In America, €120 million could buy half of Congress.

These are not the same thing. At least in America, these terms are only superficially similar in the sense that they are “people who say they love their country”.

When someone points out a country’s shortcomings and how it could be fixed, a patriot listens and makes plans, while a nationalist denies those shortcomings exist or blames them on external factors.

When someone says we should learn from our history and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, a patriot pulls out the history books, while a nationalist instead goes through them with a black highlighter.

When someone burns the country’s flag as a protest, a patriot asks why, while a nationalist will say they should be thrown in prison.

When abuses of power happen by the police or government agents, a patriot will demand an investigation and accountability, while a nationalist will say that actually, they deserved it.

If I had to guess this guy (or girl) is a Bitcoin millionaire or something. But that’s just based on the vibes of his speech with no concrete basis.

Question: how does this site differ in function to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine?

The symbol in question:

The fact that one side is a piece of shit doesn’t mean the other side isn’t also a piece of shit

There are already lots of viable strategies for getting rid of brine, they are just more expensive than the naïve approach of having a big pipe on the shore spewing it into the ocean. Diluting it with seawater seems to be the most viable right now.

I wonder if something like a 10 km underwater pipe with small holes in it that only let out a little bit of brine at a time would work. Might be a hassle to lay, at least to start, but I think that once it is in place it could operate without maintenance for decades. And piping is not really that expensive. Perhaps there are already researchers studying it, or it has been proven to not work. It seems like such an obvious idea.

And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.

—a story told by Socrates, according to his student Plato

I’m not sure why you took them literally. They’re making a tongue-in-cheek statement about how Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is able to manipulate the American president seemingly with ease and impunity.

This is probably one of the top 10 dumbest war strategies in history. Make the population of the region you’re eventually seeking to occupy hate you even more, and on top of that, it makes the very foolish assumption that Hamas leadership would give up if they see their Gazans suffer, which is so naïve it’d be funny if it weren’t so sad. Hamas leadership doesn’t give a shit if ordinary Gazans starve. In fact, they probably think it’s all the better for their recruiting numbers, seeing that I have yet to see a single Hamas fighter suffering from malnutrition on the level of ordinary Gazans.

To external observers paying attention, this can only lead one to conclude either Netanyahu is a terrible military strategist or he’s using this “strategy” as a cover to snuff out the entire Arab population of Gaza. For all I know, both are true!

Wireshark can’t but there are other methods, such as checking for the known OpenVPN protocol opcodes in the headers:

I don’t know how they update their IP list. My university is an American university which I believe has no ties to China, but I can’t say for sure. According to friends who use the clandestine OpenVPN services, they pay about 20 CNY a month and every month they are issued a new OVPN configuration file. Only occasionally do their servers get blocked before this, and then they have to issue new config files to everyone.

As for myself, I have been to China two times using the OpenVPN server that I deployed on a US-based VPS I rented from a German hosting provider. Each trip lasted about one month. So far, the IP has not been blocked. The government’s philosophy regarding the firewall and VPNs seems to be “make it as annoying as possible for the average uninformed layperson to bypass and go after people selling illegal VPNs, but otherwise, we don’t give a shit”. I do not sell access to my VPN to anyone else. It is strictly for my own use.

Both times I was there, the firewall didn’t apply to cellular data because they do not apply the firewall to holders of foreign SIM cards using their cellular service. I purchased a SIM from a Hong Kong carrier (SoSim) with a few gigabytes of data in both Hong Kong and mainland China for 100 HKD. The firewall doesn’t apply within Hong Kong. It worked fine, though I do note that surveillance laws meant that I had to upload my passport to activate the service. I’m not a big fan of that, so I kept the VPN connected at all times, though normally-blocked websites did indeed work on cellular data even without the VPN. I checked on my cell phone’s settings, and I know it connects to China Mobile towers when in mainland China. Note that China Mobile is owned by the Chinese state.

I also confirmed that it doesn’t apply the firewall when I have my T-Mobile (my US cell carrier) SIM in there. My carrier provides unlimited worldwide roaming at 2G speeds but I can confirm that it also connects to China Mobile towers and I could successfully access Wikipedia, a blocked site, without the VPN.

Attached below is a Wireshark trace I obtained by sniffing my own network traffic.

I want to draw your attention to this part in particular:

Underneath “User Datagram Protocol”, you can see the words “OpenVPN Protocol”. So anyone who sniffs my traffic on the wire can see exactly the same thing that I can. While they can’t read the contents of the payload, they can tell that it’s OpenVPN traffic because the headers are not encrypted. So if a router wanted to block OpenVPN traffic, all they would have to do is drop this packet. It’s a similar story for Wireguard packets. An attacker can read the unencrypted headers and learn

• The size of the transmission
• The source and destination IP addresses by reading the IP header
• The source and destination ports numbers by reading the TCP or UDP headers
• The underlying layers, up until the point it hits an encrypted protocol (such as OpenVPN, TLS, or SSH)

Take China for example. There is a common misconception that all VPNs are illegal in China. That’s not fully true. In China, VPNs are legal and must obtain a licence from the Ministry of Public Security, like all other online businesses. This also means that they have to agree to monitoring and censorship from the Government, so you can’t use legal VPN services to bypass the firewall in China.

The Great Firewall doesn’t block by protocol. If you set up your own OpenVPN server, you can still connect to it. I’ve done this many times in my trips to China, and it’s worked fine. That being said, they still do seem to throttle connections to international servers, though this happens to all servers, even those that are not blocked. There are many clandestine VPN operators in China who spin up their own VPN servers and sell the service. They are mostly OpenVPN-based.

My university used Cisco AnyConnect, and I was able to successfully connect to the university VPN servers as well.

The limited experimentation I have conducted seems to indicate that the Great Firewall blocks by IP and not by protocol.

The whole system of formal diplomatic recognition needs to die. Right now, “recognising” a government seems to be tantamount to acknowledging that government is legitimate and representative of the people. This is a very obstructive and unproductive system. It doesn’t matter whether you “recognise” a government and it also doesn’t matter what you decide to call your representatives to it. Refusing to recognise a government doesn’t mean that group of people doesn’t hold power or doesn’t actually control territory. It just prevents you from engaging with them in a constructive manner. It’s just a head-in-the-sand approach to intergovernmental relations.

If there’s a group of people calling themselves a government that holds power over a group of people or a piece of territory that you are interested in, it shouldn’t have to result in this whole game of charades. You should be able to send official representatives to that group without having to worry about offending everyone else. The whole concept of “recognition” is just nonsense.

One of my mates generated an entire website using Gemini. It was a React web app that tracks inventory for trading card dealers. It actually did come out functional and well-polished. That being said, the AI really struggled with several aspects of the project that humans would not:

• It left database secrets in the code
• The design of the website meant that it was impossible to operate securely
• The quality of the code itself was hot garbage—unreadable and undocumented nonsense that somehow still worked
• It did not break the code into multiple files. It piled everything into a single file

The presence of far-right politics has really seen an uptick in recent years. It seems to have started in America but has spread to Europe and other countries like a plague. You have the AfD in Germany who claimed second place unseating a centre-left government, the entry of Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK party into the British parliament (even overtaking the traditional Conservative Party in recent polls), the fourth consecutive election in Portugal where the nationalist Chega party has gained seats, and Canada narrowly avoiding electing Pierre Poilievre the “Maple MAGA”.

Surprisingly enough, prior to Donald Trump blowing up the US-Canada alliance, Poilievre was predicted to win in a landslide in Canada with a 90%+ chance of his party getting a majority but somehow it really does seem like everyone who associates with Trump outside the US loses their election. The premiership really shipped right through Poilievre’s hands like a lump of dry beach sand. Lol

I wonder what would’ve happened if they sank that mf

…or sent it on a special undersea operation