They probably have to recite a standard company line, gritting their teeth as you both know it’s bullshit.

I don’t envy customer service reps. Most of them probably didn’t apply for the job because they love Microsoft or enjoy the prospect of fielding frustrated customers’ calls.

I had to fall, to lose it all

You’ll have to be more precise on the definition of God. There are quite a lot of them.

The existence of an abstract concept is provable by thinking of it. If there exists an idea that you call God, then a God exists. However, that proves nothing about its properties beyond its mere existence as an idea, including whether it pertains to any real thing. Likewise, all attributes you ascribe to that idea become part of the idea, but do not automatically prove anything about reality.

Thus, the question whether there is an idea called God is trivially answered by asking it at all, but has little bearing on anything at all.

What makes ideas useful is that they group properties, and what makes them real is that there exists an actual thing having all those properties.

Thus, the question whether a real thing exists depends on the properties of that thing, so let’s tackle one:

Do I believe that there can be an omnipotent entity? No. The typical argument here is “Can God create a rock so heavy, They cannot lift it anymore?” Either answer contradicts the premise of omnipotence, unless that entity can create logical contradictions, in which case all argument and reasoning is moot anyway.

In particular, do I believe that some variation of the Abrahamic God exists? No, or at least none of those I’m aware of. That doesn’t mean I’m not open to being shown otherwise.

However, the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient and all-loving God runs decidedly counter to the existence of suffering, even if we ignore (or exclude) the contradiction about omnipotence.

That sounds like a blockchain with signature verification against a previously established and acknowledged set of keys as consensus mechanism. Pretty reasonable, as far as use cases go.

However, it doesn’t solve the issue of disagreements and community splitting. If one part of the mod team decides to add another mod, but the rest doesn’t, what’s to prevent that part from splitting off and continuing their own version of the moderation chain? How is abuse of power handled? And in case of a split, how are community members informed?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s a poor idea, I’m just saying that it won’t solve the issues of community splits, and I’m not sure anything ever can.

Me, if the goats use me for parkour exercise

I can’t comment on the general trend, but this specific one seems a bit too circumstantial to be of use for a serious spying effort. You’d have to have the spyware running parallel to the apps usong passwords you want to steal in a specific way.

The risk exists, which is bad enough for stochastic reasons (eventually, someone will get lucky and manage to grab something sensitive, and since the potential damage from that is incalculable, the impact axis alone drives this into firm "you need to get that fix out asap), but probably irrelevant in terms of consistency, which would be what you’d need to actually monitor anyone.

If you manage to grab enough info to crack some financial access data, you can steal money. If you can take over some legit online account or obtain some email-password combo, you can sell it. But if you want to monitor what people are doing in otherwise private systems, you need some way to either check on demand or log their actions and periodically send them to your server.

It would be far more reliable to have injection backdoors to allow you access by virtue of forcing a credential check to come up valid than to hope for the lucky grab of credentials the user might change at an arbitrary moment in time.

That’d be a wack premise for a crazy scientist story

I googled about lemmy, found a blog post to introduce the whole concept, they linked an instance recommendation thing based on (if I understood correctly) the uptime, (de)federation and user count of the instance, and I just clicked one of the suggestions. So many posts claimed that it doesn’t make a great difference that I eventually decided to toss my overoptimisation habit and take what was suggested to me.

But I’m still learning my way around here, who knows if this will stay my forever home.

Absolute big brain move

Wolfman dies, kills some monkeys, does some rope stuff, performs eye surgery and kills himself (depending on what ending you go for).

If we divide, we’ll be conquered. That wisom is at least two thousand years old by now. Better to unite and defy.

Suppose I have a javascript file for a node server’s backend access named db.js

Suppose I write tests for those functions and name the test script file db.test.js

Suppose I tar and gzip that file (bear with me), now named db.test.js.tar.gz

Suppose I sign that file with PGP, now named db.test.js.tar.gz.pgp

Now suppose I want to hide that signed compressed tarball of a javascript tests file for my db functions, and to do so, I name it .db.test.js.tar.gz.pgp

Now I have a file that looks like it consists of nothing but extensions. I’m sure you could push it even further though, if you tried.

but but but but you’d get something good for it! You would never have missed it, but maybe you just didn’t know you wanted it? Come on, I’m sure consuming shit that will make you happy twice for two minutes each (once when clicking buy, once when getting and opening the package) will fill that hole in your soul! Spending money on stuff you don’t actually need is good!

(That was sarcasm, if it wasn’t clear enough.)

What, 2023-223 for the 223rd day of the year 2023? That… is oddly appealing for telling the actual progress of the year or grouping. No silly “does this group have 31, 30, 29 or 28 members”, particularly the “is this year a multiple of four, but not of 100, unless it’s also a multiple of 400?” bit with leap days.

You’ll have oddities still, no matter which way you slice it, because our orbit is mathematically imperfect, but it’s a start.

…and if I don’t need the year, my eyes simply skip to the dash and continue to read from there.

Together with hh:mm(:ss) for times and +hh:mm for timezones. Don’t make me deal with that 12am/pm bullshit that doesn’t make any sense, and don’t make make me look up just what the time difference is between CEST and IST. Just give me the offsets +02:00 and +05:30, and I can calculate that my local time of 06:55+03:30=10:25 in India.

Germany too

Yeah, automatic voting gets dangerously close to automatic censorship and botting.

Also, human language, context and nuance is complicated and the unknown error bar on “correctly flagged posts” scares me. It’s not entirely predictable what kind of posts people may make, and accordingly not entirely predictable what the plugin would and wouldn’t recognise.

A post chain “Madness?” / “THIS” / “IS” / “SPARTA!” may make sense and be fun in the right context, but the “THIS” comment could get botted to hell.

The familar taste of poison