A decade ago I was contracting for MSFT as a database admin / data analyst.

A far older and more experienced contractor told me that he had been part of a team in Saudi Arabia, in 1990, that intercepted computer and electronic equipment bound for Iraq’s air defense command and control systems, flashing the firmware with exploits and backdoors as fast as they could before they were sent to Iraq.

Supply chain interception has been a thing for a while.

EDIT: This is a total off topic aside, but hearing about and seeing shit like that at the various tech jobs I’ve worked is why I laugh when people say ‘oh but alexa only activates on keywords’ or ‘no its totally impossible for phones to listen to your convos and then give that data to advertisement systems’.

Call me paranoid, I don’t care: If you don’t have a hardware disconnect for your microphone and personally have the source code to every bit of software, at every level, then we just have to take the giant tech corpos at their word.

I was born and raised in the PNW and first saw the LaRouchies at the UW, with a large display of Obama with a Hitler mustache… though I did not spit at them lol.

Other posters have already come up with Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche…

No American Presidential candidate before Trump has been so widely popular whilst also having a cult following of people who basically believe in an entirely different reality whilst also being so brash and brazen about it.

There have been demagogues before, with cultish followings, but they’ve not been anywhere near as popular as Trump.

To attempt to add a few:

Technically, Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, attempted to run for President back when Mormons were basically what we would now call a domestic terrorist group, and when most non Mormons viewed them as a dangerous cult.

He was assassinated by a mob, who stormed the jail he was in whilst awaiting trial for treason and other charges, before the election took place.

Also, you might be able to consider the fairly brief existence of the Anti-Masonic party at least somewhat akin to the living in a totally different reality attribute of MAGA people.

Basically, following the inciting incident of the Morgan Affair, where a William Morgan was apparently planning to publish a book outlining the evils of a Freemason conspiracy to control government and business in the US, but he was jailed, a bit of a circus trial ensued, and then he disappeared.

The Anti Masonic party was the US’s first third-party and basically it was built off of what we’d now call conspiracy theories stemming from the Morgan Affair, and called for Masons to renounce their fraternity or to be uprooted from positions of prominence.

Much like the modern MAGA movement, it was full of highly religious conspiracy theorists, but it didn’t really coalesce into also being a cult of personality around any of their more prominent members the way such reverence exists for Trump.

I have no inclination or standing to doubt you.

Hrm, Im on mobile, shittiest phone in the world, but maybe you can read these images. I can’t copy paste the latex formulas so… lemme see if i can throw this all in a spoiler so it doesnt take up half this thread:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927650524001130?via%3Dihub

Whole thing is still loading for me.

Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.

Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.

As far as actual tech competency goes?

Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.

So, this has yet to be peer reviewed, and I am far from a theoretical physicist … I certainly can’t say its correct or incorrect.

It does seem … too convenient. As in, how could it possibly have taken so many physicists so long to not just try this decades ago?

Basically, they throw the Planck Length and Planck energy (from Quantum Physics) into the Einstein Field Equation (from General Relativity) …

… and are then able to mathematically derive basically the rest of the laws of physics, which seem to be quite close to or totally in line with the Standard Model (of Quantum Physics).

Unfortunately I do not see any direct comparisons if their predicted values for MeV’s of fundamental particles with experimental data…

Anyway, the paper notes 2 interesting, direct implications:

1. Dark Matter is not real, there’s no need for it in this model. Galaxy rotation speeds work out to what we see without need for additional, unseen, mass.

2. Either A, our universe is mirrored by and entangled with an antiuniverse of antiparticles which all travel backward through time (antitime?), or B, our universe is part of an evolution of … prior(?) universe(s?) which generate black holes, which do not form singularities but instead create entangled white holes as other universes, expanding spacetimes.

Bonus conclusion:

The Fine Structure Constant may not actually be constant.

Not sure about his rejected screenplays but uh well he has definitely written a book or two with comically offensive depictions of black americans, and well now he got his dream come true in the most insane way possible and produces movies that are astoundingly tasteless like Lady Ballers.

In terms of containerized solutions for apps/programs?

Better than the alternatives.

In general?

I feel like they’re exes for Linux, and would greatly prefer to not have multiple different installations of the same or slightly different versions of dependencies wasting space.

The ligaments animating my meat digits are often quite sore.

Shockingly similar to Ben Shapiro, who seems to have wanted to be a concert violinist and later screenwriter, but had his screenplays rejected and found more luck telling the world that basically all Arabs and Muslims are savages and deserve to be collateral damaged.

At this point I wonder if Rush Limbaugh secretly wanted to be a painter but was rejected from art school.

Yes, whether or not you are immersed in still, motionless water, being showered by a … shower, or rainfall, or hose, being swept along by a river or undertow, or covered in snow…

The primary thing that triggers a human response to sweat is just your internal body temperature.

It doesn’t matter how or what is transmitting heat to you, so long as your body is generally above a certain temperature threshold, you will sweat. Go below a certain general threshold and you will begin to shiver.

Exactly what those temperature thresholds are vary from person to person, based on your genetics, the climate you are used to living in, what kind of fitness level you have, whether or not you are currently sick and fighting off an infection… etc.

Generally speaking, I am seeing that humans begin to sweat when their immediate surroundings are 32C or about 90F, but again, different kinds of people used to different environments will have somewhat different thresholds.

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1966.21.3.967

So, perhaps thats a rough approximation of how hot the water of shower or bathtub would have to be for a roughly average person to begin sweating while bathing.

Because we are imperfect animals with imperfect survival mechanisms, and sometimes water is actually hot enough to heat your body above what it considers to be its threshold for thermostatic equillibrium.

Problem: Body Temp Too Hot.

Solution: Emit Salt Water Tears from basically all of your skin so that the heat can transfer into Salty Tears and then evaporate. Works very well in low humidity situations.

But also problem: Humidity and temperature in ambient environment is so high that evaporation either does not work at all or is ineffective at dissipating internal body temp to the outside environment.

Same Solution: Keep sweating even though it doesn’t work, enjoy heat exhaustion/stroke.

This is the whole problem of a ‘wet bulb’ temperature causing mass heat exhaustion, stroke or death: If the humidity and temperature are high enough, long enough, its literally impossible for a human body to naturally cool down.

I spent quite a while paying for therapy to overcome depression.

Problem was that my depression was basically just caused by poverty: Too poor to afford healthy food, a car, a living situation that didn’t include unstable abusive narcissists causing me stress, lack of sleep, constantly guilt tripping me for things I had no control over, shaming me for enjoying anything they didn’t approve of, telling me I have mental issues.

So … what I need is money, a fresh start, a new living sitch… and I am paying a bunch of money for my therapist to also become depressed at my situation and just give me the same CBT exercises I already know.

Why did I pay for all those sessions?

Oh right, my roommates were gaslighting me.

I am currently extremely not depressed now that I am finally faaaaar away from them.

And then what they found was that to be more effective was to mix up the suggestions for late term pregnancy / early childhood products with basically random nonsense…

… because if its too obvious that they are highly statistically confident that they know things about you that they shouldn’t, people get weirded out and are less likely to buy something so specifically targeted at them.

They know an insane amount, and they do not want you to know that they know that much.

In case people forgot:

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/active-listening-marketers-smartphones-ad-targeting-cox-media-group-1235841007/

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

They (basically any large online retailer or advertiser) are, in fact, listening to everything you say near your phone, near your alexa, your echo, your smart device.

Linking heard words and phrases with your known shopping activity + a gigantic dataset + statistical analysis = they can predict all kinds of things about you, with shockingly high accuracy, and thus aim products at you.

You know how archaeologists and detectives can make a decent profile of a person or group’s daily lifestyle by analyzing your garbage?

Welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia version of that.

Please, please, sue the World Bank Mr. Musk. I am so sure that will go well, and totally won’t result in anything bad for all of your massively debt financed businesses.

And if not that, then the inverse applies: People who end up the wealthiest and most powerful do so by being the best at exploiting other people and systems.

There’s a reason there are more and more sociopaths and narcissists the higher you get in a corporate structure, and its because such people truly do not care about the harm they cause, unless they get caught.

I’m so sorry! He/She’s (never done that before)/(usually so much better behaved)!

Said by idiot dog owners who either let their dogs run off leash, or don’t pay enough attention when they are leashed, which then attack people or other dogs.

If you don’t have enough time or care to raise your dog properly such that it obeys basic commands and is familiarized with the world beyond your apartment/yard, you should be exercising far, faaar more caution and restraint.

Personally I don’t think such people should even be allowed to own dogs if they can’t train them properly.

So many people just take their dogs to a dog park and let em loose!

Make it a Starship exploding with dogecoins flying out of it.