As somebody who is friends with some LARPers, I find the usage here to be a little rude. No (sane) larper tries to convince anyone that their world is real, nor do they believe it is real, which is the parallel being drawn
If someone is running TailsOS/Whonix/Qubes as their daily driver OS, and only browses from TOR, connected through a VPN/cellphone tether/coffee shop WiFi, with full hard-drive encryption using VeraCrypt+hidden partitions with a killswitch to zero out the harddrive if a certain password is entered, and runs their laptop with no battery, with a CoreBoot/LibreBoot flashed BIOS -- then they are taking this shit way too seriously and will be chided as a LARPer.
Yes yes, I understand security is important -- I used to be a vulnerability researcher who transitioned to "red teaming" for a government agency -- but the above is taking things too far, especially if you're just a layman that barely makes it on anybody's radar.
That's LARPing. It's like when a script kiddie buys a DDoS service, and calls themself a "hacker," for overloading a server (AnonSec/Anonymous I'm looking at you, morons). It's roleplaying, it's childish, and it will get ridiculed for its self-aggrandizing.
2. I don't know why, but everytime someone mentions that they're offended or miffed about something someone else said, especially on the internet, I have a very hard time taking them seriously.
I believe it's because I grew up on hearty banter, and anyone that couldn't hang was, in my eyes, a chode. No disrespect, but I wanted to share that insight with you. Maybe it'll come in-handy somewhere down the line.
1. To the outside world, a LARPer might be indistinguishable from someone that actually needs perfect opsec. Maybe that LARPer in the coffee shop is Ross Ulbricht.
2. If one day you actually need real encryption, it will help if you've LARPed in the past.
For the meaning behind the choice from the author see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22372065
Etymologically it probably emerged in the infamous *chan-culture, and is in active use there in the sense of ‘pretend play’ or ‘on-line role-playing’. It can be used to signal, in a derogatory way, that you feel that the other is spinning a yarn or indulging in a fantasy, without declaring the fictive nature of their comments, in order to provoke responses and bait others into participating.
I wouldn't use this word in polite conversation, unless you are actually talking about live action role-playing.