police interaction)

    In general just try to avoid being in a position where you feel like you need to have hired a hero.




  • I appreciate the reply/description of my life. :)

    I have gotten myself some medication, which has helped a lot. I still have the impulse to jump right to the massive project, but now it’s way easier to recognize that “learn how to do it” is a step, and that a smaller project might give fulfillment, in addition to learning how to do it more effectively because you actually finish, or even start.

    I’ve also had good luck with teaching myself that sometimes it’s better to do half of task than to be overwhelmed and not do the entire thing.
    It’s not ideal to get dressed out of a laundry basket next to the dryer for a month, but all the clothes are there or in the laundry basket, so things look clean and I’m only slightly wrinkly for a few minutes.

    Biggest side effect I got from the medication was a tendency towards dry skin and pimples. I actually sleep a little better because I get in bed to read a book when I’m “supposed” to, so when I get sleepy I just… Sleep, instead of idling on the couch for hours.


  • I learned that many people assess their abilities, and then pick a project that’s reasonable for them, including learning or honing new skills.

    As a person who tends to pick a project, and then tries to find the best way to use my current skills and any new ones I can pick up to force it to happen… It just seems wild to me that you can pick a project.


  • I think the most alive you could be would then be some manner of homeless drug addict. You have no power over your life, so no notion of what any day will look like.

    This quote kinda rubs me the wrong way because it treats predictability the same as banality.
    If you want a job where you never know what the day is going to look like, work for a poorly managed company. You never know what you’re going to be doing, sometimes the project you’re working on one day is cancelled without warning and now people are mad at you for not having been working on the new priority for the past month. Sometimes you go in and you work 36 hours straight without warning because someone else messed up and your boss doesn’t give a shit who’s responsible and you’re the one who knows how to fix it, so fix it or fuck off. Better hope you don’t have a family or you’re going to have to make choices.

    Knowing what you’re going to do tomorrow is just having work of any consequence. Food service knows what they’re doing tomorrow. So does a CEO, a software developer at a competent business, or a project manager. I can think of very few jobs whose scope of work is limited to a day, and is so variable that you just don’t know what you’ll be doing. Temp? Personal assistant to an eccentric actor? (Not the manager type assistant, they need to know the schedule. The one that buys coffee, six turtles and a pair of roller skates and doesn’t actually exist).

    I could just be dead inside because I know that tomorrow is going to go a particular way that I like.


  • The biggest issue is that the birth certificate is typically done at a very local level, usually the county, and not anyone can file one. It’s often the case that a particular person at a hospital or a registered midwife needs to file the application. Parents can report a live birth outside of an institution but you need to physically go to a courthouse with the baby.
    A different group of people is responsible for social security cards.

    If one county clerk files a huge number of birth certificates and uses them to back social security card requests, it’ll be noticed.

    There’s always a way around the paper trail, usually by just making sure no one bothers to look at it, but they all involve adding more people to the conspiracy, which adds more risk.
    No one will notice that one doctor delivered 500 babies in one day if no one looks at the paperwork, but each person involved increases the likelihood of a mistake causing people to look, which almost certainly will cause those details to be noticed.

    It’s similar to how people do a huge amount of any fraud, and then once a thread of detail gets noticed the entire thing is unraveled.

    Your best bet is to minimize the number of forged documents. I would predict that a single person could most easily get a non-citizen us national passport for someone to assume an American somoan identity. Since there’s comparatively few non-citizen us nationals, a passport is the federally preferred method of identification. Since the territory is an edge case, there’s more room for slipups, and since you’re not posing as a citizen, you have an excuse not to have some records.