It's not about mustache twirling villains though is it. There are also a large number of people there who sit at desks and handle the logistics of moving people who are entitled either to be treated as PoWs or to a fair trial, into countries where they can be tortured while preserving a facade of it not being done by the agency itself.
Just have the courage of your convictions and extend this logic of culpability to everybody who works for the United States Government. Otherwise, it just sounds like you don't understand that a huge fraction of the work of intelligence is preventing wars.
I don't think the CIA is broadly a force for good. I think that the presumption that most people working there are evil is unfounded, though. It's a huge organization with a big portfolio, most of which isn't telegenic or activating.
That’s true of every criminal org. Enforcers are usually a small percentage of the population, because they are fundamentally businesses. Violence is "expensive" in terms of heat from law enforcement, lost revenue, lower internal stability, etc.
You don’t need to defend it with weak arguments. If you feel like you do, that is a bigger issue, maybe talk to your local therapist or priest.
It's very hard to understand what you're arguing though.
You agree the CIA is not "broadly a force for good" (which I consider a big understatement). You also don't seem to disagree it's an organization whose activities involve, among others, torture, assassinations, extraordinary renditions, psyops, etc. Yes, sometimes to "prevent wars", other times to incite wars or to topple governments they don't like, or to help crush down rebellions they don't like, or to help rebellions they do like.
So why this fixation on pointing out that the majority of CIA analysts are pencil pushers and not directly involved in unsavory activities? They still enable them. And they willingly work for this organization, why make excuses for them just because some of them are nerds who wear a suit and don't personally torture anybody, and instead translate Farsi or Chinese?
As a reminder, this is the comment to which you're reacting:
> The guy trying to work for the psychological torture club got psychologically tortured a little? My heart bleeds for him
I mean, the comment is right. This guy in TFA did willingly belong to a psychological torture group, even if he's not directly involved in this particular activity. It's ok for us to react at the irony of the situation, that he feels tortured by the polygraph, given the organization he belongs to. They didn't even physically touch him, yet he felt "abused".
I'm sure you understand the slippery slope of comparing the CIA to all of the US government is just not right.
I believe it was the subject of the test who could make the polygraph reading show whatever they wanted, even though it was being administered by an experienced operator.
I think the point is that, since polygraph readings are pseudoscience, it's always the interrogator who picks what they "mean". If this is true, a smart test subject cannot mislead them, since there's nothing to mislead, as the polygraph is just a pressure technique and it means whatever the interrogator needs it to mean.
One of the creepiest aspects of this is that the 'thirsty content' is mainly mainly AI-generated pictures by spammers who know what they are doing, but also includes 'correlated' posts by normal users.
Eg you have a 15-year-old daughter and post a picture of her smiling in school uniform on Instagram because it's her birthday or something. The algorithm takes that post and shows it to randomly selected men who often interact with pictures of attractive female teenagers, even though none of your other posts get shared like this outside of your connections.
> The algorithm takes that post and shows it to randomly selected men who often interact with pictures of attractive female teenagers, even though none of your other posts get shared like this outside of your connections.
What evidence suggests this?
I don't use any Meta services and I absolutely hate them and consider them evil. I know they do awful, terrible things and if someone has evidence of this I will believe it given Meta's track record. But this is far enough outside my current understanding of the awful things that they do, or people claim they do, that it needs a source.
Meta is beyond evil, like waaaaay beyond evil. In a normal society (that ship has said for us a while ago) the company would be shut down and everyone running it at the top level would be in prison for life
I believe it was somewhat like that at large cigarette companies in the heyday of smoking.
An ashtray on every desk and throughout meeting rooms. Free packs of cigarettes you could grab anywhere in the building + a certain number of packs given to you weekly, with your preferred brand recorded. Some amount of social compulsion to smoke at work and during work related social events.
I hear it still largely is that way, though apparently they do try to avoid smoking in the presence of their pregnant coworkers these days. Progress! :-)
SQLite is tested against failure to allocate at every step of its operation: running out of memory never causes it to fail in a serious way, eg data loss. It's far more robust than almost every other library.
assuming your malloc function returns NULL when out of memory. Linux systems don't. They return fake addresses that kill your process when you use them.
Lucky that SQLite is also robust against random process death.
That's not how Linux memory management works, there are no poison values. Allocations are deferred until referenced (by default) and when a deferred allocation fails that's when you get a signal. The system isn't giving you a "fake address" via mmap.
My interpretation of the GP comment is that you are saying the same thing. Linux will return a pointer that is valid for your address space mappings, but might not be safe to actually use, because of VM overcommit. Unixes in general have no way to tell the process how much heap can be safely allocated.
Unfortunately it is not so easy. If rigorous tests at every step were able to guarantee that your program can't be exploited, we wouldn't need languages like Rust at all. But once you have a program in an unsafe language that is sufficiently complex, you will have memory corruption bugs. And once you have memory corruption bugs, you eventually will have code execution exploits. You might have to chain them more than in the good old days, but they will be there. SQLite even had single memory write bugs that allowed code execution which lay in the code for 20 years without anyone spotting them. Who knows how many hackers and three letter agencies had tapped into that by the time it was finally found by benevolent security researchers.
Then they'll sell at a profit, but the shipping cost will be inflated to offset that profit and then some. If this is identified and corrected in the law, then the sale will be at an actual profit, but there will be a corresponding price hike in goods purchased in the future through the same partner company. Or, a politician will be bought and it will be made it illegal to restrict shipping goods for destruction, citing damage to rising economies etc, and now it's 2 countries' laws creating a situation which will drag 20yrs in courts, while the goods keep getting destroyed. Or, the goods will be sold already in the first country to a separate entity, shipped through a 3rd country, and tracking will be lost due to unfortunate bugs, nobody's fault, really sorry.
There. 4 scenarios. I could make more.
They need more Italians helping draft these laws, we have a... cultural/genetic knack for figuring ways around regulations :) and I don't even think I'm particularly good at this. But maybe LLMs will make our devious disposition finally obsolete.
The law is naive, but well intended. Maybe with 20-30 patches it will achieve enough of its purpose.
I mean if the capacity has outpaced people's ability to use it, to me that's a good sign that a lot of the future improvements will be making it easier to use.
Took me ages to realise why I couldn't kill the enemy in blue uniform behind the weird portal.
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