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I'll post here the stuff that appears in my head if it's not worth an article or if I can't be bothered / can't come up with a way to fit it into an existing one at that moment. Many of those ideas came and went and I never put them anywhere (or they died with my disappearance from Mastodon), so I guess I'll just dump them here.

Is conformity the source of all human problems?

150 years ago, people thought the Earth is the center of the solar system. It was written everywhere, and believed by everyone. Galileo then invented his telescope, started looking at the sky, and realized it just isn't so. When he shared his findings, he was mocked and derided and finally thrown in jail. Yet, no one wanted to look at his telescope and confirm or disconfirm the findings. The popular belief was just too entrenched, too important to keep.

This is the same phenomenon that happens today with people that are anti-vaccine, anti-genetic modification, anti-global warming scaremongering, anti-anything that's popular and accepted. But it doesn't end in the academia - the regular person does this too. It takes only the change of someone's birth place by a few thousand kilometers - say from the USA or a Muslim country - to an European or Asian one to make them switch from believing circumcision is fine and necessary to pointless and harmful.

Almost everyone today accepts and submits to compulsory schooling, widespread advertisements, hospital births, junk foods, and many many other suboptimal (IMO) things, just because they're the defaults. Hey, people will EVEN DIE! (https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=vjP22DpYYh8 - 8 minute vid, very enlightening, watch it now!) if that's what everyone else is doing. Does that mean that a malicious actor only needs to control what (people believe) the accepted defaults are? And then they destroy the world easily. Maybe it's even worse if it's not a malicious actor but an accident and then the repetition of the accident by inertia.

How does a non-conforming person happen? Is it possible to create an environment in which they are more likely to happen? Is it enough that they exist, or do they need a way to actually affect the world around them? After all, if they are all derided and even jailed, what good does their existence alone provide?

Is it possible to go too much the other way and start believing in total nonsense or dismissing reality? Is there a happy medium? Is this even a thing to worry about?

Michelle Obama is actually a male. Two most important pieces of evidence are his male parts being visible through his dresses in pictures, videos, etc. And the second, maybe even more telling, is when Obama called Michelle "Michael": https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=sLiXFbht7s0.

Have you ever called someone by the opposite sex's version of their name? I haven't, nor have I heard anyone else do so, either. In Polish language, the difference between a male and female name is often just an additional "a" at the end; e.g Kamil for male and Kamila for female. And yet, no one ever makes this mistake. Clearly, Michelle and Michael are pronounced completely different. So it's even less likely to swap them by mistake. I'd say it's impossible, unless the brain somehow believes it to be true. Which is what's happening, and Barack has to keep reminding himself to use the name Michelle - but the brain still has the information that it's really Michael. Barack's willpower went to sleep for a split second, and boom, we have our smoking gun evidence.

If those don't convince you for some reason, Michelle being 180cm (or 5'11) is very rare for a woman, but quite common for a man. According to this calculator https://tall.life/height-percentile-calculator-age-country/, there's just about a one in 200 chance an USA woman would be that height. There's also the male looking face, male shoulders, male hands, early life photos where Michelle just looks like a boy, etc. It's open and shut. Michelle is a man!

I'm not breaking any ground here, this is quite known in conspiracy theory circles. But, it shows the scale of lies we're being fed. All the big media companies are in on this. And it shows you can go into politics as a complete fraud. This situation should make people ask themselves what else that they've believed in for their entire lives, is actually lies. Sadly, some people will dismiss this because it's just so insane: https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=oRjTJYfRkm8

If you look at the comments, though, most people seem to realize the truth. Though it might just be selection bias (meaning, the people who watch those videos are the same ones that already realize what's going on), but I'm pleasantly surprised still. I suspected a lot more hate than there was. Yet, the mainstream media still keeps the circus going, and probably manages to convince the majority of people (those that don't go searching the internet for a second opinion) that Michelle is a woman.

Where do we go from here? How about disbanding the fraudulent mainstream media. I mean, there are all those websites "debunking the baseless conspiracy theory" that are quite useless. They all know the truth and are just covering it. Recover the billions of dollars that go into them, and funnel those into something useful, like helping the homeless, old, sick, disabled...

My quick low energy thoughts:

diggy

Is conformity the source of all human problems?

Yes and no. Herd mentality is good and bad, without it it is hard for big works or communities to form, but it also leads to grand acts that are dangerous and stupid. More like it's another aspect of human existence that exists to manipulated by all that can.

diggy

Michelle Obama is actually a male.

I mean, anything is possible and all, but I don't really agree with it. I think the evidence is barely circumstantial and that a word-slip of someone (if that's what it is, I don't have patience to watch these types of videos and find them cliche very hard to take seriously), isn't really evidence at all. I've been called by totally different names by people by mistake (also consider the amount of stress a president and public speaker is under), let alone something as similar as Michael and Michelle. Also a shadow, optical illusion, or unfortunate clothing error is not necessarily a male body part. There's plenty of women that look 'manly' (isn't there a thing about how it's harder to draw feminine characters versus masculine ones?). 1 in 200 is still a lot when you have billions of people (and that would be, what, a million+ tall women?).

The other thing about theories like this is is someone can just say it's true and a lot of people will go with it, because, how would you disprove it? Have the person in question strip naked? Also mentioning it would give it lime light/popularity. And that's not to mention the political motivation behind. It's a lot nicer (and easier) to believe <favored opposite side person/then-current/former president/power player> is <something deceitful and/or bad depending on your disposition (a lot of conservative voters are anti-gay as opposed to liberal ones)>. When you are successful, people will make up shit about you, this happens even in small-scale environments.

Nutritional advertising annoys me.

Just saw a package of "hemp protein" which claims in big font it's "a source of manganese and magnesium". The package has 45g of the product, but the nutrient listings are per 100g. This requires the person to calculate to know how much the package actually has. But it gets worse. The "recommended serving" is 3g per day. If you ingested that much, then you'd get only about the 8% of needed magnesium per day, and a little over 20% of the manganese. I don't know in which world something that provides only 8% of a required nutrient per serving is "a source" of it. Even if you ate the entire package, you'd only just hit the requirements. And no one's going to eat the entire package.

This issue is widespread, and this isn't even the worst example. The listings should be per serving (as in, what someone's likely going to eat). And the big font labels should be disallowed unless the product has, say, 30+% of a nutrient per serving. I can imagine some old person buying this product and thinking they became a magnesium champion because they eat a teaspoon of it per day.

By the way, this also applies to many many nutrition websites, where random products get claimed to be some kind of superfoods based on amounts impossible to eat.

"I'm not a lawyer, get a lawyer's opinion, but..."

"I'm not a doctor, this treatment is unapproved by the government, but..."

"The vaccines are safe and effective, but... here's evidence they're not"

"We have no evidence 'X sports player' is doping, but... and here they show the evidence"

Stop these pointless games, just say what you want. Disclaimers are disrespectful to one's audience. They always feel fake and scripted.

A happening, in MY Poland? It's more likely than you might think!

https://social.hackerspace.pl/@q3k/111528162462505087

https://zaufanatrzeciastrona.pl/post/o-trzech-takich-co-zhakowali-prawdziwy-pociag-a-nawet-30-pociagow/ (Polish)

https://badcyber.com/dieselgate-but-for-trains-some-heavyweight-hardware-hacking/ (English)

tl;dr - Polish train manufacturing company put DRM in Polish trains so they would stop working if serviced by any third party (more specifically, if they spent more than a week within any known alternative maintenance locations, defined by hardcoded GPS rectangles). Some also included DRM to cause them to report fake errors and refuse to start after 1 million km. Others had pre-planned fake errors scheduled for certain dates. The status of the internal lockdown flags was transmitted to the manufacturer via an onboard GSM modem, with evidence suggesting it could also be modified via the same. No less than 25 trains were sitting, bricked, in various maintenance locations at the time the hackers hired by one of the maintenance companies to investigate discovered this. After the hackers managed to reset the flags on one train, additional updates were pushed to try to disable an undocumented reset sequence that they didn't use to begin with. They eventually managed to develop a way to unbrick all the trains involved.

There's supposed to be a developing legal situation surrounding it, but I don't speak or read Polish, and I figured you might like this as an example in any of a number of articles. I wonder how much of Poland's transportation infrastructure is subsidized, directly or indirectly, by taxes.

It's getting so bad that I'm wishing we could go back to the days when we merely faced industrial society and its consequences, not computerized society and its consequences too...

Hey, just saying I saw your post. Very interesting story, I didn't hear about it earlier. I'll cover it sometime and probably follow the future of it. But for now, I was wondering about something else. It's really been annoying me recently how I have to use the singular "they" in the english language, if the gender of the subject is unknown. Because it is easily confused with the plural "they". You probably know how the polish language (and german, and others) has gendered nouns. So, in polish language, if I'm refering to "a person" or "a sports star" (undefined gender) I'd still use the "she" pronoun, as that's the gender of those words. I was wondering if I could lift that idea to use in the english language. Using the same word for singular and plural just rubs me the wrong way. So, I'd edit my sentences like this:

"As we can see, if the libertarian wants to claim that the government is a thief, they have to apply that label to any other property owner, as well."

Becomes

"As we can see, if the libertarian wants to claim that the government is a thief, HE has to apply that label to any other property owner, as well."

Because "thief" has the male gender in polish. On the other hand, this sentence:

"Now look at how he replied to a person that didn't like their preferred setting getting changed"

would become:

" Now look at how he replied to a person that didn't like her preferred setting getting changed"

As "person" has the female gender in polish. I could just use "he" regardless, but it's kind of sexist. But getting rid of the singular "they" seems like a great idea to me. Though it might confuse the Americans when they see different words having different pronouns used. Snap me out of it before I go and execute it. lol.

I don't have a good answer to the question of singular third person pronouns; pronouns in general have quite a bit of inherent ambiguity. For example, consider the sentence "if the student wants a parent to come along on the field trip, they must sign a form". Strictly syntactically, "they" could mean any of "the student", "a parent", or "both the student and a parent"; only semantic analysis can provide insight into what the pronoun actually refers to.

In some cases you can get around this by saying "the latter" or "the former", e.g. "if the student wants a parent to come along on the field trip, the latter must sign a form".

In your first example, it would also work to just s/the libertarian/libertarians/ and use plural they.

What you propose seems fine, as long as you limit it to nouns that refer to people - Americans would understandably be confused if a German wrote "regarding the pants, she fits well". Some might find it distracting, but it's usually easy enough to adjust if one is reading in good faith (not stopping for 5 minutes to ponder why the hypothetical thief must be male).

It would also work fine to use singular they, or to just shrug and make all such pronoun references masculine. As long as the style is consistent.

diggy

Disclaimers are disrespectful to one's audience.

Consider if someone slandered you with salacious bullshit, claiming it was verified fact and there was no possibility it could be false. Also, it's so you don't get sued for slander

unmush

polish trains have DRM

Sounds just like Apple and John Deere. Cool they actually hacked it though, of course a government gets pissed when it's their shit (fuck everyone else though).

Speaking of trains, trains.com's RSS feed still doesn't work!

deepermush

muh pronouns (liguistic edition)

The only time I've heard gendered usage of undefined things, is like, a ship (boat), or maybe a whale. "She's a good ship!" To use "she" or "he" sounds like there is all of the sudden a character to which you are referring in the 3rd person. The immediate question is "who the fuck is she?", "where did this dude come from?". WHO THE FUCK IS "HE" DAMNIT!?!?!?!?

A thief can be a female, a male, or a xir. A "thief" does not have a gender, whatever languages instilled this are retarded and this can be proven by their significantly lower usage count as compared to the chad English. Maybe instead, start using Ithkuil words or teach us Lojban. That would be cool.

Any, yes, don't do it, because it's distracting as fuck. Unless you are going to make a representative character to go along with the report, or you just want to confound readers for no reason. Perhaps digdeeper follows the story of digdeeper himself, a hapless individual who tries everything and is fucked over sometimes by society. Or maybe yet still, "she" is a militant feminist who hates that you refer to her as "she" instead of "xir" and is constantly interrupting your story to declare their conflicted feelings about possibly going transgender and how their're a lesbian but it doesn't matter, but is also a Zoroastrian and has ties to a Satanist-Fascist party. With so many conflicting beliefs, her weird ideas bleed all over the page. You just had to open that fucking can of worms, with "she" (then you learned who, indeed, "she" was!).

Perhaps gendered nouns are retarded, but I think a singular "they" is even more so. That's the core of the whole conundrum.

If preventing slander is the point of the disclaimers, then I don't think it's working very well. Sports players, anti vaccine people, etc are slandered every day by the media. On the other hand, everyone is now scared of giving his opinion on a medical or legal issue, etc.

Anyway, another FOSS project killed by the profit motive? https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issues/241

So, I don't know much about this situation except what I've recently read, and it seems some corporation known for injecting ads into their software has claimed this. Now, all the millions of people who use this will get greeted by new versions that have ads. All of this fine by GPL, as long as the source code is published. But the corporation might try to get full ownership (same as the one that bought Audacity) and change the license. But even if they fail this, it doesn't matter. They can still release an updated app on Google Play which millions will download and see the ads. The average user is not protected by the "four freedoms" in this case.

There are already forks. Doesn't matter as they will never get as popular as the original and will die just as Tenacity did.

If FOSS doesn't prevent a malicious takeover of a software, then it's useless. It's a big "security vuln" in FOSS that no one wants to admit. They think forking is a solution. It isn't. They think fighting a corporation in court is a solution. It isn't. Without tackling the profit motive, it's all a circus show.

Would there even be a need to have licenses if making profit from a piece of software wasn't a possibility? Why do people close their sources? To earn money from the software. It seems that FOSS is just a bandage on capitalism but it doesn't work in the end, as the devs need to live and money is required for that in this world. Donations don't work as has been proven over and over in many projects. So they eventually either give up and the projects die or sell out like here and in Audacity's case, and others.

diggy

Perhaps gendered nouns are retarded, but I think a singular "they" is even more so. That's the core of the whole conundrum.

Do not refer to a "them" or "they" or "he" or "she" then? You can use "one" instead. "If one does not agree with this"... "If a given person" ... "If an individual does such and such" ... "Now say someone does not do X, that someone will be brutally executed at the hands of the corpo-state" ... "As we can see, if the libertarian wants to claim that the government engages in thievery, that label must also be applied to property owners, as well."

diggy (edited/mangled to be more funny)

If ass blasting slander were the point of disclaimers (and the associated discombobulation it brings), then it's total bullshit and works like dogshit. Eggball players, anti-heart attack juice people, and other such losers (martyrs), are hammered to death every day by the media industrial complex. On the other foot, all cows are now scared of giving xir opinion on homeopathic or technocratic issues, etc.

Maybe the scientific people should be using such disclaimers as well.

diggy

Anyway, another FOSS project killed by the profit motive? https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issues/241

So, I don't know much about this situation except what I've recently read, and it seems some corporation known for injecting ads into their software has claimed this. Now, all the millions of people who use this will get greeted by new versions that have ads. All of this fine by GPL, as long as the source code is published. But the corporation might try to get full ownership (same as the one that bought Audacity) and change the license. But even if they fail this, it doesn't matter. They can still release an updated app on Google Play which millions will download and see the ads. The average user is not protected by the "four freedoms" in this case.

There are already forks. Doesn't matter as they will never get as popular as the original and will die just as Tenacity did.

If FOSS doesn't prevent a malicious takeover of a software, then it's useless. It's a big "security vuln" in FOSS that no one wants to admit. They think forking is a solution. It isn't. They think fighting a corporation in court is a solution. It isn't. Without tackling the profit motive, it's all a circus show.

Would there even be a need to have licenses if making profit from a piece of software wasn't a possibility? Why do people close their sources? To earn money from the software. It seems that FOSS is just a bandage on capitalism but it doesn't work in the end, as the devs need to live and money is required for that in this world. Donations don't work as has been proven over and over in many projects. So they eventually either give up and the projects die or sell out like here and in Audacity's case, and others.

Well, maybe a more expansive license could be used. One that prevents all integration with proprietary software (like the GPL) and prevents all commercial usage (like some of the Creative Commons). I remember someone made an (lol-worthy) anti-fascist license, and some projects have forked in this manner (like GIMP or whatever).

I reviewed Lavabit yesterday, and was supposed to finish at two paragraphs but I couldn't stop myself from digging deep, so I dug into the media's reaction to the reactivation of the service, and was deeply saddened. The media page https://lavabit.com/media.html has outlets full of congratulatory claims that don't stand up to scrutiny. For one, they all miss that bit in its privacy policy (https://lavabit.com/privacy.html) where it says:

lavabit's privacy policy

On a final note, the Lavabit e-mail servers do record the IP address used to send an outgoing message in the header of an outgoing e-mail. Because of this, it is possible for the recipient of a message to identify what IP was used to send a message. We record this information in the message header so that law enforcement officials in possession of a message that violates the law can identify the original sender.

Don't you think it's something media outlets should tell people about? But, they don't. And they praise this "Dark Mail" protocol as if it was real, when it's still not being used 7 or more years after these outlets praised it.

And what terrifies me is that every single one of the cited media outlets repeated the same narrative, just with some switched words, but same spirit. It makes me feel like some commitee decides the narrative all the big media outlets are supposed to take. If it is so, then how can we fight? It doesn't matter what kind of research is done, if the big media can just bury it. It's not the first time I've noticed this happening, either: https://digdeeper.club/images/reviewbombs.png

You'd think the independent media would pick stuff up, but it doesn't seem to be happening, either.

diggy

Lavabit

I see that they still haven't improved since a couple or so years ago ( http://abrx6wcpzkfpwxb5eb2wsra2wnkrv2macdtkpnrepswodz5jxd4schyd.onion/email.xhtml#Lavabit ).

diggy

It makes me feel like some commitee decides the narrative all the big media outlets are supposed to take.

I think it's a set of factors/influences. The similarity in wording/base content is likely they all use (or are owned by) the same "back bone" news providers (I'm not sure what or if there is an actual term for them), like AP, Reuters, AFP, Gannet, Scripps, Comcast etc.

One really good example of this is VOA (Voice of America), one of the USA's federally owned news/media organizations. Look at the bottom of this article: https://www.voanews.com/a/killed-in-blasts-at-gravesite-of-iranian-general-killed-in-2020-us-drone-strike/7425057.html

VOA

Some of the material came from Reuters, Agence France-Presse and The Associated Press.

This along with popular (Overton window), political (alphabet letter agency or ideological) and advertiser pressure pretty much keeps most publications seeming very similar. Also consider most startup news agencies don't have the ability to have reporters all over the world, or even send a reporter to a given scene.

Even your favorite left-wing or right-wing publication is probably taking information from one of these main providers. I'm not sure how the subscription process works, it certainly must be up to the minute as all these agencies must want to be the first to "break" it.

The only comparable alternative would be social media, taking tips yourself. There's also a few lesser talked about provider(s?), like UPI and maybe others.

Anyway, let's talk about something lighter and more personal. Some reflections after 6 years of running my site. Let's start with the kind of people that read my site. I don't store logs or keep stats on any of this, so this will be just from memory of E-mail communication. Anyway, only about 10% of my interlocutors bother to use PGP. And then, half of those don't attach their own keys. I guess I'm doing something wrong with my guides. Maybe PGP is indeed too hard for the average person? Or even the above average.

About 20% of people who send me mails use Gmail as their provider. Then about 40% split between disroot and riseup, showing that at least people do follow my email guides significantly. Then let's say 20% proton and 20% random providers.

A significant amount of the people who communicate with me don't appear to read what I write on my site. They ask questions I've already directly answered there. Which is sad to think about. And I even go to great lengths to divide my articles by sections, etc.

Many inquiring about browsers, etc only want to be told what to do, instead of the rationale for doing so. Quite a few wanted a review of their "special snowflake chromium fork" that isn't really any different from any of the others, in any way that really matters. There's quite a failure somewhere, in teaching the fundamentals, I think.

A surprising amount of people wants to do all kinds of modifications to their...Windows installation, not understanding that you don't start building a home on a broken foundation. They want their perfect browser and chat setups while Microsoft swipes everything.

The vast majority (90+%) of readers only care about my tech content, barely any about my reports on libertarianism, capitalism, or the schooling system (which are the more important ones). I did get a few mails praising those, though. Sometimes, they've resulted in long discussions on XMPP, so, it's nice to know at least some are digging deep into those reports, and I'm not just shouting into the wind.

Much of what I've written in 2019, 2020 and maybe early 2021, that hasn't been modified since then, is quite weak. That's big parts of capitalism and libertarianism for example. I'm surprised people haven't picked it up. I guess I'm left to do my own trash cleaning. lol.

The backlog of stuff that I wanted to do, is piling up, while the weak stuff still rots in there to be cleaned. I really have to stop myself from starting new shit now. How I've usually done things, is get an idea, get excited, whip out a draft and just throw it out there. Repeat many times. Then, some stuff I've edited later, but because it was so much, not all of it. Then corona came and I had another responsibility, that was constantly changing. And so, I took too many responsibilities. Now, I'd rather focus on the few things that I feel I can cover better than others, than start more weak stuff to rot and hurt eyes.

I usually get one or two mails per day, sometimes none for a few days. It seems I don't have more than a few thousand regular readers. Which is quite a low reach for what I hoped to accomplish. Oh well. It seems you really need shilling campaigns on the big mainstream platforms to get popular. Doesn't help I've been censored in many already. I remember when I was mentioned on HN, view per day count multiplied 10 times for a few days. That's until they censored me. For some reason, the diggy sting is particularly painful.

I guess that's it, nothing comes to mind anymore. Might edit this post later though, if it does. Edit: it did. Because it came to mind that...

The criticism I get in reddit, HN, chan type places, is fucking useless. It's obvious they don't read any of it, or they just skim and succumb to some useless "first impressions" that are completely wrong. I've had people say that I don't support any of my claims with evidence. When that's the thing I focus the most on! The evidence! The references! They could say my references don't support my claims. But that's different, they say they just don't exist at all. Or that I simplify things, miss context, exaggerate, blah blah generic claims that are never supported with examples. Clearly they don't read any of my material, just the conclusions which they don't like and want to dismiss. The art of following a 500 page argument in a book, has surely been lost in zoomers, if people can't be bothered to follow a quite short in comparison, article.

There's quite the clique, in those types of places, that believes in certain things, and doesn't want to give up that narrative. The belief in "anonymized data storage", "secure data storage", the belief in "trusting someone with your data" used as a justification for siphoning everything you do. It's very common in places like HN and reddit. The overusage of implication fallacy, used to justify something bad because, well, how can we do without it? The service must have ads or tracking because they would die otherwise! And we must have wars because bad Putin, or whatever. I don't care. If something bothers me I'll call it out. I guess that's why diggy stings so hard?

diggy

Anyway, let's talk about something lighter and more personal. Some reflections after 6 years of running my site. Let's start with the kind of people that read my site. I don't store logs or keep stats on any of this, so this will be just from memory of E-mail communication. Anyway, only about 10% of my interlocutors bother to use PGP. And then, half of those don't attach their own keys. I guess I'm doing something wrong with my guides. Maybe PGP is indeed too hard for the average person? Or even the above average.

I heard the creator of PGP doesn't use PGP.

diggy

A significant amount of the people who communicate with me don't appear to read what I write on my site. They ask questions I've already directly answered there. Which is sad to think about. And I even go to great lengths to divide my articles by sections, etc.

They are most likely skimming the article and missed that part.

diggy

Many inquiring about browsers, etc only want to be told what to do, instead of the rationale for doing so. Quite a few wanted a review of their "special snowflake chromium fork" that isn't really any different from any of the others, in any way that really matters. There's quite a failure somewhere, in teaching the fundamentals, I think.

They say Chromium did for the web browser what LLVM did for programming languages. It is relatively easy to compile a custom Chromium fork and say you created a new browser. I don't think it is helping the web ecosystem. It just entrenches Google's monopoly further.

I have heard good praise for the Arc browser, but unfortunately it is Windows/Mac only.

diggy

A surprising amount of people wants to do all kinds of modifications to their...Windows installation, not understanding that you don't start building a home on a broken foundation. They want their perfect browser and chat setups while Microsoft swipes everything.

There are many reasons why people might want to use Windows. A "secure" Windows installation can not compare to a secure Linux installation, but it is certainly better than a default Windows installation with Microsoft trackers enabled.

diggy

The vast majority (90+%) of readers only care about my tech content, barely any about my reports on libertarianism, capitalism, or the schooling system (which are the more important ones). I did get a few mails praising those, though. Sometimes, they've resulted in long discussions on XMPP, so, it's nice to know at least some are digging deep into those reports, and I'm not just shouting into the wind.

I personally enjoyed those articles.

diggy

I usually get one or two mails per day, sometimes none for a few days. It seems I don't have more than a few thousand regular readers. Which is quite a low reach for what I hoped to accomplish. Oh well. It seems you really need shilling campaigns on the big mainstream platforms to get popular. Doesn't help I've been censored in many already. I remember when I was mentioned on HN, view per day count multiplied 10 times for a few days. That's until they censored me. For some reason, the diggy sting is particularly painful.

I do not think more viewers is always a good thing. Most people spend their internet time in small communities, whether its extension of IRL life like on social media or a completely separate online community like this one.

diggy

The criticism I get in reddit, HN, chan type places, is fucking useless. It's obvious they don't read any of it, or they just skim and succumb to some useless "first impressions" that are completely wrong. I've had people say that I don't support any of my claims with evidence. When that's the thing I focus the most on! The evidence! The references! They could say my references don't support my claims. But that's different, they say they just don't exist at all. Or that I simplify things, miss context, exaggerate, blah blah generic claims that are never supported with examples. Clearly they don't read any of my material, just the conclusions which they don't like and want to dismiss. The art of following a 500 page argument in a book, has surely been lost in zoomers, if people can't be bothered to follow a quite short in comparison, article.

People not reading the link and commenting anyway is a social media tradition as old as the clouds.

diggy

I've had people say that I don't support any of my claims with evidence. When that's the thing I focus the most on! The evidence! The references! They could say my references don't support my claims. But that's different, they say they just don't exist at all. Or that I simplify things, miss context, exaggerate, blah blah generic claims that are never supported with examples. Clearly they don't read any of my material, just the conclusions which they don't like and want to dismiss.

I can really relate to this, especially with discussions about UFOs and aliens and the such. Or just anything conspiracy related at-all. I notice that the types of people who say this shit, barely research into the subject themselves and just claim that "there's no evidence' just because everyone else believes the same thing.

About your frustrations on people not reading stuff properly or asking stupid questions (that's just the type of retardation you have to deal with on the internet) or not actually following your advice, I will say that without your articles, I wouldn't be who I am now, I would've probably still been your average degenerate ancap 4channy who just believes everything contrarian without researching stuff. A long time ago, I just dismissed you as some "leftist conspiracy schizo" on your non-tech articles but after seeing how much evidence you put into your articles, I had to change my image of you and start taking you seriously. You inspired me to start researching stuff on my own.

pablo.gonzales.2007
diggy

I've had people say that I don't support any of my claims with evidence. When that's the thing I focus the most on! The evidence! The references! They could say my references don't support my claims. But that's different, they say they just don't exist at all. Or that I simplify things, miss context, exaggerate, blah blah generic claims that are never supported with examples. Clearly they don't read any of my material, just the conclusions which they don't like and want to dismiss.

I can really relate to this, especially with discussions about UFOs and aliens and the such. Or just anything conspiracy related at-all. I notice that the types of people who say this shit, barely research into the subject themselves and just claim that "there's no evidence' just because everyone else believes the same thing.

About your frustrations on people not reading stuff properly or asking stupid questions (that's just the type of retardation you have to deal with on the internet) or not actually following your advice, I will say that without your articles, I wouldn't be who I am now, I would've probably still been your average degenerate ancap 4channy who just believes everything contrarian without researching stuff. A long time ago, I just dismissed you as some "leftist conspiracy schizo" on your non-tech articles but after seeing how much evidence you put into your articles, I had to change my image of you and start taking you seriously. You inspired me to start researching stuff on my own.

That's encouraging TBH. Thanks. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch to deal with, I deal with it, too. But it's an enemy that has to be faced, not ran away from. I think the human brain just seeks to conserve resources, most of the time. So it doesn't like challenging deeply held beliefs, as that's a waste of resources. There are, of course, social reasons for this too, being accepted in the group, etc. Loners might be more likely to buck the trends, I think this is even visible in the privacy communities.

What I've also noticed, is that when someone has gone public with a belief, they are very unlikely to ditch it. Especially if they are a popular "influencer" type who has also earned money from the belief, this decreases the probability to effectively zero. I'm thinking for example of all the keto types, who sold their books on the idea that ketosis is some kind of a superior metabolic state and carbs are the devil. They never change.

I mean I'm certainly not immune to this, I even almost accepted the idea that COVID and viruses don't exist, or are at least harmless. This was heavily influenced by my (internet) social circle. But in the end my digdeepy personality prevailed, and I just had to admit that theory is a joke. But again, cognitive dissonance still had to be fought there, and it took me maybe months to fully dismiss the idea. Who knows what I'd do if I was like, ten times more popular? Who knows what I'd do if I knew I would have a thousand of no-virus people jump down my throat, instead of just a few? I hope I'd still be able to update my views. But who knows. This has to be a conundrum many popular people deal with.

Anyway, let's play "Myth Busting With diggy" :D. You know how websites say that foods digest in the stomach for like, very little time? See here: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-long-does-it-take-to-digest-food

the above site

Dr. Lee says the entire digestive process can take several hours. Food generally stays in your stomach between 40 and 120-plus minutes. Then add another 40 to 120 minutes for time spent in the small bowel.

or from https://survivalfreedom.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-digest-rice/

the above site

White rice generally digests in 1 to 2 hours, but faster than an equal amount of brown rice.

or https://planthd.com/how-long-does-rice-take-to-digest-a-comprehensive-guide/

the above site

On average, it takes about 2-3 hours for your stomach to digest a meal consisting of carbohydrates like white bread or white rice

You get the drill. Yet I just found this study https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1750-3841.12228

That says particles of rice are still in the stomach after 480 (!) minutes. And they just didn't measure after that, so they probably stay for a lot longer. So 10 hours digestion time is likely for rice? And that's just the stomach part, after which it goes to the small intestine and then the large intestine to be removed. So the full digestive time would be maybe 24h, or so.

Maybe I'm interpreting this wrong. I'd like for someone else to look at it, and see if you reach the same conclusion.

the above study

In brown rice, the average number of particles per image varied from 235 to 103 in the proximal region, and from 131 to 73 in the distal region between 20 and 480 min of digestion, respectively.

Still quite a lot of particles after 8h passed.

Oh, and yes, this is a pig study. But pigs are basically humans, so it shouldn't matter :D. I mean, there is no way that the 10h digestion time shown in pigs would become a 2h time in humans. The stomachs are just not that different between the species.

diggy

What I've also noticed, is that when someone has gone public with a belief, they are very unlikely to ditch it. Especially if they are a popular "influencer" type who has also earned money from the belief, this decreases the probability to effectively zero. I'm thinking for example of all the keto types, who sold their books on the idea that ketosis is some kind of a superior metabolic state and carbs are the devil. They never change.

It's a common saying in Washington that one can change their party, but it's super rare and it can only be done once.

The problem is even if the influencer does have a change of heart, usally they have built an entire following based on that set of beliefs. Making a U-turn means they have to find a completely new audience to listen to them. If an anti-vaxxer influencer whose primary content is anti-vax content became pro-vax their followers would probably just unfollow rather than think about why he changed

diggy

I've had people say that I don't support any of my claims with evidence. When that's the thing I focus the most on! The evidence! The references! They could say my references don't support my claims. But that's different, they say they just don't exist at all. Or that I simplify things, miss context, exaggerate, blah blah generic claims that are never supported with examples. Clearly they don't read any of my material, just the conclusions which they don't like and want to dismiss.

It's already annoying how dismissive people will be about something they've never even studied, but what perplexes me even more is how some people manage to unredpill themselves. Not gonna say names here, but an old friend of mine who read digdeeper was actually quite interested in it and seems to have a decent understanding of your writeups, but then one day I bring up digdeeper to them and their like "That guy? He's a total tin foil hat conspiracy theorist!". Umm, what the hell happened here? Did he really just troon out so easily? Maybe he was never really that commited in the first place. I've come to realize that it's actually not that hard to get people to be on board with what you're saying, rather the REAL challenge comes with actually keeping them on board. I guess we have more flip floppers in this generation than I thought, because it's not just this guy mind you. I've seen it happen with others as well, although in their case it wasn't related to digdeeper specifically, but still, it's more common than I thought for people to pretend and/or troon out and pull a 180 on your ass.

Also iirc, while he didn't say you don't have evidence, he did pull the "Your evidence doesn't count!" card. Absolute fucking brainrot! It still amazes me how these people manage to be 100x more arrogant than the average """conspiracy theorist""" despite knowing basically nothing. Incredible!

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