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Does the recent makeover of the Oval Office count as just one?

I think he has gilded many. Always gilded, though, never actually gold

Didn’t the majority of people vote to “drain the swamp” and “bring down the cost of living”?

People had nearly a decade of experience with Donald Trump as a known political entity and decades of receipts and lawsuits prior to 2016 to speak to his amoral and corrupt nature. If they didn't know exactly what they were buying into they were idiots. He isn't exactly a master manipulator.

Also, The first time Trump was elected, the majority of voters went for Hillary Clinton. Second time, it was still 49% versus 48% for Kamala Harris. The majority of Americans have never voted for Donald Trump nor ever supported him.


My company recently really cut back on slack retention. At first I was frustrated, but we all quickly got over it and work carried on getting done at the same pace as before and nothing really got impacted like many of us imagined it might.

That bears little resemblance to the Signal concerns. The reason people are worried about losing their personal messages is not lost productivity.

It's also not even really the same situation. A more apt analogy would be, if switching work laptops sometimes meant you could no longer read any Slack history.


I'd hate this, slack is an extension of my memory and it being long lived and searchable can be a super power - you don't have to remember all the details of everything, just enough of the who, what, when to find the rest.

It's fine until you need evidence someone agreed to something months ago but all records have been deleted.

Yeah, mail is the primary source of this.

Once communication with my customers moved to teams. I've had a very hard time to find historical agreements and decisions.

I try very hard to create a robust system for ADR logging now. And not just for system architecture. But for all decisions and agreements in my projects and across changes.


Methinks the better solution here is to get better friends?

Well I don't think most people choose who they work with. Even if you like your team a lot, you might have a discussion with someone from another team or division, and that's where it's useful to have a good chat history haha.

Doesn't really work in an org with 100s of people and where emails are automatically deleted after 6 months.

I expect that some types of people (in middle management, especially) may see the lack of this as a good thing.

A certain type of person sees this as a feature, not a bug.

The Soviets planted listening devices in American embassy typewriters between October 1976 and January 1984 - by intercepting them in the mail!

Really sophisticated devices: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/


Wow, back in the 70s the bugs were only detectable by x-ray scan. Makes you wonder what kinds of things can be hidden in the ICs of today.

I love the internet. For all its drawbacks lately, deep down at its core, there are still hidden gems out there like this website. There goes my afternoon.

How can Snowdon possibly feel as the international situation changes so totally since he fled? It boggles the mind.

Probably, that he did the right thing at the right time.

No, he violated a trust given to him, he deserves to be in jail, and if he had an ounce of moral character he'd come back and face trial like a man.

Unlike the movies there aren't secret death squads out to get him, just a courtroom where he can face the consequences of his actions like an adult.

Instead, he's hiding out playing the victim in a country that's actively genociding Ukrainians to a degree beyond anything the Trump or Netanyahu administrations can be accused of.

Even if you believe the law is unjust, MLK Jr still had the balls to go to jail for what he believed.


Who actually cares if the government can't perform a show trial? He did his duty by getting the information out there

The current administration is actively engaged in corruption everyday. Snowden did the right thing and had the knowledge to know he would never get a fair trial. It's too bad he had to end up somewhere like Russia but the world is still better off with him there and alive than being assassinated like MLK Jr. If anything there should be a Gofundme to get him pardoned since all it takes is cash.


He violated the trust of whom? The government who was violating the trust of the American People?

And as for Russia, he didn’t flee there by choice; he got stranded because the U.S. government revoked his passport mid-transit, He was there for a transit and hit final destination was Ecuador ...


What you said takes 5 minutes to research, too. But the party line by idiots and currently in-the-CIA people like approved mouthpiece Bustamante say "Well, he fled to Russia"

He fled to China by choice and gave them plenty of documents about Chinese targets, some of which are in the article we are discussing.

The government wasn't violating the trust of the American people. If you ask about the single illegal domestic data collection program in the leak (phone metadata collection) and how it was used (to find associates of surveilled foreign agents working against the national security of the U.S.), you will find that most people don't care.


lololol sure

more seriously, the difference is he's not doing protest via civil disobedience like MLK Jr, he's a whistleblower

working for an organization like the NSA, the only moral thing you can do is realize your error and bail tf out


You forget the security-state apparatus has secret courts and secret laws

It may not be a fair trial. He's always stated his willingness to undergo a fair one


That's not how any of that works. Criminal trials are public record and there are no such things as secret laws.


Why are you assuming he'd get a public trial at all? In the current state of unchecked authoritarianism, he'd just as soon be disappeared to a "Homan Square".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homan_Square_facility



Would you not also say that the US government violated a trust given to them at the time? The government has such an imbalance of power compared to one person that it's only fair to hold them to a higher and much more stringent standard. Except wait no, they're often held to a much lower standard compared to the average Joe.

Why not putting NSA officers to the jail first? Can't they "face a fair trial like a men" for illegal spying program?

Quite rich. A moral character would have ignored the mass surveillance and escalated internally? This is plainly stupid and dangerously naive on many levels.

He is a hero and a true patriot and an excellent litmus test to out people like you.

>No, he violated a trust given to him

He had 2 conflicting trusts, one from the people and one from the government. He chose to honor the people over the government, which is why there's so many bots in this thread who seem very angry with him.

If you read his autobio he was raised with very conservative beliefs, the issue was unlike most conservatives he wasn't able to ignore those beliefs in the furtherance of the state.

>Instead, he's hiding out playing the victim in a country that's actively genociding Ukrainians to a degree beyond anything the Trump or Netanyahu administrations can be accused of.

He would come back if you guys let him. Its not like he has a long list of safe places to go.

>Even if you believe the law is unjust, MLK Jr still had the balls to go to jail for what he believed.

I vastly prefer my anti authoritarians out of jail living their best life with their ~300 kids somewhere in the south of australia.


I hope he's still not deluding himself into thinking he did anything positive.

Account created 40 minutes ago, are you sure you are not an NSA employee?

That's rather harsh. Exposing illegal, objectively treasonous activities by the government is not exactly not something positive, regardless of whether the regime has only gotten worse and more totalitarian and tightened its noose even more around the neck of humanity.

By objective measures, having the courage he did to do what he did was courageous, albeit possibly foolish, since his understanding of the USA did not actually match the reality of what the USA long has been, because he has been drinking the Kool-Aid too.

Ironically, the system depended on and somewhat still depends on the very kind of belief in the system that Snowden had, even if he just believed it far more and actually took it serious.


He sought revenge after not getting a desired job promotion. There was nothing noble about his intentions, just narcissistic fury with what he, in his narrow world view, saw as unfairness towards himself.

I find it amazing how many people have been taken in by the bullshit narrative he concocted about human rights and privacy. So gullible.

He helped our adversaries on an immense scale, and even went to live under the protection of one of them. Some patriot he is, gladly embracing the Russian regime.


> even went to live under the protection of one of them. Some patriot he is, gladly embracing the Russian regime.

You know that's not true? His passport was cancelled while he was mid-flight and no country would touch him, and he was essentially trapped in an airport until Russia offered asylum.

The US effectively sent him to Russia.


He went to China and leaked surveillance targets to the Chinese government. Some of these documents are in the very article we are now discussing.

The funniest thing is that he'd probably be in US prison by now had they not cancelled his passport.

account created 2 hours ago pathetic

Why isn't Russia torturing him to get all the secrets out of him?

Because real life is not a Bond movie where the first thing that happens is a British actor with a bad Russian accent starts torturing you like in Goldfinger.

Plus, as the US has found out, torture has been proven a bad way to get the truth out of people, since under duress people will admit and say anything just to make the pain stop, even if they're innocent and have no valuable information.


John Kiriakou talked about just this on JRE. Everyone should watch it; be warned, you'll be absolutely furious by the end of it

It's doubtful Snowden was in possession of his NSA data dump at the time he arrived to Moscow, the things he had memorized would have been of very limited value.

If the Russian government was in possession of his data, I'd consider it fairly surprising that they seemingly never leaked any of the materials.

While it's not strictly impossible that Snowden through the Russian Government was the "second source", given that all the leaks from the second source came after Snowden had landed in Moscow, none of the "second source" files were included within the Snowden dump a bunch of journalists have access to. There are also various more specific reasons to belive that Snowden probably would not have had access to all the things originating from the second source, and even more so many of the things originating from TSB.

Same is true of Snowden possibly being TSB, whether or not "second source" and the TSB were the one and the same. It's just not really credible.

Here's a good starting point if you're not familiar with the second source https://www.electrospaces.net/2017/09/are-shadow-brokers-ide...


Because they already had everything he could provide and the embarrassment weights far more then some tiny details they could get by torturing him.

Because he is a russian asset and already delivered all the information.

He's much more useful being the ultimate tankie online

There already did? And or little to get since he didn't memorize secrets and most--if not all--his digital copies were given to the press?

That sort of thing doesn't stay hidden these days. Especially someone like Snowden who has a hundred friends who are human rights lawyers.

UUID 7 is so much easier than the ULID in the article manipulate. Pretty much every language and database has the string manipulation and from_hex functions to extract the timestamps without any special support function. Whereas a format that is too clever is way more complicated to work with.

Isn’t there a suspicion that OpenAI buying custom chips from another Sam Altman venture is just graft? Wasn’t that one of the things that came up when the board tried to out him?


The chips are being done in-house.


It was only brought in-house after the $5,000,000,000,000 self-dealing AI chip venture failed to launch.


Nvidia?


Sam Altman attempted to raise $5Tn for an AI-chip startup


Link? I only know of Rain and they raised <<$1 billion IIRC



I think this was to build datacenters


Admittedly in a different league speed wise but also scope wise is my very fast timestamp library for Java https://github.com/williame/TimeMillis

This focuses on string <-> timestamp and a few other utilities that are super common in data processing and where the native Java date functions are infamously slow.

I wrote it for some hot paths in some pipelines but was super pleased my employer let me share it. Hope it helps others.


The OpenAI pitch for “publishing partnerships” (basically buying bias and placement) leaked last year.


People made the decision to have each child at least 9 months before the child was born. And in the subsequent years and 9 months anything could have happened, eg illness or losing a job. So even careful planners might be unlucky enough to need food banks?


Not to mention that children are a multi-decade commitment. My kids are nine and twelve. In that time I’ve been laid off twice and had a serious medical emergency. Things on that timescale are just not realistic to plan for as if there are guarantees. The less well of you are the more precarious everything is as well.

This is also all on the back of people complaining about declining birth rates!


> Not to mention that children are a multi-decade commitment. My kids are nine and twelve. In that time I’ve been laid off twice and had a serious medical emergency. Things on that timescale are just not realistic to plan for as if there are guarantees. The less well of you are the more precarious everything is as well.

This sounds like a reason not to have them though. It's like saying the probability of X is high if I do Y. I do not want X to happen, but I will still do X even if I have no obligation to do so. Your decision might make sense to you but the way your comment reads it doesn't sound like a logical argument supporting your decision


It’s hardly illogical to not know what might happen in the future and my family is fine despite any setbacks!

In some senses having children at all isn’t that logical and is a choice lots of people aren’t making more often hence declining birth rates and worry over the impact of that in a global economy requiring growth.


Not to mention that children are their own people that we hope will grow up into being fully functioning adults. Mitigating their suffering due to their parents' failings is a worthy goal. There is a lot of suffering we just have to agree to disagree about (eg many religions), but lack of food is basically an unequivocal [0] evil. And are our western societies not wealthy enough to provide basic sustenance to everyone ?

[0] being HN I know I'm running the risk of having have some contrarian edgelord arguing about parents' rights to innovate with calorie restriction and whatnot.


This can of course happen but it is obviously disingenuous to imply that this is what usually happens in response to my comment.


I don't think that's what they're implying. They're simply saying that careful planning isn't necessarily always what's needed.

Consider carefully your sentences before making deep moral judgements about people and situations you might not be familiar with. That, I think, was their implied point.


I think the point is that you can’t easily isolate these issues. Are you suggesting that someone should wade through the cases and determine who should get benefits for every child, or are you saying that you find the collateral damage to the “truly deserving” worth it?


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