This has nothing to do with protecting kids...This is the classic "OH WONT SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!" meme that governments fall back on to terrorize and coerce the herd. There's an obvious push by neo-liberals to implement a digital application (ID) that they can use to "authorize". What the UK and Australia and the US homeland security really want is the ability to see a troublemaker and to toggle a switch on their digital certificate\token to dissociate them from the internet. No doubt they've got legions of Keycloak systems stood up and ready.
Readit Newspookha commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau
pookha commented on 30 years ago today "Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript" web.archive.org/web/20070... · Posted by u/donohoe
That was an insane time. The pace was unreal. I remember Netscape 2.0 had at least 6-7 beta releases prior to the full release. And each one just dropped something massive and fundamental to the Internet - JavaScript (then called LiveScript IIRC) being one of those things. Just casually dropping what would dominate the entire industry in a browser beta.
The only other period I have experienced that comes close is what is happening now. What an incredible time to build.
LOL. And Netscape 1.1 just casually birthed SSL (2.0) for the world and future generations.
Digital ID is a misnomer, it should be called "Digital Social Application". These are NOT ID"s. They're government dreamcasted app's for managing the lives of civilians.
Earlier than that, Facebook became ascendent because of quality. It was better than MySpace, the only real competitor at the time. The issue here is Facebook is not primarily a software product. It's a community, and the community was better than MySpace because it was restricted to pre-existing networks rather than taking any comer. I don't think Mark did that on purpose as a calculated decision. He just got lucky. When they eventually opened up and became just as shitty as MySpace had been, they were big enough to simply acquire better products that might have been competitors, and network effects locked them in for probably decades until their users die off and don't get replaced by younger people who never used Facebook.
I don't really see it as an example of what you're saying so much as an example of success as a product having to do with far more than explicit product features. You can see a similar dynamic in other natural monopoly markets. The NBA didn't necessarily do anything particularly right product wise, for instance. They just got the best players because basketball was historically more popular in the US than other countries, and the ABA made some stupid decisions that let the NBA win out in the US.
Hell, the US itself didn't do a whole lot "right" aside from not being in Europe when Europe decided to destroy itself, being better-positioned than other potential competitors like Canada, Mexico, and Australia simply because North America is best positioned to trade with both Europe and Asia and the US is more temperate than Canada or Mexico. But we sure like to tell ourselves stories about everything we did right.
W. Edwards Deming was partially responsible for Japanese manufacturing QA and was a huge player in WWII manufacturing. He was one of the reasons the United States went from annually manufacturing 3k planes to over 300k+ planes by the end of the war, which is pretty crazy to think about. The US did plenty right in WWII but it gets over looked by historians and (I guess) universities.
pookha commented on That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus cybersect.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/sixhobbits
Once a Chinese grad student explained to me a difference he noted between Chinese and American citizens. He said in China no really reads or watches 24/7 major news outlets in China. They are fully aware that all of it is propaganda and just go about their life. He said Americans seem to get really emotional over content in the press and seem to really struggle with the idea of propaganda / journalism in the news.
I tend to agree with student, NYT and major news outlets are clearly used for propaganda and if you sit back and look at it from perhaps another angle it makes sense , why wouldn’t a world super power with a massive government apparatus use media to influence and control citizen behavior?
So yes the anonymous experts, the anonymous intelligence experts, the experts on CNN panels .. etc etc. It’s the government pushing a narrative for a purpose. My two cents live your life and spend your precious emotional energy for the people you care about around you. Do things in your local community and help when and where you can.
What your Chinese friend isn't saying is that all those Substack writers in the US would be disappeared into Chinese gulag's. The US has a strong freedom of speech clause baked into its core governance system...When I was fifteen I'd be subscribed to five different punk zines and would be creating mix-tapes from 10 different sources (and much of it wildly offensive and political).
pookha commented on Why English doesn't use accents deadlanguagesociety.com/p... · Posted by u/sandbach
Read and read are the same exact fucking letters and are pronounced differently. You really don't need to go very far to find many examples.
English is fucked up. The only way to learn how to speak it properly is by memorization.
Other languages like Spanish or Korean keep a near-perfect one to one correspondence between written form and expected pronunciation.
As someone that enjoys reading I can't think of a more descriptive language than the English language...It's easily one of the most powerful languages on earth and has twice (!) the number of words in its vocabulary compared to something like French, which is heavily centralized by some managerial class. You just have to appreciate the language for what its strengths are (unbounded capability to communicate using just words) vs what you as a novice need to do to master it. Which, to be frank, is easier than mastering something like the Korean language that has all this drama and ceremony around politeness and speech levels.
Why are they not fungible for you? What difference is there when a drunk t-bones you two thousand times versus an iceberg t-boning fifteen hundred people one time? Also what the hell do you mean "supposed to die in a war", who decides that?
But I see the line about "multimillion dollar commercial equipment". The shareholder value must be protected after all. Conversely, a wrecked car is a potential new sale.
I can tell you haven't been a software developer or engineer long if the woes of the Titanic aren't resonating with you at some level. They built out this lux tricked out master facade to make the most high-end ocean liner in the world but built it with rivets that were high in slag (cheap). They took shortcuts that got exposed on the product launch which sent over a thousand people to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. As a dev I look at this as the worst, most historically atrocious user experience in the history of human civilization and it continues to live on in the memories of everyone in 2025. And RIP to those that gave up their seats on those shifty lifeboats so that other peoples kids could survive this debacle.
pookha commented on Working on databases from prison turso.tech/blog/working-o... · Posted by u/dvektor
While tragic, those people (or at least the vast majority) weren't forced to use drugs. They made that decision and faced the consequences. Shifting the blame for their poor decisions onto the drug dealer is unwarranted imo.
The Russians tried using a carfentanil aerosol to sedate hostages and it killed over 120 people. It's 100x more potent than fentanyl and 10,000 times more potent than morphine. He put the lives of god knows how many people at risk and could have easily cross contaminated the weed we also know he was dealing (probably to kids). And peer-pressure is an immense force, even with adults (https://news.utdallas.edu/health-medicine/peer-pressure-adul...). If he had the humility and self-reflection to post that his actions were ruthless and killed people than I'd be feel better about his mindset, but his insistence on being classified as a (non-violent) drug offender is clearly an attempt on his part to manipulate.
pookha commented on Working on databases from prison turso.tech/blog/working-o... · Posted by u/dvektor
In Northern Europe you get less than that for murder.
Unlikely...He's an incredibly callous individual that was cutting drugs with a substance orders of magnitude more dangerous than fentanyl so he could drive an Audi and live the high life. Given that they tied several deaths back to his operation, and that it was a multi-state joint effort, I doubt he'd get a slap on the wrist by a European judges.
pookha commented on Working on databases from prison turso.tech/blog/working-o... · Posted by u/dvektor
In his earlier blog post that this one links, he says:
> I've spent just under 10 years of my life in Prison (all for non-violent drug crimes.)
Him claiming he's in prison for non-violent crimes (like he's your local herb dealer) takes gumption...Authorities linked his Carfentanil escapades to several deaths.