I'm a naturally socially awkward person, due partly to personality and partly to social anxiety disorder. I don't think I have the social intelligence/agility to pull off half of these maneuvers. Just reading about the author playing different characters with tables and imagining myself in that position made me want to throw up, I'd fuck it up so badly.
You sound a little like me. I wasn't aware people thought like that until my partner told me her thoughts took the form of a constant stream of well-formed English. My default mode of thinking isn't natural language (though I can force myself to think this way, it's laborious, as the article mentions), nor images (I struggle with visualization), but more like abstract sequences of both logical connections and intuitive feelings.
Adding a data point here for posterity, in hopes that someone researches this topic deeper. I recognise myself from the above, apart from "intuitive feelings" as I don't quite get what shi.. the person meant by that. My mother noted that from a very young age I was fascinated by books and indeed did an unreasonable amount of reading growing up. My sibling thinks with words. Visualisation of real things is a challenge for me, but I think I'm reasonably adept at solving more abstract things (e.g. mechanical linkages) in a somewhat visual-adjacent way that I call my "imagination". This extends to memories, as if you were to task me to picture a dog, I would feel much more comfortable picking a non-existing, imagined dog than any the dogs that I've actually seen or met, such as family members' pets. I do some painting and could wireframe-sketch this imagined subject for you and "fill in the blanks", but trying to remember any actual moment spent with those beasts is laborious and results in something akin to one-frame flashes that are immediately gone and can't be recalled at will. Inadequate memory formation/recall have caused me grief, but I have no trouble remembering for example number sequences.
This is part of it, but everyone to some degree has discomfort with being disliked and will do things to avoid it. At least in my experience, social anxiety is much more about the cognitive distortions that convince you others dislike you, when they may in fact be neutral or even have a positive view of you.
Just as one example, when I'm interacting with someone who I haven't reached a certain level of comfortability with, I'm highly aware of and sensitive to their reactions to me in terms of what they're saying, their tone, their micro facial expressions, etc., and I perceive any small negative reaction as a sign that they don't like me. This usually isn't true! But it ironically has the effect of inducing self-sabotaging avoidant behaviors in me, such as over-censoring of what I say and just general awkwardness around them, which makes it much more likely they will end up disliking me.
You probably shouldn't accuse others of being ungrounded in reality if you don't keep up with reality.
Regardless of what it is called, it is unconstitutional and illegal; however, that does not seem to matter to this administration. Trump is currently defying a 9-0 SCOTUS ruling that he facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the US. His administration has even admitted Garcia was deported in error but still isn't doing anything about it. Now we have ICE holding provable US citizens. Maybe with that context you can understand why some might be concerned that citizens will be "accidentally" disappeared.
The news is both literally reality, and, more substantively, an important means of accessing the more distant reality that seems to be your concern. Individual news stories often contain inaccuracies and even the accurate bits may be cherry-picked to suit an agenda, which is one reason that accessing the underlying reality requires wide reading of diverse news sources and critical engagement with other information sources. But avoiding the news does not improve your access to reality,
By your own admission, you have no reasonable basis from which to draw any general conclusion about the news, having only incidental and accidental contact with it.
> You guys think citizens are getting deported because of sensational reporting.
Literally no one has said that they think citizens are getting deported at this time.
Several people have expressed concerns that the executive failing to observe the law and obey judicial orders with regard to the treatment of non-citizens, combined with the executives overtly stated intent to deport non-citizen dissenters to the same Salvadoran prison that non-citizens have been deported to in defiance of court orders, raises an imminent near-future concern of the same kind of lawless deportation of citizens as has already taken place or noncitizens
> Have you forgotten about the justice system and the constitution?
The justice system and constitution are not magic, and they only constrain executive action if (1) the executive chooses to observe the constitution and present people to the justice system before taking action, or (2) the executive chooses to observe the Constitution and obeys orders from the justice system to correct the resulting improper state of affairs after failing #1, or (3) the Congress exercises its impeachment power to remove the executive in consequence of the failures of #1 and #2, or (4) some outside force, itself acting extraconstitutionally, responds to the failure of #1-#3 by forcibly constraining or removing the executive.
Were one paying attention to the news -- even ignoring the claims presented in the news and only using it as a source to find links to official government statements, judicial decisions, and similar non-media sources -- one might be aware that #1 and #2 is precisely what is not happening that is at the center of recent controversies in which the executive branch is embroiled, and there is no immediate sign of #3 or #4, either.
I imagine the conversation between the CEO and his reports included something about "it's no biggie, the passwords were hashed using bcrypt, that's like irreversible encryption" without contextualizing that and mentioning that plaintext auth tokens were also exposed.
I think it was downplayed even more. Supposedly the initial email by the researcher only had evidence for leaking database sizes, and I think it's likely that the CEO only got confirmation for this evidence internally and nothing more.
"This server contains over 3,8GB of data exposed including the logins for 16,500 of your users and a lot of PII and credentials, you need to secure access to the server as soon as possible."
After all that transpired after etc I believe it's possible someone downplayed the severity of this to the CEO and he took that as an opportunity to ignore everything I wrote on the emails and reply that way to me assuming I was some cybersecurity vendor working for "Proton" trying to push something for the company to buy.
For reference: JD Vance said that another DOGE staffer, who resigned after it was reported that he'd publicly come out in favor of racism, eugenics, and normalizing hate against Indian people on Twitter, should be rehired because it was just "stupid social media activity".
> For reference: JD Vance said that another DOGE staffer, who resigned after it was reported that he'd publicly come out in favor of racism, eugenics, and normalizing hate against Indian people on Twitter, should be rehired because it was just "stupid social media activity".
> What is so egregious about this that he needed to be pushed out
You are cherrypicking. There are dozens of other posts, ranging from benign to South Park edgy to outright indefensible. In any case, they were shameful and he should be taking great efforts to apologize and prove he's a changed person if he actually regrets posting them.
Compared to what is daily being said about 'white men' in particular and 'men' in general those posts seem to be mostly par for the course. If the things he says about ${identity_group} are bad then so are the same things being said by people in high places about the aforementioned so a sizeable fraction of 'progressives' should [take] great efforts to apologize and prove [they're] changed person[s]. If you don't agree I'd like to know where the difference lies.
I don't know what to tell you. It's racism, whether or not he's a white man or an Indian woman. If racism is "par for the course" then guess what, it's still racism.
> If the things he says about ${identity_group} are bad then so are the same things being said by people in high places about the aforementioned so a sizeable fraction of 'progressives'
Please, point to the spot where the progressives are being racist. Are you going to accuse Democrats of being racist against Krasnodar Krai for supporting Ukraine in their racist and illegal defense of Russian homeland? Accuse them of hating Palestinians more than Trump?
Or no, you're going to cherry pick racist Buzzfeed columnists who are (somehow) an analog for an appointed government employee with privileged access to private data.
"I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life" is incredibly dishonest and Vance should be held to account for this incredibly dishonest statement.
The phrasing is intended to create the impression that the posts were made years ago, by some angry teenager, and it's not relevant to the person they are today. It's a way of downplaying the acts, creating distance between the person today and the acts at some unspecified point in the past.
But we know these timeline details. Elez is not a "kid" now, he's 25. These posts were not made when he was 13, they were made last year when he was, I suppose, 24 going on 25.
There are two conflicting perspectives being promoted by Musk, Vance, etc which IMO are in direct logical conflict:
1) This person's actions last year (going up to December 2024! Just 2 months ago!) are the actions of an irresponsible child and we shouldn't hold them accountable for those actions because they're not responsible enough to be held accountable for them.
2) This person is responsible enough right now to be operating at the highest levels of government.
It's not a lie. "I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life" does two things: characterizes endorsements of racism and eugenics policies as "stupid social media activity", and asserts that exposure of such activity should not lead to someone losing their job. The part about not rewarding journalists who "destroy" people does not exist in a vacuum away from his downplaying of Elez's abhorrent racial views. If journalists had revealed Elez, for example, was a secret left-wing antifa supporter on Bluesky, I think we can reasonably doubt Vance's reaction would have been the same.
Edit: Now that you've brought Vance's tweet into focus, it's also interesting that he does not think Elez is currently a "bad dude" when he's expressly stated a desire to normalize hatred against an entire ethnicity
Follow-up: "How is Elez both a child who shouldn't be held responsible for his actions from as recently as 2 months ago, but also the right person to be trusted with extensive access to government systems?"
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
The doge boys are in-group, so they are protected, and the law will not be brought to bear against them. Simple as that.
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,” Trump said.
Funny, I don't see those extra qualifiers in there.
No journalist is going to ask him this because they’re afraid of retribution and a loss of access. If they do he’s going to deflect - nobody will press him on a genuinely galling statement of values.
> However any agent based system exposing an arbitrary API is suddenly a much bigger attack and risk surface area than the well trod (and still fraught) path of emulating a terminal over ssh.
I can see how this increases local (to the remote system) attack surface, but as long as the agent has the same OS privileges as the user logged in over SSH, what extra remote risk does this introduce?
Because if the Agent code is compromised, the fact that it leaves things behind is enough for an attacker to hide whatever they need along with the vs code blob. Vscode does this for the right reason, mostly it’s so the bulk of it runs on the host where you’re doing remote development or WSL or whatever. But like a lot of dev stuff these days, compromise the npm packages and bingo you can own all the machines.
Npm is already a terrible thing because the packages are managed so haphazardly, but now you’re exposed to the nonsense without even going anywhere near the mad rodeo of node. I like vscode but it’s not going anywhere near a machine I care about.
The argument is that you're running code on the remote host, and it could be compromised. The same argument can be made about any code you run on the remote.
VSCode may be seen as a larger attack vector due to its popularity; but maybe not as many won't use the SSH agent? It's also fairly common sense that you should never run it to mount on a production resource; but again, you shouldn't be able to ssh into a production machine anyway.
We usually don't hand over full ssh sessions to third party programs, so while you're right, I think people are not used to this level of trust into an app.
The article was to me a good reminder that it's a whole other level of access than just remote mounting a file system.
A user that can manage remote processes is generally going to have pretty high permissions.
For example, opening up debug ports on the running server processes, sudo privileges, or just the ability to run arbitrary code or curl in random binaries from the internet.
