Conservatives consume tons of porn. They just feel guilt about it afterwards.

Headline is terrible. The big red flags are that they don’t do end-to-end encryption by default, the servers are in Dubai, and use a proprietary algorithm.

Last part should be clarified further. They didn’t reinvent AES or anything. It’s more like a protocol that puts together existing algorithms. It means they can use transport layers without TLS or anything else that wraps your messages in crypto otherwise.

https://core.telegram.org/mtproto

I’d still say this is a red flag. How you wrap encryption around your messages has several pits you can fall into. It’s not as bad as reinventing AES, though.

TLS already has algorithms hardened against QC. The effects of QC against encryption are greatly exaggerated, anyway. The number of qubits that would be needed to break encryption may be too large to ever be feasible.

Get IPv6 going and stuff like SNI becomes unnecessary.

If that Russian Trump piss tape does exist, the other people involved are almost certainly underage.

That’d be Chris Christy.

Remember to unload and clean your breakfast gun. Put it away, and then get your lunch gun.

Swords into plowshares. It’s not a bad sentiment.

Non-state actors who use violence or the threat of violence to achieve political aims.

Yup, checks all the boxes.

Théoden: “What do you expect of me? Run down to some cave and conjure up an undead army?”

Aragorn: brb

You’re not desalinating aerosilized water. All the salt comes with.

I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight a recent discovery that I think should be shouted from every major news outlet. The implications are big, but they’re rather technical and non obvious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1PbNTYU0GQ

In short, it turns out water evaporates much faster from to light than heat. Green light with a certain polarization hitting the water surface at a 45 degree angle seems to do best. From the research slides, the effects of polarization and angle might be small. That means green LEDs (which are cheap and very efficient, but wouldn’t be polarized on their own) can evaporate lots of water. Something like 4 times the amount we would get from using the same amount of energy to heat it up. This is being called the photomolecular effect.

This fills in a big gap in our climate models. There have been measurements done on clouds that show water was evaporating much faster than theory would predict. I’m not clear on if it would make the results more pessimistic or not. My guess is that more clouds in the model increase the albedo of the Earth, thus reflecting more light back into space, and the resulting temperature should be lower. But I’ll hold off on strong opinions until the models get updated.

The other big thing is desalination. Most desalination plants don’t use thermal evaporation because it’s too energy intensive. They use reverse osmosis. The photomolecular effect brings up the possibility of an even more efficient solution to drinking water problems.

I haven’t seen academic research into this yet, but I also wonder about the implications for lithium extraction from sea water (and pretty much any other sources, really). Lithium is basically one of the salts you remove during the desalination process, so the photomolecular effect potentially makes sea water extraction cheaper. Lithium from sea water is an indefinite resource–there’s more there than we would know what to do with.

Edit: actually, scratch the desalination aspects.

• Multi-stage flash distillation takes 23-27 kWh to get 1 m3 of water
• RO desalination can get you 1 m3 of water with only 3 kWh

So thermal distillation is almost an order of magnitude behind, and the 4 fold improvement doesn’t fully close that gap. In fact, it’s worse than that. The multi-stage plant works by recovering heat when the distilled water is recondensed. Merely heating water to do this would take 626 kWh per m3. That’s more than two orders of magnitude, and since we can’t benefit from a multistage setup to recover heat when using the photomolecular effect, it’s going to be a 4 fold improvement over that very high number.

Still, very big news for improving our climate models.

Lithium batteries are often -30 to 80C, but that’s just saying what’s possible to squeeze some kind of voltage out of them. Basic principle is that the colder it is, the harder it is for chemical reactions to happen, and thus this will affect all chemical batteries to some degree.

Private forums can regulate whatever they want. If you don’t like it, find another one.

However, I do think this breaks down when a few outlets dominate. YouTube, Facebook, and Xhitter are all examples. Federated platforms, like Lemmy, are the solution.

Encryption everywhere isn’t about the individual content. By making it ubiquitous, it’s harder for bad actors to separate the encrypted data they want from the one’s they don’t. If only special content is encrypted, then just the fact that it’s encrypted is a flag for them. It also makes it much harder to ban. It’s pretty much impossible to ban the algorithms in TLS at this point. Too much depends on it.

What, you don’t love downloading a zip file that contains an msi (which is perfectly capable of internally compressing much of its internal data)?

There’s often an alternative way of looking at things that can make seemingly inconsistent positions become consistent. In this case, it’s control. They want to control children and they want to control women’s bodies. How this happens morphs in each situation, but the underlying goal is there.

You can call it whatever you want. Fewer people are harmed when Republicans are not in power.

The bad thing that will happen is Project 2025. We can mitigate that by voting for candidates that want nothing to do with Project 2025.

Part of the problem I see is a major progressive generation gap at the top levels of elected government. Not even proper leftists, mind you, just progressives. Bernie Sanders is even older than Biden. The next oldest prominent name is AOC, who is almost 50 years younger and is only barely constitutionally eligible this year (by less than a month, even). There’s probably someone political wonks can name in between those two, but they’re not household names and would be unlikely to be able to spin up a campaign this quickly.

Decades of centrism have gutted the Democrats of anyone who could possibly stand up right now.

Sure it is. It’s not sufficient, not by a long shot, but it’s a start.