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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2024

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  • Telegram was banned in Russia for a short time and for some inexplicable reason unbanned. Russia has made no attempt since then to ban them. The founder of Durov explained that they managed to force Russia to unban them because they kept buying and changing IPv4 addresses to evade the ban. But everyone who knows the technology knows this is a stupid reason and completely unbelievable. IP addresses are very expensive and the connections in the app need to change to the new IP. At the rate that Russia and everyone else is able to block IPs (thousands per second) you simply cannot implement such a strategy. What Telegram is saying is dumb propaganda for the gullible.

    Telegram insists on not having end-to-end encryption for default chats and group chats and profile and contact data. They use E2EE for Secret Chats but they use MTProto, which is a custom key exchange and encryption algorithm that is doing some fairly questionable stuff according to leading experts in the field. Telegram being insecure is no problem in itself. But they explicitly advertise it as being secure and private and mislead the users to believe no government can spy on them.

    They are based in the UAE with their main office being empty and essentially only a mailbox. Nobody actually knows where they are.

    Their servers (with unencrypted chat data) are hosted in questionable authoritarian countries all over the world. They do not have any servers in Europe or the US. This is a huge problem since nobody knows what server software they are running and your chats are not encrypted.

    Somehow they have infinite funding for infinite fast cloud storage. They don’t disclose any financial data. The founder always says it comes from his liquidated assets of VKontact. But that’s impossible as he would have run out of money years ago already. Hosting cloud storage like they do is very very expensive.

    If you want to be sure that nobody gets and uses your data use an end-to-end encrypted messenger like Signal. If it’s end-to-end encrypted and open-source then no other questions need to be asked.




  • People can have smartphones and tech the past didn’t have, but be increasingly worse off financially and unable to afford housing.

    You really have no idea what life was like just two or three generations ago. At least you now have toilet paper, water, can shower, and don’t need to starve to death when the pig in your backyard dies of some illness. Life was FUCKING HARD man. Affording a house is your problem? Really?

    And you aren’t a space explorer.

    The smoke detector, the microwave and birth control pills were invented around the time when we landed on the moon.










  • That’s the first interesting argument I’m reading here. Glad someone takes an honest stance in this discussion instead of just “rich vs poor”, “but people will lose jobs” and some random conspiracies in between.

    To your comment: I agree with your sentiment that AI will make it challenging for new brains to evolve as solving difficult tasks is a problem we will encounter much less in the future. I actually never thought about it that way. I don’t have a solution for that. I think it will have two outcomes: humans will lose intelligence, or humans will develop different intelligence in a way that we don’t understand yet today.

    And you are bringing up efficiency. Efficiency is just a buzzword that big companies are using to replace human labor. How much more efficient is a bank where you have 4 machine and one human teller? Or a fast food restaurant where the upfront employee just delivers the food to the counter and you can only place order with a computer.

    I disagree with that. Efficiency is a universal term. And humanity has always striven to do things more efficient because it increases the likelihood of survival and quality of life in general. It’s a very natural thing and you cannot stop it. Much as you cannot stop entropy. Also, I think making things more efficient is good for society. Everything becomes easier, more available, and more fun. I can see a far future where humans no longer need to work and can do whatever they want with their day. Jobs will become hobbies and family and friends are what you care about most.