urshanabi @urshanabi@schelling.pt

my exalted players are trying to use sympathetic magic to convert a molehill into a mountain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE37e1eK2mY

my general opinion of the domestic unrest lately is disappointment at the sheer incompetence of it all

people burning down random small businesses instead of government buildings, no politicians being hurt in the dc raid

sloppy. disorganized.

but also things have gotten bad and our leaders should feel real fear of the populace

and i only sense contempt coming from them

i feel like theres some bad incentives going on here, wrt media environments - something something emperors clothing

pondering my increasing extremism

ive always been partial to people with principled objections to the status quo, but im leaning more and more in the direction of bitfd

i dont think destroying the system will make things better, mind

@blueberry @willdaly
iirc historically floating windows managers were designed to mimic literal desktops

so people who didnt know how to use computers at all could use them relatively intuitively

uis have to be designed for people who dont know how to computer because thats almost everyone

hmmm

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aR9gCYRGjd7KBWpTe/the-dangers-of-digital-vaccines-1

my interaction with farms has largely been in driving past them - ive not dealt with agriculture firsthand outside of gardening and the neighbors pet chickens

but ive seen a lot more cows spending their time in pastures than ive seen anything else

this updates me significantly towards eating cow being generally fine, especially given my problem with meat eating being about the factory conditions rather than meat itself

im fine with killing animals, which also blunts the original argument i guess

a counterargument: lots of farm animals are fed field-grown grains, harvested the same way as everything else

but not all! cows in particular are more likely to eat wild scrub in areas like the american west, where there isnt enough water to support fields

a newish strong anti-veg*n argument that ive heard passed around: harvesting grains/vegetables from fields hurts a lot of small rodents and other wildlife, thus making eating from fields less ethical than eating from barns

this is worth thinking about if youre veg*n

⁣

how i feel rn

okay making a key pair is pretty easy looks like

successfully signed a test file, encrypted, decrypted, imported a key, were good to go

my public key is at http://ianmhines.com/public-key if any of you crypt nerds want it

oh neat gnupg is already on my computer

and it looks like it can make keys for me

okay time to read some docs

hmm there are these things called public key fingerprints which are hashes of a public key

these can supposedly be used to identify people?

but im not sure why these are any better than anything else, and i dont see any defense against ye olde ctrl+c ctrl+v

okay so you have a function f(m,k)->e, where m is the message, k is the key, and e is the encrypted message

they are all integers because computer

furthermore, the public key and private keys are inverses for f: f(a,b)=1, f(f(m,a),b)=m, f(f(m,b),a)=m

right?

...from me, and can only be read by you

hmm hmm HMM

wait a minute, is asymmetrical encryption actually symmetrical, just in a bit more of a roundabout way? like, either key can encrypt, but the other one is needed to decrypt

ah, so this lets me send a message, encrypted with both my private and your public, that is for sure...

oh so it looks like pgp signatures are just the message but encrypted

and theyre useful when sending things in unsecured ways, to verify the message hasnt been changed and is really from me