dgroshev

So what? Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then.

Every remote communication could only be had in the clear. Everyone was fine with that. Was the US in the 80s a surveillance state?

Just a few decades years ago, everyone's names and phones in the US were freely available to anyone with a phone book. Communications were done in the clear, either via letters (hardly tamper-proof), or via phone (that anyone with access could tap).

Did every American live in a "surveillance state" back then?

Algorithmic scroll is factually more harmful, regardless of the amount of harm as long as it's non-zero, because it does affect people. Surveillance on its own doesn't. It just doesn't, everything that you can think of in response is not solely or even significantly caused by surveillance.

Instead, limiting surveillance (which in this case is only linked to the issue at hand with what's explicitly a conspiracy theory, so the link is quite tenuous) was originally meant to limit the government's powers as a form of control over the government. Control over the government is just a part of the Enlightenment project of societies being able to shape their destinies equitably, which includes shaping political arrangements.

Americans have completely lost the ability to shape their political system (when was the last constitutional amendment passed again?), so instead the discourse turned to fetishising particular tools that might help, but were never the point of having freedom. This is a fallacy.

There are straightforward ways to have age verification without descending into a dictatorship. To use an analogy, most European countries have mandatory IDs, some even have digital IDs; many of those counties are freer than the US.

Freedom is being able to stop kids from accessing pornhub without fearing a dictatorship because you can just prevent the dictatorship through a million other means. Freedom is not paralysing the political system as technology and progress (and multi-billion dollar megacorporations) march on.

Otherwise societies just get superficial "freedoms" (like using slurs in public spaces because "free speech") while their governments, say, run a paramilitary murdering political opponents on the street.

Did the US annex Vietnam or Iran?

There's a qualitative difference between interference and outright annexation, with borders redrawn and cultures violently assimilated.

> How can one intepret it in any other way is "Russia is evil and visiting Russia is thus evil"?

Simple: Durov has no problem with constructing a narrative that has little to do with reality.

Of course he would say that. Even besides the fallaciousness of this argument (there is no equivalence between an aggressor and a victim), Pavel Durov is completely untrustworthy.

There is product stuff, like misleading claims about Telegram's encryption and comparisons to Signal. In reality, for the vast majority of chats they have plaintext, unlike Signal.

There are more subtle positioning claims. Durov made a huge deal of his "exile", but I saw Telegram's office in St Petersburg with my own two eyes a year after Durov "fled the country". It definitely wasn't shut. There were even local news of Pavel assaulting a guy in St Petersburg for trying to make a photo of him a couple years later.

And then there are just completely unnecessary lifestyle claims. He said multiple times how he doesn't take any "pills" or medications. It only takes a minute to find his old photos. Male pattern baldness doesn't stop progressing without DHT suppression, and last time I checked, finasteride comes in pills. I don't understand why would he make misleading statements about something so visible, but it doesn't make him any more trustworthy.

More mysteries of Telegram Data Centres: https://istories.media/en/stories/2025/06/10/telegram-fsb/

(and a follow-up: https://istories.media/en/news/2025/06/10/telegram-responds-... )

Some heart surgeons might only be able to explain to the nurses their ideas on how to carry out the surgery, but are they still heart surgeons?

That list really misses Glove80! It's an incredible keyboard, and imo is better than the Moonlander at practically everything.

Edit: on second thought, I guess some people might not like the low switches?

China? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...

I don't mean a conversation. I understand the process and how front-loaded it is at Oxide. I mean just having an actual human being on the other side of those rejection emails, instead of sending them from an unmonitored address. Oxide's own RFD 3 says

> Candidates may well respond to a rejection by asking for more specific feedback; to the degree that feedback can be constructive, it should be provided.

…but in practice it's just boilerplate and silence. Good luck asking when no one's listening [1].

Lots of companies do that, too. The problem is that this approach feels even more unfair than when it's a more "regular" hiring flow. Oxide asks for a very high level of effort from their applicants, but you can see in these comments that at the same time they are quite far towards the lower end of how much visible effort they commit back to the applicants (delays, boilerplate, ghosting).

And sure, as you say it's hundreds-to-thousands of applications, and potentially dozens-to-hundreds of emails to reply to. But the additional time it takes to send a one line reply pales in comparison to thoughtfully reading 12+ pages of materials, which they say they do. I just don't think that adding a few percent on top of that massive effort is unrealistic. It's an active decision to save time and money on people who didn't pass the first stage; I think it's an unethical decision, but then I'm not nearly as successful as Bryan Cantrill.

[1]: To be fair, Bryan kindly advised to "DM" him for feedback in a similar thread half a year ago. There are no DMs on here, so I DM'd on bsky and tried to guess his email, but I probably guessed wrong and he doesn't check his bsky DMs.

Probably 16 hours all in between research, writing, and editing, spread over a week. That might be a bit more than average, since English is my second language, and I make many passes to make sure the text works.

Got boilerplate-rejected with zero human interaction three months later.

> Backpack launched a SpaceX token at IPO that can be moved between on-chain and your brokerage

What is the actual societal value of this? Do you seriously believe that such a token helps price discovery?

Laws are "reviewed" by courts, and in the UK newer laws automatically supersede older laws if there are any contradictions (with minor nuances as per Thoburn v Sunderland City Council). There's no need for the mechanism that you seem to have in mind (never mind that it doesn't work like that), we can and do change laws.

Most people on here are in the US, and the baseline of "scary" implied by that (and many other) posts is definitely not where it should be.

"Moron" doesn't nearly do it justice. The US saw a paramilitary force lead by an open racist (he was recently hanging out with open nazis on a "remigration" conference) executing a political opponent right on the street on camera, with zero consequences. A substantial proportion of the US cheered for literal concentration camps. Budget money is pretty openly funnelled to Trump's family and friends. This is not "Trump is a moron", this is a catastrophe and democratic collapse that is not nearly in the same category as "oh but what if they use the technology for surveillance".

I suspect that this obsession with the UK is just a coping mechanism.

Thankfully, we do have laws that change with the times over here in the UK. Just a couple months ago we had a constitutional change (abolishment of hereditary peers) and that was just another Thursday. It's fine, we don't need to rely on deliberately inefficient police force.

Substituting political process and laws changing with the times with political nihilism and fetishisation of old norms (indeed, see 2A; also see a paramilitary executing political opponents and how 2A influenced that) is how one ends up with a broken state.

Yes, I'm saying it's a normal part of a functioning country to onboard tech into their law enforcement. If anything it's positive in this case, because it's a domestic effort and not just buying a similar system from Palantir.

I don't see what's "scary" about this link. It's talking about pretty much standard data processing, Palantir is doing that in the US for many years now.

HPE Instant On is pretty nice. Zero problems over the last seven years. It literally just works, including seamless handoffs between multiple APs.

You're missing the vast interconnected network of stuff that's required to sustain that home. From your home battery to cancer treatments that you might need to sewer that runs to your home, all of this needs to be made and sometimes replaced. Most of those things are still unavailable to most humans; in many places we still haven't built roads, much less sewers and water distribution systems.

Household electricity self-sufficiency obscures the vast requirements to support it and extend this self-sufficiency to billions of other people.

Let's look at an actual case study of a police state.

I think we can agree that a state-controlled paramilitary force executing a political opponent in broad daylight, on camera, is pretty far along the "police state" spectrum, right? This kind of thing is entirely incompatible with freedom, and should be a wake up call for the civil society to weed out anything that led to that, root and branch.

Enter the execution of Alex Pretti. Days after it happened, it transformed into yet another partisan issue, a topic for discussion, something that can possibly be justified. Effectively, it was normalised on the social and classic media. Media that, in the US, are pretty "free" [].

Negative freedoms are insufficient to stop a police state. What stops the police state is political engagement and regulation, and that requires a more nuanced understanding than just "either free of regulation or embracing the police state".

: …for moneyed interests to control and influence. For all their problems, I'd argue that BBC is substantially freer than say Fox News.

We do, objectively speaking. We have free elections, viable new political parties, working mechanisms of feedback from the population to politicians, and a constitution keeping up with the times (we had a constitutional change just this year).

How is it worse than I suggested? There's no "surveillance", for all intents and purposes it's just a hole in functionality requiring age verification to be filled. Article 1 doesn't guarantee that as a kid I can use my possessions to acquire a bottle of vodka.

You don't need to show a government ID, I never did. Also, I trust Apple-mediated age verification with a single bit output to any vendor much more than a random B2B SaaS.

More generally, the backstop on abusing system is always political. It can't be just a passive immutable barrier with any variation seen as a slippery slope (see the US government just buying commercial intel on citizens). Our political system just saw two ~new national parties spring up in additional to already established three (plus national parties) and MPs revolting at a mild inconveniences to their constituents. We're alright.

It's no more "warrantless search" than object recognition in your photo app. Signal deliberately misrepresents the policy, which is about connecting (already existing, local) object recognition to (already existing, local) established adulthood of the user.

It absolutely doesn't. However, the argument doesn't work when it's about connecting the "is the user a kid" bit to the existing and constantly running object recognition (phone cameras already run skin detection all the time to set white balance), so people invent "third parties" and "report people to authorities".

Ironically, the very OP statement is exactly that: trying to make the world a worse place because they believe that that is how the world works.

The solution to avoiding dictatorship is engaging in politics and preventing dictatorship directly through that. Trying to retreat into the (perceived) wilderness and build barriers to dictatorship doesn't really work. But since people drafting that statement don't believe that politics work and it is, in fact, possible to both have a vibrant political scene (we have what, five viable political parties vs the American two?) and not let kids send nudes, they try to drag everyone into the same mind frame.

This is really disingenuous coming from Signal who pioneered secure compute architecture for a number of useful features [1][2]. On-device checks are no more "surveillance" than Signal's private contact discovery is, and the same slippery slope argument applies there.

It's also technically incoherent: the exact same kind of "surveillance" is already applied by every single phone, because that's how the Photos app (or whatever it's called on Android) searches for cat pictures based on the text "cat". I can't recall any Signal statements about cat recognition technology leading to "reporting people to government authorities".

The "cover-ups" link right in the beginning is a real mask-off moment though. This is not a measured statement informed by the reality of modern Britain. It's an American view informed by the twitter cesspool and divisive rhetoric of the far right. It's a real shame to see Signal falling so low.

[1]: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

[2]: https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/

> There are various other potential methods to verify one's age, all of which are forbidden by OFCOM. Account age, zero-knowledge proofs, key signing, some kind of OAuth thing, physical tokens that require proof of age to buy, etc. The only permitted ones require your to link your real-life identity.

This is just not true. See 4.17 here, for example [1]

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/cons...

What compelled you to write this? It's just a random point having no relationship to what you're replying to. Why have you typed this and pressed "reply"?

The question is completely different from the point I was making. "X did bad things on their own" and "Y had absolutely no relationship with X at any point" are two points so blindingly obviously different that I'm having a hard time accepting that you are genuinely confused about the difference.

It's a motte-and-bailey fallacy that starts with countries and leaders having relationships in a global, interwoven world and ends with excusing a blood-thirsty dictator as if they had no agency.