I steal crumbs.

Crumbs.

Also I maintain a secret cache of documents underneath the Alaskan tundra with the help of a diesel generator, some very large goggles and a years supply of smoked frozen herring.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Check your local library for many WW2 historical accounts of the french resistance. Madam Fourcades secret war, Virginia Hill are a couple of my favorites.

    Also memoirs from FBI and CIA agents, and anything on SOE, Churchills “Special Operations Executive” division which had as its objective to defeat the Germans covertly in Nazi occupied France, which he started because he wanted more results than the old school tie boys in traditional British intelligence.

    For that matter accounts of the beginnings of the American CIA in WW2 are interesting too.

    On all these, enough time has passed that there aren’t national security concerns any more, technology changes but the principles are always the same. Interesting reading and you can learn a lot, especially how networks are penetrated and how spies were caught.


  • Sorry you got jumped on as a new user a bit.

    The karma system on reddit encourages posting and reposting stuff that everyone has seen before to get fake internet points, and maybe what you win is a “more powerful account” for the algorithm instead of everyone getting a more or less equal voice.

    You can still get people to follow you and build a tribe if you want without that, and you are also free to start any community you like, so a few mods don’t end up controlling all the online real estate and steer the conversation unfairly.

    Plus its simpler. Sometimes simple is good.


  • Purely anecdotal but I was in Costa Rica in September of 2020. I was struck by the difference and better preparedness compared to the US.

    Every store and place of business had not only signs and hand sanitizer at the entrance, nobody was in stores without masks, and I drove by a line of people over half a mile long and 3-4 people deep, of people waiting in line for hours to get vaccinated.

    The taxi driver told me there was some program to provide vaccines to CR and what he did was stay in line and hold the place for his family for awhile and then they would wait in line allowing him to work for awhile. Overall they took public safety measures much more seriously than the US, but I was in a wealthier urban area, don’t know how it was in the rural areas.













  • Interesting pattern emerging, the IT time of the admins is pretty damn priceless, (thank you admins!) but when an instance gets up to scale a lot of them can end up with a hard cost of 10 cents per user per month.

    The last stat I remember from Facebook was revenue per user per year was around 4 dollars. At 31b revenue and 2.7b monthly users, Youtubes average profit per user is about $10 per user per year. 100 million people pay for YT premium now.

    So if every user paid $1 per month, it might not pay all the costs but the admins could get paid something and the fediverse could scale. The bigger you get though, you get economies of scale from future Fediverse data centers, but also you need really good programmers because its a huge temptation for hackers and propagandists.

    I also want to say its a labor of love and a lot of work for mods too who may be non technical but the work and time they put in is important.




  • “Private equity always finds a way”-Jeff Goldblum

    Its interesting that they plan to profit off of the Fediverse but they aren’t paying for running instances themselves. At least they aren’t now.

    The only thing that is actually valuable in all this is the data generated by Fediversers themselves though, lets say 90 percent, and a nifty container around the content to make it more viewable/accessible/prettier, 10 percent.

    They want to make profit off of memberships and probably ads, off of Fediversers content, and then they can leverage and monetize their new “social network” by some astronomical valuation in the market.

    Good playbook, its been done many times now by Reddit, linkedin, Facebook, and all the rest, and maybe they will pull it off, but after more than 10 years of Social Media abuses, the Fediverse is filled with people who no longer want to be exploited in this way anymore. How about just paying for some instances, or supporting some FOSS projects already in the works?