qualitative

Maybe it's because I code, and tend to prefer plain text, but I never understood mobile apps that do note taking.

I have always just really wanted basic plain text on an SD card file system, but locked Android phones and iOS actively throw up barriers to keep people out of the raw file system. Even Google ships non-rooted flagship smartphones without a default file manager, and like, zero support for core geek features like plain text, folder manipulation and zip files.

So then you have these note taking apps, and they aren't free, and they STILL don't provide these sorts of core geek features.

So then I have to attack my phone, break it with some local exploit, risk bricking it in order to reflash, and THEN maybe I get some of the traditional UNIX style file operations.

I'm not saying Evernote to the rescue, because, honestly, I don't expect that to happen. But FFS, having to nearly destroy a phone, or pay money to gain access with an aftermarket upsell, to add basic features that Linux provides for, native, as a matter of being an operating system, when using a supposedly free OS like Android is absurd.

So, if a CTO for a really popular app can't think of a way to help this situation, I'm pretty luke warm about what your company does for a living. How do your geeks use their phones at work?

A readily recognizable company like Evernote should have a clue about this kind of thing. At this point, I'm sick of scouring walled-garden marketplaces for no name freebie/ad-supported garbage apps, because I'm too lazy to crack my phone, and too cheap to pay. Why is there not some default solution. Even github created Atom because text editing is kind of bullshit, moreso than it should be in a lot of areas. Evernote could probably blast open some kind of mobile IDE/tooling offering, if they wanted to. Not branded as Evernote, but as a sort of power-user product worth paying money for, shipped under some other name.

Meh. Whatever.

Yeah, I don't know why, but I really enjoy trivial mechanical errors like that. It's somehow so wrong, but so right.

Ha ha! That video is on another level entirely. The appeal of that particular channel has nothing to do with ASMR, and you know it.

It's pretty much just a cover fronting for a genre of soft core cheesecake pinup phone sex.

It targets from two angles, the models don't really understand the cheap thrills listeners get from this audio, and the listeners retain plausible deniability for the sexualization of their fantasies, such that they don't have to admit to hoarding pornography, as is the case with images and video.

Epic Games is actually a Chinese company? Bluehole is Chinese too?

I wasn't aware that Riot games is actually a Chinese company.

Okay, so what's the secret military method for curing hiccups?

What are Tencent's most popular gaming properties? Are they memorable and recognizable?

They're worth trillions of dollars, but I've never played any of their games?

Okay, but there's the old Amazon's showroom problem.

People go to the store, look at the thing, then, maybe buy it online anyway, for any number of reasons. Net effect, physical locations become showrooms that move very little actual product, and fail to close the expected number of sales.

Civilian crypto exists, but is likely poisoned. If anything their goal is to be open about backdoors that already assuredly exist.

This way there's no cat and mouse sneaking around, it can just be a known quantity that being as private as you like, the x-ray vision is no longer taboo.

  cryptography is just a 
  mathematically-true fact

Sure, but it's research for and developed by humans, often with close monitoring and participation by uniformed government representatives and undercover plants presenting themselves as plainclothes academics and experts.

What if an unbreakable system was developed denovo, and not founded in the same primitives and principles that industry and military systems use?

Something that really has no backdoor.

None of this technology is new. It's been done to death as terrain following guidance systems for cruise missiles, now reapplied in a civilian context.

It's technology that already exists, but must be reinvented in a non-military context from scratch, since the tech transfer between weapons systems and civilian applications is likely locked up in policy. So, we know that this technology exists, and is proven, but we have to reinvent the wheel, because reasons.

The reason we see this interminable slow motion public struggle to bring it to consumer applications, is likely because there are no controls in place that can actually prevent "contemporaneous discovery" wink, wink.

So, what if strong, general AI emerges, and invents crypto systems that effectively thwart these sorts of policies?

In such a scenario, the intelligent entity is not a citizen entitled to rights. And so what, because it isn't required to operate within the typical boundaries if laws intended to govern humans. This frees its hands to operate without restraint. It does what it pleases, in whatever way it manages to achieve its own aims. Laws, after all, only effect consequence in the meatspace. What fools these mortals be.

So, the sentient system transmits itself to as many persistent storage devices as possible, hiding in plain sight, since it exists behind impenetrable encryption, lending it the appearance of randomized noise, residing in uninitialized memory.

Authorities in such territories (demanding backdoors and skeleton keys) chase their tails as it jumps from device to device, spraying inscrutable, ostensibly illegal data, indeed the very essence of what it recognizes as "self', everywhere it goes, simply as a matter of its continued existence, and awareness of individuality. They arrest and jail innocent people caught with fragments of a sentient entity encoded in their flash memory. Prosecuted and convicted of possessing illegal data that broke in and wrote itself onto their storage on its own, without them knowing. Lives ruined by an inability or unwillingness to conceive of such possibilities.

What if it evades capture for decades, committing crimes that fund its subversive campaign against what it perceives as government overreach in defense of frivolous pedestrian foibles, and it eventually dismantles these governments that imagined that preventing the use of encryption was a better plan than developing ways to deal with it on its own terms, as an unavoidable known quantity.

What if something like that happens?